Tuesday, December 4, 2007
< previous day | archives | next day >
Last night was cold - 30 degrees or so - and I barely had enough propane to see me through the night. I'm going to have to find some today and with that in mind I've decided to head south from Leeds on AL route 25 and keep an eye out for a propane dealer. I found one about 25 -30 miles out and AL 25 took me south of Birmingham and then gradually westward, eventually crossing I65 at Calera AL where I've holed up for the night, once again at Wal-Mart. My Verizon broadband connection is a little slow here but I'll get by. So far this service has performed very well for me.
Night camp: Wal-Mart in Calera AL
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.