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Quote by Nick LaRocca

“Michelle made a point of being friendly, not just seeming friendly, and rich girls would meet her eyes with something like humanity, surprised at themselves for how pleasantly they were treating a plebe.”

Quote by Nick LaRocca

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Nick LaRocca

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“The great edifice of variety and choice that is an American supermarket turns out to rest on a remarkably narrow biological foundation comprised of a tiny group of plants that is dominated by a single species: Zea mays, a giant tropical grass most Americans know as corn... Read the ingredients on the label of any processed food and, provided you know the chemical name it travels under, corn is what you will find. For modified or unmodified starch, for glucose syrup and maltodextrin, for crystalline fructose and ascorbic acid, for lecithin and dextrose, lactic acid and lysine, for maltose and HFCS, for MSG and polyols, for the caramel color and xanthan gum, read: corn... There are some forty-five thousand items in the average American supermarket and more than a quarter of them now contain corn. This goes for the nonfood items as well... And us?”

CornZea Mays
Book:The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
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“At that period, rising in the world meant giving up working with your hands in favor of work in a store or an office. The people who lived in town had made it, and turned their backs socially on those who had not but were still growing corn and wheat out there in the country. What seemed like an impassable gulf was only the prejudice of a single generation, which refused to remember its own not very remote past.”

Family RelationshipsCornWheat
Book:ANCESTORS: A Family History
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“One would expect to find a comparatively high proportion of carbon 13 [the carbon from corn] in the flesh of people whose staple food of choice is corn - Mexicans, most famously. Americans eat much more wheat than corn - 114 pounds of wheat flour per person per year, compared to 11 pounds of corn flour. The Europeans who colonized America regarded themselves as wheat people, in contrast to the native corn people they encountered; wheat in the West has always been considered the most refined, or civilized, grain. If asked to choose, most of us would probably still consider ourselves wheat people, though by now the whole idea of identifying with a plant at all strikes us as a little old-fashioned. Beef people sounds more like it, though nowadays chicken people, which sounds not nearly so good, is probably closer to the truth of the matter. But carbon 13 doesn't lie, and researchers who compared the carbon isotopes in the flesh or hair of Americans to those in the same tissues of Mexicans report that it is now we in the North who are the true people of corn. 'When you look at the isotope ratios,' Todd Dawson, a Berkeley biologist who's done this sort of research, told me, 'we North Americans look like corn chips with legs.' Compared to us, Mexicans today consume a far more varied carbon diet: the animals they eat still eat grass (until recently, Mexicans regarded feeding corn to livestock as a sacrilege); much of their protein comes from legumes; and they still sweeten their beverages with cane sugar. So that's us: processed corn, walking.”

Corn
Book:The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
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“For ten to twelve hours, he smoked cigs across the bleached-out American landscape, up through the deltas of Mississippi and stars falling on Alabama, he watched the sky shift in burning purple and orange wars. Armies cascaded across the plains and planes died in beautiful violent violet clashes. Dust thick enough to taste billowing off the fields serving up their corn and soy.”

WarAmericaLandscapeCornSoyAmerican LandscapeAgriculturesBig Ag
Book:Ohio
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“Nautical blue? Nah.” Her best friend, Chantal, used her fingertip to reveal the next set of colors. “Back in Chicago, with Lake Michigan nearby, maybe. But out here?” Her tone indicated just what she thought of the rural Illinois town. She tapped another hue on the swatch. “What you want here is cornflower blue.” Grinning, Simone shook her head. She’d missed joking around with Chantal. And nothing could dim her pride in the town’s agriculture. Their corn fed the nation. Lake Michigan was picturesque but cold and forbidding half the time.”

CornThrowing ShadeColor Blue
Book:Stirring Up Love
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