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Maize / m eɪ z / (Zea mays), also known as corn in North American English, is a tall stout grass that produces cereal grain. It was domesticated by indigenous peoples in southern Mexico about 9,000 years ago from wild teosinte. Native Americans planted it alongside beans and squashes in the Three Sisters polyculture.
Cornmeal is a meal (coarse flour) ground from dried maize. It is a common staple food and is ground to coarse, medium, and fine consistencies, but it is not as fine as wheat flour can be. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] [ 3 ] In Mexico and Louisiana, very finely ground cornmeal is referred to as corn flour .
The production of corn (Zea mays mays, also known as "maize") plays a major role in the economy of the United States. The US is the largest corn producer in the world, with 96,000,000 acres (39,000,000 ha) of land reserved for corn production. Corn growth is dominated by west/north central Iowa and east central Illinois. Approximately 13% of ...
After several thousand years of selective breeding, the hemisphere's most important crop, maize, was more productive than Old World grain crops. Maize produced two and one-half times more calories per given land area than wheat and barley. [13] Nutritionally, maize, beans, and squash contain all nine essential amino acids. [5]
In the grass family, a grain (narrowly defined) is a caryopsis, a fruit with its wall fused on to the single seed inside, belonging to a cereal such as wheat, maize, or rice. More broadly, in agronomy and commerce, seeds or fruits from other plant families are called grains if they resemble cereal caryopses.
A cereal is a grass cultivated for its edible grain. Cereals are the world's largest crops, and are therefore staple foods. They include rice, wheat, rye, oats, barley, millet, and maize. Edible grains from other plant families, such as buckwheat and quinoa, are pseudocereals.
Zea is a genus of flowering plants in the grass family.The best-known species is Z. mays (variously called maize, corn, or Indian corn), one of the most important crops for human societies throughout much of the world.
Flint corn (Zea mays var. indurata; also known as Indian corn or sometimes calico corn) is a variant of maize, the same species as common corn. [1] Because each kernel has a hard outer layer to protect the soft endosperm , it is likened to being hard as flint , hence the name. [ 2 ]