polenta

Northern Italy; maize polenta, which replaced the grey polenta of buckwheat and the millet among the so-called inferior grains: in the Veneto maize even took formentón, the old word for buckwheat, and polenta went from grey to yellow

A field of maize appears on a map of an estate near Padua in 1549, what may be the earliest Italian picture of one; by the eighteenth century maize was grown on a large scale on the estates of the Po valley, the Veneto yielding about six times as much of it as of wheat; it came without nixtamalization, the alkaline cooking that arose in Mesoamerica alone, and carried abroad without it maize brought pellagra wherever it became the cheap staple; in Italy pellagra was diagnosed around the middle of the eighteenth century and still killed 1,312 people in 1910

Northern Italy took maize and left the technique behind: Mesoamerican cooking treats the grain with alkali, which makes available the niacin the body cannot otherwise reach, and that method did not follow maize across the Atlantic. Pellagra followed: the kingdom's first census of the disease, in 1879, counted 97,855 sufferers, and by 1881 the Veneto's had risen from about 30,000 to 55,000. Cesare Lombroso gave decades to it and held that its exclusive cause was spoilt maize covered with Penicillium mould, a theory since proved wrong; the real cause, a deficiency of B vitamins, was found only around 1930. His theory suited the government and the ruling bourgeois and agrarian classes, because it made pellagra a question of hygiene rather than of peasant poverty, and from the 1880s proposed laws against it failed because they touched the maize interests of landowners, millers and traders, until a law of 21 July 1902 banned the sale of spoilt maize, by which time pellagra had been declining for a decade. The Italian record is blunter than the missing-knowledge story: pellagra was a disease of poor peasants, day labourers and the landless worst off, and social measures that might have let the poor eat better were deemed at the very least disruptive and at the most revolutionary. The well-off ate their polenta refined with seasonings, and the poor with water and little or nothing beside it. So the crop crossed without its method and then landed on the people who had no margin to absorb the difference: the first failure was one of knowledge, and the second chose whom the first would kill.