The field corn that is harvested in the fall isn’t what you eat in the grocery store. This corn has many different fates. Some goes to the ethanol plant a few miles from my parent’s house. There it is fermented and distilled into fuel that’s added to gasoline and powers your car. Some goes to the local feedlot, where beef cattle are fattened in the weeks before slaughter to become your next hamburger.
The rest is sold to Cargill or ADM where it enters our food production system. It eventually ends up in your soda as high-fructose corn syrup, corn tortillas as corn meal, or in most of the processed food that you as some sort of additive, like corn starch or dextrose.
Once the corn is harvested, next come the soybeans.