In the 1700s, Americans celebrated a revolutionary agricultural achievement: the corncob. Native to the New World, sweet corn emerged from thousands of years of domestication to become a favorite of colonial settlers over the next three centuries. As Caribbean-grown sugar simultaneously made the drastic transition from consumer luxury to household staple, the idea that corn would one day replace cane sugar as America’s primary sweetener would have seemed just as controversial as the idea of corn-based biofuel and bioproducts is today.
