Corn is one of many foods we eat this time of year—along with pumpkins and potatoes—that are native to the Americas. Whether part of the legendary three sisters plantings of indigenous cultivation practices, the masa of corn tortillas or tamales, the cornmeal of Southern hushpuppies, or the memory of late summer’s juicy sweetcorn, this plant is essential to so many American foodways. In celebration of corn, and what citizens in the decades surrounding the American Revolution would laud as “Republican virtue,” or humble simplicity, Poetry in America shares this video of Michael Pollan discussing Joel Barlow’s late eighteenth–century mock–epic, “The Hasty Pudding.”
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