Corn and synonyms

When something has been around for long enough, urban legends tend to develop around it. 

That’s simply how thing work. We humans need to feel that the world around us is subject to rational rules, that we are not surrounded by absolute chaos. We need to feel that we can control our environment and influence our lives – many studies show that it this is a need that makes us safer and happier people, even if in practice this is not entirely true.

We need our beliefs, urban legends, signals and other small means, and we need elements from our immediate surrounding to justify them. The more readily available, the better. Clouds, for example, are a common mean for predicting the weather (I'm not talking about heavy, gray rain clouds clearly predicting rainfall, or storm clouds over a mountain peak indicating a serious problem for those currently on the summit): red or pink “tails” – tomorrow will be warm. Or the weather will change. Or will be stormy – I've already heard the three versions.

Many of these beliefs revolve around food, a basic human component: what can be added to Turkish coffee, chickpea kernels, dough scraps (legend has it that cookies were invented by the fear that throwing the dough left in the bowl in the garbage will cause bad luck), sugar (which if added into your teaafter the milk, in case you are from England, you can forget about getting married this year), and many other weird examples.

The majority of which is related to real and reasonable human concerns – loss of crop, luck, or life. These are the reasons people were afraid to leave a loaf of bread turned over (the bakery used to turn over the loafs for the executioners so that other customers would not mistakenly take their bread while they were busy with the guillotine), as did salt, rice, and even parsley (which, apparently, in the Middle Ages people feared that sowing it in the ground may shorten the thread of a person's life).

Corn too is the subject of many beliefs and charms: Missing a row of corn when sowing resembles a difficult prophecy for one of the farmer's family, but if corn kernels are found on the path or road – a guest will arrive. If the girl's yellow corn cob contains even one red kernel–she is destined to get married by the end of that year. It is easy to understand why corn receives so much attention, because it is the world's most common agricultural crop (even more than wheat and rice!).

It requiresplenty of irrigation and prefers a warm climate, but if it is well tended it can produce a juicy cob, fit for cooking, grilling or eating raw, as it is. Corn is also the major component of other food products named otherwise, such as popcorn, cornflakes, corn oil, corn starch, corn flour, as well as non-food products such as acetone and alcohol.

The extremely long list of corn-containing products is actually in the artificial,processed, colorful and fast foods department. Products which declare their main component is corn, are still, most likely, eating corn with an addition of corn: sugar substitutes and concentrated forms of sugar, a variety of preservatives are all based on corn: glucose syrup, maltodextrin, monosodium glutamate, dextrose, maltose, lecithin, sorbitol… these are all actually synonymous for “molecules that were originally corn”.

Having said that, I’ll add – if the label on your food contains too many ingredients, especially those you are not familiar with, it might not be the food you want.

And another interesting piece of information: The word "corn" outside North America, Australia, and New Zealand refers to any cereal crop, its meaning understood to vary geographically to refer to the local staple.

In Hebrew, corn תירס, was named after the son of Japheth from the Bible (meaning Noah's grandson who built the ark into which the animals entered in pairs), whose descendants settled in Turkey. Later, Turkey became a transit station for corn on its journey to Europe, it was called “חיטי תירס”, or in short – תירס. Here is a nice patent for peeling it.

Yours,