Thread by @SarahTaber_bww

this.....we talk about tomorrow

the short answer is "probably not, but the OTHER fuckery surrounding this is an even better story"

https://twitter.com/scottgoblue314/status/1413306754876669964

My guess is no.

It's not immediately obvious that "lots of raw corn = pellagra." You have to eat p much nothing BUT unprocessed corn for months and months, only very poor people do that, & folks are always ready with more sensational explanations for outbreaks amongst the poor.

h/t @mariahgladstone for a story about Aztec prisoners who were trafficked to the Vatican early on in the Spanish invasion of Mexico.

Along with them came corn, which the Vatican proceeded to grind dry like wheat.

The Aztec guys said "No you don't do maize like that"

so the Vatican executed them bc you can't tell the pope what to do.

This "kill the messenger" approach contributed to outbreaks of pellagra in Italy in the late 1800s, when corn became a major part of the peasant diet in the form of polenta.

HOWEVER: this is not how the US pellagra outbreaks happened!

Southern US footways include nixtamalization! That's what hominy is! It's nixtamalized corn kernels.

That's why hominy looks "weird": nixtamalized corn kernels swell up & shed the hard seed coat, leaving them big, puffy, & soft.

"Hominy" is an Algonquian term for coarsely-ground nixtamalized corn. The terminology got a little bungled in translation but it reflects how US settlers were economically dependent on Indigenous farmers early on, & got personal training on how to prepare corn.

This is really different than corn's introduction to Italy where it basically came in as war booty, people with proper info on making it were killed, & as a result it was used as a 1:1 substitute for wheat. Which nutritionally it is NOT that similar to.

"But why would farmers get their food from a store??"

Because Jim Crow plantation owners prevented their sharecroppers from growing food, so they'd HAVE to buy it from the plantation owner.

Being poor, they didn't always have cash. That's ok, you can use credit!

Plantation owners also made sure sharecroppers & their kids had as little education as possible, so they couldn't read the ledgers or do the math & see how much of their "debt" was fictitious.

The result: multigenerational Jim Crow poverty.

Plantation stores were a key part of how southern gentlemen kept their sharecroppers & tenants in multigenerational debt.

They made them grow cotton, more cotton, & nothing but cotton- just so they couldn't grow food. They had to buy it at ridiculous markups from the plantation.

This helps explain one of the more bizarre episodes in US ag history: why the South kept growing cotton in the early 20th century even as global cotton prices were at rock bottom for decades & "nobody could possibly make money on it."

The business model for Jim Crow plantations wasn't selling cotton!

It was trapping tenants & loan-sharking them.

But wait! If the whole South was growing wall-to-wall cotton, the better to keep the underclass dependent on the rural elite for food

Then where was that food coming from??

It came from the Midwest. Corn & corn-fattened salt pork.

In 1901 some new corn milling equipment was invented that let Midwestern corn mills ship pre-ground corn without it going bad.

It did this by removing the germ. That's the part of the seed that has oils that can go rancid, and also has almost all the niacin.

Pre-ground corn was a hit with institutional food buyers.

It was a cheap ration they could give out to workers that didn't need much preparation: only boiling. No soaking or grinding. They didn't have to "let" workers "waste" time on food prep.

Of course, the germ is the part of the grain that had niacin in it. So the pre-ground corn was missing niacin. Salt pork is naturally low in it, as is molasses (a cheap sweetener & the 3rd component in the 19th/20th century institutional diet).

So starting shortly after 1901, the year after Beall's corn degerminator was invented, pellagra started showing up all over the South.

Southern gentlemen were super invested in making sure everyone thought pellagra just happened because poor people were gross. There's a great YT video on the ridiculous amount of detective work it took to expose what really caused pellagra.

Seriously the video is fucking wild. The epidemiologist who documented pellagra was a nutritional deficiency

was a grocer's son who showed up in the South, saw everyone eating the same 3 things all the time, & just said "oh hell no" & I respect him for that

Pellagra raged across the South for FORTY YEARS.

It finally ended when the US gov't mandated vitamin supplementation of flour, cornmeal, & cereal products at the onset of WW2

because the military was fed up with how many men were too sick & stunted by malnutrition to draft.

But wait there's more. While the South is the largest geographic area that was impacted by this, draft statistics show that there was actually another population affected even more by pellagra: listed in military records as "Indian, sparsely settled."

Again, the US was ravaged by a pellagra outbreak that lasted FORTY YEARS: 1901-1940ish.

It was an enormous public health crisis. And we've just about memory-holed it, because it came down hardest on marginalized communities.

The pellagra epidemic came down to the basic fabric of society.

All the nostalgia we have for how "family farming used to be good"?

Nearly all of that comes from a very narrow window in time & space: 1900 to 1920 in the Corn Belt, the "Golden Age of Midwestern agriculture."

A few years of that came from Europe importing massive amounts of food in WWI.

But you know what else was happening during ALL of that time period?

Jim Crow corn exports.

Today's Midwestern farm dynasties made their fortunes on Jim Crow & pellagra.

The "King Cotton" years stunted agricultural development in the South. What non-cotton ag industries we have are largely thanks to carpetbaggers buying up land down South and growing crops to export back home.

That's why FL has citrus, & GA has peach & pecan industries today.

There are a few fruit & vegetable crops that actually need CA's hot dry weather, but only a few. The eastern US's failure to grow its own produce is really mostly about Jim Crow.

It's why the US can't have nice things like regional food systems.

In conclusion Jim Crow is a way bigger influence on modern US life than anybody wants to admit, the Midwest isn't nice, and never trust anyone to handle direct in-kind food "aid" properly.