Maize

Maize is synonymous with Mexico. The Mexicans call it maiz, and it’s colloquially known as corn in the United States. Maize is the base of the Mexican diet. Mexicans use it to make tortillas, or thin cakes made of corn flour. To make tortillas, you soak and dry the maize kernels in lime juice and water, remove the skin, then stone grind the kernels into masa, which is the paste that forms tortillas

Tortillas are in turn the base for antojitos, which are like Spanish tapas, and are small plates of food. Tortillas are used to make tacos, flautas (tortillas tightly wrapped around chicken and fried with lettuce and cream), enchiladas, quesadillas, chilaquiles (fried tortilla chips in a spicy tomato sauce), tostadas (fried tortillas spread with refried beans and topped with anything). Tostadas are particularly popular in Sahuayo. They’re more like crackers than tortillas. Sopa de Tortilla is soup with tortilla strips. Mexicans even produce niquatole, which is a maize gelatin, or tejate, a drink made by marinating maize flour, mamey pits, white cacao beans in water and then sweetening it.

The tortorillia on my street, Insurgentes, produces over 800 tortillas per day. Buckets of masa sit on the floor, ready to be smashed into tortillas. The maize comes in bags, and leaves as a flat tortilla. The masa feels like mud.

Maize has been cultivated in Mexico for six thousand years. It was depicted in Olmec Art. According to the Mayan bible, Popul Vuh, humans were created from maize. Even today, people in the Oaxaca state call themselves hombres de maiz, or men of maize. Maize is more than a staple ingredient; it’s a form of identity. Today there are 340,000 farms that grow it in Oaxaca, in the Tehuacan Valley. This valley is known as the “waist” of Mexico because it’s the most narrow part of Mexico at 160 km (100 miles). Maize is usually not grown in large expanses of fields like it is in the American Midwest. Instead, farmers have retained the ancient growing pattern known as the milpa. A milpa grows crops in a way that they would grow in nature. Maize is grown next to squash, melons, beans squash chilies, yams, jicama, amaranth, and other staples, because they complement each other nutritionally. Neither contains all essential amino acids. But beans and maize combined would make a complete meal. For example, eating maize alone over time would lead to pellagra, a disease caused by a deficiency in niacin, an amino acid not found in Maize.

Not only is maize grown on thousands of farms, but the hundreds of varieties mean that each one is associated with a particular region, town, or even farm. Americans typically think of corn as sweet yellow corn. But in Mexico maize comes in different shapes, colors, and flavors. The reason for this is that maize openly pollinates, and farmers constantly sift through the different seeds to produce the myriad varieties.

Maize is as baffling as it is delicious. Kernels are wrapped inside a husk, so it cannot reproduce itself. Humans have to do that job for it. Botanists have never found an ancient ancestor to modern maize. The only similar grain is teosinte, which doesn’t look like maize and is not an efficient food source. Grains in most wild grasses form near the top of the stem, and then shatter. Mutations in wheat blocked this shattering, and allowed humans to cultivate it. There is no known form of non-shattering teosinte. Botanists, then, are not sure how Indians evolved a form of maize that doesn’t shatter.

Maize could have been combined with Zea diploperennis, a relative, or Eastern gamagrass. What’s more likely is that breeders thousands of years ago searched through teosinte stands for plants with desired traits. Indian breeders looked for the teosinte plants with the right mutations that would produce a non-shattering grain.

However they produced modern maize, today it's an integral part of Mexican life, and its spread throughout the world has fed millions.
Kevin