Sunday, November 18, 2007
< previous day | archives | next day >
I'm heading south
It's always been my traveling style to head off in a general direction and let the winds carry me along wherever my whims blow. Today my whims are blowing south. More or less down along the western flank of the Appalachian mountains. The Graphical Forecasts at Weather.gov lead me to think the prevailing weather is about the same as I would see following the Ohio and Mississippi river valleys I had planned on following. We'll see.
Night camp: Wal-Mart parking lot in Whitehall WV
Teosinte and the Improbability of Maize
The ancestors of wheat, rice, millet, and barley look like their domesticated descendants; because they are both edible and highly productive, one can easily imagine how the idea of planting them for food came up. Maize can't reproduce itself, because its kernals are securely wrapped in the husk, so Indians must have developed it from some other species. But there are no wild species that resemble maize. Its closest genetic relative is a mountain grass called teosinte that looks strikingly different - for one thing, it "ears" are smaller than baby corn served in Chinese restaurants. No one eats teosinte, because it produces too little grain to be worth harvesting. In creating modern maize from this unpromising plant, Indians performed a feat so improbable that archaeologists and biologists have argued for decades over how it was achieved. Coupled with squash, beans, and avocados, maize provided Mesoamerica with a balanced diet, one arguably more nutritious than its Middle Eastern or Asian equivalent.