{"quotes":[{"text":"Blood is thicker than water, but they still use corn starch as a thickener on cooking shows.","author":"Josh Stern","tags":["blood","corn","funny","humor","starch","thickener","water"],"id":1621,"author_id":"Josh+Stern"},{"text":"This corn will teach to you, should you peel away the husk, and be willing to open your ears.","author":"Anthony Liccione","tags":["corn","ears","learn","listen","teach","wisdom"],"id":51016,"author_id":"Anthony+Liccione"},{"text":"In corn, I think I've found the key to the American food chain. If you look at a fast-food meal, a McDonald's meal, virtually all the carbon in it - and what we eat is mostly carbon - comes from corn.","author":"Michael Pollan","tags":["american","think","corn "],"id":51103,"author_id":"Michael+Pollan"},{"text":"Originally, the atoms of carbon from which we’re made were floating in the air, part of a carbon dioxide molecule. The only way to recruit these carbon atoms for the molecules necessary to support life—the carbohydrates, amino acids, proteins, and lipids—is by means of photosynthesis. Using sunlight as a catalyst the green cells of plants combine carbon atoms taken from the air with water and elements drawn from the soil to form the simple organic compounds that stand at the base of every food chain. It is more than a figure of speech to say that plants create life out of thin air.","author":"Michael Pollan","tags":["atoms","biology","carbon","corn","food","photosynthesis","plants","science"],"id":53779,"author_id":"Michael+Pollan"},{"text":"The Indians, keeping to themselves, laughed at your superior methods and lived from the land more abundantly and with less labor than you did... And when your own people started deserting in order to live with them, it was too much... So you killed the Indians, tortured them, burned their villages, burned their cornfields... But you still did not grow much corn.","author":"Edmund S. Morgan","tags":["corn","destruction","history","indian","united-states"],"id":59505,"author_id":"Edmund+S.+Morgan"},{"text":"Try as we might, each of us can eat only about 1500 pounds of food a year. What this means for the food industry is that its natural rate of growth is somewhere around 1% every year (growth of American population).","author":"Michael Pollan","tags":["corn","food","hfcs"],"id":74475,"author_id":"Michael+Pollan"},{"text":"Farmers facing lower prices have only one option if they want to be able to maintain their standard of living, pay their bills, and service their debt, and that is to produce more [corn].","author":"Michael Pollan","tags":["corn","farming","food"],"id":107321,"author_id":"Michael+Pollan"},{"text":"The wind comes across the plains not howling but singing. It's the difference between this wind and its big-city cousins: the full-throated wind of the plains has leeway to seek out the hidden registers of its voice. Where immigrant farmers planted windbreaks a hundred and fifty years ago. It keens in protest; where the young corn shoots up, it whispers as it passes, crossing field after field in its own time, following eastward trends but in no hurry to find open water. You can't usually see it in paintings, but it's an important part of the scenery.","author":"John Darnielle","tags":["corn","midwest","nature","trees","wind"],"id":119253,"author_id":"John+Darnielle"},{"text":"Wet milling (to produce starch) is an energy-intensive way to make food; for every calorie of processed food it produces, another ten calories of fossil fuel energy are burned.","author":"Michael Pollan","tags":["corn","food","hfcs"],"id":120850,"author_id":"Michael+Pollan"},{"text":"Planted, a single corn seed yielded more than 150 fat kernels, often as many as 300, while the return on a seed of wheat was something less than 50:1.","author":"Michael Pollan","tags":["corn","food"],"id":127705,"author_id":"Michael+Pollan"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":25,"pages":3,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}