meant, of course, no crop rotation and the abandonment of any pretense of
‘‘conservation farming.’’ Foreign purchases and government support ratio-
nalized expensive chemical ‘‘inputs’’ to grow corn on the same land, year
after year. The result was more anhydrous ammonia for enfeebled soils
and more petroleum-based herbicides and pesticides to protect vast man-
made deserts consisting of but one species of plant. And while food and
drink still seemed a great bargain at the stores and restaurants, by tax-
payers were contributing no less than billion a year in direct payments
to farmers. Toward the end of , theprojected a subsidy approach-
ing billion.^2 The ecological companion to the obesity epidemic, then, is
an enormous rural landscape saturated with chemicals and—as ever with
extensive agriculture—windblown, gullying, wasting soil.
tThe contemporary plague of corn is not unprecedented. Another oc-
curred centuries ago and much farther from the birthplace of maize cul-
ture. It was an epidemic outbreak of a chronic, sometimes fatal dietary dis-
order later named pellagra that in deep retrospect seems a supremely ironic
spin on the storied Columbian Exchange. The Americas, having been iso-
lated from Eurasian people, animals, plants, and pathogens for so many
thousands of years, were, beginning with Christopher Columbus and the
Spanish, simply overrun with Europeans and European cattle, hogs, honey-
bees, wheat, smallpox, measles, and a host of other invisible conquista-
dors.^3 In return—so goes the simplified version of the cataclysm—other
than precious metals and a few novel specimens of plants and animals,
the original Americans sent only syphilis. Actually Europeans sent home
many tree seedlings intended to reforest their homelands, plus many prac-
tical, edible plants, including potatoes, tomatoes, and maize. Most Euro-
peans seemed to have thought corn unfit for direct human consumption,
but finally, in northern Spain and northern Italy, well before the end of
the sixteenth century, they adopted extensive corn culture in order to feed
swine, which tasted quite good when fattened with maize. Later, after the
French national horticultural society vigorously endorsed maize culture in
, extensive corn planting diffused to southern France, then to northern
Egypt, southern Africa, and parts of temperate and tropical Asia. Pellagra
also appeared in all these places, first in southern Europe.
In a physician to the Spanish court recorded the first known epi-
demic of a ‘‘disgusting indigenous disease’’ among Asturian peasants. Vic-
tims’ exposed skin reddened, then broke out with lesions and blisters. In
advanced cases a distinctive butterfly pattern of darkened blisters appeared