July 22, 2025
Gastropod is a podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history. It is co-hosted by NICOLA TWILLEY and CYNTHIA GRABER:It talks about the discovery, evolution, and innovation around corn showcasing its importance in Mexico and around the world. Here are some sections of the podcast to synthesise the article but I encourage you to listen to it and check other episodes out.
CYNTHIA GRABER: Chef Jorge Gaviria’s family had fed him tortillas nearly every day before that one, but when he started this routine, this was the time he claimed tortillas for himself. It was an afterschool snack at his grandparents house, but it was also as he says a relationship, the corn tortilla was the thing that helped him feel grounded after he got home from school.
ALBERTO CHASSAIGNE: Let’s go back to the origins and get in the time machine, go back 10,000 years. Our original corn grass is called teosinte.
TWILLEY: Alberto Chassaigne is the man with the time machine. He’s also in charge of the world’s largest collection of corn, it’s based at a nonprofit just outside of Mexico City. It’s called CIMMYT—that’s the acronym for its name in Spanish, which translates to the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center. When we visited Alberto, he showed us some of this weedy-looking teosinte
TWILLEY: Teosinte grows wild like a weed all over southern Mexico and Central America to this day. But here’s the thing. For a long time, scientists looking for corn’s origins assumed that maybe teosinte was involved in the mix, but it couldn’t possibly have been the main ancestor. I mean, the wild relatives of wheat actually look like wheat.
GRABER: But teosinte really doesn’t look anything like corn. Those mini cobs are just little long seed heads, really, and they’re covered with a super hard coating, you couldn’t eat those kernels, and when they’re ripe they just burst out and scatter on the ground. You, me, archaeologists in the 70s, none of us would think it was the ancestor of corn.
TWILLEY: And so researchers hunted for the missing link, until advances in science confirmed the impossible: somehow, this unpromising weed was actually *the* source for a crop that Mexico depends on.
For more information: Twilley, N.,Graber, C.(22 de julio de 2025).The Colorful Tale of Mexico’s A-maize-ing Grain.Gastropod.https://gastropod.com/the-colorful-tale-of-mexicos-a-maize-ing-grain/