Popcorn is another contribution of Mexican cuisine to the world
Yesterday, Rebecca asked me if I would make a pozole on the weekend. Obviously, I answered without thinking, "YES! I love pozole."
So today, when I had a long run again, at some point I started to wander thinking about pozole and that led me to think about corn and its domestication.
If we compare any living being that we have domesticated with its closest wild relative we will see many changes, in size, shape, color, amount of fat or protein, docility, many differences. But it is always easy to identify the wild form from which domestication began. Not in corn, for a long time it was a mystery where corn came from, there is no wild plant that looks like it.
In Mexico and Central America, there is a type of herbs, called teosinte or teosintle, small bushes, with many branches and some spikes. with very few grains covered by a very hard crust, nothing like corn. It turned out that they were the closest relatives to corn, and of all the types of teosinte, the one that is genetically closest to corn is from the Balsas River basin. So that's the ancestor of corn.
Now two questions were difficult to explain.
The first, how do we go from herbs, with many branches and many...
The truth is that I can't say that they are spikes, but I can't say that they are ears either, I'll call them little ears.
So, how do we go from herbs, with many branches, with many little ears, with few grains, covered with a hard crust, to plants with a single very thick stem, almost without branches, with large ears with grains without a hard crust?
Well, it seems like a crossroads, let's go in parts. If we compare the genetic material of teosinte with that of corn it turns out that they began to separate about nine thousand years ago. Later hybridization experiments were done between the two and it turned out that there were only 4, probably 5, different genes between the two.
How can so few genes cause such noticeable changes? It turns out that they are regulatory genes, they affect other genes. Of them, two in particular are responsible for the most noticeable changes, one participates in the branching of the stems and the other in the crust of the grains.
Second, what interest could the residents of the Balsas River basin have in a herb with small ears with few grains and a hard cover?
That is a good question, some think that the stems of the teosinte were sweet and that is why they used it, obviously, the plants with fewer and thicker stems would be selected, which would explain that by human selection we arrived at a plant with a single thick stem, but... who do you know that eats the corn stem?
Another option is that the teosinte grains were exposed to fire so that they burst, that is, to make teosinte popcorn. That would explain selecting plants with larger ears and more grains, I like that explanation better.
That leads me to several conclusions.
1. Through human selection great changes can be achieved in domesticated organisms.
2. With small genetic changes very important changes can be achieved.
3. If you are against the consumption of genetically modified organisms, you better dedicate yourself to hunt and recollection of wild organisms, since all domesticated organisms have been genetically modified.
4. Popcorn is another contribution of Mexican cuisine to the world.
Comments
Post a Comment