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Early_To_Risa@sh.itjust.works

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Anon thinks about wheat (infosec.pub)

submitted 1 week ago by Early_To_Risa@sh.itjust.works to c/greentext@sh.itjust.works

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[–] exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 6 days ago

My point being that corn only needs to be boiled to be easy to eat.

Sweet corn harvested at the milky stage, sure. But wait until the kernels are reddish brown and they won't be great. And that's a variety that was developed like 1500 years after the Romans were wiping their asses with sponges, so not relevant to the conversation about ancient prehistoric people developing a staple crop.

Go boil a jar of popcorn and see how practical it would be to try to eat flint corn with just some boiling.

Plus nixtamalization improves the nutrition of cornmeal so that it can meet more of human nutritional needs.

And your second "point" is a complete red herring. It applies to almost any crop outside of its harvest season.

It doesn't apply to staple crops. Wheat, rice, millet, sorghum, buckwheat, beans, and potatoes can be stored long term, so entire civilizations came up around them millennia ago. Sweet corn harvested at an edible stage can't be, at least not without refrigeration or canning technology.

All this is to say yeah, the civilizations built around maize as a staple crop had to figure out nixtamalization.