Big Bad Corn

If you’ve ever creeped your way through a corn maze at Halloween, you know how it can grab ahold of your imagination, turning benign stalks into monsters and discarded cobs into severed limbs. It’s just a trick of the light–but take a look at the ways that the U.S. uses corn, and you’ll see that a holiday thrill isn’t the scariest thing about this product. It was first subsidized in the late ‘70s as a fossil fuel alternative, but it’s turned out to be inefficient source of fuel.