I know, you weren’t speaking of corn. But if you were to do so in Peru, it would be helpful to know that corn is not one thing, but many there. It is not necessary to know the names of all of the varieties while traveling in Peru, but you might see some of them on a menu.

I have included below a collection of twelve images, each showing a separate variety of corn. Each one is accompanied by it’s local Quechua name. These are not the scientific names, but what the local people call these varieties in the area where I bought the seeds.

Please forgive the orthography for the ones that are not typed. I did not write the labels, and I do not speak Quechua, so I don’t feel competent to correct the labels. The Quechua speaker who wrote the labels for me does not have very neat handwriting, and I’ve included a question mark after my caption for the image when I could not be very confident about what letters were intended on the label.

I included the dime in each picture to give you a frame of reference for the size of the kernels.