Are you sure that's maize? It looks far more like something i used to enjoy during my university days :D
Boffins dig up prehistoric popcorn in Peru
Mankind was scoffing prehistoric popcorn 1,000 years earlier than previously thought, reckons a top archaeologist. Before anyone along the arid north coast of Peru bothered crafting ceramic art or making cooking pots, let alone building cinemas and other attractions in which the crunchy snack is often wolfed down by modern Man …
-
-
-
-
-
-
Monday 23rd January 2012 19:42 GMT Michael Wojcik
Junk food
As a snack, roasted maize isn't bad (low calories, high fiber) - but you probably knew that.
The real problems are either eating boatloads of the stuff drowned in salt, sugar, and/or fat, in Modern Fat Westerner (MFW) style, or making it too large a part of the regular diet. The latter probably contributed to the fall of Cahokia, for example. (Cahokia, near what's now St Louis, was a major Mississippian settlement; in the 13th century its population was comparable to that of London.)
As for the pine-cone shape of Exhibit B - that's a pretty common cob shape for maize varieties that existed prior to modern farming. There are similar ones on the cover of the book "Indian Corn of the Americas", for example. You can buy cobs like that around here (Michigan) in the summer, at farmers' markets and such.
Teosinte, on the other hand, is very different from maize (morphologically; genetically they're pretty close, though cross-fertility is limited). Apparently the ancient Mexicans bred a *lot* of generations of selected teosinte strands to arrive at maize. And maize has to be domesticated - it generally can't reproduce in the wild, because the kernels don't separate from the cob on their own.
-
This topic is closed for new posts.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
