Eating is a human constant. It provides the energy necessary for physical survival, and structures celebrations like Thanksgiving dinners, Juneteenth barbecues, and New Year’s Eve crudités. Want to bring friends together? Throw a pizza party. A colleague has a bad day? Take them out for dinner. In need of self-care? Start the day with good coffee and scrambled eggs.
Culinary history reveals the meaning behind such various manifestations of food, and also highlights the catastrophic impacts of famine and food insecurity. By studying foodways – learning about the cultivation and harvesting of foodstuffs over time, the evolution of cuisines, and the creation of food rituals – we can empathize more effectively with humans throughout time and bring depth to our own food practices.
Food both shapes and expresses our daily needs, social location, and sense of self. Through eating (or its absence), we care for (or feel privation) in the self, the intertwined psychic tangle that is simultaneously biological, cultural, and relational. I can chart my own food narrative, as well as my evolving identity and class status, by recalling menu items: the massive mounds of beef consumed at every dinner of my ranching childhood, the beans and rice of my thrifty post-college years, or the mac’n’cheese of my impoverished single parent period.
At a cultural level, certain iconic foods offer analytical potential. Consider the tortilla, a simple disc of ground corn that demonstrates the richness of human foodways. The Aztec and Maya saw corn as a divine gift to sustain human life. They elevated corn in all its uses as a way to make their cosmology visible. Corn fed them, and they responded to the generosity of the maize plant by revering it and placing corn-based foods at the center of their cuisines. Aztec and Mayan peoples experienced the generosity of the gods and the gifts of the corn plant as they ate tortillas.
A vehicle for cosmological information, the tortilla also functioned as an ingenious means to deliver nutrition. In ancient Mesoamerican cultures, women boiled corn and then crushed the softened kernels on a metate, performing exhausting physical labor to create the corn flour that could be shaped into balls, flattened, and quickly baked. The addition of ashes or mineral lime to the water reduced the cooking time of the corn kernels and made otherwise unavailable nutrients in the corn digestible. This significant development in the preparation of corn meant that those who consumed tortillas could “access niacin, six amino acids, and calcium,” and, as a result, “felt energized and healthy.”[1] Not only did the tortilla provide nutrition, it also offered a handy receptacle for meat, vegetables, and spices. It could be dipped into sauces and eaten out of hand or filled and tucked away for later consumption.
European explorers seized this key food and introduced it across their home continent. Unsurprisingly, colonizing cultures ignored or missed the nixtamalizing process (cooking with ashes or lime) created by Mayan and Aztec women. As corn saw widespread cultivation and consumption in Europe beginning in the 1500s, many working-class folks who depended on it as their main source of calories suffered from the devastating nutritional disease pellagra, a condition absent from Aztec and Mayan cultures.[2] The colonizing process discarded the contributions of ancient women, removed corn from its indigenous cultural context, and in the process reduced it to a commodity.
Mesoamerican women crafted a staple that connected humans to the cosmos, bodies to nutrition, and food to function. Contemporary humans, a majority of them also women, prepare corn tortillas to feed the biological, cultural, and relational needs of people around the globe today. So it is noteworthy that a very few celebrity chefs, mostly male, present their version of the trendy tortilla for awards and acclaim in the contemporary food scene, just as the corn tortilla appears on fine dining menus from Sweden to South Africa.
A warm tortilla, cupped in the palm, can carry both the past and present. While contemporary American culture celebrates the innovative tortilla preparations of performative chefs, we can instead honor the tortilla’s creators and sustainers, those women – ancient and modern – who put it to use in the ceremony of human sustenance.
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[1] Paula E. Morton, Tortillas: A Cultural History, University of New Mexico Press, 2014, p. 12.
[2] The symptoms of pellagra run the gamut from nasty to nastier, with horrific skin conditions, diarrhea, and cognitive impairment as some of the most common.
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