Indiana: The World’s Quiet Corn Cartel Masquerading as a Flyover State
Indiana: Where the World Sends Its Grain and Gets Back a Basketball Museum with Legislature Attached
by Our Man in the Middle of Everywhere
From a café terrace in Lisbon, the talk is of wheat futures and Russian blockades; in Lagos, container rates out of the Port of Long Beach; in Mumbai, the price of pork bellies set in Chicago. Mention Indiana and you are met with the polite smile normally reserved for a cousin who insists he once dated Beyoncé. Yet this landlocked rectangle—wedged between two Great Lakes it refuses to touch—quietly feeds a measurable slice of the planet and exports something far more contagious than soybeans: a stubborn, almost endearing belief that the nineteenth century just needs one more good harvest to come roaring back.
Globally, Indiana is best understood as the planet’s bulk grain silo with a side hustle in moral legislation. Each year the state ships enough corn to replace every calorie lost to drought in the Horn of Africa, then turns around and debates whether children should be allowed to read books that mention drought. The contradiction is so pure it could be bottled and sold as artisanal irony in Brooklyn.
Drive the interstates (a German engineer once called them “autobahns without the fun”) and you pass mile-long trains headed for the Pacific, each car stuffed with enough maize to make a Mexican tortilla weep with gratitude. Somewhere near Lafayette, a billboard thanks Jesus for low tariffs; two exits later, another thanks free-trade agreements for record ag exports. Nobody seems worried the two signs might be praying to different gods.
The international significance crystallizes when you realize the state’s crop insurance payouts now exceed the GDP of Sierra Leone. Climate change, that uninvited dinner guest, has turned Indiana into a high-stakes casino where the house is the jet stream and the chips are literally breadbaskets of the world. When a June derecho flattens 2 million acres, global wheat prices twitch like a stockbroker on his fourth espresso. Commodity traders in London, who couldn’t find Indiana on a map even if labeled, now refresh weather apps for Fort Wayne with the devotion of teenage K-pop stans.
Meanwhile, the state’s legislature—picture a Rotary Club cosplay of the Roman Senate—busies itself deciding which uteruses merit surveillance and whether teachers should be armed more heavily than the local SWAT team. The world watches the spectacle with the detached horror of tourists witnessing a bull-run in Pamplona: fascinating, folkloric, and best enjoyed from behind a sturdy barrier. European correspondents fly in for the quadrennial presidential circus, file 800 words on “America’s Heartland,” and fly out before the complimentary butter cow melts.
Yet the joke may be on the sophisticates. While Berlin argues over heat-pump subsidies, Indiana towns already run municipal fleets on the methane burped from dairy lagoons—an accidental green revolution born of budgetary stinginess rather than eco-virtue. Copenhagen may crow about cycle lanes, but Muncie powers its school buses on yesterday’s Hoosier bacon grease, a circular economy powered by cholesterol and shame.
And then there’s basketball, the state’s true religion, where tiny farm high schools still produce NBA lottery picks the way Bordeaux produces petulant sommeliers. The rest of the planet thinks soccer is the universal language, but tell that to a Lithuanian teenager who learned English from YouTube clips of Hoosier hysteria. If soft power is the ability to make foreigners dream your dreams, Indiana has weaponized hardwood floors.
In the end, Indiana is the place where globalization wears work boots and wonders why the Wi-Fi is so spotty. It feeds the world, frets over the world’s morals, and occasionally elects the world’s most improbable vice presidents. The rest of us can afford to smirk—right up until the price of bread doubles because a thunderstorm took a wrong turn outside Terre Haute. The universe, it turns out, is held together not by dark matter but by dark, loamy topsoil, and Indiana’s got more of it than it knows what to do with. Just don’t ask it to share the recipe. That would require consensus, and consensus, like decent rail service, is still a few legislative sessions away.
