Blue corn, the latest food fashion, is linked to the white wigs of King Louis XIV

As a fan of gastronomic novelty, when I saw blue tortilla chips recently, I had to buy them. Why has blue corn become popular? For the same reason that barristers wear white wigs: the fall of Constantinople.

In 1453, Constantinople fell to the Ottoman empire, severing the main gateway from Europe to Asia. Demand for products such as tea, silk and spices incentivised European traders to find other routes to India and China. In 1492, Christopher Columbus convinced the Spanish monarchy to sponsor a westward journey to the Indies.

There was widespread scepticism that this was possible; educated people had known the world was spherical since ancient times, but Columbus’s estimate of the distance seemed wildly optimistic. In fact, his estimates were wrong, but the expedition happened upon land in what is now the Bahamas. Columbus refused to admit he had not reached Asia; his stubbornness is why the Caribbean islands are known as the West Indies and indigenous American people were often called Indians.

Europeans brought with them measles, bubonic plague, smallpox and malaria, which were unknown in the Americas and against which the indigenous peoples had no immunity. A devastating smallpox epidemic was a big cause of the Aztec empire collapsing to Spanish invaders in 1521. In return they brought back syphilis to Europe, where it quickly became endemic. Today syphilis is easily treated by antibiotics but before the discovery of penicillin it caused severe symptoms such as lesions and hair loss.

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When the French king Louis XIV began losing his hair, he began wearing elaborate wigs lest he was suspected of having venereal disease. He was soon copied by his cousin, English king Charles II, and the two ushered in an era of wig-wearing by anyone wishing to be fashionable.

Maize does not grow well in the Irish soil or climate, and so many people here did not encounter it until the Famine

A century later, George Washington was often depicted in what looks like a wig. A natural redhead, he tied his hair back and applied white powder to mimic the powdered wigs then popular. Following the French revolution, wigs became associated with the bourgeoisie, and their frequent appearance in baskets in front of guillotines quickly dampened their appeal. In the United Kingdom, a tax on wig powder was introduced to fund wars against France, and soon they were seen only on judges and barristers.

Crop exchange was even more important than disease. The chilli peppers of Indian cuisine and the tomatoes so strongly associated with the Mediterranean are both New World crops. Bananas, sugar, oranges and coffee are disproportionately produced in the New World but are originally from Eurasia and Africa. Potatoes and maize swiftly became staple crops in Europe.

Maize does not grow well in the Irish soil or climate, and so many people here did not encounter it until the Famine. The British administration imported Indian maize (the name is due to Columbus – it came from the United States), which was rigid and difficult to cook and was dubbed “Peel’s brimstone”. Potatoes contain almost every essential nutrient except vitamins A and D, which are abundant in dairy products, and so a diet of potatoes with milk and butter allowed a healthy subsistence. Maize, by contrast, lacks bioavailable niacin, and areas where it was a staple, such as Italy, had frequent outbreaks of pellagra.

However, Mesoamerican cultures that featured maize as a staple were not prone to pellagra and had little difficultly cooking the hard Indian corn. This was because of nixtamalisation, where it was boiled in an alkaline solution to remove its hard outer skin, making it easier to cook and releasing niacin.

With contemporary interest in artisanal foods, blue corn has become extraordinarily popular in flatbreads, pancakes, and corn chips as an alternative to wheat or sweetcorn flour

Sweetcorn, the most common variety eaten today, is a mutation of Indian maize that Europeans favoured because it was softer, sweeter, and easier to cook. The mutation meant that its kernels had only two pigments: either white or yellow. Indian corn, by contrast, could also come in reds, purples, and blues. The blue colouration was particularly favoured by the Hopi people, who made it a mainstay of southwestern American cuisine.

With contemporary interest in artisanal foods, blue corn has become extraordinarily popular in flatbreads, pancakes, and corn chips as an alternative to wheat or sweetcorn flour. But did the blue chips taste better? They were, alas, buried under so much salsa, cheese, and guacamole that it is hard to say, and so I will have to try more.

Stuart Mathieson is a postdoctoral fellow in the School of History and Geography at Dublin City University