Education
What's for Dinner Tonight?
by Brenda Miller-Sanford, Computer & Education Coordinator, OCPA

For dinner tonight, how about roast beef with gravy, mashed potatoes, cream-style corn, homemade white bread and a fresh garden salad with a homemade French dressing? For dessert, a slice of deluxe pecan pie, still warm from the oven, ice cream and a cup of instant coffee or instant tea. Sounds good, doesn’t it?

Only two of the items on this menu do not contain grain corn, the same corn that many people refer to as cattle corn or dent corn. Grain corn is used in the following menu items:

Roast beef
- about 60 per cent of the grain corn crop grown in Ontario is used for feeding livestock. The remainder of the crop is used for industrial and commercial applications. Some of the corn may be exported.

Gravy
- corn starch can be used in making gravy as a thickening agent.

Cream-style corn
- the cream sauce is thickened with corn starch, a product of grain corn. The niblets are sweet corn. Sweet corn accounts for about five per cent of total corn production in Ontario.

Homemade white bread
- this recipe calls for margarine, which could be a corn oil margarine, used as an ingredient in the bread and for greasing the baking pans.

Homemade French dressing
- may contain corn oil as one of its ingredients.

Deluxe pecan pie
- contains both corn syrup and corn oil. If the pastry is a ready made, cholesterol-free, pie shell bought at the grocery store, it may contain dextrose, a sweetener made from grain corn.

Ice cream
- may contain sweeteners made from grain corn, such as glucose or fructose-glucose.

Instant coffee or instant tea
- maltodextrins (a dextrose-equivalent product of complete solubility, but little or no sweetness) is sprayed on ground coffee and instant tea to protect the contents from moisture and keep it free flowing. Maltodextrin is also used in instant soup mixes and other packages where the contents must be kept free flowing.

We have covered only a few food items here, but if you take a typical grocery store that contains about 10,000 items, at least 2,500 products contain grain corn in one form or another.

Corn is the most diverse crop known to humans. Some of its non-edible uses are fuel ethanol, spark plugs, toothpaste, wall paper and degradable golf tees.

Corn Awareness

Throughout April, local county corn producers, agricultural awareness committees and some individual farmers in different parts of the province worked with grades 4, 5 and 6 students to increase awareness of corn and products containing corn. In conjunction with other commodity groups, they’re helping students learn things like how corn is produced and makes its way from the field into some of their favorite products like bicycle tires, breakfast cereals, candy, chocolate bars, pop, corn chips, ketchup and don’t forget the toothpaste! Just think of the food on the grocery store shelf. What is really in it? Where did it come from? How did it get there? Most of us take this for granted. There is an effort taking place to help our young people understand the origin of food, the importance of agriculture and the career opportunities available to them in the agri-food industry. The Ontario Corn Producers’ Association (OCPA) has four educational displays circulating around the counties for this purpose.

The OCPA receives requests for information on a regular basis from teachers and students across Ontario, Canada, throughout the U.S. and other countries such as Australia, Sweden and Jamaica. At least 95 per cent of these requests come in by e-mail over the Internet.

What are you having for dinner tonight? How many of the items on your table contain corn?
For more information on grain corn, contact the OCPA office or e-mail us at ontcorn@ontariocorn.org.

For information on other commodities, the “All About Food: Agri-Food Facts” booklet or the “Mapping Your Future: Careers in Agriculture and the Agri-Food System” booklet, contact Ontario Agri-Food Education Inc at (905) 878-1510 or e-mail at resource@oafe.org.