August 31, 2006
Not a Cornfield
The corn is gone from downtown Los Angeles. The harvest was the last event in a nine month project known as Not A Cornfield, which involved planting 32 acres of corn in a former railyard brownfield near Chinatown known generally over the years, for some reason, as the Cornfields. "Not A Cornfield" was conceived by the artist Lauren Bon, as an artwork, or, more accurately, as a nexus for a network of converging activities, events, lectures, screenings, and artforms.
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The Lower 48 states of the USA is 1.9 billion acres in size. Of that, about...20% is cropland (450 million acres). On this, corn is America's largest crop, covering 81.6 million acres, about one quarter of all crops, an amount that adds up to about 4% of the land cover of the Lower 48. This is about the same amount of land that is urbanized/suburbanized. This is also almost half of the world's production of corn.
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...the largest direct consumption of corn by humans in the USA is by ingesting corn syrup. High fructose corn syrup is found in numerous processed food products in the United States, where, unlike in other countries...it is a less expensive sweetener than other sugars, like cane and beet. The vast majority of corn syrup is not eaten, but drunk in the form of soda pop,
complete article "The Landscape of Corn:"
http://www.clui.org/clui_4_1/lotl/v29/f.html
| from The Lay of the Land
Posted by Stubbornson at August 31, 2006 09:12 AM