MOULTRIE, Ga. — I get some 300 to 350 emails each day. They come from all over the world and run the gamut of finding Bigfoot to cures for herpes. I get sermons, political advice, scandal defenses and occasionally something that pertains to my business.

Now many of them I can delete in bulk because I’ve seen enough of them to detect junk. In this mix, I get a lot of reminders.

Take today for instance, I’m reminded that Friday, Jan. 19, is National Popcorn Day. It was not on my calendar so I would not have known about it otherwise.

Up in Chicago there is a National Popcorn Board. I don’t really know what a popcorn board does. I guess it promotes popcorn just like the Angus Association would promote hamburgers made from Angus beef.

I’m guessing that most people take popcorn for granted. It’s like it’s always been here and will always be here. Well that assessment may not be farfetched. Popcorn was on the continent when the first explorers got here. It’s truly an “American food.”

Archaeologists found 1000-year-old popcorn kernels in caves that were storage bins for the Pueblo natives. And the Sioux nation, which extended into Canada from our Great Plains, also had popcorn. Also, the Iroquois popped corn in clay pots.

Now along with this reminder that Friday was such a special day, I got links to a lot of  popcorn information. It gave me recipes for all sorts of popcorn concoctions, ranging from homemade Cracker Jacks to cinnamon popcorn. But it didn’t include that our natives introduced us to this simple delight.

Of course the American Indian also introduced us to tobacco which would not have been so bad had it been limited to the peace pipe.

Until now, I just hadn’t thought that much about popcorn’s heritage. My earliest association was with the movies on Saturday afternoons.  For a dime I could get into the old Grady Theater down in Cairo. Since I started with a quarter, I had 15 cents left over to get a soda, a bag of popcorn and a box of Milk Duds. I could spread these out over a double feature of Johnny Mack Brown (cowboy) and Johnny Weissmuller (Tarzan) with a cartoon and a Buster Crabbe serial to top it off. What a bargain!

My logic then was that if we didn’t have movies, we wouldn’t have had popcorn. That’s very similar to the reasoning today that if we didn’t have pickup trucks, we wouldn’t have tailgates.

Supposedly, Squanto taught the early settlers how to grow popcorn. And it is speculated that popcorn was served at the first Thanksgiving feast, but it apparently did not carry the culinary ambience as turkey. That Pilgrim-popcorn association first showed up in fiction works, but it could have happened because it existed.

If you recall, Charlie Brown and Snoopy preferred popcorn over turkey. Maybe Snoopy had a better historical bite on this subject than we humans.

A Google search shows that by the mid-1800s, popcorn was beloved by families as a late-night snack in front of the fire, or at picnics and sociables. But mass consumption of the treat didn’t take off until the 1890s, after a Chicago entrepreneur named Charles Cretors built the first popcorn-popping machine. From there it took off “like Lindbergh!”

Unlike other movie junk food, popcorn is nutritional. It’s a whole grain and provides fiber.

So now it’s difficult for me to honor popcorn on Friday without a salute to the American natives. Strangely, I’ve never seen a “cowboys and Indians” movie where the braves were sitting around the fire eating popcorn. Go figure!

(Email: dwain.walden@gaflnews.com)