Chapter One: The Plant: Corn's Conquest

Most chapters of Pollan's book are further divided into sections. The first chapter, The Plant: Corn's Conquest, actually contains five of these subsections.
1. A NATURALIST IN THE SUPERMARKET
-"What am I eating? And where in the world did it come from?" At first sight, the supermarket is filled with biodiversity: there are so many vegetables, fruits, herbs, fungi and animals! It's no wonder the first thing you stumble upon is the produce section. But venture farther and the the diversity is gone. 

It's not as diverse as it looks.

Sure, tortilla chips differ from breakfast cereals, soda and microwaveable dinners. But they are all tied together by--you guessed it--corn. Corn feeds the chicken, the cow, the pig, the catfish and even salmon that becomes steaks, eggs, filets and fish sticks. Corn is in the high-fructose corn syrup in our soda. Corn makes up anything from maltodextrin, absorbic acid, dextrose, lecithin, maltose, HFCS, MSG, xanthax gum, polyols, caramel color, crystalline fructose.... the list goes on and on. Even vegetables have corn-wax coatings, corn derived pesticides and they stand on stalls that have some connection to corn. But where did it come from, and how did it end up in everything?
2. CORN WALKING
- "So that's us: processed corn, walking." Mayan descendents in Mexico refer to themselves as "the corn people." But after finding out how much corn we eat, Pollan began to refer to Americans as the real (processed) corn people. This chapter explains that corn is a special "C-4" plant that makes it easier to capture carbon from the air and create more sugar and energy for itself, which in turn gives us more sugar and energy. Since the corn is so successful in creating calories, we eat it, and then grow more of it, and the corn's success story spreads. Carbon 13 is found in humans who eat corn, compared to the Carbon 12 found in most plants. This proves that Americans, not Mexicans, eat more corn.
3. THE RISE OF ZEA MAYS
-Corn is a success story. Many native species of the Americas, from Native Americans to bison, got killed off when Europeans came to conquest this new world. But corn helped the colonists survive; it grew and thrived in many places and climates. (Ironically, the Native Americans shared their corn knowledge with colonists, who without it would have died, only to have the colonists kill the Native Americans.) Corn can be eaten "green," dried, stored or ground into flour. It's no wonder corn is as invaluable as we believe it to be today.  
4. MARRIED TO MAN
-Corn was quite lucky that the colonists had favored it. Without anyone to plant it, it would have become extinct in a matter of time. Maize is not a wild plant; its ancestor teosinte is a weedy plant without ears. The plant lost its capability to reproduce itself in order to capture more nutrients in its stalk. This mutation was only successful because humans began to plant it, nurture it, and fall in love with it.
5. CORN SEX
-"Corn was the first plant to involve humans so intimately in its sex life." The male organs of corn are located at the top of the plant and releases up to 18 million pollen grains per plant--that's 20,000 grains per potential kernel. Obviously corn doesn't want to die out. After one of these grains of pollen finds its way to the ovary by way of style, the nucleus divides in two: one for the top and one for the bottom of the kernel. Fifty days later, and the kernels are mature. Because of this reproduction, humans are very involved, and corn can grow in a multitude of places. And now that corn has become genetically modified, and hybrid corn has become available, more corn, in more places can be eaten by more people. Yum!