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5. The Mayan diet that is too "healthy".

I said so many **** things before, I guess it has disgusted everyone, now let's talk about those things that are not very ****.

No matter how terrifying the Mayan city may seem. But no matter what, people always have to eat. So, let's get in the mood and take a seat at the "food stalls" selling food in the Mayan bazaar, and get ready for a Mayan-inspired meal!

Then, to your greeting, the stall owner graciously brings out a variety of meals, places them on a reed mat, and then motions for you to sit on the floor and enjoy the food - like the ancient Chinese and Japanese, the Maya rarely used furniture such as tables and chairs.

So, what's in the Mayan recipe?

As mentioned earlier, the Mayans called themselves "corn people", and they relied on only one crop, and that was corn. So, we Chinese have "grains" to choose from, while the Mayans have to eat corn on the cob all year round......

Of course, although corn is a coarse grain, it can also be coarse grain. To spice up their monotonous diet, the Mayans began soaking corn kernels in lime water early on, then grinding them into cornmeal, which were eventually eaten in red-hot stone cakes and seasoned with chili sauce and cocoa powder. To this day, cornmeal baked round cakes are still one of the staple foods of the Mayan descendants of Central America.

But the problem is that in the ancient Mayan city-states, tortillas were not a casual mass food.

――What many people don't know is that in ancient societies around the world, those delicately made pasta were often more expensive than meat of the same weight!

In medieval Europe, for example, a loaf of brown bread could sometimes be exchanged for three or four times the weight of grilled fish. In China during the Ming and Qing dynasties, the price of fine white noodles was also comparable to that of pork. It was not until the end of the Qing Dynasty that the steam flour grinding machine was introduced and the mechanical power grinding machine was used to grind the flour, and the price of white flour gradually decreased.

The reason for this is that the ancient people turned wheat into flour stone mills, which were extremely inefficient compared to modern electric flour grinders. In Eurasia 6, people still have windmills and water-powered mills, but it is really not good, get a little donkey blindfolded around the stone mill in a circle, and you can grind dozens of catties of flour a day...... But in Central America, where there were no livestock or mills, the Mayans had to grind flour with their own arms.

What's worse is that the grain used by the Mayans to grind flour was not wheat, but more difficult corn, but the tools used were grinding discs and grinding rods, which were more primitive than the hand mills of the Eurasian Da 6...... As a result, they are less efficient at grinding dough.

Overall, grinding noodles is not only very hard, but also time-consuming. If they had to eat pasta every day, the family would spend seven or eight days a month, from morning till night, doing nothing but grinding cornmeal together.

Moreover, corn flour that is milled by hand like this is generally very coarse, mixed with a lot of bran and impurities. Modern people in later generations are accustomed to eating fine flour, and occasionally eating such coarse noodles may still feel quite fresh, but if you eat this thing every day, it will feel like it will not only wear out your teeth, but also hurt your throat and stomach, and you can't swallow it! If you want to get a finer flour that is similar to that of modern products, you have to grind the coarse flour many times, or sift the flour by hand to get out the sand, bran, and sawdust inside...... However, if such fine flour were to be produced purely by hand, it would take at least three or four times as much labor as coarse flour, and it would be so precious that even the little nobles could not afford to eat it.

Therefore, the cornmeal round cake you buy may taste a little cracked and the texture is very rough, and I am afraid that it is more comfortable to gnaw on the corn cob.

In addition to corn, the Mayans had vegetables such as peppers, pumpkins, gourds, beans, cassava and tomatoes, as well as mushrooms collected from the wild. It should be noted that at this time, the tomatoes eaten by the Mayans were still very small, completely different from the large tomatoes we eat now, but more like the modern finger-sized fruit tomatoes, but the taste is extraordinarily sweet - the concentrated is the essence!

In addition, because they are in a tropical region where everything grows wildly, the Mayans were able to taste an abundance of tropical fruits. One of the most popular fruits among the Mayans is the avocado, which has a creamy and fragrant taste. The taste of pineapple, coconut and dragon fruit is also very sweet.

Compared to the abundance of luscious fruits and vegetables, the Mayans had a little less meat on their plates - apart from dogs, the Mayans did not have cattle, sheep, horses, donkeys, and pigs that could provide a lot of meat. At that time, turkeys in the Americas had just been domesticated and were not widely farmed. So, in order to replenish protein, the Mayans had to pick up javelins and go to the forests to hunt hares, deer, monkeys and snakes, and use fishing rods and nets to catch fish. Among them, there is a delicious grilled lizard meat, which has always been highly respected and sought after by the Mayan aristocracy, and is regarded as something that should be enjoyed by the superior people.

Through guò hunting and fishing, the Maya barely made up for part of the meat shortage, but during the boom of the Mayan civilization, the Mayan population of the Yucatan Peninsula was already as high as 140,000, and it was obvious that primitive fishing and hunting techniques alone could not provide meat for so many people.

What's more, at this time, most of the land in the Yucatan Peninsula was reclaimed, and there were not many wild places where they could hit their prey. Therefore, the poor Mayans, who could not eat wild game, had to lower their requirements and collect all kinds of strange insects and snails for tooth sacrifices.

Despite the limited variety of ingredients and the relatively rudimentary cooking conditions (no metal pots), the Mayans developed some very characteristic dishes. One of the most famous Mayan dishes is tamales, which are made by mixing corn flour with plenty of chicken, vegetables or dried fruits, rolled in a hard corn husk, and steamed. To this day, tamales are one of the most famous dishes in Guatemala and Mexico.

To sum up, the staple food of the Mayans was corn on the cob and tortillas, and the side dishes were vegetables such as tomatoes, pumpkin, peppers, a small amount of fish and meat, plus a wide variety of tropical fruits, and sweet corn wine flavored with honey. According to modern nutritional standards, this should be a very scientific and healthy diet - high fiber, low calorie, low fat, rich in vitamins, mainly vegetarian, very conducive to excretion and weight loss.

But the problem is that this healthy recipe was a bit too far ahead for the ancients who had a hard time even having a full stomach. Asking them to make a healthy diet is the equivalent of making scrawny starving ghosts worry about obesity – indeed, thanks to this low-calorie, high-fibre and low-fat healthy recipe, the Mayans have almost no high blood pressure and coronary heart disease, but tooth wear and malnutrition are staggeringly severe. Moreover, every 1oo grams of corn can provide only about half of the calories of 1oo grams of rice, and in order to consume the same calories, the Mayans had to eat twice the weight of food, which invisibly increased the burden on the stomach and intestines, and also increased the risk of digestive diseases.

Okay, now that we've talked about the healthier parts of the Mayan diet, let's move on to the less healthy parts. But before that, you should pay for the meal...... So you call the stall owner, praise him for his cooking, and give him a few cocoa beans.

-- The Mayans in the Stone Age did not have gold or silver, and jade was so scarce that cocoa beans were commonly used as currency.

Although this kind of "cocoa bean coin" looks quite primitive, there are still some traitors who will forge "counterfeit money" - they skillfully peel off the skin of the cocoa bean, stuff it into the stirred soil, and then mix the fake beans into the good beans...... Because of this deposit of "fake cocoa bean coins", savvy Mayan merchants always pinch the cocoa beans paid by the other party with their fingers when trading, just as the Chinese bite silver dollars with their teeth to distinguish the authenticity.

Anyway, the stall owner has pinched all the cocoa beans you paid for, made sure there were no "counterfeit money", happily poured them into the bag, and then recommended you some after-dinner pastimes - for example, how about a little chocolate?

In fact, the most practical use of the cocoa bean currency, which was widely used by the Maya, was for the production of chocolate.

However, the chocolate of the ancient Mayans is very different from the chocolate we eat now, and it is generally not made into a solid, but a lump of chocolate sauce, or dissolved in water to make a chocolate drink that the Mayans called "bitter water". In addition, the Mayan chocolate also has no sugar and milk in it, so the taste is quite bitter. It's not so much a snack food as it is a refreshing stimulant.

You may not be very interested in this chocolate, which is more bitter than medicine, so how about some smoke?

-- As we all know, tobacco originated in the Americas, so the Maya learned smoking as a harmful pastime at an early age.

In the earliest days, the Mayans mixed tobacco with other herbs and threw it directly into their mouths like chewing gum to chew, similar to modern chewing tobacco. But it didn't take long for them to fumble their way around rolling tobacco into dried plantain leaves to make the original cigar. Later, they began to crush the dried tobacco leaves and mix them with tapioca flour to make the oldest snuff powder. In addition, the Mayans made a wide variety of pipes, including clay, stone, and corn cobs. Among them, corn cob pipes are the cheapest and are still widely used by Americans today. For example, at the end of World War II, when Japan surrendered unconditionally, Marshal MacArthur flew to Tokyo with a corncob pipe in his mouth to surrender.

Belch? Are you a fan of heavy flavors and don't think tobacco is exciting enough? So let's have some of the most exciting ...... How about simply taking drugs?

- True! As early as thousands of years ago, the Mayans of Central America began to take drugs very badly! They extract poisonous pus from toads that can cause hallucinations, or dissolve snuff powder in water, mix it with cocoa powder, honey, poisonous mushrooms, natural spices, and finally put it into slender clay bottles to make tubes of natural drugs, which are sold at high prices in the bazaar. If anyone likes to hunt for curiosities, you might as well buy it and give it a try.

But it should be noted that after you buy pure natural and pollution-free Mayan drugs, you must not pour them into your mouth stupidly, so as not to be ridiculed - because Mayans generally do not take drugs in their mouths, but use **** to take drugs.

Therefore, these original Mayan drugs are actually enema liquid. Mayans need to carefully poke the **** when taking drugs, and then pour the drugs into the rectum and absorb them from the mucous membrane of the intestinal wall, which can quickly make people want to die...... It's just that it feels a bit ****.

No way, from the perspective of our modern people, the Mayans are indeed a very **** people in many ways.