96 Quotes About Corn

Michelle made a point of being friendly, not just seeming friendly, and rich girls would meet her eyes with something like humanity, surprised at themselves for how pleasantly they were treating a plebe.

I was having one of those experiences where you're in a place, whether it's a job interview for a position you don't want with a company you don't even trust or a class you don't want to take, and you're sitting there wondering, What am I doing here? Like a part of you has split off from yourself and occasionally drops in and asks, Can we leave now?

When I think of the person I was, I don't know how anyone ever forgave me: my parents, all the people who were the age I now am. I suppose it's that they thought of me the way I sometimes think of young people now: It's okay, because they'll change, because they'll have to.

At that period, rising in the world meant giving up working with your hands in favor of work in a store or an office. The people who lived in town had made it, and turned their backs socially on those who had not but were still growing corn and wheat out there in the country. What seemed like an impassable gulf was only the prejudice of a single generation, which refused to remember its own not very remote past.

So this is what commodity corn can do to a cow: industrialize the miracle of nature that is a ruminant, taking this sunlight- and prairie grass-powered organism and turning it into the last thing we need: another fossil fuel machine. This one, however, is able to suffer.

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

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]

The free market has never worked in agriculture and it never will. The economics of a family farm are very different from a firm's... the demand for food isn't elastic; people don't eat more just because food is cheap. Even if I go out of business this land will keep producing corn.

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.