I’ve just been reading E.A. Wrigley‘s Energy and the English Industrial Revolution which I highly recommend if you are interested in the transformation wrought by fossil fuels.

In passing, he gives these figures for the labor involved in growing maize in Mexico ca 1940. A hectare is roughly the area inside an athletic track.

Cultivating a hectare of maize by hand.   1,140 man hours

Cultivating a hectare of maize with an ox. 380 man hours (plus 200 ox hours)

His figures come from Cornell entomologist turned agricultural economist, David Pimentel “Energy Flow in the Food System,” in Pimental and C.W. Hall, eds.,  Food and Energy Resources (London, 1984).

They reminded me that I have always been frustrated that the “food system” so often ignores what happens after the harvest.  So here’s my effort to get an order of magnitude figure of the relative work expended by men and women in putting tortillas on the table prior to oxen, mules, tractors and mills.

In 1970, maize yield per hectare was 1,194 kg ( INEGI, 1999 cited in “El maíz en México,” by Massieu Trigo and Lechuga Montenegro).  Assume that you needed 1 kg of maize per adult per day when it was providing 65% of the calories, allowing for seed corn and wastage in storage.  Assume a family of two adults and four others, say three children and an old person (probably low), with the four others needing 1/2 kg of maize a day.  Multiplying 4 kg by 365 days and dividing by 1,194 you find that a plot of 1.2 hectares was needed.  And that means 1,368 man hours to grow maize for the family.

Now what about turning all that maize into sometime you could put in your mouth.  Assume that it took about 5 hours a day to grind the maize for a family of six.  Add in time to collect firewood, de-grain the maize, haul the water to nixtamalize it, and shape and cook the tortillas.  Say another hour a day for this (a low estimate I think).

That means 2190 woman hours to turn maize into tortillas for the family.

That is to say, processing maize took more time than growing it even prior to animal power. Once the man had the help of an ox or a mule, the woman spent four to five times as much time processing and cooking as the man spent farming.

Given what hard work grinding is, I would guess the woman spent at least four times as much energy processing and cooking as the man spent farming.

These are just back of the envelope calculations. Does anyone have any corrections or modifications to make?  Or any pointers to studies on the  relative energy involved in farming versus processing and cooking?

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.

If that sounds like double dutch to you, here’s a two sentence primer. Tortillas made of maize are made by heating the maize with alkali, then wet grinding the result, called nixtamal.  The lovely smooth masa is then shaped into tortillas.  Tortillas made from Maseca are made from dehyradated nixtamal (Maseca is the name of the company).  Because they are not so flexible, wheat flour is usually added.  The taste and texture is generally judged inferior.  OK, five sentences.

In the fifteen years I have lived here, tortillas de maseca have gained enormous ground so I commented on Betsy McNair‘s Facebook link to this article that it was not always easy to find tortillas de maiz anymore even in Mexico.

This prompted two well-informed comments from Juan Marquez, suggesting that the twin causes were US maize and Mexican inflation.   Here they are.   Quoting them is probably contravening all kinds of conventions.  So Juan if you want to squawk, I’ll delete them immediately.

Rachel, I understand why you would perceive a scarcity of masa tortillas. There is an economic double whammy where the big 3 producers of masa harina import subsidized U.S. corn & then receive an additional subsidy from the Mexican government. On top of this.. inflation in urban Mexico has been relatively high over the the last 15 years making … Read Morelabor intensive products like fresh masa tortillas even more expensive.

However, in rural cash poor Mexico.. fresh masa still makes sense. For example, the last time we were in the Yucatan a few years back I observed that in every little non-touristy town we entered the Abarrotes store had a large scale food mill and the locals would bring in their home grown slaked maize for grinding on a daily basis.

And in Mexico City… Bill Esparza & Alex LaPierre confirmed that there is still an absolute proliferation of blue corn masa used in antojitos amongs the street food vendors outside of the touristy areas.

The importance of blue corn masa in antojitos is that it is practically a guarantee that they are made from fresh masa and not masa harina. It is heartening (and not that surprising) to hear that people in the Southern 1/3 of the country still care enough to spend a little extra.

I’d just like to supplement this by adding a third cause.  That means talking about the hard choices I see people around here (the city of Guanajuato in the center of the country).

Much of the country is dry hillside. Rains fail on average one year every seven (though that may mean two in a row or ten good years).  If we don’t get rains this weekend they will fail this year and every rural Mexican who has planted will lose the investment.

So lots of people no longer plant but work as bricklayers, the main alternative short of the increasingly unappealing option of going north.

A bricklayer earns about MN$1000 a week (about $75 US).

Wife stays at home, buys maize, nixtamalizes it, takes it to the mill, gathers twigs for firewood, makes her own tortillas. Cost for a family of four. MN$15 a week for about 12-14 lbs.

Two children now go to school, officially free, but they have to buy uniforms, pens and pencils, etc. plus special outfits for school events, plus medicine etc.

Wife goes to work to pay for this, and other necessities.  No time to make tortillas. Buying tortillas (made of a mixture of maiz and maseca to keep the price down) MN $60 a week for the same quantity. Husband complains. She wants her children to become professionals.

Net gain in family income after paying bus fares.  $800, an 80% jump.

Rising expectations are one reason why tortillas de maiz are losing ground.

First, for those of you who don’t know what a tortilla is, it is the basic flatbread of Mexico. It is made from maize. I spent a bit of time looking for a good youtube video of grinding and found nothing that I thought was good. And at the moment I can’t find my photos though I’ll post them when I can.

Second, you can’t use just any old maize. It has to be made with a white (or sometimes red or blue) starchy maize that is grown on farms of all sizes in Mexico. The maize grown in the US is by and large unsuitable for tortillas. So if you live outside Mexico, you need to first get hold of Mexican-style maize.

Third, you have to treat the maize before you grind it. If you grind it as is, you will get good old corn meal. And if you try to make that into tortillas, it won’t hang together and it certainly won’t roll up in a nice flexible way.

So you take your maize, put it in some kind of pot, cover it with water, and throw in a handful of “cal” or lime. You can beg any building site for a plastic bag full or you can buy your own sack. This is not of course strictly traditional. But if you are outside Mexico your chances of getting the traditional tequisite are not high. And everyone in my area uses lime. People do this by eye, varying the quantity slightly depending on whether they are going to make tortillas or tamales. But for starters, the measurements that Diana Kennedy givesare one tablespoon of cal to 2 pounds of maize. Then you heat the pot to boiling, remove it from the fire, and leave it overnight to cool.

Next morning you pour off the water and rub the skins off the corn kernels, rinsing until they are clean. Then you put your maize in a plastic bucket (oh the joy of plastic in poor rural areas). Most people in Mexico would now go off to the local mill and have it ground into masa, fine for tortillas, coarser for tamales (steamed maize dumplings). But you are going to keep your nixtamal (as the maize is now called) to grind. But you are going to grind it yourself.

Fourth, you need a metate or simple grindstone. It should be of medium size, that is just over a foot wide and about eighteen inches long. The bigger ones are for chocolate, the smaller ones for spices. But this size is ideal for the pass needed for turning maize into masa.

Most metates are made of volcanic rock, basalt or andesite. No need to worry about the geology of this. What is important is that these rocks are both hard and have pores. You need hard so bits don’t come off too easily when you are grinding. You need pores because as you grind down the surface stays uneven, meaning you don’t have to have the metate picada (pecked) to restore an uneven surface so often. Diana Kennedy recommends smooth stone. After talking to a number of metate makers and grinders, I have to say that I believe the more porous stone is better.

If you buy your metate second hand watch out. Normally they are sold if the mano (the grinder) has broken which, amazingly, it does. Then the vendor adds a new mano. This often does not fit the metate well and you have to work twice as hard. So it’s perhaps better to buy new. And here watch out too. At La Merced, the main market in Mexico City, they sell metates made of concrete. Not good news. Check it’s real stone. And I have reason to believe that those made with traditional metal picks are much better than those made with electric drills because there is less likelihood that bits of stone break off and get into the digestive system. But I need to do a bit more work on this. Once you’ve picked out a metate, begin by using an electric drill fitted with a metal brush to remove bits of stone, not traditional but effective. Then go to the old-established custom of grinding rice until it comes clean.

Now your grindstone and grinder (mano or hand as it is called in Spanish), the brush to clean the metate, bucket of nixtamal, bowl of water, bowl to hold the masa, and a towel to cushion your knees.

Fifth. Grinding itself. Take a heaping handful of nixtamal and put it an inch or two from the high end of the metate. Take the mano in both hands, holding it near the ends, thumbs pointing back toward you. Now push down on the mano moving the maize forward in a shearing action, giving the mano a little twist upward at the end of the stroke. No rolling. The maize will have moved down the metate a little. Lift the mano, and start the process over. After a few strokes (ha! this is hard work as the weight of your body is doing the work), the maize, now white and streaky, will be close to the lower end of the metate. With the fingers of the right hand, pull the mass together and move it back to the upper end of the metate. End of pass one.

(This is actually pineapple, a breeze to grind, but it is a place holder until I find my masa grinding photos).

To make masa fine enough for tortillas, you will need five passes, maybe more if you are a novice. If as you grind, the maize-masa gets out of place use those backward facing thumbs to corral it back. You will now have enough masa for one or two tortillas.

So forget that you are getting dizzy, feeling slightly sick, and that every muscle is quivering. Think that you will never ever have to go to the gym again if you keep this up. Think about the joys of modern civilization. Think you’re glad you weren’t born a Mexican woman in the past.

You might actually consider making gorditas which don’t require such a fine grind for your first go.

About half an hour should be enough to give you masa to make about ten tortillas, enough for one working person for one day (have to check these figures).

Use a tortilla press to make them (no one I’ve met has ever suggested that patting makes a better tortilla). I know, I know, this needs instructions too, but enough for one post. But if you make it to the end, rejoice in one of the most fragrant delicacies you will ever encounter, sheer toothsome deliciousness, food of the gods if ever there was one.

Interesting looking new book on the decline of honey bees in North America.

And fall out for the world grain market thanks to the credit crunch.

And some evocative photos of tortilla making in Mexico City from the blog Saborearte entusiasm. One amazing tortilla press and several great women.

I’m somehow very attracted to corn, to masa and to all Mexican things that can be cooked from it. After destroying a number of grinders, I have a Nixtamatic. I’m still learning to get the best grind from it. It is not a stone grinder but is, basically, a motorized Corona (hand grinder).

My basic question is: in Mexico, do people add water when grinding nixtamal for the finest tortillas? I had always thought that no water was added for the best masa and that “wet grind” referred to the corn itself, once it is hydrated by the cal. . . .

I know from reading the literature (esp anthropological) that the cal is often listed as a 5% solution (of the weight of the water). I’m using much less, around 1%, which effectively softens the skins for removal. Diana Kennedy’s recipes are by volume but seem to weigh out at 1-2%. I wonder if the more intense solution would hydrate the corn to a greater degree, creating a wetter grind? I also wonder what % assures the nutritional transforms.

First off, assume all my answers are preceded by “around here” or “among grinders I have watched.” Mexico is such a big country and practices vary wildly.

The answer to the first question is that when grinding on the metate, the grinder does add water. The equipment that is laid out around the metate is the bucket of nixtamalized (cooked in water and cal) maize, the bowl to put the masa, something to pad your knees (often) and a small bowl of water. As the grinder does one pass after another (usually five for masa for tortillas) to reduce the maize to masa, she will put her cupped hand into the bowl and sprinkle on a little water if the mix seems too dry. Not much is needed. How this would translate into machine grinding, I’m not sure. But you want to end up with a play dough (plasticine) kind of consistency.

I have never measured the cal. The women I know usually just take a bit of cement and add it by eye. But I’m sure Diana Kennedy has and I’d go with the volumes she suggests (with one caveat below).

The cal does not so much hydrate the maize (that’s done by the boiling) as it allows the skin to be rubbed off (just the same technique canners use for getting the skin off canned peaches) and alters its chemical composition so that it has different handling properties when ground and different nutritional properties. If you use too much cal you will get yellowish tortillas that don’t have that enchanting smell and tend to be brittle.

However some women do vary the amount of cal. For atole, none. For tamales, a little. For gorditas and tortillas more. The grind is different for the latter three as well as I am sure you know.

Hope this helps.

I don’t blame the author, John T. Edge, who is a fine scholar and tireless investigator of Southern Food, as well as a great guy to be around. He was just picking up on hundreds before him when he referred to the “the so-called tortilla riots of 2007, during which thousands took to the Mexico City streets to protest the rapidly rising cost of maize.” (It’s actually in a review of Paul Roberts’ new book, The End of Food, about which once I’ve read it I shall undoubtedly have lots to say).

But it’s not at all clear to me that these particular tortilla riots are symptomatic of anything except business as usual in Mexico. True, tortilla prices did rise in Mexico in January 2007. And since these maize flatbreads provide about half the calories of the poor in Mexico, that created hardship for many in the population. And true, there were protests.

But consider the situation.

1. Part of the NAFTA (North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement) agreement between Canada, the US and Mexico signed during the Clinton administration was that price supports for tortillas would gradually be eliminated. They’d been in place for decades as part of Mexican food policy, a complex subject that we needn’t pursue here. The point is that tortilla prices had been way below market value for a long time and everyone, at least everyone who could read, knew they were going to go up. (And that’s not because cheap American yellow corn would be imported. It was. For animals. But Mexico was, and still is, largely self sufficient in the non-sweet white corn that is used for tortillas. In fact production has increased dramatically in the past few years).

2. A new President, Felipe Calderón had just been sworn in (literally just, given the razor edge political race and the protests at his inauguration. We stopped watching television to get a cup of coffee and when we returned the inauguration was all over). He belongs to the PAN party. Mexico City is in the hands of the PRD party which had lost the election. There was and is near-open warfare between the very-powerful Mayor of Mexico City and the President.

3. Protests in Mexico City, where we live part time, are a fine art of politics not a spontaneous outpouring of the feelings of the people. Planned by political groups, the participants are carefully rounded up, bussed in, and given food and drink or much more to participate. They bring traffic in the city to a halt, or more of a halt than its usual situation. So when people in Mexico City “rioted” you have to understand that even if participants were in agreement, this was a PRD ploy.

4. When I asked people in villages and towns around here two hundred and fifty miles north of Mexico City what they thought of the rise in the price of tortillas, they were at a loss. What rise?

Thus these riots had little to do with rising prices of maize worldwide, less to do with biofuels, and everything to do with the internal politics of Mexico.

Now since then, prices have been creeping up and tortillas are once-again subsidized though it’s hard to tell by how much. But the point remains. None of the foreign reporting seemed to understand that this was part of an internal political battle.

If the reporting about the “food crisis” elsewhere is equally superficial, well, it makes me nervous.

PS. Comment from my husband who follows Mexican news carefully.   What riots?  I don’t remember any riots.

PPS. Correction from my husband. No riots, just protests. Those are very different.

And of these other parts of the world, few are more impacted than Mexico. Mexico is the land of corn, the place of its invention, the place where activists today chant “Sin maíz no hay país“–without maize, no country or homeland or nation. Last week more demonstrations were organized (organized is the operative word) in Mexico City against NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement or TLCAN in Mexico).

With emotions running so high, it’s almost impossible to figure out what is actually going on. So I was especially glad to see Sergio Sarmiento‘s editorial (under the pen name Jaque Mate) in Reforma on the 1st of February. Too bad he doesn’t list his sources but more on that later. For now, here are some interesting facts and figures.

But before we get started, when talking about corn in Mexico, it is essential to distinguish between white and yellow corn. No, white is not that super-sugary white you get in the US. White is what the US calls field corn, starchy, terrific non-sweet flavor, and the essential base for Mexico’s flat bread (tortillas) and steamed dumplings (tamales).

Now, according to Sarmiento,

1. Mexico remains self sufficient in white corn for tortillas and tamales.

2. Between 1970 and today, corn production in Mexico has risen from 8.9 million tons to 21 million tons.

3. This has been done by using modern agricultural methods. The acreage has essentially not changed while the output has almost tripled.

4. Imports of corn have also soared in the same period from 2 million tons a year to between 6 and 8 million tons. Almost all of this is yellow corn, destined for animal feed and for high fructose corn syrup.

5. With so much imported yellow corn (and sorghum and soy) now available, Mexico has become the world’s fourth largest producer of chicken and eggs, and its sixth largest producer of pork. Roughly speaking these have increased from 4.5 million tons a year in 1970 to 7.5 million tons now.

And so? Mexico is still producing enough white corn for human consumption. And it’s producing chicken, eggs and pork as well. A net gain of quite incredible proportions. When I came to Mexico ten years ago, the poor in the country around here ate very little meat. Now, at least in this area of Mexico which is relatively wealthy, they take it for granted.

There’s more about this and about Mexico’s agricultural subsidies, but the latter make my head ache, so I’ll leave them for later.