With Milk and Sugar Blest 209 



to find more and wider uses for the farmers' crops. Naturally, 

 they turned their attention to the refining of cornstarch. 

 While the war between the states was engaging men's atten- 

 tion, an inventor patented a process which ultimately set the 

 present corn-refining industry in motion. 



Sixty to eighty millions of bushels of corn from each year's 

 crop go to the refineries to be turned into corn oil, gluten 

 and starch. Besides the billion bushels which are eaten by 

 American hogs and go into pork, bacon, ham and lard, and 

 the billion, three hundred million bushels which feed cattle, 

 horses and poultry and make their returns in milk, cream, 

 cheese, butter, beef, eggs and farm labor, the flow to the 

 starch refineries is a mere basketful out of the corn harvest. 

 But that basketful is transmuted by the magic of modern 

 industrial science into vast wealth and industrial power. Some 

 of the gluten separated from the other constituents of the 

 corn kernel goes back to the farms on which it was grown 

 in the form of cattle feed. The oil goes into homes and restau- 

 rants for cooking purposes, and into the manufacture of 

 paints, toilet soaps, linoleum, glycerine. The starch is used as 

 starch in a score of ways, or refined into dextrins, glucose and 

 corn sugar. 



Actually, the mechanical process which separates the germ, 

 the gluten and the starch of the grain of corn, and which 

 refines the starch closely parallels nature's process of mastica- 

 tion and digestion. The refineries are like mammoth stomachs 

 into which the raw corn is fed. As with the human digestive 

 system, the ultimate achievement is the derivation of blood 

 sugar (dextrose) from the cornstarch. 



Briefly, the grain is received at the refineries, cleaned, and 

 mixed with warm water with a small amount of sulphurous 

 acid to prevent fermentation. After forty-eight hours or so, 

 when the hulls are softened, the wet mass is chewed by ma- 

 chinery, which breaks up the grain while keeping the germ 



