Word: corns
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...What can I tell you about Pedro Infante? If you're a Mejicana or Mejicano and don't know who he is, you should be tied to a hot stove with yucca rope and beaten with sharp dry corn husks as you stand in a vat of soggy fideos. If your racial and cultural ethnicity is Other, then it's about time you learned about the most famous of Mexican singers and actors." -Denise Chavéz, from her 2002 novel Loving Pedro Infante...
...Bolivians deem such steps unnecessary because if not chemically transformed into cocaine, coca itself is harmless. On the contrary, studies point to nutritional benefits from a leaf packed with vitamins, minerals and protein. "It's like banning corn because you don't want people to drink alcohol," says Rolando Vargas, a coca grower union leader...
Biofuels, however, are the real growth science, particularly after President George W. Bush, in his State of the Union address, called for the U.S. to quintuple its production of biofuels, primarily ethanol. That was good news to American corn farmers, who produce the crop from which the overwhelming share of domestic ethanol is made. But the manufacture of corn ethanol is still inefficient: the process burns up almost as much energy as it produces...
...fuel sold in Brazil. But such ethanol causes environmental problems of its own, as forests are cleared for cane fields. Better still would be to process ethanol from agricultural waste like wood chips or the humble summer grass called switchgrass. The cellulosic ethanol they produce packs more energy than corn ethanol, but it also takes more energy to manufacture. "If you make ethanol by burning coal, you defeat the purpose," says Sarah Hessenflow Harper, an analyst for the advocacy group Environmental Defense...
...when it had to phase out its production of ozone-destroying chlorofluorocarbons, has made a similar environmental pledge. It sold its Dacron, Lycra and Nylon division--all fossil-fuel-based fabrics--and is concentrating on bio-based materials like Sorona polymer made from starch found in the kernels of corn. DuPont hopes to more than double its revenue from nondepletable resources, to $8 billion by 2015. The company has also cut its greenhouse-gas emissions 72% since 1990 and is aiming for more. That puts DuPont in position to respond nimbly if Washington eventually acts to cap carbon. "We learned...