How sticky corn confounded western science

You might know about sticky rice. It’s pretty popular in Asian cuisines, often used in desserts and specialty dishes. It’s sometimes called “glutinous rice”, but it doesn’t actually contain gluten. Instead, it’s sticky because of the chemistry of its starch. Sticky rice starch is almost 100% made of the gluey carbohydrate amylopectin, while the regular rice starch is a mix of amylopectin and amylose. Rice isn’t the only grain with a sticky variety. One of the others is sticky corn, or “waxy corn”. Waxy corn has the same kind of starch as sticky rice, rich in amylopectin and lacking amylose. Like sticky rice, it’s also popular in Asia – you can buy it at Korean grocery stores in the US. In fact, waxy corn has been popular all over Asia for centuries, a fact which made several western botanists in the mid-20th century very confused indeed. If corn is from the Americas, why is waxy corn only grown in Asia, and why has it been there so long? Korean waxy corn Zongzi, a dish made with…