SC - Corn-Early Modern

[Jenne Heise]

> One of the books I was reading back in september (and of course I can't
> recal which) suggested that famines in the 1800s were what brought these
> foods into popular usage as a foodstuffs. no hard documentation was cited as
> I recall, but it's an interesting theory.

Actually, _6000 years of bread_ says that in the 1800s the use of maize
died off because of its association with pelagria. Apparently, people had
substituted maize for wheat in the normal 'peasant' diet andit didn't fill
the same nutritional niche. Had they adopted other parts of the native
American diet they would have been fine, or stayed with the old wheat and
whatever they added to it, they would have been fine.

One reason that all the sources agree on for maize's popularity is that it
doesn't require a plowed field for small-scale production. Unfortunately,
field production of the stuff causes all sorts of agricultural problems.
(Depletion of nutrients in the soil, ease of disease transmission, etc.)
 -- 
Jadwiga Zajaczkowa, mka Jennifer Heise	      jenne at tulgey.browser.net
disclaimer: i speak for no-one and no-one speaks for me.
"I do my job. I refuse to be responsible for other people's managerial 
hallucinations." -- Lady Jemina Starker