The agronomist’s reaction, like mine, owes something to our confusion of corn-the-food with corn-the-commodity, which turn out to be two subtly but crucially different things. What George Naylor grows, and what the pile by the elevator consists of, is “number 2 field corn,” an internationally recognized commodity grown everywhere (and nowhere in particular), fungible, traded in and speculated upon and accepted as a form of capital all over the world. And while number 2 field corn certainly looks like the corn you would eat, and is directly descended from the maize Friar Sahagún’s Aztecs
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