POP-POP-POP! A trip to the movie theater, a ball game, or an amusement park wouldn’t be complete without popcorn. But did you know people have been enjoying this iconic treat since ancient times?
Indigenous people living in what is now Mexico started to grow corn as a crop about 10,000 years ago, says Dolores Piperno. She’s an archaeobotanist who studies the history of preserved plant remains at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. These prehistoric people cultivated corn from a type of grass called teosinte (TAY-oh-SIN-tee). It’s likely that they discovered corn’s ability to pop by accident, says Piperno. Indigenous people would dry, crack open, and grind kernels of corn, also known as maize, to make cornmeal, which they then baked on hot stones on a fire. Sometimes uncracked kernels would pop. “The story goes that the children would run around, grabbing up the kernels that popped to eat,” says Donald Grinde, a historian at the University at Buffalo in New York.
In the 17th century, Indigenous people shared their agricultural methods—including how to make popcorn—with European colonists in North America. Popcorn’s popularity exploded in the late 1800s, when inventor Charles Cretors from Chicago, Illinois, redesigned a peanut roasting machine to pop corn kernels. This helped vendors make large batches. Then in the early 1980s, microwave popcorn was introduced. People could pop a bag at home in minutes. Today popcorn is one of America’s favorite snacks.