Corn Syrup: Brian Leech does local history, regional history, labor history, technological history, environmental history, and food history

In early 1965, three executives boarded a plane in Japan, bound for the United States. “Unbeknownst to the U.S. Customs, they were carrying corporate secrets. Each man had carefully placed two vials of an isomerase enzyme into their pockets before the flight.” With it, they would change the world. For after two arduous years of nearly aerobic chemical engineering, their corporation produced what it called Isomerose 30. We know it, or its technically improved successors, as corn syrup.

That’s how my guest Brian Leech begins his intricate, multi-valenced history of what went on in Clinton, Iowa, from the 1960s through the 1980s. It’s food history, it’s labor history, it’s technological history, it’s environmental history, it’s regional history—“and not any single one of them, which is to say,” to quote the great Edmund Morgan, “that it is good history.”