What is Maize ?

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What is Maize ?

To Eat

Potatoes

Or not

To eat

Mealy-Meal

In post war Sweden, food consisted of anything coming from a cow udder and potatoes. Potatoes could be cooked in a variety of ways, with milk, with water, with milk and water, without milk, there was no end to the variety of the food ingested. I still cannot understand why the visitors where somewhat tongue tied when came to moment to express their admiration for our national food. They should have tried finnish food !

True they had not been served one of our most revered delicatessen, pölsa, a kind of brownish mud looking very much like the stuff you tell your wife to clean up when the cat vomits; I am a bit at a loss to understand the reluctance of foreigners to confront pölsa, after all it is made up of everything that remains once you have taken all edible meat parts from the pig. Hoofs and nose are main components of pölsa. If you want to go into diversity and audacity you can eat red beetroots with pölsa. But you do not have to, pölsa is a very self sufficient dish. As students we ingested large amounts of pölsa, so far as I know nothing was cheaper than a tin of pölsa and there was no way even a student could spoil it through inexpert cooking.

I cannot remember why I am telling you about these delicious Swedish recepees?

It had something to do with maize, which is rather stupid as maize was unknown in Sweden, as to Belgians and Frenchmen they had a lot of respect for maize and trusted their hens to consume large amounts of this American imported strange pellet. None would ever have considered ingesting it, even under the most horrendous torture threat.

Father was a good Swedish man and would eat potatoes for the noon meal (eaten at eleven o'clock as is done in any wise country) and his evening meal (eaten at 5 o'clock, when else could you have your evening meal?)

When forced by unemployment to construct his life in France, he willingly adapted all the French habits. Wine was on the lunch and dinner table, aperitif was enjoyed with friends, all kind of strange parts of animals running, swimming, flying were ingested with all kind of strange sauces,

with potatoes.

Confronted at times by my mothers (french) claim that this relish could be eaten with say green beans ( yes, a bit of a rude joke, but these were hard times) or tomatoes (you know that vegetable you throw at people you do not like) or even with salad (a dish much appreciated by rabbits, which is fair as my father much appreciated rabbits), at times my mother would make psychedelic trips into exotic cooking and serve spaghetti with the main dish, which was OK with father, spaghetti and potato went quite well together.

Anyway, enough about his, which idiot would eat sill with spaghetti and how can you sing dinner songs if you have some king of disgusting noodle looking at you while you try and get the loudest sound out of your throat just before injecting the “renat” you have been demanding for the longest five minutes of your life?

Why am I rambling about potatoes?

It had something to do with maize, did it not?

In East Africa, food and maize was synonymous.

Maize is pounded until it looks like cement, then it is cooked until it tastes like cement.

This is called mealy-meal.

The mealy-meal is either eaten from the pot or from a heap on the table. You make your right hand into a pincer and grab a slab of mealy-meal, you roll it into your hand until it feels smooth and dead, you push your thumb into it and you plunge this man made tool into the relish (usually cabbage that has been brought to fulfillment by being cooked for three hours), all of this is happily pushed into the waiting mouth.

For beginners, here is a piece of advice that nobody else will give you. Do not wash your hands previous to eating mealy meal or you will be eating soap all through during the meal.

Well, being in divulging local secrets, why not go all the way.

Mealy-meal prepared by women can be rather horrible. Instead of mixing the flour and water and rapidly boiling it they will persist in boiling the water first, then cooking the flour for days and days while you hungrily wait, some of them push your patience too far by adding some piece of lard they have grabbed somewhere. Some have been known to add the cooking oil used to ensure the purity of the mixture of tomato and cabbage that has been cooking for three hours. Women will claim that their mealy-meal tastes much better, totally missing the point, why should it taste anything when you are hungry?

Did I tell you about the stupid women in Zambia who went to the Food Aid distribution points and came back with American yellow maize and tried to feed it to her husband? Had there been an Urgency department they would have ended there. Instead the “Yellow American Mealy-meal concoction” usually ended on the hut wall where it would ooze to the floor, where event he dog would reject it as unfit.

My women brothers in Kenya had the same disastrous experience with donated flour from which they tried to prepare “Ugali”. Divorce was considered as a very mild sanction for such atrocious behavior.

By the way, I did not insult you, did I?

There was to line where I was telling you what you were supposed to do with your left hand?

No, I would not have been that rude.

It would be a bit like asking you whether, when in France, you did the most awful thing, you cut your bread instead of breaking it!

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/25/science/25creature.html?src=me&ref=science

Tracking the Ancestry of Corn Back 9,000 Years

John Doebley

RELATIVES Corn, or maize, descended from a Mexican grass called teosinte.

By SEAN B. CARROLL

Published: May 24, 2010

It is now growing season across the Corn Belt of the United States. Seeds that have just been sown will, with the right mixture of sunshine and rain, be knee-high plants by the Fourth of July and tall stalks with ears ripe for picking by late August.

Corn is much more than great summer picnic food, however. Civilization owes much to this plant, and to the early people who first cultivated it.

For most of human history, our ancestors relied entirely on hunting animals and gathering seeds, fruits, nuts, tubers and other plant parts from the wild for food. It was only about 10,000 years ago that humans in many parts of the world began raising livestock and growing food through deliberate planting. These advances provided more reliable sources of food and allowed for larger, more permanent settlements. Native Americans alone domesticated nine of the most important food crops in the world, including corn, more properly called maize (Zea mays), which now provides about 21 percent of human nutrition across the globe.

But despite its abundance and importance, the biological origin of maize has been a long-running mystery. The bright yellow, mouth-watering treat we know so well does not grow in the wild anywhere on the planet, so its ancestry was not at all obvious. Recently, however, the combined detective work of botanists, geneticists and archeologists has been able to identify the wild ancestor of maize, to pinpoint where the plant originated, and to determine when early people were cultivating it and using it in their diets.

The greatest surprise, and the source of much past controversy in corn archeology, was the identification of the ancestor of maize. Many botanists did not see any connection between maize and other living plants. Some concluded that the crop plant arose through the domestication by early agriculturalists of a wild maize that was now extinct, or at least undiscovered.

However, a few scientists working during the first part of the 20th century uncovered evidence that they believed linked maize to what, at first glance, would seem to be a very unlikely parent, a Mexican grass called teosinte. Looking at the skinny ears of teosinte, with just a dozen kernels wrapped inside a stone-hard casing, it is hard to see how they could be the forerunners of corn cobs with their many rows of juicy, naked kernels. Indeed, teosinte was at first classified as a closer relative of rice than of maize.

But George W. Beadle, while a graduate student at Cornell University in the early 1930s, found that maize and teosinte had very similar chromosomes. Moreover, he made fertile hybrids between maize and teosinte that looked like intermediates between the two plants. He even reported that he could get teosinte kernels to pop. Dr. Beadle concluded that the two plants were members of the same species, with maize being the domesticated form of teosinte. Dr. Beadle went on to make other, more fundamental discoveries in genetics for which he shared the Nobel Prize in 1958. He later became chancellor and president of the University of Chicago.

Despite Dr. Beadle’s illustrious reputation, his theory still remained in doubt three decades after he proposed it. The differences between the two plants appeared to many scientists to be too great to have evolved in just a few thousand years of domestication. So, after he formally retired, Dr. Beadle returned to the issue and sought ways to gather more evidence. As a great geneticist, he knew that one way to examine the parentage of two individuals was to cross them and then to cross their offspring and see how often the parental forms appeared. He crossed maize and teosinte, then crossed the hybrids, and grew 50,000 plants. He obtained plants that resembled teosinte and maize at a frequency that indicated that just four or five genes controlled the major differences between the two plants.

Dr. Beadle’s results showed that maize and teosinte were without any doubt remarkably and closely related. But to pinpoint the geographic origins of maize, more definitive forensic techniques were needed. This was DNA typing, exactly the same technology used by the courts to determine paternity.

In order to trace maize’s paternity, botanists led by my colleague John Doebley of the University of Wisconsin rounded up more than 60 samples of teosinte from across its entire geographic range in the Western Hemisphere and compared their DNA profile with all varieties of maize. They discovered that all maize was genetically most similar to a teosinte type from the tropical Central Balsas River Valley of southern Mexico, suggesting that this region was the “cradle” of maize evolution. Furthermore, by calculating the genetic distance between modern maize and Balsas teosinte, they estimated that domestication occurred about 9,000 years ago.

These genetic discoveries inspired recent archeological excavations of the Balsas region that sought evidence of maize use and to better understand the lifestyles of the people who were planting and harvesting it. Researchers led by Anthony Ranere of Temple University and Dolores Piperno of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History excavated caves and rock shelters in the region, searching for tools used by their inhabitants, maize starch grains and other microscopic evidence of maize.

In the Xihuatoxtla shelter, they discovered an array of stone milling tools with maize residue on them. The oldest tools were found in a layer of deposits that were 8,700 years old. This is the earliest physical evidence of maize use obtained to date, and it coincides very nicely with the time frame of maize domestication estimated from DNA analysis.

The most impressive aspect of the maize story is what it tells us about the capabilities of agriculturalists 9,000 years ago. These people were living in small groups and shifting their settlements seasonally. Yet they were able to transform a grass with many inconvenient, unwanted features into a high-yielding, easily harvested food crop. The domestication process must have occurred in many stages over a considerable length of time as many different, independent characteristics of the plant were modified.

The most crucial step was freeing the teosinte kernels from their stony cases. Another step was developing plants where the kernels remained intact on the cobs, unlike the teosinte ears, which shatter into individual kernels. Early cultivators had to notice among their stands of plants variants in which the nutritious kernels were at least partially exposed, or whose ears held together better, or that had more rows of kernels, and they had to selectively breed them. It is estimated that the initial domestication process that produced the basic maize form required at least several hundred to perhaps a few thousand years.

Every August, I thank these pioneer geneticists for their skill and patience.