This oversized packet of starch is corn’s most important contribution to the industrial food chain: an abundance of carbohydrate molecules in long chains that chemists have learned to break down and then rearrange into hundreds of different organic compounds—acids, sugars, starches, and alcohols. The names of many of these compounds will be familiar to anyone who’s studied the ingredient label on a package of processed food: citric and lactic acid; glucose, fructose, and maltodextrin; ethanol (for alcoholic beverages as well as cars), sorbitol, mannitol, and xanthan gum; modified and
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