Flying SquidFinally, an answer!
DonjuanmeWhat about all of the other varieties of corn? Are they not relatives to each other?
Look, if you keep asking questions, we’re never going to get these crappy corn husk crafts finished.
Boomer Humor DoomergodI just watched the Good Eats episode about corn so I can answer this: Yes, popcorn, hard corn, and sweet corn are all related to each other.
I knew of popcorn and sweet corn, but what is hard corn used for today? Animal feed?
What about candy corn?
It’s a candy grass.
EdibleFriendLot of work for a dildo.
It’s not worth it if you don’t make an effort.
ITS BEEN A LOOOOOONG ROAD GETTIN FROM THERE TO HERE
THIS IS NOT TEN FORWARD!
agent_flounderFire photonic cannons.
Everything’s a dildo if you’re brave enough.
Maybe, but an aerogel dildo wouldn’t be especially fun.
What’s fun got to do got to do with it?
What’s love got to do with it?
JakdraculaHave we checked all food to see if exploding them makes them into something better or did we just stop with corn?
Potatoes
Apples
Marijuana
Bananas
Tulips
Etc…
Bananas are a similar one to corn too. Take something almost entirely inedible and cultivate it into something edible. Makes you wonder what convinced them to start.
Starvation was probably a good motivator
Could be. We still don’t know why people became sedentary farmers over hunter-gatherers, but it’s happened many times in history.
Somehow, farming happened independently but around the same time around the world, between 8000 and 10000 years ago. This is everywhere from Europe to the Americas to New Guinea, all apparently independently of each other!
it was likely so humans could make booze
Beer was one of the first processed foods, but I don’t think that was the reason for the development of agriculture.
They were farming taro on New Guinea 10,000 years ago. There’s no tradition, as far as I know, of making alcohol from taro.
Saying we don’t know is kinda dumb though, farming allows a population group to massively outperform a hunter gatherer group in terms of food and energy collected over a year, this allows them to have more children, and results in fewer deaths due to accidents while hunting. Farming also means fewer people are required for the same amount of food intake leaving more people free to do other things like develop tools and weapons
This all snowballs resulting in massive growth that allows the farming group to kill off or absorb any group that doesn’t farm.
Same as natural selection/evolution, random choices/changes occur and the ones that lead to more children are the ones that last 1000s of years.
Actually, farming underperformed compared to hunter-gathering, which allowed for more food to be gathered and more leisure time to be spent.
Hunter–gatherers have less famine than agriculturalists
The idea that hunter–gatherer societies experience more frequent famine than societies with other modes of subsistence is pervasive in the literature on human evolution. This idea underpins, for example, the ‘thrifty genotype hypothesis’. ...
harkIf I’m going off my own experience and behaviors, I would assume that laziness made it seem like simply planting things would take less effort than hunting down an animal without doing hard calculations on total calories in/out and without imagining what could go wrong with the “lazy” approach.
I don’t think you understand how hard it is to plow a field without draught animals. They didn’t have domestic horses or oxen when farming began. It was incredibly hard work vs. just cutting down wild plants and shooting animals with animals or hitting them with spears. And, of course, processing grains by hand before milling was invented was also very hard work. You can’t just eat wheat as-is. You have to turn it into flour and cook with it.
The “lazy” people would be the ones who didn’t want to do all of that and instead just walk around the woods until they saw a deer and then shoot it.
The biggest advantage of agriculture over hunter-gathering is storage during cold or dry seasons when foraged food could be harder to come by, but it is not clear that this was an advantage of farming or the reason for it.
This isn’t even something we have to infer from ancient peoples. There have been studies of modern peoples that show that hunter-gatherers do not work as hard as farmers, and that is with draught animals and other techniques that were developed after the development of agriculture: cam.ac.uk/…/farmers-have-less-leisure-time-than-h…
I’m assuming it started small and simple (perhaps just intentionally dropping seeds in a location and hoping for the best) and then problem-solving for higher yields is what led to the great amount of work in the end. It’s like how making a weapon can range from simply picking up a stick to refining and material science to mass production methods (to outfit an entire army), all the way up to splitting the atom. There’s a wide gulf between wanting to have some extra food growing in a convenient location and wanting to feed an entire village throughout the entire year solely on cultivated food.
Let me tell you a little story about brassicas… broccoli, cabbage, bok choi, cauliflower, kohlrabi, canola oil. They’re all this little guy.
Edit: Shit! I missed the exploding part.
And yet I love broccoli but hate cauliflower.
JoeBigelowCan you elaborate? Texture differences?
One tastes good, the other does not.
Ya cauliflower is nast, it stinks like sweaty ugly. Brocolli is delish and the texture is perfect for sauces.
Imma change your life bro, Mashed Cauliflower, like you do mashed potatoes, just change the potatoes for cauliflower, so fucking smooth and tasty
I’ve had it and I do not agree.
kintherDamn I’ve never seen the evolution of corn like this before. Really interesting stuff!
I don’t know if tireless is the right word, I’m sure they had time to sleep.
They never came up with the wheel. Of course they were tireless.
Booooo! 🍅🍅🍅
You loved it and you know it.
You see that single downvote? Guess who did it. :P
The Phantom of Krankor?
Iirc they did come up with the wheel as some children’s toys involved it, but just didn’t find a practical use for it because they didn’t have beasts of burden to pull carts.
Take this with a grain of salt though because I have no idea where this trivia came from, it was just rattling away on my head.
I believe the Aztecs were the ones with wheeled toys (although it might have been the Maya).
Some tribes used stone wheels to crush maize. Full circle.
Stone wheels are a full circle!
Is this even true? Why would they keep breeding something inedible and practically useless hoping in thousands of years it’d be edible?
I really don’t know, it just seems like a stretch
Edit: spelling
It is true. They can trace the genetic lineage. The original plant isn’t totally inedible, it’s just less nutritious and harder to process. The same is true with wild grains in the Middle East. precursors of domesticated crops like wheat and barley were cultivated from wild grasses which produced less, had less nutrition and took more effort to process into flour.
It’s wrong to say they were useless like OP suggests. They were very useful. It was a crop you could reliably grow and come back to harvest.
It also stored very well. The breeding was only to make it more useful. It was always useful.
Much of the breeding was just selection. The crops you would pick and store would be larger. So we it came to plant your were using the biggest largest variety every year. A few generations of this would produce notable results. Then even finer and more deliberate selection would be done.
I didn’t make the picture. I just felt that it was finally time to answer the question: Is corn a grass?
It has puzzled Bill Corbetts the world over.
Are grains grasses then? Is wheat and barley grass?
I believe most grains are grasses, I don’t know about all.
I have seen this image many times in my uni courses.
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when european first reached the continent, the breeding of the plant was heavily advance, somewhat on the right side of thr image
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this is one of the staple crops without which we could not survive.
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the current varieties are so productive, but they require all modern farming methods, which can be impactful
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if you want to apply biological agriculture, the mkst recent varieties are not a good pick, unless they actively support that
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that image also serve as a quick explaination as to how our food systems evolved. When you read ancient folk tales, or even when you read about these plants in Biblical texts, imagine the one on the mid left. A small plant capable of supporting a limited amount of people
What I think is more interesting in terms of New World staples is what the indigenous people of the Andes did with the potato. Not only did the cultivate dozens of varieties, they also learned how to freeze-dry them for long-term storage. That’s amazing for people who just barely entered the bronze age by the time of European contact.
The one all the way on the right is what used to be stock corn, meaning we gave it to stock animals or ground it into flower. It’s not for human consumption the way it’s eaten now. Actual maize is quite colorful and was modified for easier human consumption. Ever wonder why corn shits out whole? It’s because America gave you our stock corn instead human corn. Congratulations America, I you played yourself.
Rob T FireflyYou can see corn in your poop because the outside of the corn kernal is made of cellulose, a.k.a. dietary fiber, that stuff that’s good for you because it isn’t digested and you poop it out. Meanwhile the nutritious inside of the corn kernal has been easily digested by your body as normal.
The corn in your doody is not the nutritional content, it’s the nutritional content’s used empty packaging which helps clean the pathways on its way out.