India, Aug. 7 -- In The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan makes the case that while we think of agriculture as the process by which humans domesticated plants, in some sense, it is crops like maize that have domesticated people by encouraging us to grow more of them. The current varieties of maize were bred for yields, harvestability, sugar content and productivity. By the 20th century, maize was being used for everything from animal feed to high-fructose corn syrup, and had effectively embedded itself in the industrial food system more than almost any plant before it. While this is a bit of a writer's trope, it is generally true that plant traits and profitability then drive lobbying efforts and government policy in their favour, which ...