Simply the way it smells in the oven is enough to warm you on the coldest day. Whether you grew up withit on a farm, eating it off of a cob freshly picked from a field, or your folks served it hot, scooped from store bought containers, chances are that as a child, you had a plate of yellow or white corn on your dinner table. According to food historians, most people in America ate corn until 1860, when Georgian immigrants form Russia came to the great plains region and to Detroit, bringing their winter wheat with them. Not long after those immigrants arrived, wheat began top replace corn as the staple in this country. The controversy has erupted largely because of genetic engineering, which has stirred a public outcry over the merits of inserting genes from pesticides and other non-corn sources, such as Brazil nuts, into the genes of corn.
Corn has a history as rich as the fertile farmland soil that has nurtured it for centuries.
The world today boasts approximately 9,000 different kinds of corn. American Indians have micro-selected corn in this country for the last two millennium, and today, they have perhaps 300 different types of corn. One of those types, a white heirloom variety known as Iroquois White Corn, is getting special treatment from a group of celebrated American chefs. It's toasted, so it has an extra corn flavor that we don't usually get to experience here, particulary in the posole. It is truly worth getting.