TomG
Sep 30, 2003, 9:22 PM
Post #7 of 12
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Re: [Madam ZZ] Diabetes & diet in Mexican population
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Corn is an interesting subject.
Twenty years ago US agriculture, which had already morphed into agribusiness, was using 10 units of energy to deliver 1 unit of energy to the table. Over many years there has been no end of noise about the American farmer being the world's most efficient farmer.???? Since that time US farming, food processing, transportation, and presentation has become a great deal more energy intensive. I can't imagine what that data could be these days. But at this level of surreality you almost wonder, "why quibble over another increase in factors." So the few American farmers now remaining have bigger machinery, bigger farms (a lot bigger), and pound the land more intensively in order to be considered by their politicians even more efficient than before. John Deere and his brothers' preference for practical-minded farm-boy-engineers coupled with the chemical producers produced a system that took the culture out of agriculture.
Before the individual farmer was able to divine that he was not an isolated yeoman with a longrifle, he found his drinking water fouled, and sometimes his family sick. The healthy boy that grew up on a farm later found himself in the country's most hazardous occupation. By purely accidental encounter I know of 2 young women who were born severely defective due to prenatal farm chemical poisoning. The luckier one was raised in a white room and is spending most of her adult life in an almost fulltime search for safe living envelope environments. There are 6 foods that she can safely eat now as a result of months long white room allergy testing, all of them organic, 4 of them exotic. People currently living within a few miles of a modern "pig operation" (pig farm) are getting weird crippling diseases in there 30's and 40's that put them on the sidelines, as in the case with of a high school teacher who cannot use his mind to teach (think lawsuits, insurance, Medicare and welfare).
What those farm-boy-engineers failed to calculate with there sliderules in those seminal days was efficiency. While they myopically watched the beans they were counting, uddles of other monster factors where hovering over the act. So if one thinks that using 10 calories of energy to produce 1 calorie of food in the mouth was bad in 1980, try calculating the modern numbers and include all the peripheral costs that the private sector would like the public sector to subsidize for them. There is not much to the yeoman farmer image beyond his Farm Bureau literature; he is barely a proud pawn anymore.
Out of all this monoculture corn is one of the most chemical intensive crops. They grow it to burn in the Midwest – in the cars. That’s right the gas is 10% corn ethanol……and there is still too much. I haven’t even mentioned the ugly political particulars on dimensions of the subsidies.
Now all this takes us right down to Mexico on more subject fronts than we could deal with in this forum: rural poverty, immigration, degradation of quality of food products, genetic destruction of thousands of years of evolution of corn in its homeland (in as remote a place as the mountains of rural Oaxaca), public health, and who knows what else.
Speaking of diet, there is an excellent book on the corn and wheat wars in Mexico, the exact name of which I have forgotten. Since almost the earliest days, the Spanish tried to eradicate the use of corn and replace it with wheat in the indigenous Mexican diet. The main economic problem with corn was that the Mexicans could grow it, store it, prepare it, and eat it without ever passing a peso through the economy. Talk about yeoman farmer! Long rifle or no long rife. There is the rub: if they grew corn and ate tortillas and tamales they were entirely independent. If they could be switched to wheat eaters, they would need millers and bakers, and thus money to pay them…..and then you had them. The corn and wheat wars took many forms, at times it was religious: wheat being the grain of the Church in the form of bread and thus the grain of God, making corn the grain of the devil. At other times there was medical/scientific research showing that wheat was brain food (witness the superior wealth and position of the brainy Spaniards), while corn stunted mental development (sort of like La India Maria, I suppose. Although this phase of the war long predated the practical Maria ).
From Mexico to Iowa and back, corn has journey has been surrounded with myths, both beautiful and ugly; and some weird politics. And to this day corn is up to its tassles in myth and politics.
One of my saddest personal experiences in Mexico was riding next to a campasino in a combi on the road to Zinacatan, Chiapas. We were the same age, but he reminded me of my grandfather. He asked me where I was from, I told him. He asked me if there were campasinos there. I said it was a state famous for corn; but that there very few campasinos now, and that there had been many 50 years ago. We exchanged information about big machines and chemicals – he used neither. I asked, and he said that the food in his village was natural, and he knew it was better. He was very dignified. He had a white serape with light red embroidery. I was sad to part company with him. It was as if my grandfather and I were the same age. I knew we were the same age. I was also 9 years old. The boy wanted to stay where he started.
Later that day I was talking with a woman in her courtyard. The chickens were eating yellow corn. I asked, “Which is better for tortillas, the yellow or the white corn.” She said, “the blue.” She invited me to the kitchen where another woman was cooking blue corn tortillas on a wood-fired comal. The corn was freshly ground. She handed me one from the comal. It was very good. I smiled and got another. Then one more. Then squash.
Diane Kennedy considers corn from the USA to be too sweet for good Mexican tortillas.
(This post was edited by TomG on Sep 30, 2003, 9:36 PM)
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