A Story of Corn’s Journey from Mexico to Global Staple in Five Dishes

Corn has spawned and shaped civilizations. It feeds subsistence farmers and fattens shareholders’ pockets. It’s politicized and, thankfully, nixtamalized, the ancient process of transforming corn into a nutritional powerhouse. Corn matters in the macro of geopolitics and micro of summer dinners. Tell me how you cook corn, and I’ll tell you where you’re from.

My grandma keeps gallon bags of creamed corn stashed in her second freezer, and I grew up on grits,...