Polenta thread> Nobody's gonna care but whatever, I'm in a storytelling mood and feeling grateful rn. And no it's not thanksgiving and that generally means nothing to me as a non-USian but you know what? I have to thank the American land and the Native people of America (1/15)

for sustaining the people of the specific area of Italy I live in (not exclusively though), for a century give or take. Because in the late 1800s my region (and Northern Italy in general afaik) was annexed to the new nation of Italy (at the time it was still a kingdom) (2/15)

and that move impoverished us for quite a while, which means we could generally not afford a rich enough diet. And I cannot speak for the rest of Italy, but I grew up hearing of pellagra, a disease that is still present in the world and develops from a lack of vitamin B. (3/15)

It appeared in the early 1800s; symptoms include fatigue, weak limbs, dry skin that could often hurt (hence the term "pellagra", pelle = skin; agra = dry), thirst, paleness, bloated belly and in some cases it caused death.
This disease lasted all the way into the 1900s. (4/15)

Some would be tempted to blame polenta for it. Polenta is a dish we make using primarily corn, and corn of course comes from the American continent. Without it, we probably would have starved, or anyway it would have been so much harder to survive. (5/15)

Yes, being able to pretty much only eat that was kind of the problem, but at least we had something to eat at all, in an area that was still primarily in the business of agriculture, where the main work model and lifestyle for poor people was basically a feudal one. (6/15)

And ultimately, pellagra was not the fault of polenta/corn, it was the fault of misery and poverty. Polenta is perfectly fine in itself. Proof: as soon as we got to accumulate more wealth and afford a more varied diet, the disease virtually vanished from the area. (7/15)

So even though the diet being centered on polenta was not ideal in the long run and part of the problem, it helped us get through poverty whenever it didn't kill us. And by "us" I mean my family too, for example. (8/15)

My parents will still tell me stories about how they were children and had to work the fields all day, how their life was centered on working the land and getting to keep only part of its fruit, and they still tell me stories about how they had farm animals, (9/15)

and slaughtering the animals was a big event, and you would absolutely not waste any part of the animal, like you'd even be baking cakes with pig blood (nope, never tried that and I'm not really eager to). Fortunately they could follow quite a healthy diet at that point, (10/15)

but my grandparents' generation was definitely still dealing with pellagra.

We still LOVE polenta though. It's a staple of our regional diet and we eat it in the cold months, we have folk songs about it and it's not the fall without it (and roasted chestnuts tbh). (11/15)

So yeah basically what I wanted to say is, thank you to the native land of the American continent for giving us corn, and also tomatoes without which we could not have tomato sauce for pasta and pizza. And pizza is the love of my life. Can't live without it. (12/15)

I - we - owe America as a land and to the Native people so much of our FOODIE JOY and especially our families getting through the shit. Corn really helped.
Of course, we didn't suffer exclusively from pellagra, but this is a thread about my community's experience.

(13/15)

Btw fuck Cristoforo Colombo, Cortés and Pizarro. Fuck all European colonialism in general.
Had history not been shaped by the cruelest, greediest and vilest of people among our ancestors, maybe we would've been able to trade with BIPOC peacefully, without all the cruelty. (14/15)

Without all that arrogance and violence.

Oh and if ur gonna whine abt "white guilt" in this thread: it's actually called fairness, or... that's the closest term to what I mean anyway. There's probably a better word, I can't think of it now though. Not anglophone here.
(15/15)