If you’ve ever wondered how we discovered popcorn, you haven’t really been asking the right questions. It’s an interesting story, but have we ever tried popping anything else since? This heart healthy diet needs more looking into than just how we came across such an awesome movie snack.
You might be drawn to believe that this heart healthy diet snack was only recently added to our menu. We go to the grocery store and buy a box with several bags ready to be exploded in microwaves around the world. Nothing could scream consumerism louder, and the idea of popcorn vendors at the Colosseum in Rome as Spartans fought lions in front of the blood thirsty audience just doesn’t seem to feel historically accurate.
But the fact is that it was an ancient civilization that first discovered popcorn. They already knew all about corn. They grew it and harvested it because with butter, it can make your feet curl. But back in the day of early Peru, many, many moons ago, the hot sun would beat down on the crops, and one day, a huge explosion could be heard from the village. It lasted for about five minutes with a rapid series of loud pops, and then it stopped.
The villagers had no idea what had happened. They ran to find a totally new food group. But they didn’t have any idea what they had at first. They used it to make jewelry and Thanksgiving decorations. It was just a new thing to them, and they didn’t know where it came from either. They hadn’t put two and two together yet.
It would take the next corn harvest for a kid to discover popcorn in the making. He was playing hide and seek with his friends. He stopped to grab the hose to get some water to drink, and that’s when he saw it. The corn started popping, and wild kernel puffs magically appeared all over the place. He ran to the village to let them know, but they blew him off because he had told so many lies before.
A cross between Chicken Little yelling, “the sky is falling,” and The Boy Who Cried Wolf, the young Peruvian would go on to write his memoir and tour the late-night television shows to spread awareness about how he discovered popcorn. This, of course, was years after the villagers finally came around to realize that he had been right all along. Popcorn does, in fact, come from corn.
His own people finally got on board when a magnifying glass was left propped up against a window on a particularly sunny day. An ear of corn was innocently lying in the vicinity when a beam of light started to focus brilliantly on the cob. As the shopkeeper came through the door, science exploded all over his face. He peeled away the husk that had slapped him on his forehead to watch the kernels pop off in rapid succession.
When the shopkeeper told his friends, they believed him and attributed the discovery of popcorn to Alejandro Redenbacher, the great ancestor of Orville. The problem those ancient civilians had was when they looked around for a TV or a movie theater, they were out of luck. How were they going to enjoy this new heart healthy diet snack? So, they found a way to improvise by putting on shadow puppet shows on the wall of their caves.
The kid who had originally alerted the villagers slipped into obscurity, requiring therapy for being denied his rightful place in history. In fact, things got much worse for him after his book failed and the late-night talk show hosts laughed him off the stage. He was determined to discover something and go down in history for it.
He started off with peas, but that didn’t quite work out the same way. It just wasn’t as fun blowing them up. The next thing he thought of was blowing up pickles. Of course, that was a lot of something for nothing when he finally realized what he had done. Curing a cucumber in vinegar only to dry it out before blowing it up was the biggest brain fart ever recorded throughout history. But it was when he thought of blowing up a dry pepper that his family and friends stepped in for an intervention.
It really does take the magical mechanics of the corn kernel to pull off popping corn, the universal snack for watching a movie. If any other fruit or vegetable were capable of providing us with so much entertainment, from listening to the battle taking place in the microwave to picking the skin out of our teeth, we would have boxed it already. But if you want to take up the mantle and start experimenting yourself, let us know if you come up with another heart healthy diet snack. Write us at nothingbeatspopcorn@emailsRus.com and let us know what you find.
Enjoy another funny read when I tell you the story Cheeseburger Near Me Turns Into The Sweetest Life Destiny
