Popcorn, Apparently
How a sleepless night turned into a journey through ancient maize, American English, and the economics of cinema snacks.
I have a feeling my circadian rhythm is judging me.
It’s genuinely giving me reminders of why it’s better that the night time means sleeping and the day time means being awake.
But the rebellion is also still around.
And that has led to doomscrolling a bit where you end up seeing a reel of someone making popcorn.
I’m not sure if it’s due to the lack of sleep, the overthinking mind, the ADHD, being a woman, being a woman of colour, being a Hindu, being a Shiv Bhakt or just being Puja in general, that I ended up asking myself, where did the word popcorn originate from, and how did the snack get invented?
How did people know to pop corn and then add different seasonings?
Or make it an expensive staple at cinema halls?
You are free to choose any of those reasons I went off to find out the answers.
I’ll fixate on it because I was curious.
Apparently, popcorn has been around for thousands of years, and was originally discovered in the Americas by accident.
It wasn’t a brainstorming meeting to create the latest innovation.
It didn’t need a degree, nor the gatekeeping that comes with it by experts.
But it did seem to need experts to find out its story.
I read that archaeologists have found popped corn kernels from around 5,000-6,000 years ago in the Americas and the indigenous people likely discovered it when dried corn kernels were left near fire or hot stones and the kernels suddenly popped open.
The Smithsonian Institution claimed that people along the coast of Peru were eating popcorn 2,000 years earlier than previously reported and before ceramic pottery was used there.
The corn itself comes from Zea mays, a crop domesticated in the Americas thousands of years ago.
So it’s not just Paddington Bear we have to thank Peru for.
It’s the snack we have whilst watching any one of his films too.
Now if we take the etymology of the word, we see it does what many other words in American English do - describe exactly the function of the thing.
One will remember that Michael McIntyre conversation when he said America uses the English language to explain things to the point.
That is why we have to hear ‘eyeglasses’ for glasses, ‘sidewalks’ for pavements, and ‘waste paper baskets’ for bins.
Popcorn has taken a similar route. It’s corn that pops.
The word started to appear in written English (away from the original Zea mays) in the early 1800s, especially in the United States where maize was common.
Before that, people sometimes described it as ‘popped corn’.
But how did this phenomenon reach the cinema halls to be the go to snack whilst watching a film?
Well, this happened to be another accident too. And it was all because of economics and timing, especially during the Great Depression.
Movie theaters in the early 1900s tried to imitate fancy live theatre with the use of velvet seats, carpets and chandeliers and a classy atmosphere.
Popcorn was considered as messy, noisy and low-class, so many theatres banned it.
In the late 1800s, portable popcorn machines made it easy to sell popcorn on the street, and vendors began setting up outside cinema halls, selling bags to people before they went in.
It began here.
But then the Great Depression changed everything.
When it hit in the 1930s, films became cheap entertainment for struggling families and the price of popcorn was cheap and thus affordable to have whilst watching.
Theatres saw this as an opportunity too.
It was cheap to make but could sell for a big profit.
So the popcorn machines started to appear inside the lobby of the cinema halls, and by the 1940s became a permanent feature of the cinema experience.
Popcorn even became a saviour of the cinema business, because any hall refusing to sell snacks ended up going out of business.
But it’s odd learning this in this day and age knowing how expensive this snack has become in the very cinema halls you want to go and watch Paddington films.
Or maybe, knowing the history of the snack, that it stands on a foundation of thousands of years, and at a point in history was strong enough to save the cinematic experience during a tough economic period, I would indulge in purchasing it despite seeing the extortionate prices in the lobby.
One thing is for sure, I will try and watch these reels in the daytime and get my normal sleep routine back.
It’s important to create this routine, knowing full well I’d want to dig up how a staple snack came about in our everyday lives.