History of Corn

Intriguing tales of its migration, the slave trade, and beginning of the "Butterfly People"

History of corn is such that when Christopher Columbus first came to America, its indigenous communities had already developed more than 200 types of corn – one of the most remarkable plant breeding achievements in history. He noted that it was ‘most tasty boiled, roasted or ground into flour’.

When he returned back to Spain, his exhibits included, among the few specimen ‘Indians’ and gold dusts, maize seeds in the baggage.

Soon Spaniards began distributing maize around Mediterranean, although it was the Venetians who took it to the near East, from where it went up to the Balkans and back to France, Britain, and Holland.

History of Corn - Its introduction to Africa

It was Portugal who introduced corn farming in to Africa to provide ships’ stores for the slave trade. Corn was quickly accepted in Africa because it grew rapidly and its growing was not demanding. (This is not true to today’s heavy-cropping varieties).

A woman alone could plant her seeds, leave them to grow and harvest the crop as and when she needed it. When one patch became exhausted, she moved onto the new one.

With time, the health of the ‘Old World’ people who adopted corn as their staple foods began to deteriorate. Africa, until recent times, was all too familiar with disease of the what came to be identified with the “butterfly people”.

The history of corn cannot do without the mentioning of the ‘butterfly people’ who were affected by it. The butterfly people had the characteristic skin rash that "symmetrically marked the hands and feet and sketched an ugly red butterfly across the victim's face". These marks then spread to the rest of their body in huge scabs. Some people drowned themselves to stop this itching.

History of Corn - Europe and North America

In America, the disease spread like an epidemic across the South, sent many of its victims to insane asylums and, for instance in 1906 in the Mount Vernon Insane Hospital, had a case mortality of 64%. In institutions the prognosis was poor. South Carolina put the vegetable on trial.

“Corn stands indicted!” wrote the state’s agricultural minister in 1909, “the original wild grass of Aztecs and given to us by the Indian. You are here assembled to try the case and render a verdict … for the charge of murder …. “.

Its cause was finally detected in the mid-1900s by the Nobel nominee Joseph Goldberder. He proved that the disease, now called pellagra (rough skin), was the result of absence of the vitamin niacin in corn.

That, of course, begged the question of why Indians were not affected by it, especially since they had been relying on it for so long. The answer was in how the plant was processed. Indians always soaked the kernels overnight in a bath made of water and lime or wood ashes before grinding it.

The Europeans, of course, took that to mean that this was done to make the maize easier to grind and had taken it as an example of “Indian laziness”. It is important to note that this step of soaking the grain with ash, called nixtamalization, was what released the niacin “held” inside the corn. This process turned the plant into a kind of universal superfood that met almost all nutritional requirements.

The Indians understood this quiet well – they used a similar process with coca (cocaine) leaves to activate its chemical stimulants. However, the Europeans were too arrogant to ask the Indians about this.

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