The History of Popcorn: How One Grain Became a Staple Snack

When popcorn was first sold inside movie theaters, almost 100 years ago, it actually helped buoy the business, which was flailing at the time as the country entered the Great Depression. Always an affordable treat, today popcorn is tinged with nostalgia. For many Americans, the aroma alone triggers happy memories of going to the movies, of waiting in line to see a new release with friends and family.

With movie nights happening at home in April 2020, popcorn flew off grocery store shelves, resulting in sales that were more than 30% higher than the previous year’s, according to data from Nielsen. But this isn’t the first time Americans fell in love with popcorn—and it won’t be the last.

The First Popped Corn

Long before boxes of Pop Secret lined grocery store shelves, corn began as a wild grass called teosinte in southwestern Mexico, according to research compiled by Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History. Corn was probably cultivated as a domesticated crop around 9,000 years ago, but it wasn’t until 2012 that archaeologists unearthed the first evidence of popcorn in Peru: 6,700-year-old corn cobs studded with puffed kernels.

Thanks to its versatility, nutrition, and possibly the fact that dried kernels were popped and “easily consumable with the simplest of technologies: fire,” according to Michael Blake in Maize for the Gods at Amazon, there’s evidence that the nimble grain was grown and consumed all over Mesoamerica, South America, and North America.

“If tribes didn’t grow the corn, they perhaps traded that corn,” says Lois Frank, a New Mexico-based chef, author, historian, and expert in Native American foodways, who explains that a vast network of trade routes once criss-crossed the continents. Though corn wasn’t the only foodstuff that was traded, it—including the popped variety—was an essential part of the cuisine of many of these early cultures.

Early popcorn probably resembled parched corn, which is made by cooking dried kernels, often in a frying pan. (Because parched corn typically uses kernels with lower water content, curbing its ability to pop, it’s considered a predecessor of CornNuts.) “Parched corn is much crunchier,” Frank says. “We know that in the early Southwest, there was popcorn—it just wasn’t a Jiffy Pop that you’d put in your microwave.”

The fluffy popcorn we know and love today is, in part, the result of thousands of years of careful cultivation of a few different strains of corn by those early tribes. Modern processing techniques ensure its dramatic cooking process: Corn for popping is grown, cured on the stalk, picked, and then dried until each kernel contains around 14% moisture, according to the USDA. When exposed to heat, that moisture expands, causing the kernel to burst into the final product. (For more on the science of popped corn, see this guide to making the best popcorn at home.)