delights of hasty pudding and Indian pudding, of hoe-cake and hominy, of sweet corn and popcorn.  I remember thirty years ago seeing on a London stand a heap of dejected popcorn balls labeled “Novel American Confection.  Please Try One.”  But nobody complied with this pitiful appeal but me and I was sorry that I did.  Americans used to respond with a shipload of corn whenever an appeal came from famine sufferers in Armenia, Russia, Ireland, India or Austria, but their generosity was chilled when they found that their gift was resented as an insult or as an attempt to poison the impoverished population, who declared that they would rather die than eat it—­and some of them did.  Our Department of Agriculture sent maize missionaries to Europe with farmers and millers as educators and expert cooks to serve free flapjacks and pones, but the propaganda made little impression and today Americans are urged to eat more of their own corn because the famished families of the war-stricken region will not touch it.  Just so the beggars of Munich revolted at potato soup when the pioneer of American food chemists, Bumford, attempted to introduce this transatlantic dish.

But here we are not so much concerned with corn foods as we are with its manufactured products.  If you split a kernel in two you will find that it consists of three parts:  a hard and horny hull on the outside, a small oily and nitrogenous germ at the point, and a white body consisting mostly of starch.  Each of these is worked up into various products, as may be seen from the accompanying table.  The hull forms bran and may be mixed with the gluten as a cattle food.  The corn steeped for several days with sulfurous acid is disintegrated and on being ground the germs are floated off, the gluten or nitrogenous portion washed out, the starch grains settled down and the residue pressed together as oil cake fodder.  The refined oil from the germ is marketed as a table or cooking oil under the name of “Mazola” and comes into competition with olive, peanut and cottonseed oil in the making of vegetable substitutes for lard and butter.  Inferior grades may be used for soaps or for glycerin and perhaps nitroglycerin.  A bushel of corn yields a pound or more of oil.  From the corn germ also is extracted a gum called “paragol” that forms an acceptable substitute for rubber in certain uses.  The “red rubber” sponges and the eraser tips to pencils may be made of it and it can contribute some twenty per cent. to the synthetic soles of shoes.

[Illustration:  CORN PRODUCTS]

Starch, which constitutes fifty-five per cent. of the corn kernel, can be converted into a variety of products for dietary and industrial uses.  As found in corn, potatoes or any other vegetables starch consists of small, round, white, hard grains, tasteless, and insoluble in cold water.  But hot water converts it into a soluble, sticky form which may serve for starching clothes or making cornstarch pudding.  Carrying the process further with the aid of a little acid or other catalyst it takes up water and goes over into a sugar, dextrose, commonly called “glucose.”  Expressed in chemical shorthand this reaction is