In A Nutshell
Corn has been a cultivated crop for thousands of years, and popcorn also dates back several millennia. The earliest traces of popcorn indicate that it was used much as it is today, as an occasional snack. But in the Aztec culture, it was an important offering to the gods as a way of ensuring safety for their people and a successful harvest.
The Whole Bushel
Today, popcorn is both a healthy snack option and a must-have when watching movies, preferably slathered in butter of questionable origins and made decidedly less healthy by the movie theater. But what you might not know is that popcorn has an incredibly long history, and one that involves millennia-old trade routes and sacred ceremonies honoring ancient gods.
Corn was first cultivated as a crop in Mexico somewhere between 9,000 and 10,000 years ago, and it traveled into South America a few thousand years later. Excavations of archaeological sites in Peru revealed that corn was a part of the Peruvian diet around 6,700 years ago. It wasn’t a huge part of that diet, but ancient cooking sites have yielded the remains of corncobs and corn stalks.
They’ve also found popcorn.
More precisely, they’ve found whole cobs of corn that had been popped. Corn kernels pop because when they’re heated, the water contained in each kernel expands and the pressure causes the shell to burst open. In these ancient sites, the whole cobs were placed over the fire and the kernels were popped on the cob.
At that point, corn wasn’t a main staple in the diet of the people who were eating it. It was thought to be more of a special treat based on the relative handful of corncobs that were found. Much later, though, corn—and popcorn—became extremely important to the cultures of the Aztec.
When Hernan Cortes first came to the New World and encountered the Aztecs, he noted that they had a strange way of decorating the ceremonial dress that was worn during festivals and dances held in the honor of Tlaloc, the rain god. Strings of popcorn would adorn headdresses and costumes, and dancers would wear garlands of popcorn.
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Post time: Mar-21-2022