{"id":308,"date":"2019-07-04T10:29:56","date_gmt":"2019-07-04T14:29:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/?p=308"},"modified":"2022-04-14T17:34:13","modified_gmt":"2022-04-14T21:34:13","slug":"corn-wet-milling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/corn-wet-milling\/","title":{"rendered":"Corn Wet Milling: A Step in the Food Process"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

What is corn wet milling? What does it produce, and what is the point of corn wet milling? <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

If the corn flowing from midwestern elevators doesn\u2019t end up feeding cattle, it likely goes to a corn \u201cwet\u201d mill, which is the first stage for processing it into numerous food products. (They\u2019re called wet mills to distinguish them from traditional mills that just grind corn into dry meal.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We eat less than a bushel of corn per person per year in its original form. Yet we each consume a ton of corn annually<\/strong>, mostly through ingredients in processed products, such as breakfast cereals, condiments, or snacks.
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\u201cWet\u201d corn mills turn corn into components that companies like General Mills, McDonalds, and Coca-Cola use in processed foods<\/a>. The wet corn milling process reduces corn to simple molecules, mostly sugars, forming corn syrup, the first domestic substitute for cane sugar. It was further refined into high-fructose corn syrup in the 1970s, which is now the predominant processed product made from corn and is the main ingredient in soda.
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The corn mill takes apart the corn kernel:<\/p>\n\n\n\n