Part of the What Do You Know About That series
by Ruth Orr
THE AMERICAS — Despite the slightly cooler weather we’ve had this last week (hurrah!) we are actually approaching the summer season at speed, which means we can start keeping an eye out for summer blockbuster film releases and outdoor movies on the golf course. While I like movies just fine and am looking forward to the upcoming season of fighting off mosquitos while trying to focus on the screen, for me there’s really only one reason to go out to the movies instead of watching things on my laptop balanced on my lap while I sprawl ungracefully across my couch: popcorn. Specifically, popcorn drenched in an unholy amount of butter and salt and provided to me in an oversize bucket with minimal judgement. Yessss.
I’m far from alone in my love of popcorn. I know some of you out there may not be as firmly in the popcorn-is-the-food-of-the-gods camp as I am, and it’s okay to be wrong, I still love you, but for the rest of us, we owe our supreme snack to the inventiveness of the ancestors, and I don’t think we’re grateful enough. So here’s a recap on the history of popcorn.
So right out of the box, let’s get something taken care of: there’s no such thing as wild corn. Not really anyway, there’s little dinkie cousins and stuff, but nothing like what you picture when you say you want corn with dinner. Its origins start roughly 10,000 years ago in what is today Mexico. For context, the pyramids of Giza in Egypt are about 4,500 years old.
Whoever was hanging out in western Mexico during that time period began selectively breeding the wild teosinte grass in their region, selecting for larger and larger grains in each new generation. The teosinte grains were initially small and in hard shells, not ideal for easy mass consumption. As the ancient Meso Americans bred it however, the kernels lost the shell and became larger and juicier. The loss of the protective shell also doomed the grains to domesticity, since without human intervention and assistance everything would be eaten by wild birds and animals before it could ever mature enough to propagate. Teosinte is still around, by the way, and corn farmers in Mexico and Central America often let it grow wild around their fields to allow some genetic mixing to keep their crops strong. At any rate, over thousands of years of trial and error and hard work, they produced the big chunky deliciousness we know today.
It didn’t take long for maize (the proper name for corn, by the way, it’s pretty much only North Americans and Australians who call it corn) to become a staple food crop in the Americas. They weren’t necessarily grilling fresh cobs to slather with butter though, rather the dried kernels were ground into flour, from which any number of things could be made, including tortillas and alcohol (chicha, or fermented corn beer, is still wildly popular in Central and South America). The first evidence we have for someone figuring out that if you heated up those dry kernels they’d pop into delicious fluffy clouds comes from around 4,700 BCE in Peru. They knew what was up. For many, it was the number one most important crop, the mother of all people, and therefore sacred.
The Aztecs in particular were super into maize. They viewed corn as the equivalent to a human body, with a similar life cycle. They ate so much corn that they believed (and their descendants still do, at least philosophically) that their blood is maize. When they ate corn, they were eating the earth, and when they died and went into the ground, the earth ate them. Blood is life, after all. And perhaps that helps explain why the Aztecs felt that watering newly planted corn crops each spring should involve a healthy dose of blood. Farmers would cut themselves on purpose and just bleed all over their crops to encourage growth.
But at least that was their own blood, so fair enough, right? Well that was fine until harvest time rolled around in the fall. To celebrate, ceremonies in honor of the gods would be held. Everyone would get together, young girls would make popcorn garlands, and every year one young girl was chosen to personify the maize goddess herself. If you know anything about the Aztecs, you know this doesn’t end well for her— she would be sacrificed by the priests, who decapitated her, collected her blood, and poured it over a figurine of their goddess. Her skin would then be peeled off and draped over a priest. Another woman was also offered to the gods during this ceremony. She’d be killed, and her face would be removed and put on the priest’s face to go with his little girl skin suit. All so everyone could continue eating corn next year. Sorry for the gross bit, let’s move on to when popcorn became less murder-y.
Aztecs weren’t the only indigenous people in the Americas to notice that popped corn is amazing. In 1650, the Spaniard Cobo wrote that the native Peruvians he’d encountered toasted corn until it burst, calling it pisancalla. French explorers wrote accounts of Iroquois who made their own snacks by throwing tough corn kernels into pottery jars filled with heated sand. Side note, the myth that Squanto taught the Pilgrims to make popcorn and they ate it at the first Thanksgiving feast is probably only a myth, the kind of corn the settlers at Plymouth grew was a delicate little baby variety that would just burn, not pop.
The European settlers moving into the Great Lakes region that is home to the Iroquois were not so blind as to not notice that their new neighbors had a great idea, and so they quickly adopted the practice of making popcorn too. By the mid-1800s, popcorn was absolutely beloved by families across the nation. They called it Pearls, or Nonpareil. The first time popped corn showed up as a term was in 1848 in John Russell Bartlett’s Dictionary of Americanisms.
It wasn’t nearly as easy to get popcorn then as it is now however. The advent of the steel plow in the mid 1800s helped a lot, allowing farmers in Nebraska, Iowa, and Indiana to cut through the soil on their farms (that’s a later day problem!) and start putting in cash crops, like corn, which was dubbed “prairie gold”. Popcorn still had to be popped by hand, usually in pots over an open flame, and that limited availability. Necessity is the mother of invention however, so folks were already on the case of solving that problem.
To prevent sticking in the pans, a bit of butter or lard was included in the device. It often burned or produced really greasy popcorn, so getting it right was a bit of an art. Later, devices called ‘poppers’ came into play— basically boxes of tight wire gauze attached to long handles that could be held over open flames. In 1885, the snack’s popularity really popped off. A Chicago entrepreneur named Charles Cretors built the world’s first commercial popcorn-popping machine, a lightweight device that popped corn in oil and ran on electricity. By 1900, he’d graduated up to horse-drawn popcorn wagons he could pull through the streets, and that was that!
During the Great Depression, popcorn was one of the few little treats that was still somewhat affordable, at 5-10 cents a bag. The popcorn business actually thrived through the bad times, becoming a source of income for many struggling farmers. The snack’s importance to the American public further grew during World War II, when sugar rations diminished candy production and the folks back at home needed something to munch at the movies. Consumption of popcorn tripled.
The movie-goers had to bring their own popcorn from home however, and smuggle it in because the theater owners did not approve. That turned around in 1938 when one genius named Glen W. Dickinson Sr. gave up keeping popcorn out, and instead installed a machine in his lobby. It didn’t take long for popcorn sales to become more profitable than ticket sales. Other theaters soon followed suit.
The first microwavable popcorn bag arrived on scene in 1981, containing perishable butter and requiring refrigeration. It was an insta-hit, within two years microwave popcorn brought in $53 million in sales nationally. In 1984 a shelf-stable version arrived. In 1986, Americans bought $250 million worth of popcorn.
During the 2000s people began to worry about what chemicals were in microwaved popcorn, and turned instead to pre-popped popcorn. It’s grown in popularity ever since, and I’m guilty of keeping at least one bag on hand pretty much at all times. I just felt we should all take a minute to appreciate how lucky we are to be able to pull it out of the cupboard for an instant snack, no beheadings required.
