Food historians believe it dates back 8,700 years. A few years ago, Joey Chestnut, the champion of food eating contests, swallowed 32 servings of this snack in 8 minutes. A recent survey found that 92% of Americans can’t get enough of it, munching 17 billion quarts a year. Author Lexi Jacobs reported that it would fill the Empire State Building eighteen times.
Have you figured it yet?
It originally came from teosinte, a large wild grass native to Mexico, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. According to Science Daily, archeologists Anthony Ranere and Dolores Piperno found “rock shelters or caves where people lived thousands of years ago.” They discovered that forests had been cleared to make room for crops.
Similar “ears” were found at the Bat Caves in New Mexico.
It was a basic food for early Aztecs. They ate it as well as made garlands, ceremonial headdresses, necklaces, and ornaments for their gods, like Tlaloc (below), the god of rain and fertility,
