Maize
Zea mays
Domesticated by indigenous Americans over 9,000 years. Now 92% genetically modified. Progress.
Maize did not evolve so much as get engineered, slowly, by hand. Indigenous farmers spent more than nine thousand years turning teosinte, a wild grass with an ear about five centimeters long, into the crop that fed a hemisphere. It is one of the great unhurried achievements of human history. In the United States today, that crop is about 92 percent genetically modified. Progress.
