But it is in soft drinks that we consume most of our sixty-six pounds of high-fructose corn syrup, and to the red-letter dates in the natural history of Zea mays—right up there with teosinte’s catastrophic sexual mutation, Columbus’s introduction of maize to the court of Queen Isabella in 1493, and Henry Wallace’s first F-1 hybrid seed in 1927—we must now add the year 1980. That was the year corn first became an ingredient in Coca-Cola. By 1984, Coca-Cola and Pepsi had switched over entirely from sugar to high-fructose corn syrup. Why?
