Mysteries of the Corn Maidens

Beware of maize making bargains. ;)

 The fact that corn, maize to non-Americans, is about as pedestrian and common a thing as could be imagined, hides an important fact - 

- the fact that maize is freakishly scary tech. If some genetic scientist had created maize in the laboratory, either the environmentalists would be burning him at the stake or he would win the Nobel Prize.

The mythologies surrounding maize are pretty bizarre too, but we'll get to that in a moment. First of all, consider teosinte. A very pedestrian family of grasses, most rather endangered now. The grains scatter to the winds as soon as they are ripe, and they are also encased in a shell so hard you could probably use the grain as a replacement for buckshot. One teosinte plant doesn't produce that much seed, you would probably need to pick the seeds (from the ground, since they scatter the instant they are ripe) from multiple plants to get a meal of any sort out of it. A promising grain for agriculture? Not so much, or at least so you would think.

At the bottom of the picture above is teosinte, the little green stick with the odd-shaped grains. Above is maize, corn. Somehow, round about 9,000 to 11,000 years ago or so, the little green toothpick below began to be morphed into the big bounteous ear we know today. It was not accident or some natural evolution of the plant: humans presumably did it. And even today, to do it would be virtually impossible. There is not one gene to be mutated here but at least sixteen. To give an Old World parallel, the wild brand of wheat known as einkorn had a shattering seed head too like teosinte has, and a mutation arose called emmer that had a non-shattering seed head and this sparked the agricultural revolution in the Old World. However, einkorn and emmer are practically identical except for the fact that the seed head of emmer doesn't shatter, thus leading to it being easier to gather by humans. There is only one gene that controls seed head shattering in einkorn.

Above: einkorn. Below: emmer.

Aside from the non-shattering seedhead in emmer, 

they are functionally identical. Only a single

mutation was involved.

The more you look into it, the weirder the whole thing becomes. Initially Western scientists believed that there must have been some now-extinct precursor to maize, a form of teosinte that resembled maize much more. This has now been pretty much definitively disproven. Teosinte will actually hybridize with maize, in other words these two extremely dissimilar plants will actually breed. Teosinte would have had to been grown and bred very carefully for a long long time in at least a semi-agricultural society for all the requisite changes to have taken place. The question here would be "why?" Teosinte itself would have made a lousy food grain, its shell is very hard, it's seed scatters to the wind. And it is not like other seed grains weren't around. Chia was around, a seed much more nutrient dense and perhaps easier to harvest, and chia didn't need to be shelled. I am drinking an ice tea with chia seeds in it right now, the chia seeds swell up to little balls of jelly making a super nice and very nutritious drink. Good for weight loss since the little jelly balls take up a lot of space in the stomach and consist of mostly water. No shelling required. And yet chia, as far as we know, remains more or less the same as it was 9000 years ago, while teosinte went through a transformation bordering on magic. If not actual magic. If you knew the end result ahead of time, putting time and effort into teosinte was a very productive use of time because in the end they got a plant with really huge food yields, that was very easy to prepare into bread, didn't require any particularly complicated methods to be hulled, and stored super well. But presumably they would have had no clue how successful they would be.

(An interesting aside, what did Americans do with one of the most

nutritious foods on the planet? A powerhouse of Omega-3 acids,

protein, antioxidants, fiber, manganese, calcium and phosphorus?)

(Yes, we turned them into Chia Pets. ;) )

So the superfood they left alone, the problem child they turned into what is now the worldwide monster of agriculture providing 20% of the human calories consumed on the planet. It's not like they didn't know the value of chia either, the Aztecs used it as money, it was a huge part of their agriculture, but they evidently didn't change a single thing about it. The unpromising stick of teosinte seeds, that they chose to change. 

Interestingly, maize beans and squash together form a nutritionally complete food, which might not have been that big of a deal if you were a hunter gatherer primarily, but if you were going to be an agricultural society that was a very big deal, and yes incidentally these three plants (the Native American "Three Sisters") also have a synergistic relationship when they are grown next to each other. And all of this, all of this, was just some happy happenstance engineered by stone age people, whereas we with all our advanced 21st Century technology have never done anything even remotely in the same ball park as this? Is it just me, or does something smell fishy? A fix was in somewhere, I don't know where. One thing about teosinte that might have captured the imagination of the early Americans, it will pop like popcorn, which might have made it magical in their eyes. Still it is hard to imagine them being THAT impressed with popcorn, and even if they were, this wasn't a run-of-the-mill wolf-to-dog type domestication. This was like starting with a wolf and turning him into a buffalo.

Also interestingly, while the mesoamericans performed the near-impossible in transforming teosinte into maize, they showed no particular talent in domesticating much else. The wild turkey they probably transformed a bit in domestication, they domesticated the dog, both were sources of meat, but the diet of most settled and agricultural people in mesoamerica and elsewhere was pretty much habitually short of protein and fat. That's one reason the Aztecs were so keen on their bloody ceremonies: after they rip the victims heart out, they roll them down the pyramid, then comes the cookout (pass the barbecue sauce). You got a lot of hungry folks to feed, capturing a thousand or so enemies in battle (they were very keen to capture in battle, not kill) and sacrificing them to the gods goes a long way towards filling bellies and providing those all-important proteins and fats.

You would have thought they would have put a little more effort into domesticating food animals, considering the difficulties of hunting people, but as it happens, not so much. Turkeys don't have much fat on them, fat being a surprisingly important thing for non-modern people, and dogs are a pretty inefficient way of getting meat unless you happen to have a ton of carrion hanging around. It's like the guy at the gas station who can't clean your windshield or check your oil right, who suddenly and brilliantly performs emergency brain surgery with common household items and an old toothbrush. The invention of maize was a very singular, very mysterious and very important event, and its like has only happened once in all of human history. And it is more an invention, rather than a domestication: all domesticated animals and plants bear a very strong physical resemblance to their wild counterparts. All except maize. Maize is physiologically incapable of existing in the wild, it requires human intervention to reproduce. It is true that emmer and all modern wheats cannot reproduce in the wild either, but einkorn can, and einkorn is identical to emmer except for one gene. Teosinte is not anything like maize, and there are 16 different genes just governing seed-head shattering alone. 

We have to open our minds to the possibility something happened here that might not fit into our Western cosmology of things.  Of course some might think that aliens taught them maize...

LOL! Love that guy!

But what are UFOs except a way to render the spiritual more scientific? No one believes in spirits anymore, so they put them in flying saucers and attach some scientific gobbledegook to it. Like the cosmology of kamis or kachinas or angels and demons, there are the good guys and the bad guys, and they even sort of have their own specialties. Since I do believe in kami, I don't particularly think that E.T. had anything to do with it. ;)

Switching to mythology for a moment, indigenous American legends concerning the origin of maize are very peculiar and interesting, but don't really tell us a great deal. The most common one runs something like this: An old woman, or in some cases a young one, comes to live in a village, and the people of this village are starving to death. The old woman mysteriously starts feeding everyone, and everyone is like, "where is she getting all this food?" So they spy on her one day, and see her producing food in a super disgusting manner. Some versions say that she is pulling scabs off herself to feed them, others snot or feces, but in either case this makes everyone understandably want to puke their guts out. The villagers decide that the woman needs to die, and the woman quite amiably agrees so long as her death is performed in a particular way. They oblige her, and from her blood and body parts spring the first corn plants. Rather interestingly, this is almost an exact parallel to the story of Uke Mochi, goddess of food in Japanese Shinto belief, who sort of snorts and vomits and farts forth this huge banquet of delicious food and who is subsequently killed in disgust by Amaterasu's brother Tsukuyomi. This so peeves Amaterasu, goddess of the Sun that she banishes her brother Tsukuyomi, the moon god, from her sight and henceforth day and night were forever separated.

Interestingly, the motif also evokes the idea of human sacrifice, and the Aztecs gruesomely sacrificed a young girl every year to their maize goddess Chicomecoatl. Still, this was pretty tame by Aztec standards, particularly in comparison to the sacrifices to the rain god Tlaloc in which innumerable young children, often the second child of their own noble families, were killed. It was said that if the children cried on their way to the mountains where they were to be sacrificed, it boded well for the next year's rain. Human sacrifice was a feature of many many civilizations, but never ever on the kind of epic scale of which the Mayans and especially the Aztecs were capable. It was also universal among all other mesoamerican civilizations, there were essentially no mesoamerican civilizations that did not partake. There were no mesoamerican civilizations that did not grow maize. Is there a connection of some kind between maize and human sacrifice? On one level the answer is absolutely yes, because without the mass production of food that maize agriculture made happen, the level of centralization and hierarchy that typified the more powerful mesoamerican civilizations would simply not have been possible, and hence sacrifice on that massive scale would not have been possible. All those people could not have been fed without maize. Was there more than that?

Eeeeeeeeeat Meeeeeeeeee!

There are a number of occasions in Native American legend when plants spoke to people, and they tended to have something pretty important to say. The story of peyote is particularly instructive. According to legend, a man was wandering through the desert, possibly starving, and a peyote button pretty much spoke to him and said, "eat me." Now no one would ever mistake peyote for food, the taste of a peyote button is reputed to be super nasty and typically makes people puke. Sure, shit happens in the world, people eat sick crap for all kinds of reasons, but peyote is a relatively rare and inconspicuous plant to start out with. Is it really so hard to believe that the plant told him to do it? Almost sounds like the simpler explanation.

Teosinte may or may not have done the same thing, at this point we will never know. We will also never know whether there were strings attached to that deal. Maybe it is a particularly bloody minded plant. "You can eat my flesh, but I get to eat your flesh." Certainly considering the fact that wild teosinte is bordering on extinction these days and probably never was extremely widespread and successful, it wouldn't have been a bad deal from the plant's point of view. We may never know exactly what mysteries were involved here, but mysteries were certainly involved. As a result, maize is now the most produced grain by weight in the entire world. Not bad for an obscure, not very competitive and relatively unpromising plant with a gift for massive transformations and maybe a gift for striking a good bargain. ;)

There is a final twist to the story though. Maize by itself, ground straight into meal, is practically worthless nutritionally. That's why so many European settlers who grew corn got serious nutritional deficiencies like pellegra: they didn't understand the final magic trick. So the Native Americans, in addition to having to figure out the freaky tech of transforming teosinte into corn to begin with, also had to come up with a bit of chemistry in order that this corn would actually give them enough nutrients to be worth growing. This last bit of magic is called nixtamalization, a chemical process that takes the almost nutritionally worthless corn and turns it into nutritious hominy and masa dough. This was tech that the European settlers lacked and the poorer among them who especially settled in the Southern U.S. and depended on corn suffered for it. Basically this was a process of boiling the corn briefly in either certain mineral deposits or in the ashes of certain plants and letting it sit overnight. This not only loosened the husks so they could be removed, it made many of the nutrients in the corn much more bioavailable. It was almost like the maize didn't want the white man to benefit from it, so it added a secret key. Sort of like tobacco, which was for the natives an infrequent ritual drug and for whites just a very addictive drug with seriously detrimental effects. When maize went abroad to feed the poor in Europe, they had the same problems: corn without nixtamalization has some serious issues. In parts of Italy, polenta from corn meal was a major staple and they too got the same sort of dietary deficiencies. Native Americans on the other hand would hardly ever eat corn that was not nixtamalized, unless it was popcorn or maybe roasted fresh ears. Their staple was tortillas, made from masa, which was made from hominy: nixtamalized corn. How did they know that they needed to do this? Who told them? Sure, they could have found out by accident, but that means that prior to the accident they were expending a lot of time and energy growing something with very little food value. Doesn't make much sense.

And here you were thinking that corn was just something you ate off the cob in the summer. ;) The whole thing is a fucking mystery wrapped in a puzzle surmounted by an enigma.