The human body cannot absorb much if any of the nutritional value in corn until it’s processed in an alkali bath and converted into hominy. It’s then then dried and ground into Masa Harina. That’s what corn tortillas are made from. The nutrition in the corn is then accessible to humans. How early Americans figured this out and used it as the staple in their diet for thousands of years has always puzzled me. The staple foods of the rest of humanity, grains like wheat, barley, oats, and rice, are directly digestible or can fermented into into bread and beer. That and making cheese from animal milk are relatively simple in comparison. One can conceive of those being accidental discoveries. But chemically processing maize into quality food? And how they figured out getting chocolate from cacao beans is even more puzzling.
meh.. I like flour tortillas with pork lard
I sure am glad they figured out the chocolate thing ...
The corn + alkali could have come about from a chance combination with wood ashes.
As for the cacao beans, I've read that originally the fruit pulp was eaten fresh.* The pulp is juicy and sweet, the seeds are bitter. Perhaps someone left the fresh beans + pulp in a heap and accidentally left it to ferment, then accidentally got fire in contact with the fermented beans... and the rest is history.
*Recommended: Young, Allen M. The Chocolate Tree: A Natural History of Cacao. 1194: Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC and London. 200 pp.