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Five Food Finds about Corn

1. One bushel of corn weighs 56 pounds – more than a large bag of dog food.
2. Corn is America’s largest crop and accounts for more than 90 percent of the total value and production of feed grains.
3. Family farmers grow 90 percent of America’s corn.
4. The United States produces 40 percent of the world’s corn, more than any other country.
5. In the United States, 87 percent of all the corn is grown utilizing only naturally occurring rainfall.

Today’s Food History

on this day in…

1439 In an effort to stop the spread of disease, kissing is banned in England.

1827 Josiah Spode II R.I.P. Inventor of Fine Bone China (Spode porcelain). It became the standard English bone china.

1867 Reinforced concrete was patented by F. Joseph Monier. He was a Paris gardener, and developed reinforced concrete to use in garden tubs, beams and posts.

1951 The controversial novel ‘Catcher in the Rye’ by J.D. Salinger was published.

1967 Arlo Guthrie performs a new song, the 20 minute ‘Alice’s Restaurant’, at the Newport Folk Festival.

1980 The California Supreme Court rules that Ted Giannoulas can appear in public in his San Diego Chicken suit as long as it does not have the call letters of the radio station (KGB) that first used it as a promotional gambit.

1981 Shukuni Sasaki spins 72 plates simultaneously.

2004 The City Manager of Key West, Florida fired its Official Chicken Catcher. Armando Parra was hired in January to catch and relocate some of the more than 2,000 ‘wild’ chickens that roam this small island city. They did not feel he would meet his contract quota to relocate 1,000 chickens by September.