People throughout the world depend on corn, the one major grain that originated in the Americas. Corn is everywhere, not just in our corn bread and popcorn. As author Margaret Visser put it in her book, Much Depends on Dinner, You cannot buy anything at all in a North American supermarket which has been untouched by corn…

There's corn oil and corn syrup, corn starch and degradable plastics, ethanol, corn sweeteners, corn fed to animals and corn itself as a human food. This grain is low-tech, high-tech, the plant with many faces. Bred into thousands of varieties, corn is known as maize outside of North America.

Corn probably began its journey in Mexico or Central America and was nurtured by native peoples for generations. Sometime between 4500 and 1000 BC, corn reached what is present day New Mexico, feeding the Pueblo Indians who lived along the Rio Grande. By around 1000 AD corn had reached the northeastern part of the continent. Corn fueled the Aztec Empire of central Mexico as well as the Mayans in the southeast and the Inca along the length of western South America.

The Indians carried corn to the Caribbean. On today's island of Cuba, Columbus first encountered corn grown by the Arawaks. The Spanish took corn back to the Mediterranean in 1493 and it spread into both Europe and the Middle East. The Portuguese carried it to Africa where corn began to replace millet, the traditional grain. The Chinese had corn by the 1550's, and today are second only to the U.S. in corn production. India and Indonesia are also top corn growers in Asia.