Your Gas Tank Is Partly Filled With CORN

Almost every single time you fill up your car, you're pouring in a fuel made partly from corn.

How does an ordinary vegetable from a farm field end up powering your engine out on the highway?

It comes down to sugar. Corn is packed with starch, which can be broken down into sugars. Add yeast, and those tiny organisms feast on the sugar and excrete alcohol, the exact same fermentation that makes beer and wine. That alcohol is ethanol. It's distilled, purified, and blended into gasoline. In the United States, nearly all gas is about 10 percent ethanol.

It adds up fast. Around a third of the entire US corn crop is now grown not to feed people or animals, but to be fermented and burned in our fuel tanks. A huge slice of America's farmland is quietly growing gasoline.

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