Icon from a picrew by grgikau. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
Wheat fields are more mystical than fields of other crops. You are 7,000 times more likely to meet an old god or see a portent of doom in a wheat field than in a field of like… soybeans.
For your consideration: cornfields
Cornfields are less mystical than wheat fields but more mystical than soybean fields. Two-bit monsters congregate in corn fields to eat people, but their power is nothing compared to the things that manifest in wheat fields.
Have been in both wheat and cornfields; can confirm. Cornfields host monsters who eat people. Wheat fields attract old gods.
I have a theory that this is because the notions most of us have of “old gods” are pretty intrinsically European, and wheat was (and is) the staple crop of European life. It is quite literally tied to the ancestral rituals and beliefs of most white people. Odin, the Morrigan, and even Zeus are actually linked to a set of peoples who cultivated wheat.
Meanwhile, corn (maize) is a crop native to the Americas. It features in the white cultural imagination in a very different way. Corn is a motif seen not in our ancestral myths, but in a much newer genre: the American Gothic. With its focus on the tensions between man and nature and—perhaps more importantly—the United States’s history of genocide against its indigenous population and trade in enslaved Africans, the American Gothic is VERY preoccupied with agriculture. Our monsters come out of corn fields because corn is a symbol for not only what we did to the Native Americans (who were the first to grow the crop), but of what we are doing to the very land itself. Corn is a monument to our cultural sins.
Meanwhile, I suspect that corn features very differently in the imaginations of people of color. If you asked a Native American person or a Latinx person what sort of mysticism they associate with corn fields, I imagine their answer would be very different than ours.
TLDR: White people associate wheat with our ancestors’ gods because our ancestors grew wheat. We associate corn with terrible monsters because it is a literal sign of our own monstrosity.
Native American here, can confirm that small plots of corn feel safe and homey; ideally they should be interplanted with other crops. You find turkeys and possums and raccoons in the corn. It might tell you important knowledge.
However.
Giant monocultures of corn, where the corn grows unbroken for miles and miles, not near human habitation, devoid of local wildlife, just corn on corn in the soft wind? Corn mega monocultures? Those sound like screaming.
If you go to the American Midwest there’s a wizard living in the corn and if you catch him you get three wishes.
Yes, yes. Just go into the corn fields. Nothing will harm you in the corn fields, no, nothing. That’s right, the corn is perfectly safe, perfectly sane, step right in and walk among the rows. Just keep walking deeper into the corn. It is perfectly safe. Nothing will harm you.
what’re foods that where u live is known for? i’m curious!
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It’s a cruel irony that people in rural Iowa can be malnourished amid forests of cornstalks running to the horizon. Iowa dirt is some of the richest in the nation, even bringing out the poet in agronomists, who describe it as “black gold.” In 2007 Iowa’s fields produced roughly one-sixth of all corn and soybeans grown in the U.S., churning out billions of bushels.
These are the very crops that end up on Christina Dreier’s kitchen table in the form of hot dogs made of corn-raised beef, Mountain Dew sweetened with corn syrup, and chicken nuggets fried in soybean oil. They’re also the foods that the U.S. government supports the most. In 2012 it spent roughly $11 billion to subsidize and insure commodity crops like corn and soy, with Iowa among the states receiving the highest subsidies. The government spends much less to bolster the production of the fruits and vegetables its own nutrition guidelines say should make up half the food on our plates. In 2011 it spent only $1.6 billion to subsidize and insure “specialty crops”—the bureaucratic term for fruits and vegetables.
Those priorities are reflected at the grocery store, where the price of fresh food has risen steadily while the cost of sugary treats like soda has dropped. Since the early 1980s the real cost of fruits and vegetables has increased by 24 percent. Meanwhile the cost of nonalcoholic beverages—primarily sodas, most sweetened with corn syrup—has dropped by 27 percent.
“We’ve created a system that’s geared toward keeping overall food prices low but does little to support healthy, high-quality food,” says global food expert Raj Patel. “The problem can’t be fixed by merely telling people to eat their fruits and vegetables, because at heart this is a problem about wages, about poverty.”
