How Corn Conquered America Summary

Improved Essays
“How Corn Conquered America”

I. The main idea of the “introduction” is: corn is the cornerstone of many American’s diet, managing to become the most widely planted crop in America.

One fact or example that supports the main idea is about 40 percent of Mexicans calories come directly from corn, mostly in the form of tortillas. Yet Americans have more corn in their diet diet than Mexicans.

Another fact or example that supports the main point is that there are some 45,000 items in the average American supermarket and more than a quarter of them contain corn.

In addition, there were many things I found very interesting, such as;
Since the 1980’s, almost all sodas and most fruit drinks sold in the supermarket are sweetened with high fructose
…show more content…
The average American farmer today grows enough food to feed one hundred forty people.
Hybrid corn quadrupled the yield of farmers from about twenty bushels per acre to about eighty bushels per acre. As yield grew and farmers grew more corn, prices dropped.

In conclusion, (Write a one sentence summary.)
In conclusion, the invention of tractors and other machinery has changed the face of farming for forever.

III. The main idea of the “Turning Bombs into Fertilizer” is: materials from bombs, such as ammonium nitrate, is a main ingredient in farmer’s fertilizer.

One fact or example that supports the main idea is after world war two, the government found a huge surplus of ammonium nitrate left over. Scientists in the department of agriculture had an idea to spread the ammonium nitrate on farmland as fertilizer, thus the government helped launch the chemical fertilizer industry.

Another fact or example that supports the main point is chemical fertilizer was needed to grow hybrid corn because the hybrid corn seed requires large amounts of fertilizer containing ammonium nitrate to properly

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    In Michael Pollan’s “Corn’s Conquest” I find these findings disturbing. I am extremely shock to find out that the molecules in my body have been fundamentally altered by the prevalence of corn in our diet. Food is like taking a breath, we can’t survive with it, but in scientifically we can survive with it for certain amount of days. The repair of our body depends on the food we intake and the energy and nutrition’s it provides for our body. These nutrition’s keep us alive and makes our body functions correctly.…

    • 435 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The changes were mostly caused by new technologies that created a greater supply for produce than the demand for it, thus forcing down prices (Document A). This was also due in part to he increase of railroad lines across the country (Document B). Some of these technological changes included moving from hand power to horses, to new innovative plows to steam tractors in 1868, to the building better storage silos and deep water drilling all contributed to the farmers increase yields per acre. Commercial farming and chemical fertilizer all contributed to overproduction and falling prices as well. The effect of these circumstances were that this massive growth in industry benefited the…

    • 909 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Corn’s journey starts after World War II when “the government had... a tremendous surplus of ammonium nitrate” which they sprayed on corn as a fertilizer to help farm the land without depleting nutrients (Pollan 41). This not only helped farmers grow higher yields but also “liberated [them] from old biological constraints” by allowing a monoculture and an abundant supply of corn (Pollan 45). However helpful in creating a surplus to feed billions, nitrogen fertilizers have a negative connotation to many in society. One farmer activist even said “’we’re still eating the leftovers of World War II’” in response to their use on corn (Pollan 41). Furthermore, even farmers using fertilizers suffered from them economically due to a flood of cheap corn, which was “far more than Americans could afford to buy” causing low prices that bankrupted many farmers (Pollan 49).…

    • 576 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Industrial farming poses dangers to our health, In Pleasures of Eating, Wendell Berry describes the importance of understanding the connection between eating and the land in order to extract pleasure from our food. When A Crop Becomes King is like Wendell Berry's article, however it focuses on corn and corn production in our food. Unlike the two articles listed above, David Barboza’s article: If You Pitch It They Will Eat It is about the advertisement part of the food industry, and how they manipulate us to buy there products. I agree that Industrial Farming is bad for our health and that this must be fixed or modified to fix eating habits. To grow all this corn we have to use a ton of pesticides to keep animals from eating the crop.…

    • 592 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    King Corn is an eye-opening documentary that highlights the huge role that corn plays in American society. The film was produced in 2007 by college friends Aaron Woolf, Ian Cheney, and Curtis Ellis, who together moved from their familiar urban city to an Iowa farm. The film follows Cheney and Ellis as they rent a one-acre plot of farmland and plant their own crop of field corn. The documentary serves to demonstrate the American food industry’s reliance on corn and how corn has come to be in essence the dominate ingredient in almost everything we eat. The documentary explores the history that led to this reliance on corn products, and analyzes whether this is a trend that the American public should support.…

    • 975 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Flavr Savr Research Paper

    • 656 Words
    • 3 Pages

    Ninety percent of feed grain production is due to dramatically changed corn (techrepublic). Industrial livestock benefits from this feed grown by farmers in the midwest over eighty million acres (techrepublic). Corn is also produced as the main ingredient in some foods we use everyday such as sweeteners and corn oil (techrepublic). Crop yield monitors invented in 1990 through technology has caused the production of corn to dramatically increase in the last twenty-five years (techrepublic).…

    • 656 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Question 1: What role did technology change play in improvements in agriculture during the era of the market revolution? What kind of impact on values did such changes foster? When technology booms, there is no surprise to the beneficial advantages that come forth from agriculture, industry, and transportation: there was no exception in the market revolution of 1815. “One of the earliest and most important… was an iron plow introduced by Jethro Wood in 1819;” the plow led to the modification of almost every agricultural tools to excel farmers’ jobs twice or thrice as quickly (pg. 245). With the engineering of all these new farm tools, farmers were able to farm more land in less time.…

    • 826 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Industrialization Dbq

    • 1685 Words
    • 7 Pages

    Farmers in the United States during the industrialization were impacted by problems that affected them. The farmers in America were beginning…

    • 1685 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Decent Essays

    Changes In The Gilded Era

    • 251 Words
    • 2 Pages

    Now that crops could be shipped across the country, small local farmers were in competition with large specialized “cash crop” farms who produced their crops in massive quantities. And because the railroad was the only shipping option, their rates were extremely high which added to the debt of many farmers. The combination of the growing technological advances and increasingly difficult field of agriculture, turned the American society into a very industrialized one.…

    • 251 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Decent Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In the world that we live today, food industries produces low end fat products that are slowly becoming the norm in today’s society. Many consumers do not understand the process of how their food is made, through nor do consumers know where their food originates from. When consumers are exposed to advertisements and commercials, they are drawn into the products that big food companies are trying to sell. In the short essay “The Pleasures of Eating” by Wendell Berry, Berry talks about how consumers do not know where their food comes from and how people are consuming foods with toxic chemicals. In “When a Crop Becomes King” by Michael Pollan, Pollan states that companies are putting corn related products into everyday foods, which are leading into bad eating habits.…

    • 1187 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Humans have a natural tendency to prefer perfection and to judge by looks. If one tomato looks more red and round than another, that’s the one that will be selected at the supermarket. However, in this case, judging by good looks instead of quality is to the buyer’s disadvantage. Much of the food in America has been genetically modified to look and feel perfect, yet there are many risks that come along with it. While they may look pretty, genetically modified organisms carry major health risks, have harsh impact on the environment, and have significant impact in the production of corn which is one of America’s unhealthiest crops.…

    • 1930 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Pollan writes, “ Most researchers trace America’s rising rates of obesity to the 1970s. This was, of course, the same decade that America embraced a cheap-food farm policy and began dismantling forty years of programs designed to prevent overproduction” (Pollan 285). Pollan argued that the reason America began being unhealthy was because of the fact that America embraced overproduction of food. Although the most of the food produced with corn syrup are good and cheaper, it is unhealthy. In America 17.5 billion pounds of high fructose corn syrup is being…

    • 653 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    1865 To 1900 Dbq

    • 605 Words
    • 3 Pages

    The new inventions caused a rise in the popularity of farming and, as a result, the profitability of agriculture. This time period truly was an age of industrializing and improving agriculture as a…

    • 605 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    For many years corn has been a main crop for a multitude amount of people. From the Middle Ages and Romans, to this day with varied gadgets and useful technology. Furthermore, there were countless methods of producing corn, some of which growers still benefit from today. Although agriculturists have a few advanced machinery, producers still occasionally practice methods for producing crops that were used long, long ago.…

    • 575 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The U.S. government finances the corn business intensely, and this outcome in high corn creation and utilization. Different governments finance distinctive…

    • 502 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays