What should you never feed a vampire?

The obvious answer to this week’s quiz is garlic, but garlic may have been the one food that could cure a vampire.

The word vampire was first recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1734, a year after an insidious disease had erupted throughout the Old World. Symptoms of this unexplained sickness included bad breath, sensitivity to light, dementia, aggression and eventually death. No one was safe and no one could figure out the cause. Romanian peasants described the epidemic as nosferatu, a term derived from the Greek nosophorus, meaning ‘plague carrier.’ Before long, the word vampire came into 18^th century lexicon and a cottage industry of Hollywood dramas and teen literature was born.

Today we know the disease that ravaged Europe’s population as pellagra, a vitamin deficiency of niacin and tryptophan. One food is now believed to have caused it.

The mystery food that led to vampirism

If you look on any food box in your cabinet you will probably find the food that caused pellagra. Its derivatives are listed as dextrose, dextrin, xanthan gum and a bunch of other scary chemically modified foods. It is the number one food crop grown in America and our first known genetically engineered diet staple. You can find it in everything from soda to crackers and it may even someday power our cars.

What is this mystery food? Scroll down for answer…

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Answer: The indigenous Americans called it maize, but we know it as corn.

A Brief history of Corn

Ancient mesoAmericans may have been a little slow discovering the wheel, but they sure knew how to whip up a good batch of corn. Corn did not sprout out of the ground with its sunny kernels begging for some butter. Maize was originally an inedible weed-like grass that was crossbred with a wild grain called teosinte. After a series of genetic mutations….voila corn on the cob. But corn still needed a little more coaxing to make it digestible so indigenous Americans soaked the maize in ashes of lime in a process known today as nixtamaliuzation. They called it Nahuati (which sounds far more magical and is much easier to spell).

This last step was VERY important!

Enter my favorite guy Columbus. He brought maize to Europe and everyone loved it. It was easy to grow. It packed a high caloric punch and it soon became the staple food supply for most of rural Europe. Unfortunately, Columbus and the rest of his marauding thugs forgot the instructional booklet on how to grow maize and Europeans skipped the nixtaumaluzation process. Bad move. What resulted was a bunch of crazed lunatics in need of some serious Flinestone vitamins. By skipping the last step, the maize essentially prevented the body from naturally absorbing niacin. The disease that resulted was pellagra and it bore a eerie resemblance to vampirism.

Sensitivity to Light

Remember when Bram Stoker described the Count’s skin as of  “an extraordinary parlor"? Vampires throughout legend have always been sensitive to light, but were they really suffering from pellagra? One of the first symptoms of pellagra is an increased sensitivity to light with shiny, paper-thin skin following any exposure to sunlight. Hmmmm.... coincidence? 

Vampire fangs

Pellagra victims also suffered from a swollen, red tongue and inflamed reddened lips which made them look like they had just chugged a big blood fruit smoothie and forgot to wipe their mouth. The swollen tongue may have also resulted in tooth imprints on the tongue and lips that could appear to be caused by....fangs.

Dementia

Things get really fun in the later stages of pellagra when grandma starts acting wacky and eating the family pet. Pellagra victims suffer from insomnia, anxiety, depression and a desire to eat strange things. When a person has unnatural food craving caused by vitamin deficiencies we call it pica, but to an 18^th century peasant it looked a lot like their loved one had gone to the dark side.

Death

Pellagra is not always a quick death. Victims slowly become anemic due to gastrointestinal bleeding. When a person becomes anemic, they lose weight, get paler and paler and appear as if the blood is getting sucked right out of them. In Dracula, everyone suspected Lucy was being drained of her blood, but maybe she was just eating too many corn chips in bed?

Springtime for Vampires

In Stoker’s Dracula, Jonathan Harker is warned as he enters Transylvania that, ‘it is the eve of St. George’s Day. Do you know that tonight, when the clock strikes midnight, all the evil things in the world will have full sway?' Stoker had done his research. According to legend, vampires would gather at the edge of the village on St. George’s Day in late April for their annual vampire convention. Springtime was not only mardi gras for vampires, it was also the worst time for pellagra victims. Before new crops could be harvested, cornmeal was often the only food source for a typical peasant resulting in increased cases of pellagra.

Garlic

So where did we get the myth that eating garlic keeps away vampires? Well, if you were living in an impoverished village where all your friends and family were turning into vampires then eating garlic may have been the one food that could save you. Eating garlic actually prevents niacin deficiencies and may have prevented pellagra.

So our superstitious ancestors may have been smarter than we think when it comes to living with vampires. Let that be a little raucous history for your teen (or you) going to see the latest Twilight movie. Stay away from the popcorn or you could return a vampire. (insert evil/geeky laugh here)

Love monsters? Read more about the Science and Lore behind your favorite monsters with Monstrous: The Lore, Gore, and Science behind Your Favorite Monsters. In stores Fall 2019

Sources and Further Reading

Standage, Tom. An Edible History of Humanity, Waterville, Me. : Thorndike Press, 2009.

Pellagra and the origin of a myth: evidence from European literature and folklore, Jeffrey S. Hampl & William S. Hampl. JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF MEDICINE, Volume 90 November 1997

The sexiest drink in history: Coffee

Satan’s drink
Take away my morning coffee and I start to resemble Nick Nolte after his drug arrest.  It is undeniably addictive. Still controversial. And oh so delicious. Coffee originated in Ethiopia in the 9th century, but it didn’t become popular in Europe until 1600. That's when the trouble started. Believing it to be "Satan's drink", Pope Clement VIII’s priests petitioned him to ban coffee, but Clement took one sip and declared, “Why, this Satan’s drink is so delicious.” (1) Thereafter, Clement christened coffee as the drink of choice and Europeans fell in love with their java.


Coffee Contraceptives
But despite the pope’s endorsement, coffee continued to have its detractors. A German scholar visited Persia in 1637 and found that the people used it as a contraceptive. He concluded that they couldn’t possibly be wrong and preached against the consumption of coffee.

By the late 17th century, coffee houses in England had become increasingly popular places for men to gather amongst fellow coffee lovers and debate the hottest issues. Now, instead of spending their time whoring about in their local tavern, men were gossiping, reading, daintily sipping and acting like…well, girls. Their wives decided to put a stop to these effeminate, caffeine-induced gatherings. In 1674, they petitioned Charles II to close coffee houses down arguing that it caused impotence. In a pamphlet titled The Women’s Petition against Coffee they presented their case against the “Excessive use of that Newfangled, Abominable, Heathenish Liquor called COFFEE.” King Charles II (who had never been a coffee lover) agreed and closed them down. But you know what happens when people suddenly don't get thier coffee....they get positively rabid. Soon, an outcry from the public forced Charles to reopen the coffee houses and coffee drinking continued.

By the 18th century, the coffee debate swung to the opposite end of the sexual debate. In 1771, a French doctor named Bienville preached that coffee caused nymphomania. He further argued that coffee paired with romantic novels was a recipe for hysteria. A typical scene at Starbucks would have been a breeding ground for the crazies.*

So who was right? Does coffee rev up your sex drive and ability to conceive or does it squelch a man’s fertility faster than wearing a tight pair of briefs on a long bike ride?

Scroll down for answer....






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It turns out that those desperate housewives and the Persians were not as crazy as we might think. Although coffee won’t necessarily make a man love needlepoint or cry over Beaches, recent research does show that coffee, wine and nuts contain chemical called phytoestrogens which lowers male fertility and mimics the female sex hormone oestrogen. So if you are trying to conceive then I guess you might want to lay off the bean.

*Actually, come to think about it...there are a lot of crazy, homeless people at Starbucks. Why don't they go home and drink their coffee?

(1) Pendergrast p. 8

Sources and Further Reading:Pendergrast, Mark. Uncommon Grounds, The History of Coffee and How it Transformed Our World, Jackson, TN: Basic Books, 2000.
Lee Allen, Stewart. The Devil's Cup: A History of the World According to Coffee, New York, NY: Ballantine Books, 2003.
The Women’s Petition against Coffee
How beer, wine, coffee and nuts can ALL 'lower a man's fertility'

Let Them Eat Hair Garnishes

(I am on the countdown to my next book deadline so I am recycling a old guest post this week....)

We tend to associate the potato more with Ireland and England than we do with France and that may because the humble spud had a very rocky start with French Parisians. Although already widely accepted in England, the potato did not come to France until around 1600.(1) Still, no respectable royal would dare to eat the strange, dirty, lumpy looking spud. The potato became so feared that in 1619 it was banned from Burgundy, France because it was rumored to cause leprosy. It all made perfect sense to 16th century scholars. A potato looked like leprosy so therefore it must cause leprosy.(2)

The leprosy spud finally got an image makeover in the 18th century with the help from a potato propagandist and French chemist named Antoine-Auguste Parmentier. Parmentier threw some fabulous parties and invited the French upper class to taste his potato creations. At one of these parties, Parmentier gave Louis XVI a bouquet of potato flowers. Knowing his wife's proclivity for putting vegetables in her hair, Louis thoughtfully placed one delicate, purple sprig in Marie Antoinette's pouf. Thereafter, the potato may not have become a fashion accessory, but it did become the new, hot food delicacy among the upper class.

The potato then went on to feed the French peasants and everyone loved their queen and...lived happily ever after. Ok not exactly. Unfortunately, it took a few bread shortages, a nasty revolution, and some beheaded monarchs for the government to finally see the potato's full potential for feeding the rest of the starving country. In 1794, a year after Marie Antoinette was beheaded, the queen's beloved flowerbeds in the Tuileries were plowed over to make way for the purple blossoms that would feed a nation and become one of France's biggest exports.

Notes:

(1) Some historians have blamed the slower populations grown of France in the 18th century to their dependence of grain while other countries had the starchy potato to fall back on. In reverse to France’s grain dependency, reliance on the potato backfired in Ireland during the Great Potato Famine.

(2) This was at a time when walnuts were eaten to treat headaches because they looked like a brain and eating the brains of another animal would make you smarter.

Sources and further reading:

Langer L. William, "American Foods and Europe's Population Growth 1750-1850." Journal of Social History 8.2 (1975): 51-66.

Salaman N. Redcliffe, The History and Social Influence of the Potato, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985.