Midwest Maize: How Corn Shaped the U.S. Heartland by Cynthia Clampitt (review)

In Midwest Maize, popular history writer Cynthia Clampitt successfully explains the history of corn in a regional context. This is no easy task. Corn was and remains significant in several American regions, not just the Midwest, requiring the author to maintain focus while shifting from regional to national contexts throughout the book. The author also deserves credit for telling such a big story so succinctly. In fifteen brief chapters, Clampitt synthesizes secondary scholarship on corn farming, foodways, processing, and related topics. Readers learn about the migration of plants and people, different races and varieties of corn, technological change, and dietary habits. The author relies mostly on secondary accounts, occasionally using primary sources; most significantly interviews with representatives from almost every link in the commodity chain.

Midwest Maize begins long before there was a Midwest, although most of the coverage is of the nineteenth century to the present. The author traces the domestication of corn in Mexico and the subsequent spread into the mid-continent. The author pays attention to both city and country, narrating how the growth of farm country depended on the growth of urban markets, manufacturing, and developments in transportation such as canals and railroads. Historians will recognize the significant impact of William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis (New York, 1991) on the book at numerous places. Naturally, farmers figure prominently in the book. The utility and adaptability of corn as human and animal food is shown throughout. There are two chapters on “living with corn” in which farmers’ voices are prominent. One of the later chapters includes historical recipes for corn dishes as well as context for their preparation and consumption. Readers will learn about sweet corn and the associated canning industry, how popcorn became a popular snack, and the leading roles that Midwesterners played in those events and processes.

There are several praiseworthy aspects of the book. General readers will be rewarded with an appropriate recognition by the author of the many contributions of First Nation’s people to the development of corn. There is a good discussion of the role of corn in the beef industry that compares grass-fed versus grain-finished beef. The author also makes sense of corn as food through a discussion of the process of nixtamalization as well as breeding and genetically modified organisms. The author reflects the contemporary scientific consensus that the process of genetic modification has produced far more benefits than problems, despite critiques that contemporary breeding practices designed to maximize quantity have resulted in a crop of diminished quality. Clampitt also writes with a reporter’s verve. This talent is on display in the book’s best chapter, titled “Celebrating Corn.” The author brings out the enthusiasm Midwesterners have displayed for this critical commodity and the ways that communities have rallied around their staple crop. Indeed, the author is at her best when she assumes the reporter’s role.

This journalistic sensibility is also a weakness. The sense of drama and attempts to engage the reader sometimes get in the way. Clampitt states: “It is almost unimaginable how much farming has changed in the last 150 years” (49), which is a true statement, but also a hackneyed one. Consider substituting the terms communications, travel, or space exploration for farming and the problem becomes clear. The suggestion that “[p]erhaps it is because the United States is a nation of immigrants and pioneers, but there is something in the American spirit that has tended toward exploration and innovation” is also problematic (135). Contemplating the histories of other places that have had so many immigrants and pioneers (even other North American countries such as Mexico and Canada) quickly debunks the author’s invocation of American exceptionalism.

Other statements are misleading or inaccurate. Nineteenth-century clay agricultural drainage tile was not perforated, but late twentieth and twenty-first-century plastic pipe is (57). The author states that the US army made...