How Carrots Won the Trojan War

by Rebecca Rupp

  Most victims, however, seem to have associated the disease with corn, variously blaming it on corn’s “impure Indian” nature, moldy kernels, or corn-associated insects. In the poverty-stricken American South, pellagra reached epidemic proportions by the early twentieth century: an estimated 100,000 Southerners died of the disease between 1900 and 1940. In 1909, the afflicted state of South Carolina put corn on trial, on a charge of murder. (“Corn stands indicted!” thundered Ebbie Watson, the state agricultural commissioner.) An alternative take, which let corn off the hook, held that pellagra sufferers were simply weak by nature and had acquired the disease in an unmentionable manner from sheep.

  In 1915, Joseph Goldberger, a Public Health Service physician, performed a series of comparative nutritional studies in prisons and orphan asylums that definitively pinpointed pellagra as a dietary deficiency disease. It was noninfectious, linked to “low-grade starchy diets,” and curable by supplementing the diet with proteinaceous meat, milk, and eggs. The amino acid tryptophan is a precursor of niacin, which means that in the absence of ready-made niacin, the body can manufacture its own, provided it is supplied with proteins rich in tryptophan. Corn in this case administers a nutritional double whammy: its niacin exists in unusable form, and it lacks tryptophan.

  Once the corn/pellagra link was understood, scientists began to wonder why prehistoric societies based on corn, such as the Mayas and Aztecs, were not riddled with the disease. The answer lay in traditional corn-processing techniques. Before grinding their corn into meal, primitive societies subjected the kernels to an alkali treatment — soaking in wood ashes or lime. Called nixtamalization, this process both helped in the removal of the hulls and improved the overall nutritional quality of the cornmeal. The nutritional benefits are upped, perversely, by reducing the availability of zein, the principal storage protein in corn, and the worst of the corn proteins in terms of its rock-bottom low content of lysine and tryptophan. This in turn increases the relative availability of these scarce amino acids.

  Alkali-treated corn both provides the eater with nearly three times the lysine of untreated corn and converts the bound niacin to a useful absorbable form. Corn tortillas and grits (or hominy, from the original Algonquian rockahominie or tackhummin) are thus better protein sources than corn on the cob.

  Today the latest approach to the nutritional limitations of corn involves boosting lysine and tryptophan levels through genetic engineering. Before biologists started fiddling around with its DNA helix, however, corn did a reasonable job of juggling genes on its own. Among the first to notice this phenomenon was Cotton Mather, who, peering into his neighbor’s garden in 1716, noticed that yellow corn plants, located down-wind from red and blue, ended up with multicolored ears. The multicolored corn was the result of cross-fertilization, to which wind-pollinated corn is promiscuously prone.

  Each (male) corn tassel annually produces up to 60 million pollen grains, powdery specks that with the help of just a bit of breeze can travel half a mile in under a minute. Corn doesn’t stay put, and corn pollen’s gypsy-like behavior makes it more than likely that whatever is growing in your corn patch got some input from the corn patch next door. Most early corn breeding proceeded in this happy-go-lucky fashion: different varieties of corn planted next to each other cross-pollinated to yield new and occasionally better offspring.

  It was in this offhand manner that Robert Reid produced his famous Yellow Dent, by interspersing a dent corn called Gordon Hopkins Red with Little Yellow, an early flint corn, on his farm south of Peoria, Illinois. Reid’s Yellow Dent, cited as “the most significant stride in corn production since prehistoric times,” won a prize at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 — belatedly, since by then it had been America’s favorite corn for decades.

  More extensive studies of plant hybridization — in everything from cabbages to petunias — were performed by no less an authority than Charles Darwin, who published the results in 1876 under the title The Effects of Cross and Self-Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom. This made much less of a splash than the inflammatory On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859), but it was to have a substantial impact on the world of corn. Darwin’s key observation was that the offspring of crosses between related strains were weaker and less productive than those of crosses between unrelated parents — or, conversely, that the progeny of unrelated parents are healthier and more vigorous. This phenomenon is known as heterosis or hybrid vigor, and, on the human scale, is why kings occasionally marry commoners, with an eye to beefing up the royal bloodline.

  In 1879, an American disciple of Darwin, William James Beal, at the Michigan Agricultural College (now Michigan State University), performed the first systematic studies of controlled crosses in corn. Beal planted his cornfield with two different varieties of corn, then put one over on Mother Nature by detasseling — emasculating — corn number one, thus making certain that any ears would result only from cross-fertilization with pollen from the tassels of corn number two. The hybrid offspring of this carefully directed interaction, right on cue, were healthier, happier, and higher-yielding than the wimpish progeny of closely related parents.

  George Harrison Shull, a farm boy from Ohio, is usually credited with introducing hybrid corn to the commercial cornfield. One of eight children from a poor family, Shull managed to work his way through college as a janitor, graduated at the top of his class, and went on to earn a PhD in plant genetics from the University of Chicago.

  His corn hybrid experiments began in the early 1900s at the Station for Experimental Evolution in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, where he planted his first corn patch as a vegetable-garden demonstration for tourists of the principles of Mendelian genetics. From this showplace garden came the corn that was to become his major contribution to the world of agriculture: pure inbred parental strains, painstakingly developed by repeated generations of self-fertilization.

  Once his collection of pure lines was established, Shull tried a cross and in one fell swoop obtained vigorous, high-yielding, first-generation hybrids. Hybrid corn seed — the plant version of Superman — went on the market in the 1930s, and by the end of the decade high-yielding hybrids occupied the vast majority of American cornfields.

  Unfortunately, farmers have paid for their increased production figures with decreased genetic diversity — which means that in the 1970s, more than 70 percent of American corn acreage was planted with just six varieties of corn. Such a degree of specialization was asking for trouble, and in 1970, when a new strain of southern leaf blight fungus appeared on the scene, identically susceptible corn plants dropped like flies across the nation. Sensitivity to the attacking fungus was correlated to possession of the otherwise useful Texas (T) cytoplasmic male sterility factor, a genetic element that functions like a vegetable vasectomy, eliminating the need for painstakingly detasseling the plants by hand to prevent self-fertilization. The result was an overall 15 percent loss of the corn crop, and up to 50 percent in some unlucky states.

  Even more than a vacuum, it seems, Nature abhors uniformity. In light of this painful lesson, research efforts now are directed toward incorporating a greater range of characteristics into existing corn varieties, and toward preserving corn’s genetic heritage, notably Mexico’s landrace corn, a reservoir of biodiversity developed by indigenous farmers over the past 9,000 years.

  Corn in America is often still eaten three meals a day, although the morning dollop of cornmeal mush has now been replaced by the bowl of cornflakes. The name most commonly associated with this breakfast treat is Kellogg, of whom originally there were two, the brothers John H. and Will K.

  John H. Kellogg was a doctor who, fresh out of medical school in 1876, took over the directorship of the Western Health Reform Institute at Battle Creek, Michigan. Under his rule, the Institute became famous for its specially designed vegetarian diets: the skinny were fed twenty-six meals a day and made to stay in bed with sandbags on their stomachs; the hypertensive were served nothin
g but grapes; and everybody was encouraged to gnaw on zwieback, for health of gums and teeth.

  Within the first year, Kellogg was also plying patients with his first toasted cereal creation — a mix of mashed-up biscuits of oats, wheat, and cornmeal known as Granose. It took him until 1895 to come up with the first flake cereal, a wheat preparation made by rolling partially cooked whole grains out flat, then toasting until crisp and dry. (The idea, said Dr. Kellogg, had come to him in a dream.) The public turned up its collective nose at wheatflakes, but cornflakes, brought out several years later, were a success. In fact, cornflakes were so popular that by the early 1900s some forty-four cereal companies — some of them in tents — were in business in and around Battle Creek.

  Prominent among cereal promoters was C. W. Post, a suspender salesman turned health-foods manufacturer, whose personal brand of cornflakes went on the market in 1906 under the name Elijah’s Manna. Both name and carton — which showed an assortment of heavenly ravens dropping cornflakes into the hands of a hungry prophet — were considered blasphemous by clergymen, and turned out to be downright illegal in Britain, where it was forbidden to register Biblical names for commercial purposes. Post reissued his flakes in 1908 as Post Toasties.

  Kellogg’s cornflakes (flavored with barley malt) were the foundation of the enormous Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company, established in 1906 by Dr. Kellogg’s entrepreneurial brother Will. John and Will seldom saw eye to eye over the proposed direction of the breakfast food industry, and their differences of opinion landed them in court for twelve years of legal tussling over who was legally entitled to the use of the Kellogg name. Will K. won (with a few limited privileges to John), which is why it’s Will’s signature that gives the seal of approval to the modern cornflakes box. Both John and Will, nourished on cornflakes, lived well into their nineties. Will died in 1951; his tombstone, suitable for the prototypic morning man, is a sundial bearing a bronze robin pulling up a bronze worm.

  “Plough deep, while Sluggards sleep / And you shall have Corn, to sell and to keep,” wrote Ben Franklin in Poor Richard’s Almanac. It could be a motto for corn growers everywhere.

  * * *

  Corn Palaces

  In the early years of the twentieth century a craze known as the Corn Show swept the country. Farmers competed to produce the biggest, the best, and the most mathematically perfect ear of corn, the hopefuls often judged in theatrical Corn Palaces especially constructed for this purpose. Only one such palace still survives, in Mitchell, South Dakota, a turreted extravaganza built in the days when the citizens of Mitchell decided to outshine the glamorous celebrations of the Grain Palace in the neighboring town of Plankinton.

  * * *

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  In Which

  CUCUMBERS

  IMITATE

  PIGEONS

  plus

  The Emperor Tiberius’s Moveable

  Garden, Sparta’s Beastly Broth,

  Cleopatra’s Beauty Secret, New

  York’s Electric Pickle, and

  A Burmese Cucumber King

  A cucumber should be well sliced, and dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out, as good for nothing.

  SAMUEL JOHNSON

  The lot of the parent of teenagers is often not a happy one. Virginia planter Landon Carter of Sabine Hill records in his diary on July 24, 1766, that he’s worried about his daughter Judy. “She does bear ungovernable the whole summer through,” he writes, “eating extravagantly and late at night of cucumbers and all sorts of bilious trash.” Teenagers: they’re moody; they keep awful hours; they eat junk food; and they form foolish attachments. The cucumber-gorging Judy eventually eloped, to her father’s fury, with her cousin Reuben — though presumably he eventually forgave her, since in his will he left her 800 pounds sterling and a gold watch.

  Judy Carter’s cucumber, Cucumis sativus, comes to us by way of India, where it has been cultivated for at least three thousand years — and perhaps considerably longer, since excavations in 1970 at Spirit Cave on the Burma-Thailand border dredged up seeds of cucumbers, peas, beans, and water chestnuts, remains of meals eaten, according to radiocarbon dating, in 9750 BCE. The wild ancestor of our present-day edible cucumber has never been definitively identified, but one guess is C. hardwickii, an unappetizing native of the Himalayas, small and bitter, scattered with nasty little spines. It may have been C. hardwickii that the unfortunate Enkidu ate along with worms, figs, and caper buds in the ancient Sumerian epic Gilgamesh.

  Time and human effort, however, eventually created a sweeter and less off-putting vegetable, and the result quickly spread. The ancient Egyptians supposedly ate them at every meal, dipped in bowls of brine, and used them to make a questionable drink called cucumber water. To do this, a hole was cut in a ripe cucumber, the inside stirred up with a small stick, the hole plugged, and the cucumber then buried in the ground for several days. When unearthed, boasts an ancient recipe, “the pulp will be found converted into an agreeable liquid,” possibly the concoction the Israelites mourned as they slogged thirstily through the desert after Moses.

  Nonetheless, not everybody liked cucumbers, and some thought them downright dangerous. Charles Estienne and Jean Liébault’s L’Agriculture et Maison Rustique, translated in 1616 into English as The Country Farm, warns starkly that “The use of Cucumbers is altogether hurtfull,” and contemporary medical authorities cautioned that cucumbers filled the body with “cold noughtie humors” and brought on ague. Samuel Pepys recorded in his diary on August 22, 1663: “This day Sir W. Batten tells me that Mr. Newhouse is dead of eating cowcumbers, of which the other day I heard of another, I think, Sir Nicholas Crisp’s son.”

  If not fatal, they were nondescript. A quote from the biblical Apocrypha states, “A scarecrow in a garden of cucumbers keeps nothing,” which certainly implies that the cucumber was not the top crop on the Middle Eastern block. Nutritionally, that “nothing” is literal. The average cucumber — like the average jellyfish — is 96 percent water, and contains little else other than a smidgen of vitamins A and C (1 percent and 2 percent of the Recommended Daily Allowance, respectively), all in the peel. At that rate, in terms of vitamin A, it takes 120 unpeeled cucumbers to equal one carrot. Food historian Waverley Root describes the cucumber as “as close to neutrality as a vegetable can get without ceasing to exist.”

  Still, all that water gave the characteristically cool cucumber a banner reputation as a refreshing thirst-quencher. Early caravans took them along as a sort of vegetable water bottle; overheated Greeks mashed them and mixed the pulp with honey and snow to make an ancient version of sherbet. The Romans were enthusiastic about them, occasionally eaten raw but more often boiled and served with oil, vinegar, and honey. The emperor Tiberius was mad for them, consuming, according to Pliny the Elder, ten a day, every day. To indulge his autocratic whims, Roman gardeners began growing cucumbers in earth-filled carts, which they trundled about from spot to spot to make the most of the sun. In the off-season, they grew them in cucumber frames, of the sort Peter Rabbit fell into so disastrously in Mr. McGregor’s garden, glazed with transparent sheets of specularia, which was probably mica.

  Cucumber cultivation dwindled with the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, and only reappeared in force in the sixteenth century, a period of deprivation that chef and food writer Bert Greene refers to as the “cucumber black-out.” Still, in the late eighth century, Pepin (the Wise) of France, possibly influenced by a classical belief that steeping seeds in cucumber juice protected them from insect predation, ordered rows of cucumbers planted around his vineyards to keep boll weevils, borers, and cutworms away from the valuable grapes; and Pepin’s renowned son, Charlemagne, ordered them planted in the royal gardens. He even declared them his favorite fruit, and — though cucumbers are found on his plant list under “Salads” — he reportedly ate them for dessert, in custard tarts.

  * * *

  The Cucumber King

  In the tenth century CE, a fa
rmer became king of Burma because of a cucumber. The story goes that King Theinhko, after a recreational day galloping through the forest, was hungry, and so paused to pick and eat a cucumber from a farmer’s field. The furious farmer killed him with a spade. The king’s attendant then told the farmer — possibly making up the rule on the spot — that whoever killed a king then became a king in his stead.

  The farmer was unwilling to leave his cucumbers, but was eventually persuaded by offers of gold, silver, elephants, and a new wardrobe. When he arrived at the palace, the queen — “fearing lest the country and villages be cast into turmoil” — accepted the situation, provided the farmer had a bath. He ruled Burma for 33 years as King Nyaung-u Sawrahan, popularly known as the Cucumber King.

  * * *

  Cucumbers were being grown in England in the fourteenth century, but only became truly popular, the story goes, during the reign of Henry VIII, under the auspices of the first of his six queens, Catherine of Aragon, who liked them sliced in her Spanish salads. They lasted better than Henry’s wives, and by the reign of Elizabeth I, according to John Gerard’s Great Herball (1597), English gardens boasted five varieties: the Common, the Turkey, the Adder, the Pear Fashion, and a mysterious “rare & beautiful cucumber” from Spain, a foot in length and streaked and spotted in “divers colours.” John Parkinson, in his horticultural manual Paradisi in Sole Paradisus Terrestris (1629), mentioned seven varieties, including one that “bareth but small fruit (used in pickles)” and another the size and shape of a lemon.