In American regional cooking, corn is important in many recipes, such as corn chowder, creamed corn, succotash, and cornbread. But no preparation can come close to the timeless appeal of simple buttered corn on the cob. All over the Midwest and Great Plains, small towns celebrate the harvest with sweet corn festivals. Settlers adapted the Indian style of roasting corn with the husks removed, and to this day, street vendors around the world sell husked corn.

In Iowa, the heart of the Corn Belt, almost half of all cultivated land is devoted to corn, making it first in the nation for corn production. Corn is the largest crop in the United States, in terms of acres planted and the value of the crop produced. It is also the most widely distributed crop in the world.

In Native American usage, the word for corn means "our life," or "our mother," or "she who sustains us." It was the cultivation of corn that turned Native American tribes from nomadic to agrarian communities.

It was from the Native Americans that the first European settlers learned about corn. Native Americans had spent hundreds of years developing what we now know as corn from seed-bearing grass. Long before Christopher Columbus sailed from Spain in 1492, Native Americans were cultivating this grass in North, Central, and South America. Native American farmers in the Ohio River Valley had been growing corn for more than 1,700 years before the first white men crossed the Appalachian Mountains, and there is evidence that they used corn to brew beer before Europeans arrived in the Americas.

The Pawtuxet Indian tribe in Massachusetts was cultivating corn when the first settler arrived, and corn was on the first Thanksgiving table in 1621. If it had not been for corn, the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony might have starved to death during their first year in America. The Indians taught settlers how to grown corn, pound corn into meal, and how to cook with it.