A maize tour

SIRGEALC over, Marleni, David and I headed for CIMMYT, the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre. That’s in Texcoco, about an hour’s drive from the hotel where we were staying in Mexico City (or three hours, unfortunately, on the way back). It turned out to be something of a maize odyssey. I’ll tell the story in pictures.

When we got to Texcoco, it was too early for lunch, but that didn’t stop us spending some time in the market sampling the local cuisine, as the quesadillas there are famous. This lady certainly made us some great ones. Note the two types of maize she’s using.

One of the things you can have inside your quesadilla is huitlacoche, which is fungus-infected maize. Sounds disgusting, but is actually quite delicious. This is what it looks like.

At CIMMYT, of course we visited the maize genebank. That’s Dr Suketoshi Taba in the photograph. He runs the genebank, and has done for some years now. One of the things he and his staff are doing at the moment is getting seed ready to send to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in time for the opening in late February next year.

As luck would have it, Dr Garrison Wilkes was giving a lunchtime seminar, so we gate-crashed it. It was fantastic: the evolution and domestication of maize in an hour, as told by the man who maybe knows most about it. He made an impassioned plea for urgent in situ conservation of teosinte in Mexico. This is not to be taken lightly. He’s been collecting maize and its wild relatives for over 40 years, and has seen the classic sites disappear, in particular to urbanization, one after another. That’s him at the back, the tall man in the blue shirt. A giant in more ways than one.

The CIMMYT genebank has a public area containing some nice displays, including murals celebrating important maize and wheat scientists. One of these is — or was: he died in 1991 — Dr Hernandez Xolocotzi. But instead of showing you that mural, here’s his bust along the Avenue of Distinguished Agronomists at the Universidad Autonoma Chapingo, not far from CIMMYT. The guy in the picture is Dr David Williams, one of Dr Xolocotzi’s students, and a colleague and friend of ours here at Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog.

The Rectoria of the agricultural university at Chapingo has some famous, agriculturally themed, Diego Rivera murals in the chapel, but unfortunately this was closed. But not to worry, we can still close with Diego, as I planned to. That’s because there’s a fantastic little bit in his huge mural at the Bellas Artes in Mexico City called Man at the Control of the Universe. Just to the right of the center, at the bottom, there’s this homage to maize evolution and diversity.