Campaign Notes | For 100 Percent Nixtamalized nonGMO Tortillas | Part One
Tenemos que voltear la tortilla
The campaign for nixtamalized nonGMO tortillas: the political
ecology and deep nutrition of our daily plate
#PuroNixtamal
Devon G. Peña | Seattle, WA | May 1, 2018
Like nearly every Mexican, I have been
eating corn tortillas all my life. Or, at least as soon as I was able to chew on
the crispy, slightly burned edges when I was a precocious 3 year-old. There is
photo of me somewhere as an infant teething on a tortilla. I think all Mexicans
must have such a photo or at least a memory of that primordial experience.
I have also been thinking and writing about
tortillas for a long time. Back in the 1980s-90s, when I was a professor at Colorado
College (CC), I spent a good part of a decade teaching in the
College’s “Mexico Program” based at the time in Guanajuato, Mexico. Between
1986 and 1996, I taught several times in the Mexico Program. During those many month-plus
visits I witnessed first-hand the transformation of Mexico’s tortilla during the neoliberal prelude and then the aftermath of NAFTA.
Witnessing the industrialization of the
tortilla was more than an alarming ethnographic observation. My feelings
emerged from how these changes hit me straight on the taste buds. It was a sort
of colonial tongue lashing. It felt like my cultural identity had been violated
and my taste buds were objecting; strongly; viscerally.
I recall sharing these and other observations
with my CC students while we studied the history, culture, and ecology of maize
as part of a seminar on the “Sociology of 20th Century Mexico” back
in 1995. I explained how the tortilla should be considered a sustainable
technology because it is “The plate that you eat.” No dirty dishes to wash. I
was serious.
About ten years ago, I wrote a blog entry
here in EJFood about this experience:
…It was
in the 1980s that I first noticed a change in the texture, smell, and quality
of [Mexican] tortillas…I noticed the change in…the tortillas I purchased from
the tortilleria de la vecindad
(neighborhood tortilla maker). The tortillas had changed in color and no longer
seemed whole-grained…It became difficult to make enchiladas without the
tortillas falling apart…I asked the tortilleria manager if they were using a
new type of corn. Her explanation led me on a quest to understand what had
happened to Mexico’s most famous contribution to world cuisine. “Oh yes,” she
said, “we get our corn from the United States now, and it is not as good as the
corn from Mexico.” This revelation took me on an investigative journey to
uncover the secret behind the decline of Mexico's edible corn plate. (December 2008)
Neoliberalism and the Degradation of the Mexican Tortilla
With the advent of the salinista neoliberal reforms (1991-92) and NAFTA (1994) a deeply
rooted legacy of violence intensified with transnational capital joining
Mexican co-conspirators in stalking and sweeping across rural Mexico in actions
aiming to privatize everything, especially the ejido (peasant communal land
holdings). This was centered on the dispossession and displacement of millions
of native corn farmers; those in power on both sides of the border were
complicit in acts of environmental and cultural violence against Mexico’s
native corn farmers.
This exacerbated the capitalist conquest of
the Mexican tortilla. Industrial capitalist investment and direct control of
assets accelerated after NAFTA which opened the floodgates to subsidized hybrid
and eventually GMO corn. This was something we all felt deeply. It felt like an
action by some hidden corrupt greedy powers that were somehow now able to circumvent
due process, transparency, and accountability. This affected my own direct
lived experience of eating tortillas in Mexico and en el norte.
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| Artwork by Juan Coche (Maya) |
This felt like an armed-robbery. Before the
change in the corn supply and the corporate takeover of the production of masa harina flour and mass-produced
tortilla products, one could always count on finding local tortilla makers who
were able to deliver the unmistakably smoky and slightly sour note of an authentic
tortilla.
This particular scent (left by ‘cal’) is
really important to taste memory. You only get this scent and taste when eating
a tortilla made from properly nixtamalized masa harina—the ground or milled corn
paste (when wet) or corn flour (when dry) that is used to make fresh tortillas,
tamales, sopes, huaraches, and much more. The masa has to be produced with
native corn to optimize the gastronomical potentialities of nixtamalization.
Allow me to explain this important ancient process
which has been abandoned in the post-NAFTA transition to industrialized mass
production of masa harina, tortillas, and related corn products. This
capitalist transformation of the tortilla is associated with significant
dietary, nutritional, cultural, and ecological factors and these are strongly
correlated with environmental and community health disparities.
Nixtamalization: Alkaline Cooking of Maíz
This is an odd word—an English nominalization
of a Nahuatl root word; i.e., from Classical Nahuatl nextamalli (hominy), from
nextli (ashes, lime) + tamalli (something wrapped).
Nixtamalization involves a process that
chemically changes corn in a variety of very interesting ways with implications
for nutrition, how the corn is used in recipes, and even nuances in taste. The
first step involves harvesting the corn at the right time. If you are using native
flint, dent, or flour corn landrace varieties to make masa harina you must time
the harvest to those days when the maize silk has fully withered and the cobs
are dry and hard to press (just short of the seed-saving stage which is when
the stalks also dry). If you are making chicos
del horno, you time the harvest to when the corn is still at the “milky”
stage. If you are making pozol (hominy
for stew) then you harvest just before the corn completely dries (you need a
little moisture content).
The next step gets a bit controversial
because there are subtle regional and cultural preferences. These differences
have produced a hilarious discursive ruckus among some artisanal producers about
the vital question: Where does one find the “most authentic” masa harina? We
all know there are many sources and the jest is actually intended to affirm the
shared value that good masa harina comes from local native nixtamalized corn.
This is a unifying thread for the many indigenous and mestiza/o groups
embracing corn as one of the few culture memes that binds us in a unitary
cultural identity. This should not be misconstrued as a real contest.
This second step involves dissolving the chemical
bonds between the pericarp surrounding the endosperm and germ of each kernel.
This can be accomplished several ways: You can soak and cook the dry corn in a
dilute solution of cooking lye which can be produced from water and wood ash to
produce potassium hydroxide. Or, you can do the same using “slaked lime”
(calcium hydroxide). This comes from limestone not from lime (fruit). Some
small batch and many industrial producers rely on cooking lye (sodium
hydroxide) or soda ash (sodium carbonate) but these approaches appear to affect
taste memory.
I note how traditional artisan producers
prefer to use the water and wood ash solution or, as is the case with chicos,
cooking the corn overnight inside sealed adobe ovens which basically function
as large pressure cookers that surround the corn within a deep ash pile inside
the oven.
The traditional methods of nixtamalization
are difficult to replicate in large-sale industrial production systems.
The benefits of nixtamalization
Scientific studies verify what indigenous
people have always known: Nixtamalization makes all of the nutrients in maize
available to the human digestive system including a wide range of amino acids
and Vitamin B3 (niacin), which corn is naturally richly endowed with.
As for taste, nixtamalization transforms the
amino acid tryptophan into a volatile chemical called “2-aminoacetophenone.”
This chemical compound is a powerful odorant and accounts for the taste memory
I am referring to and which my tongue perceives as the sweet-and-sour notes underlying
properly prepared, whole-grain nixtamal from native heirloom corn. In the blog,
Cook’s Science, Paul Adams provides
an outstanding introduction to the
science of nixtamalization.
Despite research by corporations and
scientists, these traditional methods of nixtamalization have not been easily
or successfully replicated at the industrial mass production scale (Yglesias, Parkhurst,
and Jackson 2005). They have tried but the nutritional composition and taste
memory of industrialized tortillas remain inferior compared to tortillas
produced through small-batch artisan methods and with the appropriate types of indigenous
corn.
El neoliberalismo ‘nortea’ la tortilla y
nosotros la volteamos
These changes are partly due to NAFTA since
the treaty allowed a flood of inappropriate maize from the USA and the rapid
homogenization and standardization of the underlying process for producing masa
harina, no matter the endless diversity in the innumerable product lines based
on large-scale mass production systems. These changes have affected the
nutritional qualities of the tortilla and the chemical composition of masa
harina. The failure to nixtamalize the corn reduces the bioavailability of
macro- and micro-nutrients. This is likely contributing to the mounting
malnutrition crisis currently unfolding in Mexico.
There were three major consequences of
NAFTA (and earlier Mexican neoliberal reforms) that affected the tortilla: (1)
the displacement and dispossession of nearly 2 million indigenous corn farmers;
(2) the dumping of cheap subsidized US corn; and (3) the concentration of
capital controlling the vital corn-milling sector which has resulted in the
degradation of the nutritional quality and taste memory of masa harina and thus
the Mexican corn tortilla.
My colleague Lee Ann Epstein (2017) has
written about the process of being norteada/o.
She describes this as a sense of being disoriented, of losing one’s sense of
direction; of being confused and lost. I think this describes what has happened
to the Mexican tortilla. We Mexicans have so far allowed corporate capital to nortear
nuestra orientación a la comida. Our tortillas
are norteadas because they are now made with the wrong corn and without the
proper nixtamalization. Our nutritional heritage has run askew, misdirected by corporate industrial preferences.
In a recent monthly thematic edition of La Jornada del Campo, the editors
entitled their collection, “Voltear la
Tortilla” literally, “to turn the tortilla.” This is a reference to the
method for cooking each side just long enough to allow the sides to eventually separate,
forming a hot air pocket in between the two layers. This separation is the mark
of a good artisanal tortilla. Three contributors to this thematic issue explain
how their goal is to:
…ir
más allá de la visión romántica de la diosa del maíz y la madre
naturaleza, más allá de esa captura artística, científica, política y
objetivizada científica, de las mujeres del maíz, puesto que ahora queremos
“voltear la seguridad y la soberanía tortilla.” Es decir, contribuir a la generación
de conocimientos en la formación de una masa crítica para promover una nueva
realidad en defensa del maíz, basada en la justicia, la igualdad de género y
la defensa del medio ambiente.
Translation:
... go beyond the romantic vision of the goddess of corn and mother nature,
beyond that artistic, scientific, political and objectified scientific capture
of the women of the corn, since now we want to “turn the security and the
sovereignty of the tortilla.” That is, to contribute to the generation of
knowledge in the formation of a critical mass to promote a new reality in
defense of corn, based on justice, gender equality and the defense of the
environment. (Vizcarra, Castañeda and Massieu 2018: 4).
For me, the word “voltear” (to turn) as
used here means that we change directions; we flip things back on the other side. We sublate the
sense of being norteada/os and return to an indigenous orientation grounded in
deep Mexico, south and north of the border wherever native farmers are growing heirloom
corn to make masa harina, chicos, or pozol.
In the coming weeks and months, we will be
covering an official campaign launched by the Asociación
de Consumidores Orgánicos de México. This campaign seeks to promote the use
of nonGMO corn and calls for a return to traditional methods of nixtamalization.
The Acequia Institute is pleased to join
this campaign. We seek to identify technical and funding support focused on
mobilizing native corn farmers in Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and California
to become active partners in this vital campaign in defense of a traditional
healthier corn tortilla. We believe one way to proceed with this campaign is to
link environmental sustainability and social justice by connecting farmers,
consumers, and tortilla and masa harina artisan producers and distributors in a
network dedicated to the liberation of our sacred food. Vamos a voltear la tortilla
hacía sus origenes.
Sources consulted
Epstein, Lee Ann. 2017. Norteada/o en el
barrio: Decolonizing foodscapes in South Central Texas and reclaiming belonging.
Pp. 107-24 in: Mexican-Origin Foods,
Foodways, and Social Movements: Decolonial Perspectives, Eds. Devon G. Peña,
Luz Calvo, Pancho McFarland, and Gabriel R. Valle. Little Rock: U. Arkansas Press.
La Jornada del Campo. 2018. Voltear la Tortilla. Armando Bartra,
Coord. Feb 17. URL: http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2018/02/17/delcampo.html.
Vizcarra, Ivonne, Yolanda Castañeda and Yolanda
Massieu. 2018. Voltear la tortilla: reflexiones en torno al
género y el maíz. In: La Jornada del
Campo. Voltear la Tortilla, pp.
4-5.
Yglesias, Roxana; Parkhurst, Anne M.; and Jackson,
David S. 2005. Development of Laboratory Techniques to Mimic Industrial-Scale
Nixtamalization. Faculty Publications in Food Science and Technology. 100. http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/foodsciefacpub/100.
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