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by decode
4075 days ago
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A similar, little-known disease caused by a lack of dietary diversity is pellagra. It's caused by a lack of vitamin B3 (niacin). In the early 1900s it became an epidemic in the southern United States, due to (largely poor, rural) people's diets consisting almost exclusively of corn. The most interesting part of the disease is that corn actually contains vitamin B3, but it cannot be absorbed by humans when eaten by itself. Native people always treated corn meal with lime, which allowed the vitamin B3 to be digested. When Europeans came to the Americas and learned about corn from the native people, they thought it was stupid to put lime in their food so they left that part out. Thus, causing a disease that afflicted 3 million people and killed over 100,000. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pellagra#History |
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· the “lime” we’re talking about here is not the fruit, but the strong alkali slaked lime, i.e. whitewash or mortar, made by roasting limestone. You can apparently also use lye (Drano), and I wouldn’t be surprised if fermented urine (lant) also worked, but I really recommend that you know what the fuck you’re doing before you start trying to cook with Drano or construction materials. This may help understand the Europeans’ reluctance.
· nixtamalization is done on the whole corn, not on the corn meal. Nixtamalized corn is also known as “hominy”, and if you’re from the US you’ve probably heard of it under that name. It’s been common in the US since colonial times.
· When you nixtamalize corn, you don’t leave the lime in your food. You have to rinse it out after the long, slow nixtamalization process. Otherwise, the result is really bitter.
· Nixtamalization is indeed a traditional practice with a broad pre-Columbian distribution, but it is almost unknown in South America, even though the native cultures here in South America are much more intact and in many ways less assimilated than in North America; this suggests to me that it may not be true that “Native people always treated corn [...] with lime”. I mean, maybe Tawantinsuyu universally nixtamalized its corn, and then the Spanish stamped out the practice so thoroughly that you can’t find nixtamalized corn in the grocery stores there today, even as a special holiday product like chuño; but it seems much more likely to me that nixtamalization just was not universal or even common there in pre-Columbian times.
The pellagra epidemic is one of my favorite examples of how ignorance kills people.