On Food and Cooking

energy and building tissue. In fact, they’re
such a good source of these essential nutrients
that cultures have occasionally relied on the
grains too heavily, and suffered from dietary
deficiencies as a result. The debilitating
disease called beriberi plagued rice-eating
Asia in the 19th century when milling
machines made it easier to remove the
inconvenient, unattractive outer bran layer
from rice grains — and along with it their
thiamin, which the rest of the largely
vegetarian diet couldn’t make up (meats and
fish are rich in thiamin). A different
deficiency disease called pellagra struck the
rural poor in Europe and the southern United
States in the 18th and 19th centuries, when
they adopted corn from Central and South
America as a staple food, but without the
processing method (cooking in alkaline water)
that makes its stores of niacin available to the
human body.
Beriberi and pellagra led early in the 20th