How was popcorn discovered? – Kendra, 11 years old, Penn Yan, New York
One has to wonder how people first got here to eat a number of the foods which might be so popular today. The cassava plant is poisonous unless fastidiously processed in multiple steps. Yogurt is essentially old milk that has been around for some time and is contaminated with bacteria. And who discovered that popcorn might be a crunchy, tasty treat?
Such food mysteries are quite difficult to resolve. Archaeology relies on solid stays to determine what happened up to now, especially amongst individuals who didn’t use writing. Unfortunately, a lot of the things that folks traditionally used were made from wood, animal materials or cloth. disintegrates quite quicklyAnd Archaeologists like me never find it.
We have loads of evidence for hard material, corresponding to pottery and stone tools, but softer material – like food stays – is way harder to seek out. Sometimes we’re lucky when softer material is present in very dry places that preserve it. And when things burn, they’ll last a really very long time.
The ancestors of corn
Fortunately, corn has some hard parts, corresponding to the husk. These are the pieces at the underside of the popcorn shell that get stuck in your teeth. And since corn must be heated to make it edible, it was sometimes burned, and archaeologists find evidence this fashion. Most interestingly, some plants, including corn, have tiny, stone-like fragments, so-called phytoliths that may last for 1000’s of years.
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Scientists are pretty sure they know the way old corn is. We know that corn was probably first cultivated by Native Americans in what’s now Mexico. Early farmers there domesticated corn from a Grass species called teosinte.
Before agriculture, people gathered wild teosinte and ate the seeds, which were high in starch, a carbohydrate present in bread and pasta. They picked the teosinte with the biggest seeds and eventually began to weed and plant it. Over time, the wild plant evolved into what we now call corn. Corn will be distinguished from teosinte by its larger kernels.
There is evidence of maize cultivation in dry caves in Mexico already 9,000 years agoFrom there, corn cultivation spread throughout North and South America.
Popcorn, canned food
Finding out when people began making popcorn is tougher. There are several varieties of corn, most of them burst when heatedbut a spread that is definitely called “popcorn” makes the perfect popcorn. Scientists have found Phytoliths from Peruin addition to burnt kernels of any such “poppable” corn, date back to six,700 years ago.
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You can imagine that popping corn kernels was discovered by accident. Probably some corn fell into the cooking fire and whoever was around discovered that this was a handy recent way of preparing food. Popped corn had an extended shelf life and was easy to make.
The popcorn of antiquity probably didn’t resemble the snack you eat within the cinema today. It probably didn’t contain salt and definitely didn’t contain butter, because it There aren’t any cows to exploit in America yet. It probably wasn't served hot and was probably quite chewy in comparison with the version you're used to today.
It's unimaginable to know exactly why or how popcorn was invented, but I might guess that it was a clever solution to preserve the edible starch in corn by removing the little little bit of water from each kernel that may make it more liable to spoilage. It's the heated water within the kernel that escapes as steam and makes popcorn pop. The popped kernel then has an extended shelf life. What you think that of today as a tasty snack probably started off as a useful approach to preserving and storing food.
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