The silly way they connect corn to bananas annoys me, which you could do for literally anything, corn -> fuel -> lights -> you ate near a light ergo CORN!
I don't see how this is anything but good. Having a single crop for so many things, makes the replicator go brrr. Yes it's a single point of failure, but it's efficient to use food production to scale everything else and it's not a dead-end if corn were to have problems (ie Interstellar)
Arguably civilisation and market are orthogonal so the marketisation and commodification under capitalism means there's very little civilisation as well.
I have know idea what this string of words means in context. Agricultural products, especially staple grains are all commodities, definitionally: "a raw material or primary agricultural product that can be bought and sold, such as copper or coffee." In the Inca store house system for example, potatoes were the central commodity, and all types of foods stuffs were made from the freeze dried potatoes. In MesoAmerica corn was used for food, drink, animal feed, and so on.
https://twunroll.com/article/1074810043495796736