The world is an extraordinary place!
There isn't a day that goes by that doesn't give us one reason or another to curl up on the couch, grab a bucket of popcorn and enjoy the show.
The folklore of some Native American tribes tells stories about the spirits that inhabit the hearts of corn kernels.
These good-natured beings live happily and contently in solitude, but they get terribly angry when they feel hot.
Any heating mode alters them.
The more the temperature rises in their homes, the angrier they get, and they can become angry to the point of flying into a rage, violently shaking the walls of the cereal grains in which they live, in protest, and exploding their teeth. own houses blown up.
This is how popcorn is made.
Much less interesting is the version of events that defines a grain of corn as 4% water enclosed in a cabinet lined with starch cushions and hermetically sealed on the outside by a hard shell.
When this water is heated, it expands and exerts pressure against the walls of the cupboard, until the outer shell cannot support it and bursts, turning the corn kernel inside out like a sock, and exposing a spongy mass of swollen starch. with the appearance of a small white dove.
The history of popcorn begins approximately 10,000 years ago in Mesoamerica, present-day Mexico, where the cultivation of corn was first domesticated.
The oldest popcorn ears ever found were discovered in Bat Cave in west central New Mexico in 1948 and 1950, and are about 5,600 years old.
In tombs on the east coast of Peru, popcorn kernels nearly 1,000 years old have been found, so well preserved that they would still burst today.
But where does the marriage between popcorn and entertainment come from?
At the outset, we must start from the importance of corn cultivation in America.
When a food is so well adapted to the environment and is given abundantly and cheaply, it is easy for it to appear here and there in any situation and context to be consumed and become a source of nutrients and business.
Corn was the carbohydrate around which traditional recipes revolved wherever its cultivation was important, but its rise as a
snack
in the form of popcorn began in the 1890s with street vendors pushing carts chasing the crowds at fairs, parks, and exhibitions. or sporting events, and exploded with the Golden Age of Hollywood, in the decades of the twenties and thirties, of the last century.
At that time, it was forbidden to eat anything in the theaters, which were luxurious, upholstered and padded theaters, intended for a refined audience.
Now, with the arrival of sound cinema in 1927, on the one hand, which made it possible to enjoy cinema without having studied or knowing how to read subtitles, and the coming of the Great Depression after the crash of 1929, which left large masses of unemployed people, cinema became an affordable mass entertainment option for all audiences.
Going through an entire session on an empty stomach was difficult, and viewers would buy bags of popcorn for five or ten cents from street vendors before entering the room and sneak it inside under their coats.
Quickly, movie theater owners understood that taking a stand against popcorn was a losing battle, and they realized that, instead of watching customers cheat, they let street vendors stand in the lobby. from the cinema and charged a commission on sales, they had a great business.
This week, what has had a few of us eating popcorn has been the spectacle that Greenpeace has given with its campaign to promote avocado consumption in the middle of the drought.
What would be a self-proclaimed environmental organization promoting the use of a non-native ingredient whose cultivation requires enormous amounts of water and is responsible, in Latin America, for serious conflicts related to arms trafficking, drug trafficking, misery and deforestation, and in Spain, to bring the Malaga region of Axarquía to the brink of desertification.
“Now, when you go to make your shopping list, you will know how to choose what is best for your health, your pocket and the planet.
Left behind will be the fruits and vegetables whose origin is thousands of kilometers away and which have a high cost for the environment and people,” Greenpeace encourages us, in the article that accompanies the announcement.
Faced with such levels of irresponsibility and cynicism, I get hot.
The kind little spirits that live inside me rebel against my change in temperature, they stir, they rear up, they push against my walls and
poof!
That's how my columns come out.
By the way, happy world popcorn day!
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