Grains & Cereal Educational Posters, Art Prints & Charts, pg 2/2
for classrooms, homeschoolers, decor.

Corn - The precursor plant to what we know as corn today is believed to be a wild grass called teosinte, indiginous to central Mexico, and first cultivated (made part of the culture) about 7,000 years ago.

The wild grass, which has relatively few, small seeds that easily scatter when the plant is touched, was domesticated for traits of larger, easier to harvest seeds.

The domesticated plant and seeds came to be known as maize by the indiginous peoples throughout North and South America, and a major food source.

Today ground corn is used in many cultures: polenta in Italy; masa in Central America; grits, hominy and mush in the US.

Poet Joel Barlow wrote a poem about cooking and eating “Hasty Pudding”.

Botanist Barbara McClintock's life long work was on the cytogenetics of maize.

Corn as a raw material is used an animal feed (“corn-fed beef”), for creating plastics, and biofuels.

In researching corn I learned something about corn that I didn't know before - Corn is also “a natural pesticide as some insects' digestive organs will swell after consuming cornmeal and water, causing them to die”.

• article - “Does Eating Corn Syrup Kill Your Memory?” - A team of UCLA researchers have observed that rats, fed high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), are more forgetful ...

The peanuts, or groundnut (Arachis hypogaea), is a species in the legume “bean” family (Fabaceae).

The cultivated peanut, first domesticated in South America, was found by Europeans in the markets of Tenochtitian (Mexico City) and spread world wide.

African American botanist and agricultural educator George Washington Carver reputedly discovered three hundred uses for peanut (but not peanut butter).

The Gleaners is a painting about the practice of collecting leftover crops from farmers' fields (Leviticus 19:9-10) after they have been mechanically harvested, or where it is not economically profitable to harvest.

Pre-Impressionist art posters.
FYI - Karl Marx published the Communist Manifesto in 1848; gleaning was punishable by death in the former Soviet Union; contemporary humanitarian groups "glean" from restaurants to feed the poor.