![]() Through selective breeding, Indigenous people living in the Balsas River Valley, south of Mexico City, turned teosinte, a wild grass with little value as food, into a crop bearing ears of large, closely packed kernels that were dense with protein and other nutrients. Its long history of cultivation goes back at least 9,000 years, according to archaeologists. Unlike deer or cranberries, maize wasn’t just there for the taking. ![]() It can tell you why, when the wheat crop planted with grain brought from Europe failed, Wampanoag corn kept the Pilgrims from starving, and why it wove itself so deeply into the diets of the European settlers and their descendants. If you know how to read the corn, it can tell you about the civilization those people built. In that corn - written, in a sense, into its genetic code - is the story of the people who lived in Plymouth and throughout the Western Hemisphere before Europeans arrived. But cornmeal - usually ground from another hard maize called dent corn - is one of a handful of main ingredients found on Thanksgiving tables across the continental United States, baked into loaves, muffins and sticks crumbled into stuffings and dressings and steamed with molasses and eggs in a custard that has been known as Indian pudding since the era when the colonists referred to ground corn as Indian meal. Today only a few farmers plant kernels from those heirloom lines.
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