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WITH our first infant wail, we establish that intimate link between food and language on which our lives depend. You could say that ingesting food is our primary act of translation, in which the mouth is a portal for both eating and speaking, for ingesting the world of things and articulating the world of ideas. That we have but the one orifice for these opposite actions is a curious fact of human engineering that may cause some to dismay,1 but this fact helps explain why the foods of a particular culture cannot be separated from the language of that culture. The simple act of translating the name of a food from one language to another transforms not just our response to that food but often the substance of the food itself. Food, then, is a good medium in which to demonstrate how much language preconditions perception and how often we eat first with our heads and then with our stomachs, so that we can no more taste with an innocent palate than we can look with an innocent eye.
Among the world's major foods, corn is a prime example in both its botanical nature and its cultural history of the ways in which language shapes perception and history genetics. As long as we view corn as a typical domesticated wild grass, a cereal grouped with wheat and rice as one of the world's three basic staple crops, corn is appropriate for a case history of food change. But the moment we translate "corn" back into "maize" and examine this language shift and its meanings, we find that maize/corn is in no way typical. No other human food plant has undergone such extraordinary changes with such far-reaching results, most of them within the last two hundred years as a result of the clash between indigenous and European languages that began with Columbus' arrival in the Americas.
To say the word "corn" is to plunge into the tragi-farcical mistranslations of language and history. If only the British had followed Columbus in phoneticizing the Taino word mahiz, which the Arawaks named their staple grain, we wouldn't be in the same linguistic pickle we're in today, where I have to explain to someone every year that when Biblical Ruth...