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Corn Shouldn't Be Food, But It Is

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You probably have a bag of frozen corn in your freezer, or have chowed down on a buttery ear of corn at a cookout. But not only did it take thousands of years for humans to domesticate teosinte to corral it into what we now know as corn, but there's a whole bunch of reasons that it never should have reached staple crop status in our diets. It took a few thousand years of random coincidences for us to end up with that tasty side dish, and avoid getting nasty diseases like pellagra on the way.

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Sources:
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Images:
https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4395/12/7/1646
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Prolificacy-phenotypes-A-Segment-of-a-teosinte-lateral-branch-showing-a-cluster-of_fig13_245029474
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Perennial_Teosinte_ear_%28Zea_diploperennis%29_-_Detail.jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Maize-teosinte.jpg
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0237715
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Museo_Nacional_de_Antropolog%C3%ADa_-_MA%C3%8DZ.jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aztecs_storing_maize.jpg
https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0472/11/6/556
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Secado_tradicional_del_ma%C3%ADz.jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nixtamalized_Corn_maize_El_Salvador_recipe.jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hominy_(maize).JPG
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tortilleras_Nebel.jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Niacin-3D-balls.png
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Uno_de_los_primeros_imagines_europeos_de_maiz.jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Blowing_on_maize.jpg
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