The world over pellagra has ever been an illness of the poor, both rural and
urban, whose diets center on corn. Maize, whether local and fresh or im-
ported and suspect, lacks an amino acid to unlock its own niacin. Some-
how Mesoamericans learned long before recorded history that corn must
be soaked in lime and water before grinding and cooking. The lime not
only separates husks from kernels but unbinds niacin available in the corn
itself. Later, we also know, Mesoamericans cultivated citrus limes and com-
monly supplemented maize dishes with the juice of lime. More important,
Mesoamericans always consumed corn along with the other two parts of the
great American triad, beans and squashes, which also supplied the niacin-
releasing amino. The triad is not only an ancient system but a perfectly bal-
anced foodway. Maize becomes a plague, then, only when its companion
foods are, for whatever reasons, lacking, and the world is out of balance.^4
The most common causes of the crippling of the triad seem to be two:
economic dependency and the alienation of dependents from land that
might produce food with niacin-releasing properties. When Dr. R. M.
Grimm traveled through Georgia, South Carolina, and Kentucky during
– observing pellagrins, he discerned a clear-enough pattern. Hardly
any sufferer had a garden. Instead, virtually all pellagrins purchased their
food (usually on credit) in company stores or plantation commissaries.
Practically none of this provender was fresh but dried, canned, or packaged.
Practically none was of first quality, either, rather the opposite.^5 Eighteenth-
century Spanish and Italian peasants were similarly deprived of access
to gardens and balanced diets, even as they labored in maize fields to
produce food for animals. Workers’ own rations consisted principally of
mealy maize leftovers. Italian peasants in mid-eighteenth-century Lom-
bardy labored under themezzardriasystem, which closely resembled post-
bellum sharecropping in the American South. For a long while, many south-
ern sharecroppers had gardens and kept chickens, milk cows, and hogs.
But Lombardian peasant plots were so tiny that their occupants devoted
all their arable space to the commercial crop that would pay their rents.
Maintaining milk and meat animals was out of the question, too. So they
ate principally polenta—the yellow version of grits—made from old and/or
substandard corn.^6 When maize culture expanded southward to the region
of Lazio (surrounding Rome) and beyond, pellagra followed, for similar rea-
sons.
One early educated guess at the source of pellagra, both in Europe and
America, was spoiled cornmeal, badly processed and old. Very poor rural
people who were deprived of access to land for their own gardens, and