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Anne E. Desjardins discovered maize some 30 years ago when the U.S. Peace Corps program assigned her to the Lamjung district of Nepal to teach science
Anne E. Desjardins discovered maize some 30 years ago when the U.S. Peace Corps program assigned her to the Lamjung district of Nepal to teach science
A Maize-ing Travels
Janet Raloff
As July 4th activities formally usher in the summer picnic season, U.S. sweet corn sales will skyrocket. Corn on the cob is the perfect finger food—at least for people not obsessed with counting carbs. Quintessentially American, corn—or maize as it's known outside the United States—evolved somewhere around Panama or Mexico some 5,000 to 7,000 years ago, then spread throughout the Western hemisphere. Its subsequent cultivation has been widely credited with letting pre-Columbian communities throughout the Americas settle down and launch their civilization. Eventually agriculture, based on corn, moved into what would become the United States.
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NATIVE AMERICANS. These exotic Latin American maize varieties, collected by the U.S. Germplasm Enhancement for Maize project, are used by scientists as potential sources of genes for improved yield, vigor, taste, or resistance to blight. They also illustrate the colorful stock that might have served as the basis of initial maize exports around the time of Columbus.
Keith Weller/USDA/ARS
However, corn (Zea mays) has won gustatory converts far from its natal continent. In some parts of Asia, it's been grown for so long that farmers there consider it an indigenous species. Certainly, that's what Anne E. Desjardins discovered some 30 years ago when the U.S. Peace Corps program assigned her to the Lamjung district of Nepal to teach science. There, farmers every spring planted terraced fields high in the Himalayas with orange, red, white, and multicolored maize.
Sometimes, workers ate popcorn for lunch, along with beer made from fermented maize. More often, she found, the brightly hued kernels would be ground to make a thick porridge that accompanied lentils or a vegetable curry.
Her neighbors were convinced that their maize, or makai, is indigenous to the Himalayas, as rice, millet, and buckwheat actually are, she notes in a new report posted on the National Agricultural Library's (NAL) website. Desjardins, who is now a USDA chemist, and NAL's Susan A. McCarthy, trace the long road that maize took from the New World to Asia. Their survey begins with Christopher Columbus' 1492 discovery of maize and then focuses primarily on historical records compiled during the 16th to 18th centuries.
Although some anthropologists have argued that there must have been concurrent evolution of maize in the Americas and elsewhere, the authors found no historical reference to the plant being indigenous outside the Western hemisphere. They conclude that it rapidly spread eastward across Eurasia and reached China less than 60 years after Columbus introduced it into Spain.
Today, the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center—known by its Spanish acronym, CIMMYT—puts much of its effort into improving maize for cultivation in Asia, Africa, and South America. In southern Africa, poor people rely almost solely on that grain. Elsewhere in the developing world, its popularity is also high and growing.
Indeed, CIMMYT noted 3 years ago, "Demand for maize in developing countries is projected to surpass both wheat and rice by 2020, meaning that maize supplies for those areas must nearly double."