(country music) - [Narrator] What's the most American food?

(country music) (country music continues) (country music fades) (Latin music) With a 9,000 year track record, there's really only one contender.

- We're coming down, too.

(motors whir) - [Announcer] Please welcome Déja Fitzwater, our Miss Oregon's Outstanding Teen.

- [Narrator] Corn is something that Oregon isn't exactly known for, but don't tell that to the roughly 4,000 residents of Aumsville.

(upbeat country music) - [Announcer] Three, two, one.

Go.

- [Narrator] Here at the annual summer Corn Festival, corn shows a few of its many faces, on the cob, drenched in butter, popped and glazed and wrapped around a hot dog on a stick deep fried.

It's what Oregonians do with corn that makes it special here.

And the state lays claim to one of the most iconic corn products of modern times.

The corn dog was invented on the Oregon Coast.

(truck passing) (mixer whirs) - So, we mix the batter up each day by hand.

Everything needs to be on a stick in order for it to stay under the oil in the fryer.

So, we put sticks in everything.

Then everything is dipped by hand.

- [Narrator] It was Labor Day 1939 when a Rockaway Beach hot dog vendor named George Boyington had an idea.

What if, instead of buns, cornmeal batter could be cooked on demand.

He developed a delicious and pronto solution, and the snack on a stick became a national hit.

- It's pretty amazing when you realize how big of a following Pronto Pups have.

And when people come in and they say, "We drove three hours to come and have a Pronto Pup," or, "We came from Idaho," or "We came from Michigan."

It's tough to name all the places that everybody has come from.

- Whoa, slow down.

Slow down.

- [Diane] People love fried foods.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] As iconic as it is, the corn dog plays only a small role in the story of corn in Oregon.

(powerful music) For many Oregonians, the relationship with this grain runs much, much deeper.

(speaking Spanish) (speaking Spanish) - [Narrator] Here, fresh corn tortillas are made by the thousands each weekday morning.

(upbeat Latin music) Three Sisters Nixtamal has been in business for over a decade.

The women-led operation makes tortillas in a traditional way, how generations have before them.

- The three sisters are a reference to the Indigenous way of growing corn, beans and squash together and the way they sustain each other and work together and create something greater with the three of them.

- People think of tortillas from an industrialized point, not from a cultural, deep rooted point.

- [Crystal] They use an ancient and all natural process invented by Indigenous Mesoamericans called nixtamalization.

- We have this business that's based on three ingredients and it's corn, water and limestone.

- So, the majority of tortillas are now made out of an industrialized masa harina, which is a corn flour product.

So, we have to start with a high quality corn, but it has to also be a corn that's integral.

It has to be like a whole kernel.

When you nixtamalize the corn, it slowly dissolves the outer seed coat in the alkalinity of the limestone.

And in the morning, we just wash away the lime water and that corn is nixtamalized corn or hominy, and it's ready to be ground into fresh corn masa.

It's like more nutritious than just grinding up corn into cornmeal.

- [Narrator] And each tortilla shows off the natural color of the corn, from yellow to blue to green.

- Coming to our kitchen and picking up the tortillas is something that a lot of people did growing up if they grew up in Mexico.

So, it really hits something deep.

(upbeat music) - It's an important grain for the survival of Indigenous people in the Americas.

We always say in Mexico, (speaking Spanish) without corn, there is not country.

- [Narrator] Corn as we know it wouldn't exist without humans.

Between nine and 10,000 years ago in the region now known as Mesoamerica, people cultivated corn from a wild grass called teosinte, which means mother of corn in the Nahuatl language.

When white settlers arrived, they were fascinated by corn.

Indigenous people taught them to grow it, and corn spread around the world.

(dramatic music) But as settlers forced people from their land, they also changed the nature of the corn that grew there.

- The diversity of corn has been eroded over time, particularly just following colonization and all the chaos and tragedy that happened out of it.

And as cultures got moved or died off, a lot of the corn varieties also did, as well.

- [Narrator] Today, corn is the most grown crop in the world, and the U.S. leads the way.

The majority comes from the corn belt states, which Oregon isn't one of.

We're not big by corn standards, but corn is big by Oregon standards.

It's one of the most valuable grown commodities in the state.

Most of it isn't meant for people directly.

It goes into animal feed, high fructose corn syrup and ethanol.

And as the world and specifically the climate changes, corn is changing, too.

As always, with a little help from us.

- Oaxacan green corn is special first and foremost by its name and how it looks.

It's a green corn and people, when they first see it, are shocked or surprised, and beyond the color, it has a fantastic flavor.

- [Narrator] And that green corn goes into those tortillas we saw at Three Sisters Nixtamal.

- In terms of the diversity of corn varieties, I think today some estimates put it at around 5,000 varieties.

- [Narrator] Lucas has spent years studying the farming of corn and other crops, and his emphasis is in dryland farming.

- So, the modern corn growing has been yield maximization strategy.

You're trying to get as much corn out of the field as you can, but with dryland corn or dry farmed corn, you're trying to work more closely with what you have in the environment and do low inputs.

Corn is a very heat loving plant and it loves the sun.

And with global warming, it's really a good plant to have around for hotter weather.

- [Narrator] While corn can grow in a variety of environments, it also reflects the people of a place, those who tend to it, eat it and drink it.

(upbeat music) In Oregon, Hispanic residents are the fastest growing ethnic demographic.

When Xicha Brewing opened in Salem in 2017, it became the first Latine owned brewery in the state.

- Xicha is a word that exists in all of Latin America.

It is a fermented beverage.

It was actually the first fermented beverage of the Americas.

- [Narrator] And that drink is made with, you guessed it, corn.

- Maíz is definitely the gold of our culture, the sun, such a staple in our community, in our life.

(upbeat Latin music) (crowd murmurs) So, we make this as a special, something that we kind of hodgepodge with 'cause it's not really a Venezuelan arepa, and it's not really a Colombian arepa, so we just call it like a Xicha arepa.

And it just kinda, you know, kind of shows people, like, all the stuff that we are able to do with, like, different kinds of corn.

In Salem, even sourcing masa or sourcing some corn products and some really even South American ingredients, right?

I wasn't, you couldn't find them.

And so, Salem has just recently kind of gone into this transformation that more and more diversity is happening.

Luckily, we're kind of at the forefront of it.

(upbeat Latin music) - The Chela was the first beer that the kitchen started drinking after their shifts.

And that's when I knew that we were really onto something important.

And since we first released it in, it must have been 2018, we've made Chela every month of every year, and I'm really excited to see, as corn continues to make such a big impact in the culinary world, that there ought to be more corn available for brewing, as well.

- [Narrator] As Oregon becomes more diverse, corn will become more important to the state.

Before there was America, there was corn.

It's one of the great gifts of this continent's Indigenous people to the world.

It can be used in so many ways and can be grown in different conditions, but it's also personal, a piece of family traditions and summer rituals.

- Even having my little daughter make masa with me some days is such a beautiful thing.

So, I mean, it goes, you gotta teach it really young and then it comes in.

It's very much part of our every day.

- [Narrator] It is agriculture, and it's culture, and it's woven in our history and memories.

Corn may be the most American food, but as the state's climate and people change, it will increasingly become an Oregon food.

(upbeat Latin music) - I'm episode producer Meagan Cuthill.

We had such a fun time capturing these kernels about corn in Oregon and making them pop.

Telling the stories of regional corn and everything else delicious by OPB is only possible because of our members, viewers and listeners like you.

Thank you.

If you want to stay up to date on Pacific Northwest foods and get tasty seasonal recipes, check out our weekly "Superabundant" newsletter.

Sign up now at opb.org/superabundant.