by Ananya Sen — In the fall of 1918, the Ital­ian chemist and phar­ma­cist Bar­tolomeo Bizio stud­ied the com­mon oc­curence of po­lenta (corn meal mush) some­times tak­ing on a "bril­liant red color." The red color was be­lieved by the pop­u­lace to be blood, and thus a mirac­u­lous por­tent. For many decades, farm­ers had lived in fear of this "bloody po­lenta" and...