[Macky]

Corn is a high-calorie and nutritious grain crop that you most definitely want in a survival garden. It's sustained entire peoples for centuries in some parts of the world (usually in combination with beans, which compliment the nutrients in corn). Corn is not awful and is not unhealthy.

Because corn is such a high-energy and multi-purpose crop, it's one of the primary crops that science has tried to improve upon. They've done it through natural hybridization (completely safe, natural breeding and selection of plants), through hybridization in the lab (just speeding up natural breeding process) and by inserting genes and such from things that would not naturally cross with corn (animals, etc... not accepted as safe by all, including myself). It's the latter that scares people away from modern commercially farmed corn because it's so prevalent in the food supply.

"Organic" merely refers to how a plant is grown. If a plant is grown in ground that has not had synthetic chemicals added to it and no synthetic chemicals were used on the plant while it was growing, both the plant and the seeds produced by that plant can be slapped with the "organic" label and if the variety is established and stable and meets certain criteria, also the "heirloom" label. However, there are many pesticides that occur in nature and that are harmful to humans at certain levels. Organic growers are allowed to apply these pesticides with little regulation and because they're not as effective as their synthetic counterparts, they have to be applied to the crops more often. Organic doesn't always mean pesticide free, just synthetic pesticide free. You'd have to know the practices on that particular farm to know what you're actually getting and that's often not on the label in the grocery store. Organic doesn't always guarantee safe, although it's a lot more likely.