Category: Neglected species

While irrigation and market improvements could help, it would be reduction of processing time from hours to minutes made possible by mechanical hullers that might achieve most, “allowing women to take advantage of both their preferences for reduced labour loads and for the taste of millets in their everyday diets.”

I’ve quoted this before. It comes from a study looking at how so-called “minor” millets could be revitalized in India. A similar story of rescue of a traditional crop through the mechanization of processing is unfolding on another continent for quinoa. I was reminded of both by reading about the recent history of maize processing in Mexico on Rachel Laudan’s blog, which we have also blogged about.

…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.

This has been completely changed, of course, by the wet-grinding mill, the tortilla-making machine, and finally, quite recently, the dehydration and packaging of wet-ground maize. One wonders whether bread would have made more of an inroad into Mexican cuisine, culture or no culture, if it hadn’t been for this revolution in processing. The resulting tortillas don’t taste as nice as home-made, but that’s a price most are willing to pay.

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.

Is a similar trade-off to be expected for those Indian millets and quinoa? And if so, can anything be done about it? In Mexico, they are already coming up with better tortilla machines “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 says Rachel Laudan, adding: “…I think there will be a movement for good tortillas.” What I want to know is whether these tortilla machines will come to East Africa, so that we can eat maize meal in forms other than the very dull ugali.