By Vision Times Staff
To live is to sustain life, and at its most basic, human existence depends on eating, drinking, resting, and sleeping. Throughout history, as environments and customs ebbed and flowed, food has always remained a focal point of connection and joy. Beyond fruits, vegetables, and beverages, staple diets around the world rely on meat, eggs, poultry — and above all, grains. Among these, corn stands out as one of the most important.
Corn, an annual cereal plant in the grass family, has been known in China by more than 100 names — from “yu mai” and “fan mai” to “bao gu” and “yu mi” in Chinese — a testament to its wide adoption and cultural imprint. According to records in Xu Guangqi’s “Nongzheng Quanshu,” corn was introduced to China during the Jiajing reign of the Ming dynasty. In 2011, I wrote a series titled “Notes on Plants.” In the article “On the Origins and Spread of Crops and Flowers,” corn is described as:
“Today, corn is one of the world’s major staple crops, serving both as food and as an important source of animal feed and industrial raw material. The main corn-producing regions are now North America, Asia, Latin America, and Europe.
Corn originated in Mexico and Central America, where the Indigenous peoples—the Native Americans—had already been cultivating it for 4,500 years. In 1492, Columbus discovered that the Indigenous people of Cuba were growing corn. Two years later, in 1494, he brought it back to Spain. From Europe, corn spread to Asia and Australia. By the 16th century, it had entered China via both overland and maritime routes. China, in fact, has now been growing corn for more than 500 years.”
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From this overview of corn’s economic value, origins, history of cultivation, and routes of global spread, it is clear that corn has played a vital role in human survival and in shaping living environments. Below are some additional facts about corn worth noting.
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1. Corn as a staple of the Americas
From the perspective of world history, corn was originally a staple food of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. It was they who first brought wild maize into cultivation. The earliest forms of maize were little more than fragile grasses. Through countless generations of careful selection, seed improvement, and domestication, Indigenous farmers transformed it into the tall, robust crop with plump ears and high yields that we know today.
2. The ‘Five Grains’ of Ancient China
In ancient China, staple food crops were collectively referred to as the “Five Grains.” In early 2018, I wrote an essay titled “Food Is Heaven for the People,” in which I discussed the origin and significance of this saying.
3. Shifting definitions of the ‘Five Grains’
The definition of the “Five Grains” varied across time, geography, and tradition. In southern China, the five were rice, millet (yellow rice), foxtail millet, wheat, and legumes; in the north, they were hemp, millet, foxtail millet, wheat, and legumes. In classical Chinese medicine texts such as the “Huangdi Neijing,” the Five Grains were unhusked rice, red beans, soybeans, wheat, and millet.
In Buddhism, offerings of the Five Grains referred to barley, wheat, rice, red beans, and sesame. These variations reveal how crop categories shifted with region, climate, cultural custom, and dietary habits. As I noted in previous writings, native Chinese grains include wheat, rice, millet, sorghum, and soybeans, while cotton and hemp ranked among the country’s most important cash crops.
4. Why every part of the corn plant is useful
Every part of the corn plant has value. The kernels serve as food for people and as feed for livestock, poultry, and fish. Fresh stalks and leaves also provide fodder. In winter, dried stalks can feed cattle and sheep or be burned as fuel, along with dried roots and cobs. Even the silky tassels of corn ears are prized in traditional Chinese medicine for their cooling, detoxifying, diuretic, and blood-pressure-lowering properties.
5. Corn as a powerful industrial raw material
Corn is also a vital industrial raw material with immense economic value. It is used to produce ethanol (alcohol) and edible corn oil, as well as starch, plastics, and syrups. Remarkably, it even serves as a material in the manufacturing of compact discs.
