49 Fun Facts About Corn

Which author's short story 'Children of the Corn' launched a long-running horror film series?

Stephen King also wrote a screenplay for the first film in 1984, but the studio had it rewritten, and the finished picture credits George Goldsmith as its only screenwriter.

Corn was first domesticated about 9,000 years ago in which present-day country?

Mexico's Balsas River valley is where corn began: grinding stones from a rock shelter there carry traces of corn about 8,700 years old, showing people were already milling it.

What is the wild grass from which corn was domesticated?

Teosinte hardly looks like corn: it is a bushy, many-branched grass whose tiny ears hold a handful of seeds, each locked in a stone-hard case, and changes in a few key genes made the difference.

Native Americans grew corn alongside beans and squash in a planting system known as what?

In the Three Sisters system cornstalks held up the climbing beans, the beans fixed nitrogen for the soil, and broad squash leaves shaded out weeds and kept the ground moist.

The male flowers at the top of a cornstalk are called what?

The tassel is the cluster of male flowers at the top of the stalk; its pollen drifts on the wind down to the silks, the female parts that emerge from the developing ear.

Each strand of corn silk connects to what?

Each silk strand is the style of one female flower; a pollen grain landing on it grows a tube down to fertilise a single kernel, so every kernel on the cob has its own silk.

The rows of kernels on an ear of corn almost always add up to what kind of number?

Even is the rule, usually 16 or so: each row on a young ear starts as one line of cells that divides into a pair, so the rows come in twos.

Which pigments give yellow corn its colour?

Carotenoids, the pigment family that turns carrots orange, colour yellow corn; flamingos owe their pink-orange feathers to the same pigments, taken in with their food.

In 2020 corn's harvest outweighed wheat's and rice's, but which crop beat all three by tonnage?

Sugarcane led with about 1.9 billion tonnes in 2020 to corn's 1.16 billion, because cane is weighed as whole fresh stalks, and only about a seventh of that weight is sugar.

Which country grew the most corn in 2020, with about 31 percent of world output?

The USA grew about 31 percent of the world's corn in 2020, ahead of China's 22 percent; it is also the biggest exporter, yet roughly 85 percent of the crop is used at home.

Which type of corn makes up almost all the grain corn grown commercially in the US?

Dent corn is named for the dimple that forms in each kernel's crown as it dries; it accounts for nearly all US grain corn, while the sweet corn eaten off the cob is only about one percent of plantings.

At which stage of kernel development is sweet corn picked for eating?

The milk stage is when a punctured kernel oozes milky white juice, about three weeks after the silks appear; left longer the sweetness fades, so sweet corn is eaten, canned or frozen fast.

Which scientist won a 1983 Nobel Prize for showing that genes can move, a discovery she made in corn?

Barbara McClintock traced the speckled colours of corn kernels to genes that jump between chromosomes; she found them in the 1940s, over 30 years before the Nobel committee honoured her alone.

Old American farm wisdom said a good crop was on track if the corn was 'knee-high' by when?

The Fourth of July was the benchmark in 'knee-high by the Fourth of July'; today's corn is planted weeks earlier, so by then fields usually stand far taller than that.

Soaking corn in an alkali solution, a process the Maya used, is called what?

Nixtamalization means cooking and soaking corn in limewater or wood-ash lye; the alkali loosens the tough hulls so they rinse away and softens the kernels enough to grind.

Which deficiency disease broke out wherever unprocessed corn became a staple food?

Pellagra, the niacin-deficiency disease marked by dermatitis, diarrhoea and dementia, swept corn-dependent populations in Europe and the US South; alkali treatment, used by Mesoamericans for millennia, unlocks the grain's bound niacin.

The corn dough used to make tortillas and tamales is called what?

Masa is simply Spanish for dough: corn cooked in limewater is stone-ground into it, or dried into the instant flour masa harina.

Mămăligă, a thick cornmeal porridge, is a national dish of which country?

Mămăligă is Romania's cornmeal porridge, boiled so thick it can be sliced like bread; Jonathan Harker eats 'mamaliga' for breakfast at the start of Bram Stoker's Dracula.

Which seafaring nation's traders introduced corn to Africa in the 16th century?

The Portuguese brought corn from the Americas to Africa in the 16th century; it spread so widely that it is now the continent's most important cereal crop.

For which food did early Spanish settlers refuse to substitute corn flour for wheat?

Communion bread had to be wheat: church doctrine held that only wheat bread could become the body of Christ, a rule Catholic canon law still keeps, so corn flour would not do.

Corn uses which photosynthetic pathway, shared with sorghum and millet?

Corn is a C4 plant: it concentrates CO2 in special bundle-sheath cells, so it can keep its leaf pores more closed and loses far less moisture than C3 crops such as soybeans.

US corn yields climbed sharply from the 1930s after farmers adopted what kind of seed?

Hybrid seed, made by crossing inbred lines to restore the vigour that inbreeding drains, reached farmers in quantity around 1930; by 1950 almost all Corn Belt corn was grown from it.

Apart from animal feed, what has been the US corn crop's biggest use since 2010?

Ethanol fuel has taken roughly a third or more of the US corn crop since the late 2000s, driven by the Renewable Fuel Standard of 2005 and 2007; exports and corn syrup take far smaller shares.

Which whiskey must by US law be made from a mash of at least 51 percent corn?

Bourbon needs a mash of at least 51 percent corn and brand-new charred oak barrels; since a barrel can never be reused for bourbon, most are sold on to age Scotch and other spirits.

The 'HFCS 55' grade of high-fructose corn syrup is used mostly to sweeten what?

Soft drinks get HFCS 55, the higher-fructose grade; Coca-Cola and Pepsi finished switching their US recipes to it in 1984, because import quotas and tariffs had made the sweetener it replaced far dearer.

The Kellogg brothers developed flaked cereal in the 1890s as food for what kind of institution?

A sanitarium in Battle Creek, the health resort where both brothers worked, first served the flakes to its patients; John and Will later fought in court for years over the right to the family name.

Which Battle Creek rival of the Kelloggs launched Grape-Nuts cereal in 1897?

C. W. Post saw the Kelloggs' cereal-making first-hand in Battle Creek, then set up his own company in the same town; he was later accused of copying the Kelloggs' recipes.

A popcorn kernel swells to roughly how many times its original size when it pops?

About 40 times: a kernel puffs up to between 20 and 50 times its size, and the first starch to burst out forms a leg that pushes off the pan, which is why popcorn jumps as it pops.

A popcorn kernel bursts when what, trapped inside its hull, reaches about nine times normal air pressure?

Steam does the work: moisture inside the kernel boils but cannot escape the tough hull until, at about 135 psi, the hull splits and the soft interior puffs into foam.

Kernels that fail to pop are known in the popcorn trade by what nickname?

Old maids are kernels that never pop, usually because they have dried out too much to build the pressure needed to burst; adding a little moisture back before popping can revive them.

Charles Cretors built his pioneering popcorn machine by adapting his own roaster for which snack?

Peanuts came first: Cretors rebuilt a peanut roaster for his confectionery shop around 1885, later added corn popped in oil, and drew crowds with the machine at Chicago's 1893 world's fair.

Which businesses at first refused to sell popcorn, then relied on it to survive the Great Depression?

Movie theaters at first refused to sell popcorn, thinking it messy and distracting; in the Depression a five- or ten-cent bag proved so profitable that owners who still refused went out of business.

Which popcorn brand is sold in its own disposable pan, with a foil lid that expands as the corn pops?

Jiffy Pop was not the first of its kind: E-Z Pop had sold a similar inflating foil package since 1954, and its maker won a patent ruling against Jiffy Pop that an appeals court then reversed.

Schoolchildren in Joliet persuaded which US state to make popcorn its official snack in 2003?

Illinois adopted popcorn as its state snack after second- and third-graders at Joliet's Cunningham Elementary proposed it as a class project and their state senator, Larry Walsh, sponsored the bill.

Evidence that corn was being popped about 6,700 years ago was found at coastal sites in which South American country?

Peru's Paredones and Huaca Prieta mounds yielded corncobs up to 6,700 years old, showing coastal villagers ate popcorn before they had pottery, about 1,000 years earlier than previously reported.

What was candy corn called when the Goelitz company began selling it in 1898?

Chicken Feed was Goelitz's name for it: sweet makers of the day moulded candy into farm produce such as turnips, and sold it to children across farm country.

As of 2026, which brand is the largest maker of candy corn?

Brach's, begun in a Chicago storefront in 1904, pushed its candy corn as trick-or-treating spread after the Second World War, helping turn a year-round farm sweet into a Halloween fixture.

Huitlacoche, an inky delicacy tucked into quesadillas, is corn infected with what?

A fungus called corn smut swells the kernels into grey-black galls; farmers often destroy infected ears as blighted, yet cooks who prize the galls pay more for them than for healthy corn.

The 'World's Only Corn Palace', redecorated with corn murals every year, stands in which town?

The Corn Palace in Mitchell, South Dakota, opened in 1892 and is re-covered with fresh corn murals each year; Sioux City built the first corn palace in 1887, but Mitchell's is the only one left.

What Dr. Seuss-inspired nickname is given to the cornstarch goo that turns solid when you hit it?

Oobleck is named after the sticky green stuff that falls from the sky in Bartholomew and the Oobleck; a sudden blow jams the cornstarch grains together, so you can run across a pool of it.

After popcorn became the first food Percy Spencer cooked with microwaves, which second food exploded in a colleague's face?

An egg came second: Spencer, a Raytheon engineer, noticed a candy bar melting in his pocket beside a radar set, tried the microwaves on popcorn, then on an egg, which burst over a watching colleague.

A 2012 corn maze in Lacombe, Alberta earned a Guinness record as the world's largest what?

The scannable QR code was cut across about 7 acres of corn at the Kraay Family Farm, a pattern so large that it could be scanned only from the air.

In Canada, corn dogs are commonly known by what brand-derived name?

Pogos are named after a frozen brand sold across Canada since the 1960s; Oregon's Pronto Pup, which claims to be the original corn dog, says a 1939 rainstorm that ruined a stand's buns inspired its batter.

Which country's smallest coin showed a cornstalk until it adopted the euro in 2023?

Croatia's 1 lipa coin carried the cornstalk from 1993; lipa means linden tree, and the kuna it divided means marten, recalling the marten pelts once paid as tax.

What were Chilean protesters implying by throwing corn at military barracks before the 1973 coup?

The soldiers were cowards, the gesture said: women opposed to Allende scattered corn at barracks as if feeding hens, to goad the army into overthrowing him.

As of 2024, which state grows more corn than any other in the US?

Iowa harvests about 2.4 billion bushels a year, more than most countries; it sits at the heart of the Corn Belt, where level land and deep, fertile ground suit the crop.

Bt corn kills the European corn borer with a toxin gene borrowed from what kind of organism?

A soil bacterium, Bacillus thuringiensis, supplied the gene: Bt corn, approved in 1996, makes a protein that kills caterpillars such as the borer but is harmless to bees, so farmers spray less.

Piki, a paper-thin bread of blue cornmeal, is a traditional food of which Native American people?

Piki is the Hopi bread made from finely ground blue cornmeal mixed with ash, spread by hand in a paper-thin layer on a hot stone and rolled up.

Raw sweet corn kernels are about three-quarters what, by weight?

Water makes up about 76 percent of a raw sweet corn kernel, because the crop is picked immature and juicy; grain corn is left on the stalk until its kernels are dry and hard.