Corn being marvelously adaptable, it was being grown in a LOT of places whose climates were far removed from the Mexican highlands of its birth. Indigenous nations across North America had corn, from the deserts of the southwest to the humid warmth of the southeast & north to NY.
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The indigenous people of Mexico who developed corn as a crop also made a crucial discovery about the need to process it with a base solution. Known as nixtamalization, the process makes vitamin B in the corn bioavailable to humans.
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Nixtamalization spread with corn as part of the trade goods that linked indigenous communities to one another.
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Incidentally nixtamalization is also crucial to being able to make tortilla dough - masa.
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Roughly 4000 years after corn and nixtamalization were established in North America, Europeans show up and proceed to get racism all over everything. They were happy to learn to grow corn, but didn't listen about nixtamalization. Enter pellagra.
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Pellagra is the result of niacin deficiency. The niacin in corn is only bioavailable to humans if you nixtamalize it. If you are living in an area where traditional European grains like wheat don't grow so well so you eat a lot of corn but don't nixtamalize - boom.
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Why wouldn't you use nixtamalization? Obviously no one could explain the whole niacin thing, so the Europeans decided it was just an indigenous method of cooking that they didn't need to bother with. Not nixtamalizing was a mark of not being indigenous, therefore good.
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After a while it just got forgotten by whites, and particularly in the southeast where corn was widely eaten by poor people (Euro grains like cool weather so wheat flour was often expensive) pellagra was A Thing.
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These days we know about niacin and why nixtamalization is a good idea and hardly anyone in the US gets pellagra anymore. Corn meanwhile has gone on to be a global behemoth of a crop.
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I kind of wonder what the person who domesticated teosinte (remember at the top of the thread? How all corn comes from one domestication event? That means one person did it - there was one father or mother of corn) would think of it all.
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I think a lot about questions like these. It’s amazing.
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