Many of them selectively bred from wild precursors that are almost totally inedible.
It’s one of the big questions about domestication; why did people thousands of years ago select plants that had very limited food potential for domestication? Like obviouslt they were right bc maize is amazing, but how did they know?
Then discovering / figuring out nixtamalization to evade pellagra. (Which the whites in the south were going crazy and dying from - this book I read said whites had worse diets - lacking key nutrients-than many enslaved people)
Actually, there’s some evidence as to how ancient Americans discovered nixtamalization. Among pre-agricultural societies across the world, a common method of boiling water before the invention of earthenware was to dig a hole with the water, put a rock in a nearby fire, and drop the heated rock, called a pot boiler, into the water. What they discovered is that if you used limestone, which is common across the Americas, as a pot boiler, the resulting reaction between the heated limestone and water made limewater, providing the necessary alkaline environment for nixtamalization.
What do you mean by “like that”?
A large variety of easy-to-cultivate and calorie-rich crops, and hot peppers.
Many of them selectively bred from wild precursors that are almost totally inedible.
It’s one of the big questions about domestication; why did people thousands of years ago select plants that had very limited food potential for domestication? Like obviouslt they were right bc maize is amazing, but how did they know?
Then discovering / figuring out nixtamalization to evade pellagra. (Which the whites in the south were going crazy and dying from - this book I read said whites had worse diets - lacking key nutrients-than many enslaved people)
Actually, there’s some evidence as to how ancient Americans discovered nixtamalization. Among pre-agricultural societies across the world, a common method of boiling water before the invention of earthenware was to dig a hole with the water, put a rock in a nearby fire, and drop the heated rock, called a pot boiler, into the water. What they discovered is that if you used limestone, which is common across the Americas, as a pot boiler, the resulting reaction between the heated limestone and water made limewater, providing the necessary alkaline environment for nixtamalization.