Garden Planning #1 - the idiocy of corn

I love the idea of a garden. I like producing food. I even like the digging and hauling of dirt. I tend to fail at regular habits involved, but in all honesty I'm getting better at that too year by year. So this year I decided to look at growing corn.

I've avoided growing corn for years:

• They are heavy feeders and suck fast amount of nutrients out of the soil
• I hate cleaning off corn silks... they stick to just everything and get under my nails.
• Hornworms are one of the few insects that give me the heebie jeebies. I mean look at them....super creepy.

The reason for growing it, is that I really like trying at traditional foodways and I want to try a real three-sisters planting of corn, beans, and squash. In the past when I've tried it, I've used sunflowers in place of the corn. The problem is that the sunflowers never seem to get going fast enough to carry the bean vines.

However, looking into corn, I found out that each corn stalk only produces one or two edible ears in most cases. Which is ridiculous given what they take out of the soil. I'm a home gardener, it might be annoying but I can easily, and naturally, amend the soil. Think what those vast fields of corn that we pass on the highway are doing to the land. What are they taking out of the soil, and where do the nutrients come from to fix it? The answer is not comforting. The nutrients come from a loss heavy system relying on petroleum.

What gets me about it though is that whats the point of corn? Really? Sure, we've found plenty of ways to use it, but that's because the governments agriculture bills have created a corn surplus that has existed for decades and actually leads to quite a bit of waste as there's no silage for the surplus produce.

Why not focus on staple crops that produce more and take less from the land.  Why so corn obsessed?