"Roundup Ready" corn, I was glad to learn, is a stupid mistake of the past. One of the most deservingly detested GMO crops of all time, this strain of corn was produced by splicing genes from Escherichia coli, bacteria often blamed for "food poisoning," into corn so that the corn plant survives heavy spraying with glyphosate.
How was it possible not to know that this was a bad idea?
In the 1990s US-based Monsanto held a patent on glyphosate. However, the first "Roundup Ready" corn was tested overseas, on poorer people who had less legal recourse than US citizens. The corporation knew the corn was likely to make people sick. Well, it did. E. coli is more often fatal to a larger minority of the population than COVID-19 ever was. The company kept testing, sickening whole towns in the Philippines and elsewhere, until they found a strain of E. coli that seemed relatively weak. The genetically modified corn was then drenched in glyphosate from before planting right up to harvest time, and it made people sick, though usually not as acutely as E. coli itself did.
So-called corn allergies weren't common before the 1990s. They became common in the 2010s, when the original patent expired and chemical manufacturers were selling glyphosate at competitive prices. Most of the "allergies" were probably glyphosate sensitivity. By 2020, food producers were looking for corn that was neither sprayed with glyphosate nor bioengineered to be sprayed with glyphosate. Corn-based foods became relatively safe to eat. Southerners rejoiced that we could safely make cornbread with Martha White, White Lily, and similar beloved corn meal brands, once again. Those of us who were gluten-intolerant (probably fewer than a tenth as many Americans as went gluten-free and found that not eating glyphosate-soaked wheat relieved their chronic conditions) were getting tired of rice being the only grain we could eat, and started buying canned and frozen corn again. Because stores had had a hard time selling canned corn in the 2010s, it had become very economical.
A large amount of the corn raised in the United States is still Roundup-Ready and still treated with glyphosate. It was so treated even when Bayer, which now owns Monsanto, released a glyphosate-free brand of "Roundup" herbicide spray "for farm use." In 2024 and 2025 customer complaints caused the formula for this chemical disaster to be changed. Some small farmers, unaware of the changes, bought Roundup-Ready corn, sprayed it with Roundup, and got a small part of what they deserved as the glyphosate-tolerant plants died of exposure to diquat, dicamba, or other poisons. This year, bitter clingers are getting their glyphosate back, and we must all try to laugh when they describe their wives and daughters giving birth to babies with useless eye stalks flopping out of bare sockets in little bare skulls.
(One of my cat Silver's Seralini kittens was born like that. Mercifully it never breathed. I pickled it in alcohol with the intention of exhibiting it in the Friday Market that summer; the next strain of COVID kept the market from reopening and eventually I burned the body.)
Those still clinging to glyphosate know by now that even the US government has agreed that the stuff promotes cancer and aggravates just about every chronic condition known to humankind, including the ones that ought to be fully controllable by merely modifying our lifestyle in such a way as to give up all social eating for as long as we live. They know, although they may try to pretend otherwise. The more arrogantly they bray about "the (outdated, disproven) science," the more certain we can be that they know. They deserve no pity. Real farmers, who have been struggling to do without glyphosate and other poisons since at least 2018 or 2020, deserve sympathy and support, as do the old people who are now dying from cancer after years of trying to believe that glyphosate was safe and effective and the symptoms they had after spraying it were unimportant, but the bitter clingers to glyphosate deserve to be denied treatment when they develop cancer.
But the corn monocroppers are clinging, and they are getting away with it, because the majority of the corn grown in the US is either not used as food for humans, or else processed in ways that seem to eliminate most glyphosate residues. Before it has soaked into plants or plant parts glyphosate is pathetically soluble, easily washed into the water supply where it does no "good" to the lazy farmer after just a little shower of rain; when corn is made into high-fructose corn syrup or monosodium glutamate, those processes apparently get rid of the glyphosate inside the kernels.
Photo from New York Animal Agriculture Coalition, by way of Google.
Corn meal is made from "field" corn, which is less sweet than "sweet" corn even when fresh. Hard corn ("field" corn or popcorn) is not usually eaten fresh, because everyone would rather eat sweet corn on the cob. Hard corn contains niacytin, a "bound" form of niacin that should in theory be nutritious but isn't. Niacytin not only fails to be digested as niacin but makes it harder for the body to digest niacin from other sources. Traditionally Southerners loved our cornbread because corn, unlike wheat, grows well in the South and because most of us got enough niacin from other sources that the niacytin was not a problem. By the twentieth century, however, severe niacin deficiencies were appearing in poor people who ate cornbread alone or with cheaper, fattier, less nutritious meat. A campaign was launched to sell the idea that cornbread should always be made with at least half wheat flour, to reduce the niacytin content and add digestible niacin to the bread.
Researchers now know that an even better way to use hard corn is to process the dry, hard corn kernels in ways called "nixtamalization," which break down and unbind the niacytin. Traditional nixtamalization involved soaking dried corn in a mix of water and wood ashes, which loosened the outer layers of the kernels and produced grits.
Sweet corn, however, needs little processing. In addition to containing more sugar, sweet corn contains a rich variety--and variety is the word, because the mix varies widely among different ears of corn, but in any case there's a lot--of B-vitamins, including niacin, not niacytin.
I started mixing Wal-Mart's store brand of canned corn with canned beans and peas. This added variety, fibre, and flavor to what I'd been eating through most of the 2010s, which was rice, onions, and garlic, and sometimes for variety rice, garlic, and onions. Not all beans were safe to eat after 2020; garbanzos, which I particularly liked before 2010, were especially likely to contain glyphosate residues, even if the beans hadn't been sprayed themselves, probably because they were raised in between crops of wheat, in glyphosate-saturated soil. Being a walking glyphosate detector, I found that Bush's pinto beans were reliably safe, as were Bush's butter beans. Black beans and crowder peas were less reliable. Wal-Mart's store brand of green peas, pinto beans, corn, and tomatoes seemed glyphosate-free, or close enough not to trigger my hair-trigger reactions.
Various combinations of any of these legumes with corn and/or tomatoes and/or some sort of meat made satisfactory meals for me between 2021 and 2025. The corn could be store-brand canned corn, or cornbread made with Martha White or White Lily corn meal, or corn chips. (The Wal-Marts near me all stocked both brands' "self-rising corn meal," with salt and baking powder added, and "self-rising corn meal mix," with salt, baking powder, and a generous share of white wheat flour added. In practice, people who have learned to distrust wheat usually snapped up the wheat-free corn meal so that, nine times out of ten, I didn't find it on the shelf.) I usually bought a case of a dozen cans of canned corn and one or two bags of chips on each shopping trip to Wal-Mart and felt that that yielded a good mix of hard and sweet corn in the diet. I also bought vitamin supplements with all the B-vitamins.
But in 2025 I started to notice that after eating Wal-Mart's canned corn, my tongue felt sore and swollen. That is, of course, an early warning sign of a B-vitamin deficiency or imbalance, including niacin deficiency...if it becomes chronic. But it didn't become chronic. Nor did the vitamin supplements affect the symptom. My tongue, and mouth generally, felt irritated for about twelve hours after eating the canned corn--not at other times. Drinking water helped. Vitamin supplements didn't help.
Regretfully, I stopped buying the canned sweet corn and replaced it with more cornbread (other stores did better at keeping wheat-free corn meal on their shelves). Cornbread with a can of chicken chunks drained in around the edges of the pan, and a can of pinto beans and a can of tomatoes warmed on top of the bread, makes a delicious panada, everyone I ever feed agreed. Children love the sweet undertaste in a bowl of cornbread and milk. Corn chips also soak up the juices from the canned goods, and/or whatever raw vegetables go into a taco salad, in a satisfactory way.
But the last couple of times I've done a taco salad with Wal-Mart's store brand corn chips, the "Original" kind that look like Fritos, I've had the tongue and mouth irritation. I didn't have it before. And don't try to tell me it's because I've eaten too many corn chips in the last five years--I may have done that, but the "White Corn Tortilla" chips did not have the same effect, nor did the cornbread made with Martha White corn meal. What's being sprayed on the corn, Wal-Mart?
* * * * *
A primer on why we never need to spray anything on corn...Corn was actually the first crop that rebounded when my family broke the Vicious Pesticide Cycle. Strawberries were close behind.
This is how we eliminate weeds from cornfields. It costs about $15 at Tractor Supply Company. Cheaper and more expensive versions are available, there and at most other hardware stores or department stores that have a garden department--including Wal-Mart.
(Photo from Walgreens by way of Google.) This is how we eliminate corn earworms. We can buy knee-high stockings or use the washed foot ends of laddered tights. We tie the foot part of the stocking around the bottom of the developing ear of corn. When the baby corn earworm tries to gnaw its way in through the corn shucks, it gets a mouthful of nylon and decides to go somewhere else. Its chances of starving or being eaten by a bird, or wasp, or bigger insect along the way are high. Although aggressive (not strong enough to do any damage to a human, it will bite and kick with all its puny might when picked up; it will also eat another corn earworm if it can) the corn earworm has no effective defense against predators, and would never have been much of a nuisance to farmers had the farmers not fallen into a Vicious Pesticide Cycle that destroyed the corn earworm's natural predators.
(Photo from Wikipedia.) This is how we eliminate corn borers (cobworms). All of these little beetles, and a few dozen other species, can be called ladybirds, ladybeetles, or ladybugs, because monks who noticed how useful they were in the garden dedicated the whole genus to Our Lady Mary, the Mother of Jesus. (You can identify the one plant-eating species in the family, the Mexican Bean Beetle, because it is yellow-green instead of orange, amber, or red.) Ladybeetles and their larvae are best known for eating aphids but they eat other nuisance insects too, if the other insects are small enough, which corn borers are. Stop poisoning your insects and watch your corn borers disappear.
(Photo from the Audubon Society by way of Google.) This is how we eliminate corn cutworms. They like to hang around near my home so I think of them mostly as mosquito eaters, but they'll take just about anything to feed their babies, which often happen to hatch at the time of year when corn is vulnerable to cutworms. (The one photographed above appears to be bringing home a beetle--not a ladybird, possibly a Soldier, Net-winged, or Burying Beetle.) Lots of other birds like cutworms, too. Again, stop poisoning the insects and watch the cutworms disappear.
And when we eliminate the borers, we automatically get rid of the worst kind of fungus that infests corn, too...although glyphosate actually promotes the growth of human-toxic Fusarium mold.
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