Institutionalized poverty led to an outbreak of pellagra that Americans would rather forget. But grain farmers remember; they know that hunger is good

Hunger in the Heart of Empire: Pellagra in the United States

submited by

Style Pass

2021-09-05 17:30:04

Institutionalized poverty led to an outbreak of pellagra that Americans would rather forget. But grain farmers remember; they know that hunger is good business.

“We are still surprised by the prevalence of . . . food shortages . . . 3,500 years after the Pharaohs worked out how to store grain.” The Dictator’s Handbook

The United States might be the last place you’d expect to hear about malnutrition that killed hundreds of thousands of people in the last century. Most Americans have already forgotten it, but a disease called pellagra—a niacin deficiency that causes dementia, diarrhea, and victims’ skin to roughen, crack, and eventually peel off—ran rampant in the United States for forty years.

Like most hunger, America’s pellagra nightmare didn’t just happen. It was allowed to fester for four decades because hunger suited the men in power. It disappeared once mass hunger became an inconvenience for America’s elite: when the US needed millions of soldiers in top physical shape for World War II. The United States’ long experiment with pellagra holds lessons for how its own internal hunger politics still work today; how it extends those hunger politics outward into “famine relief” efforts; and how food reform efforts in today’s America are still trapped in politics of denial about our own past.

America’s pellagra outbreak was a departure from earlier ones in Spain and Italy. In Europe, pellagra came from peasants trying to use the newly introduced crop of maize the same way they used wheat: by grinding dry grain into flour and using it to make breads and porridges. By contrast, European newcomers in what became the United States learned how to process maize from indigenous communities like the Chickahominy because for the first decades they were economically dependent on these communities. They ground it wet after a long soak in water and hardwood ashes. This process is today called nixtamalization, from the Aztec language (Nahuatl) nixtamalli for “ash dough”. It makes the kernels swell, shed their tough coats, and become soft and easy to grind into a dough by hand. The process also renders the niacin in maize digestible for the human body. Wherever maize becomes a staple crop, without the soaking process, pellagra often follows.