num_pages: 0
description: Sometime around 1500 A.D. an African farmer planted a maize seed imported from the New World. That act set in motion the remarkable saga of one of the world's most influential crops--one that would transform the future of Africa and of the Atlantic world. Africa's experience with maize is distinctive but also instructive from a global perspective: experts predict that by 2020 maize will become the world's most cultivated crop.James McCann moves easily from the village level to the continental scale from the medieval to the modern as he explains the science of maize production and explores how the crop has imprinted itself on Africa's agrarian and urban landscapes. Today maize accounts for more than half the calories people consume in many African countries. During the twentieth century a tidal wave of maize engulfed the continent and supplanted Africa's own historical grain crops--sorghum millet and rice. In the metamorphosis of maize from an exotic visitor into a quintessentially African crop in its transformation from vegetable to grain and from curiosity to staple lies a revealing story of cultural adaptation. As it unfolds we see how this sixteenth-century stranger has become indispensable to Africa's fields storehouses and diets and has embedded itself in Africa's political economic and social relations.The recent spread of maize has been alarmingly fast with implications largely overlooked by the media and policymakers. McCann's compelling history offers insight into the profound influence of a single crop on African culture health technological innovation and the future of the world's food supply.
language: English
title: Maize and Grace: Africa's Encounter with a New World Crop, 1500-2000
publisher: Harvard University Press