Yet soybeans still don't get the kind of honor and respect that corn does. There's certainly no college football team called the Soybean Threshers.

Ines Prodöhl, a historian at the University of Munich, in Germany, has been thinking about the reasons why.

She's writing a history of soybeans, and she ran into what she calls our "societal indifference" toward this crop when she came to the United States, years ago, and started searching for pictures in an online database called American Memory at the Library of Congress. "I was looking for images like farmers being proud of their soybeans, or anything like that," she says.

She could only find fifteen or twenty soybean images; for other crops, there were thousands. "There was a ton of images about cotton, or corn, or wheat, and there was almost nothing about soybeans!" she says.

It probably doesn't help that soybean plants are pretty unimpressive to look at, compared to those tall stalks of corn with tassels on top. They're modest bushes that grow hip-high. Their leaves conceal pods full of little beans that, when mature, are tan and hard as marbles.

But Prodöhl says there are important historical reasons for the soybean's lack of a public profile. Soybeans were brought to the U.S. from China relatively recently, in the 1920s, by scientists who promoted them not as food, but as alternate crop that would replenish soil that had been depleted from many years of growing corn or wheat.

"They never talked about soybeans as a foodstuff. Never, ever. It just didn't happen," says Prodöhl.

Today, soybeans are an important food, but they're still quite literally invisible to most Americans. From the fields, they flow into giant factories that crush them into oil and meal. They end up in processed food, or industrial products, but their largest use is as animal feed.

This is how most Americans experience the country's new #1 crop. They meet it in the form of a pork chop, or as that other American cultural icon, the chicken McNugget.