I’ve received many responses on this post about the tags:
#i texted one of the people i know in a corn genomics lab today#bc i was haunted and vexed from the memory of a pic she showed me like six months ago#of her in front of a solid wall of supercorn#and when i say ‘supercorn’ i mean like. literally four feet above her head#shes like 5 foot 5#i cannot make this shit up#but i kept wondering this week#if it was a real pic she showed me or if i had just dreamed it or smth#and she sent me the pic#its real#it looks like shes standing at the edge of a fucking jungle#and u kno what maize is? a grass. a fucking grass. a really fucked up grass#the image haunts me u . have no idea#maize
and after discussing the Just Really Big Corn more with the person in question, I have some more information about the offending Really Big Corn (the pic is coming up dont worry):
-for those who are new to Exactly How Fucked Up Corn Is, corn, or Zea mays, is comprised of many varieties (called ‘landraces’) native to central and south america. They were first bred by the native peoples in the region from an ancient grass called Teosinte that’s still around today. theyre really fucked up. i cant talk about it here but trust me there’s a reason some people devote their entire lives to studying it
-the lab in question is a maize genomics lab, and does a lot of work with these landraces. sometimes this work involves bringing various kinds up to their lab at my university in Iowa to grow in test plots for experiments. you can see where this is going
-so the supercorn itself. the supercorn in question is actually a collection of a few different landraces from the valleys of mexico and south america. they are naturally taller than what we would consider ‘normal’ corn in their native environment, but like corn generally is when brought to Iowa, they’re really fucking happy here and are a little bit taller than their natural height to show for it (we get longer days here then they get where they’re from, resulting in the plant getting slightly different growth signals, so on so forth)
-i got the height wrong in the tags on the original post. my friend is 5 foot 7, not 5 foot 5. this corn is over 20 feet (6 meters) tall. they were grown from seed in this test plot. she says the stalks are as thick as bamboo to compensate for the sheer height. behold the image that’s haunted me for literally months:
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