That may be the general pattern.  There are lots of exceptions though. Women do a whole lot of farming, including the staples in many societies.  Men do a lot of post-harvest processing, threshing of grains, for example.  In Hawaii men traditionally cooked the sacred staple, taro.  Preparing was forbidden to women, though in fact they apparently did so when there were no men about.

In Mexico, though, although women helped farm, men did not grind.  Absolutely not.  The women who taught me to grind progressed from amazement to nervous titters to outright hilarity when men friends of mine tried their hand at it.

Five hours sound too much. You don’t need an almost an hour to grind 1 kg. I did fieldwork in Tlaxcala in the beginning of the 80′s, and maize was sometimes ground by hand on a metate, usually between 5 and 6 or 7 in the morning. And I’ve tried it out myself, too, though to rather uneven results. Yes, it was hard work, but five hours? And there were more than six family members, plus the dogs that were also fed tortillas. Considering all the other stuff a rural housewife has to do, apart from the tasks you mentioned – wash clothes by hand, cook, feed the domestic animals, go out to buy stuff, keep the house and patio in working order, look after kids, help with the field work, it also sounds unrealistic.

From the way Heike phrases it, it sounds as if this village already had a mill so that the metate was used only on special occasions.  So was the dough (masa) for the day or just for a special meal?

Grinding (pineapple in this case, not maize)

Getting a clean measure of the time to grind for a family is hard.

• Family size and family appetites vary.
• Children interrupt or grandma pitches in to help.
• It is hard to grind continuously because it is such hard work.  In my experience, at first it goes really quickly because a metate plus woman is a very efficient machine.  Then it gets harder and harder as you tire. So do the breathers the grinder takes count as part of the time?  I would say so. For tortillas, you usually have to make five “passes” across the metate, that is starting with a handful of nixtamal (maize heated with alkali and drained) you move it from the top to the bottom of the metate with a series of back and forth strokes.  Then you gather it up with your fingers and move it back to the top, a small breather.  Then repeat four more times, with a few seconds’ rest leaning back on your heels between each repetition. Then a slightly longer breather as you put the dough (masa) in one container and take nixtamal out of another.
• Some women are better grinders than others, producing a consistent dough quickly.  Why there should be differences I am not sure, but it is a widely repeated claim.
• The dough for tamales and gorditas takes less time than the dough for tortillas (though tamales then take longer to make than tortillas).

Even given these problems, I’m pretty certain that grinding was the dominant task of the day, day after day, for whoever it was that did the grinding, taking not just an hour or so but hours and hours.

What about the other chores Heike mentions?  In the past washing would have been less of a chore because there were fewer clothes and yet fewer bed linens.  Keeping the house and patio clean (largely endless sweeping) was often handed off to girl children (who did not go to school), as well as the care of chickens, dogs, pigs, and younger children.

Child care, I think, often got very short shrift as women had to balance turning out the tortillas with spending time with the kids.   It’s purely anecdotal, but I remember being very taken aback in the mid 1990s to hear Eugenia Ricaud, then working for DIF (Desarrollo Integral de la Familia, the government family welfare agency run by politician’s wives) in San Miguel de Allende, say that the very best way to improve childrens’ lives was to put a mill in the village.  This allowed women to spend time with their  children (or take paid employment or develop handicrafts).

Of course, the ladies of DIF varied in their grip on life in the villages so I went back to Eugenia several years later to find out if I had really understood what she was saying.   Her answer was yes.

Leaving Mexico for a second and going to western Eurasia where simple grindstones were the main way of reducing grains to meal until Roman times (and in backwaters long after), grinding was work reserved for the lowest in society, usually slaves/prisoners so far as I can see.

The Roman army adopted rotary mills, I think largely because they ground more rapidly.  Even so it took a hefty legionary an hour and a half to grind enough meal to feed his group of eight for a day. And not only was the mill faster and less tiring because it was not driven by the weight of the grinder, the meal was almost certainly not as fine as the dough for tortillas. (Anyone who can get me a rotary mill so that I can do some comparative studies with the simple grindstone will win my unending gratitude).

But this is to get into Nick Trachet’s questions which will have to wait for tomorrow.

Heike also asks where I got my information on maize processing.  The answer is from observing, cross-questioning and working with women in different villages in Guanajuato: Margarita Muñoz Ramirez, who started grinding at the age of twelve in a village outside San Miguel de Allende, AltaGracia Sanchez Torrez and Maria Jesús de Cabrera Parra of Rodeo San José and Emily Bonilla of El Capulín, both outside Guanajuato.  I am also grateful for the input of the metateros (metates/grindstone-makers) in Comonfort, Guanajuato, particularly Manuel Olalde and Rafael Hernández Laguna and families.  Comparing notes with José Rodriguez of Mexico City who is finishing a Ph.D. thesis on Mexican metates and grinding for the University of Barcelona was also very helpful.  And of course my own experiments.

I also know the article by Arnold Bauer that she mentions originally published in Agricultural History 64 (1990), 1-17 and updated in Enrique Florescano and Virginia García Acosta, coord., Mestizajes tecnológicos y cambios culturales en México (Mexico: CIESAS, 2004), 169-99.  He suggests five to six hours, and cites various studies going back to one by Miguel María de Azcárate in 1837 that come to similar conclusions.  Jeff Pilcher has a good discussion of the mechanization of masa grinding and tortilla making in chapter five of ¡Que vivan los tamales! (University of New Mexico Press, 1998).

While we are at it, here is my response to the question “Why didn’t Mexicans abandon the metate?  And if you search under grinding you will find lots more.

I think he is not right about the kind of metates and molcajetes needed.  Pores are good. And he understandably does not know how to grind.  Doing it the right way you never get a wet masa dotted all over the grinding surface.  For pores and grinding, see here.  Or click on grinding in the cloud on the right for lots more.

Let’s leave to one side the fermenting and cleaning and just think about the grinding of cacao. Because of the oil content, grinding cacao beans is a whole lot harder than grinding grains. In Mesoamerica the grinding of cacao was done by sheer brute force on a simple grindstone.

Yet in the sixteenth century, chocolate as a drink spread quite widely from Mesoamerica to Spain and other parts of Europe on the Atlantic side and to the Philippines on the Pacific side.

(The rest of Asia never accepted chocolate, largely still doesn’t), an interesting question in itself).

Neither the Europeans nor the Filipinos  were still using a simple grindstone.  They’d given it up hundreds of years earlier for the more efficient (if less flexible)  rotary grindstone. Hopeless for cacao because they gum up.

So where did the simple grindstones (metates) and the grinders come from?  A non-trivial question because this is one of the few culinary technologies that go from the New World to the Old World.

First, I assume the grindstones/metates went from New Spain to the Old World by ship.  Making the kind of metate that is good for grinding chocolate (and shown in pictures) is a skilled job.  It’s not something that any old stone mason can just knock out.  And it needs a knowledge of which rock formations are good and these are not necessarily or even normally the same as those for rotary grindstones.

Second, the grinders.  These poor folk had not only to do the work of grinding but hump the 30-50 lb grindstone around with them.  When I bought my chocolate grindstone (a specific size and shape), the metatero and his son, neither of them weaklings, used a wheelbarrow to move it.

In Spain and southern France, according to Marcy Norton, it was usually Separdic Jews who did this, though painting also show “Moors.”

And Beatrice Misa sent me this about the Philippines.

I was talking to a friend who is also doing work with cacao and apparently, before the stone grinders were used here (the ones you turn around, for grinding rice and corn), there were metates (at least he described them to look exactly like that, but no local name was given). It was a surprise to me, because I have never seen pictures or read accounts.

There were Chinese who would walk around and provide the service to families who wanted their cacao ground. Obviously the metate was more portable. It was said that the Chinese (who were abundant in the Philippines at the time, working as cooks or street vendors, also marginalized considerably) were the best cacao grinders, and would get them very fine despite the manual nature of their work. Every family would have their own beans “timpla” or mixed the way they wanted, and then the individual tableas would be stamped with their family seal.

Both the Sephardic Jews and the Chinese must have learned how to do it from migrants from New Spain, if what normally holds in technology transfer also applies here.  It almost always happens when there is someone to show you.

I wonder if we will ever find manuscripts that shed light on who taught Sephardic Jews and the Chinese in the Philippines to grind?  And where they got their beans?  And how all this functioned as a business?  And why and how it kept going until it was mechanized two hundred and fifty years later?

Not easy, technology transfer.  And meantime, I would like chocolate stamped with my personal seal.

Pain shot through my knees as I attempted to get up from the floor. My legs wobbled. The backs of my knees felt slick with sweat, and my T-shirt was damp. I shuffled the four paces to the jar of agua like an arthritic old woman. A blister was starting to form on my left palm. Why was I doing this to myself?

Of course, as you will see when you read her full account, she was using the physical motion of grinding to heat the metate.  Remember your physics lessons.  Mechanical work as force exerted over a distance.  That´s what Lesley was up to.  Maybe physics classes would be more immediate if students had to force the stone over the grindstone time and again to create heat.   It would have been easier, though not a whole lot easier, if the metate were heated. And of course it would have been hotter.

Anyway compare Lesley’s reality with this oh-so-cool gentleman, not a suspicion of sweat on his brow, not a hint of the weight of the body forcing that stone along.

Finally in a tweet, Lesley said she would never look at dark chocolate the same way again.  Well, even Lesley’s final puddle of chocolate was a long, long way from the dark chocolate so popular now.  That kind of smoothness can never be created with a grindstone.  It took the Industrial Revolution to produce that.   Another post coming soon on that.

Even if you have a grindstone, though, even if you know how to grind, it’s tricky to work with cacao because as you grind the mixture seizes up.  The time-honored Mexican way of dealing with this is to heat the grindstone.

Here in this classic engraving from Nicolás de Blegny´s 1687 Le bon usage du thé, du caffé et du chocolat an aproned gentleman is shown gingerly wielding the mano of the grindstone.  Underneath you can just see the brazier that is warming the stone. Cristina Potters, always informative on Mexican customs,  has a series of photos showing Doña Lupe of Patzcuaro in the state of Michoacán in Central Mexico grinding beans.  Since Doña Lupe says she processes 20 to 30 kilos a day, I suspect there are actually a number of other (and perhaps less elegantly dressed) women helping her.

Because given the hard work of grinding as I discovered here or as Lesley Téllez is now discovering, grinding over a heated grindstone is work indeed.

Now back to some archaeology.  A recent article in Nature pushed back the origin of chocolate consumption to 500 BC.

The first chemical evidence of cacao use came about 15 years ago after the analysis of residue from a vessel found at the Mayan site of Rio Azul in northeastern Guatemala and belonging to the Early Classic period of Maya culture—approximately A.D. 460. But Michael Coe, co-author of The True History of Chocolate, believes based on a slew of evidence, some linguistic, that the roots of chocolate go much further back to the great Olmec civilization, which preceded the Maya.

Mayan teapots have always fascinated Terry Powis, an archaeologist at the University of Texas at Austin, which is how his investigation began. “Spouted vessels are very distinct from other Mayan ceramics and quite rare, typically associated with elite burials,” he explained.

Fortunately for Powis, fourteen such vessels were excavated in 1981 from a site at Colha, which lies close to the Caribbean coast in northern Belize, and have since been housed at the University of Texas, Austin. The Maya occupied Colha, which is known for its production of stone tools and its Preclassic spouted vessels, continuously from about 900 B.C. to A.D. 1300.

He scraped residue from the vessels and sent the samples to W. Jeffrey Hurst, who has a delicious job as an analytical biochemist at the Hershey Foods Technical Center in Hershey, Pennsylvania.

Using “high performance liquid chromatography coupled to atmospheric-pressure chemical ionization mass spectrometry,” Hurst analyzed all the samples. The first instrument separates all the components of the mixture and the other measures the molecular weight of each. Cacao is a blend of more than 500 chemical compounds. Of this tasty compendium the signature chemical is a compound called theobromine—the chemical marker of cacao.

Of the 14 samples analyzed, 3 were positive for theobromine, “chocolate, that is,” said Powis.

OK, well and good.  Theobromine in pots from 500 BC.  The trouble is that, if my memory serves, metates on legs do not appear until the Classical Period in Mexico, that is, until around 200 BC.

So whether you take Powis´s proven 500 BC or Michael Coe´s plausible earlier date of something close to 1000 BC, how were they grinding the chocolate? Or were they?  Were they just simply making nibs?

I’m sure some archaeologist has addressed this.  I just haven’t run across it.

It’s one of the few native American foodstuffs to make it immediately to the Old World.

And now, when anyone who has any pride in their foodie credentials praises the fresh and natural, chocolate, one of the most elaborately processed and industrialized foods around, is given a pass and allowed into the hallowed company of heirloom vegetables and fruits and grass fed meat in the foodie ranking of goodies.  That, and the fact that several new articles and books about chocolate have come my way, are the reason for this and three or four upcoming posts.

I’m going to start with contemporary artisanal processing. I’m re-posting (with permission and a little light editing) a lovely and non-technical blog post by Beatrice Misa in the Philippines about how she processed some beans from her family’s backyard–with one important modern innovation.  It’s about as clear and well-illustrated as anything I have encountered on the subject.

And it reminds us that cacao went east to the Philippines as well as west to Europe, along with the techniques for getting from pod to tablea (tablet of drinking chocolate).

Home-Processing Cacao

A thick cup of home-dried, home-roasted cacao with coconut milk from the garden. Sarap.

Three pods. You can tell if it is ready to eat when you shake it and the mass moves around, there is a layer of air between the skin and the fruit.

Cutting the pod up to share with friends.

Cacao arrived in the Philippines during the galleon trade.

The fruit has thin but fabulous sweet flesh.

Seeds drying.

The cacao tree is a humble one, not particularly beautiful, growing well only under canopies. Taken from the forest basins of the Americas, they have traveled well into our muggy, tropical island setting, cultivated in some large plantations and agroforestry areas, and in numerous backyards all over the country. There is still considerable backyard production and kitchen processing going on to turn cacao beans into tableas (tablets for making hot chocolate) most especially in the province.

All dried and ready to roast.

I took my fruit from my great-uncle’s house in Metro Manila. The pods had been given all these years to the gardener, whose mother would do the tedious processing. As I am not schooled in these matters, I enlisted the help of Wilma, who is from Zamboanga and has been eating and growing the stuff since childhood. I have read about cacao processing in books, but I wanted to get an idea of how it is processed by normal people for everyday consumption.

Seeds roasting on an iron skillet.

The pods at the top of this page yielded many seeds, covered by fruit pulp that is absolutely delicious. I would describe the taste as sweet yet tart, like a mangosteen or a nice yellow mango. The “beans”, which look a bit like rambutan seeds, were set out to dry. After they were suitably devoid of moisture (a few weeks, given the rain), they were roasted. I thought them to be a bit burnt, but Wilma insisted that was how they liked it.

An old brandy bottle.

Just as our house was filled with an aroma good enough to marry, we took the beans off and put them on a bilao (bamboo tray). Wilma used a glass bottle to crush the crunchy beans and force the skin to separate. She did this in a hurry, before everything cooled off.

Almost nibs, with motions like making pie dough.

More crushing.

We then ran out into the garden and got rid of the skins directly into the soil by the same movements that people use to winnow rice. The instructions of blowing the skin away with a fan seem quite comical and devoid of integrated daily exercise, once you see how gracefully the skin floats to the ground for decomposition.

Winnowing cacao.

What we are left with are cacao nibs, the much-hyped “superfood” and relative newcomer to the culinary world. A whiff at this point is pretty sublime.

Skinless nibs.

We decide to grind this for drinking chocolate. We first used a mortar and pestle, which proved to be too much even for our idle, chatty selves. A coffee grinder works nicely.

Too much work.

The moisture is coming up.

Cocoa fat ahoy.

Once the paste was finished, we scouted the kitchen for a suitable mold. This we found in an old spice jar cap. We washed the paprika out of that and pressed the paste in.

Standardization is important to us.

You can tamp it out with a bit of difficulty. Cacao, at this stage, becomes the consistency of your high school experiment of baking soda and water. It seems solid, but when you press your finger against it, there is a slow melting that occurs. Thus, you cannot scoop it out of the mold without damaging it, you must pound it onto a solid surface with some force.

From three pods, we get five 1-inch tableas.

My excitement was barely enough to contain, so I plunked two of these still-soft tableas into a pot and whisk them with water into tsokolate, kakaw, cacao, chocolate-eh, whatever you may call it if you are from these islands. I feel I’ve come a bit closer to the holy grail of my cacao-loving conquest.

Ready to drink.

Some things to change next time: It was a bit darkly roasted, more so than I am used to. Though delicious in its own way, I think I will decrease the roasting time. I was left with bits of the bean at the bottom of my cup, which I ate. Yes. I ate them, but it could have used a finer grind, so I may as well invest in a Turkish coffee grinder.

Now notice the one place where Beatrice cops out and abandons traditional methods.  The grinding of the roasted beans.  She puts them in the coffee grinder and presses the button.

Transcript of Fueling Mexico City

Rachel Laudan: All cities require fuel: oil, gas, electricity, and so on. What I want to talk about today is the energy that fuels the people in the cities—food. Without food energy, a city is nothing. A city is nothing without the people who work and play and enjoy or suffer through the city, and they require food.

IMAGE: Tortillas. Photo by Nick Gilman, author of a handy guide to Mexico City’s food, via Rachel Laudan.

I want to talk in four short bursts. The first is about what all cities need in the way of food. The second is the reason why Mexico City had a particularly hard time with food. The third describes a revolution in the food of Mexico City that has taken place in the twenty years since I first saw it. And the fourth is about the kind of trade-offs that had to be made to undergo that revolution in food.

So: what do cities need in terms of food? There’s only one way to feed a city, at least historically, and that’s to feed it with grains—rice, wheat, maize, barley, sorghum, etc.. You can go round the world, and there just aren’t cities that aren’t fed on grains, except for possibly in the high Andes. Basically, to maintain a city, you’ve got to get grains into it. Be it Bangkok, be it Guangzhou, be it London, or be it Rome—throughout history, grains and cities are two sides of the coin.

And what do you need in terms of grains? For most of history—really, until about 150 years ago—most people in most cities, except for the very wealthy, lived almost exclusively on grains. They got about ninety percent of their calories from grains.

That meant that for every single person in a city you had to have 2 lbs of grains a day, turned into something that people could eat.

IMAGE: Rachel Laudan holds up a kilo of tortillas—the daily grain requirement for each city dweller.

[Holding up a standard supermarket package of tortillas.] This is a kilo of tortillas. That’s what one person in a city needed. It’s the same weight, more or less, whatever the grain is—you can go to the historical record, you can research in China, in India, in the Near East, and you will still be talking about 2 lbs of grain-based food for every person in the city every day.

So you can do some calculations. If you’ve got a city of a million, like ancient Rome,  you’ve got to get two million pounds of grain into the city every day. It’s the same for all the cities in the world— it’s 2 lbs of grain per person. That’s the power, that’s the energy that drives cities.

So let’s start with that for Mexico City. What are Mexico City’s grains? Pre-conquest, of course, it was just maize. Post-conquest, it’s maize and wheat. I want to talk primarily about maize, and we’ll move onto wheat later on.

Maize is not the greatest grain for the person who is preparing it. Because when I say that cities live off grain, I’m actually telling a lie. Cities don’t live off grain. Grain is not edible. Maize is not edible, wheat is not edible—if you eat a lot of wheat or a lot of maize, it will go straight through the system. Grains—maize, wheat, or rice, it doesn’t matter which—are only edible once they have been processed and cooked into boiled rice, bread, tortillas—whatever the end product is. That’s what you eat.

IMAGE: Women grinding maize: a processing technique that remained the same from antiquity until surprisingly recently. Image courtesy Rachel Laudan.

Yesterday, Nicola was saying that food blogs can be a bit girly. Let me tell you, there’s nothing girly about processing maize to make tortillas.

The Mexicans in the audience will know this, but if you don’t, here is what you have to do to turn maize into a tortilla. First of all you have to cook the maize with something alkaline. Today you can use cement, but in the past they used the salt from the dry lake bed around Mexico City. You have to take the grains off the maize, which is very time-consuming, and then you heat it, you cook it, and you rub the husks off.

Then, when you have got your wet-cooked maize, you have to grind it. For thousands of years, Mexican women ground maize like this. [kneels to demonstrate] I’ve spent some time grinding. You have a metate, and you start with your handful of maize and you put it here and you grind it down to end of the grindstone, and it’s not fine yet. You use your fingers to move it back up again, and you grind it all the way back down again. Then you move it back up again—and to get it fine enough to make tortillas you have to do this five times for each handful of maize.

IMAGE: Rachel Laudan mimes wet-grinding maize at Postopolis! DF.

Depending on how good you are, it takes somewhere between fifty minutes and an hour to do enough maize for tortillas for one person. That means for a family of five someone is going to be spending four or five hours a day doing nothing but grind. [gets up] It’s very exhausting, grinding.

When I first got to Mexico, young women, particularly in the country, would say to each other, “Do you grind?” Imagine it! The girl who worked for me when I first came here, when she was twelve years old, her parents handed her the mano, the thing you grind with, and they said, “OK, girl, now it’s time you start grinding.” That meant, in sickness and in health, from Monday to Saturday—on Sunday, you ate stale tortillas—she ground for four or five hours a day.

When I was twelve years old, I had my first period. I though, “Oh my god, is this what I’m going to have to put up with for the rest of my life? Roll on menopause!” But imagine if I’d been a little Mexican girl, twelve years old, and I’d not only had my first period, but I’d also been handed the grindstone and I knew that from then on, for five hours a day, six days a week, I was going to grind…

It is a very, very time-consuming thing. It’s terrible for the individual: arthritis, bad knees, no time to spend with the children, and no opportunity to go to school. It’s also, obviously, not a great thing for the society if you’ve got one fifth of your adults doing nothing but grinding.

IMAGE: Masa on a traditional metate, photo via.

That kind of labour-intensive grinding was what they did in Ur, and in ancient cities of the Middle East and Egypt. By the time you get to Rome, roughly—by about the birth of Christ—in the Middle East and in Europe, they get a rotary grindstone, and instead of requiring one person per every five to spend all day grinding this two pounds of grain that everybody in the city needs, they get it down to one in thirty. Then they get watermills and it goes down to one in three hundred—and nowadays we don’t even think about it! There are big steel rollers up there in Minneapolis and they’re grinding grain for hundreds of thousands of people, using just a handful of workers.

Now why didn’t Mexico do that? Was it just backward? Why didn’t it move to other forms of grinding? The trouble is if you grind wet, you cannot use these other rotary grindstones. So even if the Mexicans had had them, they couldn’t have used them. When the Spaniards came here they brought rotary grindstones, but you just can’t grind wet maize with rotary grindstones. And if you want tortillas—which we now know have nutritional advantages, but they are also a flexible bread, and hence more appealing than the kind of porridge-y things or tamales that you would have otherwise—you have to grind wet.

IMAGE: Atole, a kind of sweetened corn porridge drink, which to me tastes like thin, lumpy rice-pudding. Photo via.

Therefore, in Mexico, right up until about twenty years ago, large numbers of Mexican women were spending five hours a day grinding. Just imagine Mexico City: every household had somebody grinding tortillas. The landscape of Mexico City up until fifty years ago, and in many ways even later, is one of bakeries that make wheat breads for the upper class or perhaps for breakfast or the evening meal, and then in every household, somewhere in a back room, somebody grinding maize to make tortillas for the main meal of the day.

IMAGE: Mexican pastries at Walmart’s in-store bakery.

That’s all changed. You can still find the odd person who grinds in Mexico City, but it doesn’t happen very much.

So, what’s the revolution that’s occurred? What’s happened to Mexico?

It took about a century. In the late nineteenth century, people began trying to find ways of mechanizing this business of grinding and cooking tortillas. Three things happened: first of all, they worked out how to make a mechanical mill that could grind wet. You still find these mills in many rural villages today—people cook their maize at home, and then they take it to the mill and grind it, and then they take it home and cook their tortillas. Those mills really came to Mexico City in the fifties and sixties—it had been invented earlier, but it needs electricity, and the early ones weren’t very good, and so on.

The second thing is that they invented a tortilla machine. If you live in Mexico, or even if you are a visitor here, and you go into any of the big grocery stores, you can see a tortilla machine back in the corner. It’s a kind of Heath-Robinson-esque contraption that cooks the tortillas.

IMAGE: Walmart’s in-store tortilleria

And the third thing that happened, finally—this really took place in the seventies and eighties—is that the company now called Gruma (Grupa Maseca) discovered a way to take the wet, alkali-treated maize, grind it, dehydrate it, and put it into packets. You’ve seen those packets in the grocery stores, I’m sure.

IMAGE: Maseca, photo courtesy Rachel Laudan.

By the 1970s, five percent of the maize for tortillas in Mexico came from Maseca. By the 1990s, it was fifteen percent. Maseca now has plans—whether they’ll pull it off, I don’t know—to take over all the tortillerias in the country.

Another thing that happened, during this crucial fifty-year period between 1945-ish and the end of the twentieth century, was that bread changed in Mexico. Traditional bread in Mexico was bread by the small piece, made in the traditional oven: the bolillo, the semita, and the numerous small breads you still see in Mexican bakeries today.

IMAGE: A bolillo and a semita, photos courtesy Rachel Laudan.

Beginning in 1945, an immigrant from Catalonia, Lorenzo Servitje, bought two second-hand loaf-making machines from the United States—the kind that make sliced white bread. The Servitje family founded the Bimbo company, which is now, as you know, omnipresent in Mexico. Bimbo bread lasts a long time and became widely available, and Bimbo now the largest bakery in the world. It is the fifth biggest food company in the world.

And so now, what does the landscape of Mexico City look like in terms of grains? It’s a whole series of Walmarts with in-house tortillerias and bakeries and shelf after shelf of Bimbo.

IMAGE: Bimbo bread, photo courtesy Rachel Laudan.

Of course, there are trade-offs. Bimbo is not as good as a bolillo. A machine-made tortilla is not anything like a homemade tortilla – it’s not even in the same universe.

Mexican women that I have talked to are very explicit about this trade-off. They know it doesn’t taste as good; they don’t care. Because if they want to have time, if they want to work, if they want to send their kids to school, then taste is less important than having that bit of extra money, and moving into the middle class. They have very self-consciously made this decision. In the last ten years, the number of women working in Mexico has gone up from about thirty-three percent to nearly fifty percent. One reason for that—it’s not the only reason, but it is a very important reason—is that we’ve had a revolution in the processing of maize for tortillas.

Lesley Tellez of Mija Chronicles:  What do you personally think about Gruma trying to take over the tortilla business?

Rachel Laudan: I think I’ve got the same mixed feelings that many Mexicans do. It would be nice if there were more masa harina companies, and it would be nice if Gruma couldn’t get a monopoly, but are we going to go back to grinding at home for five hours a day? No.

IMAGE: Walmart’s in-store tortilleria, photo courtesy Rachel Laudan.

Am I terribly upset that there seems to be a near one hundred percent takeover of not-such-good tortillas? Well, one of the interesting things about this story is that we’re apt to assume trends go on forever—but think about two of the things I just mentioned in my talk. There wasn’t a Bimbo company in 1945 and there wasn’t a Walmart in 1945. So I think all kinds of things can and might happen.

One of the negative effects of having had tortillas subsidized for so long in Mexico—which has really aided the poor—is that nobody has wanted to invest huge amounts of money into developing better tortilla machines and flour mills and things. Now, maybe, we’re at a point where we’re developing a boutique market for good tortillas. And there are better tortilla machines coming out now—we’ve got ones that rotate and flip the tortillas like you do on the comal, so they’re much closer to the taste of the handmade ones. So I think there will be a movement for good tortillas.

IMAGE: A Bimbo employee stocking the shelves at Walmart. Rachel pointed out his suit and tie, and explained that the Bimbo company was founded along Fordist “welfare capitalist” principles, paying above the average and demanding, in return, hard work, loyalty and adherence to a conservative social code.

Edible Geography: Did the move away from grinding at home have spatial repercussions? Was there an empty room in people’s houses all of a sudden?

Rachel Laudan: In the city, I’m not so sure. In the country, there used to be two kitchens—the regular kitchen and the black kitchen. In fact, there still often are. The black kitchen is where you grind and where you cook tortillas and the regular kitchen is where you might have your other stove. But I’m sure people can find something to do with that extra space in the house, especially in the city. Now, of course, you’d probably put a great big refrigerator on the floor space that used to be occupied with your grindstone, because with a refrigerator, you don’t have to make your tortillas every day, because they last from one day to the next.

Audience Member: Can you talk about other gender divisions in the production of food?

Rachel Laudan: It’s a good question—I’d like to think more about it. Agriculture was always male, and bakeries were always male. I think a lot of street food is female.

Edible Geography: Just to range further a little further afield, into the global geography of culinary techniques, I’d love to hear more of your thoughts about something you blogged about recently: the Columbian exchange that did or did not happen in 1492.

Rachel Laudan: Well, we’ve all heard about the Columbian exchange. It’s a cliché at this point: Mexico’s gifts to the world and so on. In fact, there may have been an exchange of plants, but there was no exchange of cuisines.

What happened was that European techniques—wheat mills and bread-baking, for example—came to Mexico, but what Mexicans knew about how to process food did not go to the Old World. The process of adding alkali to maize and grinding it wet didn’t go. The Europeans ground maize like they ground wheat, and they got pellagra, and they went blind, and they died.

The technique of dehydrating chiles and grinding them and rehydrating them to make some of the healthiest sauces in the world has never moved out of Mexico. It hasn’t even got to the United States, for goodness’ sake—what most of the United States thinks is a salsa is some chopped-up tomato with a few chiles in it. I mean, that’s a sort-of salsa, but it’s nothing like the wonderful salsas you find in Mexican cuisine. So no, there wasn’t a Columbian exchange in food. But the question of why not needs a much longer answer than we have time for today.

Caption: These are Middle Stone Age food processing tools recovered from the Ngalue cave site, Mozambique.

Credit: Grady Semmens, University of Calgary

Usage Restrictions: None

It used to be the story that farming and grain eating came along together 10,000 years or so ago.

Then evidence of grass seed use in Israel and of granaries dating way before that threw doubt on that assumption.  Good thing too because it seems highly improbable that you would grow grasses until you had a processing technology in hand.

And now there’s a story that’s going to appear in Science tomorrow about evidence for eating grass seeds 100,000 years ago in Mozambique.  Can’t wait to read the details. Pity Science is gated.

And would I love to have a go at some seeds with those tools?

Thanks to Jeremy for the pointer.

This is what it took to make flour from emmer wheat in the period between about 1600 and 1100 BC in Egypt.

Take uncleaned spikelets of wheat from your store. Sieve or winnow them to get rid of straw, chaff etc.  Hand pick to take out weed seeds, stones, etc.  Now you have clean emmer spikelets.

Put the spikelets in a mortar, sprinkle with water, and pound with a long pestle. This gives you a mix of chaff, freed grain, some large cracked grain, all damp.

Put all this to dry in the sun or over heat.

Now winnow. Several times.  This gives you grain with the heavier bits of chaff.

Now start sieving, scooping the chaff from the upper layers.  Do this several times.

Now pick out the last bits of chaff by hand.  Now you have clean grain.

Now grind the grain on a simple grindstone.

Have fun.

None of this is my research I hasten to say.  It’s the work of Delwen Samuel, currently at King’s College London. In 1996, I ran across a fascinating paper in Science on how to investigate the early history of bread and beer using correlative microscopy by someone called Delwen Samuel. I fired off a letter never expecting a reply. Well lo and behold one turned up and we have been corresponding on and off about grinding ever since.

Anyway here’s Delwen’s flow chart–a bit small to read–that I have summarized above.

Go to ancientgrains.org the website that Delwen and her husband Mark Nesbitt maintain where you can find the full text of the article from which this flow chart is taken “Brewing and Baking” in Paul T.Nicholson and Ian Shaw, eds. Ancient Egyptian Materials and Technology (Cambridge University Press, 2000).

I bet you will be as awed as I am at the range of expertise it takes to work out what was going on in food processing in the ancient world from the morphology of wheat to electron microscopy from experimenting with tools to the chemistry of yeasts.  And I bet you will enjoy as much as I do the very careful weighing of evidence and argument that Delwen brings to these issues.

And do look at the resources on Delwen and Mark’s site, particularly the list of other people working in this area.   There should be some fascinating stuff coming out in the next few years.