Seeds of Change for a Culture Rooted in Corn

Posted by Cynthia Belliveau  |  April 26, 2012

I am no stranger to the food culture in Oaxaca, Mexico. Over the past few years, during my month-long stays in this region, I’ve become familiar with local ingredients, agriculture, and the challenges this deeply-rooted culture experiences with modern-day agricultural policies, processes, and plight.

I come here to teach students at the University of Vermont about food systems – it is a way for them to see first-hand how economic, environmental, health and social forces all affect, and are affected by, the food system. Through a combination of lectures, readings, fieldwork, excursions, cooking and eating in our local kitchen classroom, they learn about the entire supply chain, from seed-to-plate.

In preparation for the course, I did field work with a colleague. We had the privilege of working with Chef Pilar Cabera of La Olla restaurant on tamale-making.

Tamales, a local food staple
Tamales are a pre-Hispanic dish of ground corn covered in a rich sauce, and then steamed in banana leaf or corn husk. After the Spanish arrived, chicken, pork and other meats were added as well as lard. There are also dessert tamales of corn mixed with something sweet, like berries and brown sugar.

The large metal steamers in which tamales are cooked are reminiscent of lobster pots and can accommodate 25-50 snuggly. During fiestas (which are numerous) the tamale pots are gigantic and can accommodate hundreds of these steamed delicacies.

The beautiful thing about tamales is that they are easy to handle, require no silverware or plate, and what’s left over is completely compostable.

But all is not well in tamale land. For nearly 20 years, the Oaxacan food culture has been thrown into the balance by forces outside of its control – namely, international politics. It’s an example that shows the complex inner-workings of local and global food systems.

For centuries, the cornerstone of the Mexican diet, culture, and economy was corn – and it still is today. This is, in fact, corn’s birthplace and home to thousands of varieties of corn thanks to Mexico’s varied climate and history of seed cultivation and harvesting.

The complex role of corn in day-to-day life is immediately apparent in the rugged and isolated terrain of Oaxaca, where corn is at the foundation of the local community. Village women perform the daily task of making corn tortillas known as “blandas,” a staple of Oaxacan meals, just as their ancestors did centuries ago. The remoteness of this region has kept many culinary traditions intact.

It’s symbolic of a larger national commitment to sustainably farming, sourcing and producing corn and corn products. For thousands of years, farmers all over Mexico gathered together at the end of each growing season to select the best corn seeds for their agricultural terrain. The process gave birth to thousands of varieties of corn throughout the country, each uniquely suited to the climate and geography of the place in which it is grown. Talk about taste of place!

But that’s not all. Through this natural process, Mexican varieties often have the best yield, pest resistance, growth cycle, drought resistance and protein content.

NAFTA
In the early 1990s, however, the quality of Mexican corn took a turn for the worse: the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was passed, which included free trade of Mexico’s staple crop. Much of the heritage corn is under threat because its being replaced by what the Mexicans call cheap “pig corn” from the US. Like Americans, Mexicans are conscious of their food budgets, and are replacing these ancient varieties with cheaper, less nutritious and tasty American varieties.

But, in my opinion, cheaper isn’t always better.

Introducing genetically-modified, hybrid American corn into Mexico contaminates local varieties. Farmers suffer lower yield on crops as U.S. seed makes its way into their fields. Because of the varied climate and lack of pesticides and heavy machinery, the one-size-fits-all method doesn’t work in Mexico.

And the results are tragic:

  • Between 1994-2000, with the insurgence of U.S. corn, Mexican corn prices were cut in half to reflect international prices.
  • Lack of rural farm subsidies caused many farmers to seek employment in urban areas, where jobs were also lacking.
  • The migration of farmers from the land to city deteriorated the vital, centuries-old practice of seed selection, directly impacting the quality of Mexican corn varieties.

A once vibrant food system is now struggling to survive.

Don’t despair though, there are several organizations here in Mexico who are coming together to prevent this from continuing, including Nuestro Maiz, an NGO dedicated to preserving Oaxaca’s corn heritage, and Itatoni Tortilleria, a restaurant and non-profit with an agronomist for its owner, dedicated to the preservation of traditional corn varieties used in making traditional Oaxacan tacos, tostadas, quesadillas, memelas, tetelas, tlayudas, tamales and pozole. School-aged children and teenagers participate in lectures and interactive workshops that focus on heritage corn and the need to protect it. Even the government, notorious for its corruption, is stepping in to create protection laws, especially in Oaxaca.

You can see more from our trip to Oaxaca at our students’ blog.

Have you observed any food cultures under threat around our world? Please share your thoughts by leaving a comment below.

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Introducing UVM’s Masters in Food Systems Degree

Posted by admin  |  April 23, 2012

Faculty Director: Amy B. Trubek, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Department of Nutrition and Food Sciences

I have observed with fascination the groundswell of interest among Americans, (especially twentysomethings) in becoming passionate advocates for changing our food system. There is a real passion to know more, to do more.

My observations are not merely academic; I too graduated from college wanting to immerse myself in food, both in theory and practice. In those days (the mid-1980s) there were no graduate programs that allowed you to study food in a holistic manner, in contemporary parlance, from farm-to-plate. I cobbled together my own program of study, getting a culinary degree and a PhD in cultural anthropology. Over the course of an almost twenty-year career as a food educator, I am thrilled at all the new possibilities for teaching and learning about food, food culture, and food systems.

Here at the University of Vermont, we have launched an M.S. in Food Systems. The two-year, research track will begin in September 2012; the 18-month professional track will begin in September 2013.

Why UVM?

UVM is an ideal location for a graduate program that explores the complexity of contemporary food systems, and the power of emergence and interdependence in just what happens in any type of food system –from local to global, from subsistence to techno-science.

We have designed the program to provide students with a solid foundation in what we consider the core methods and concepts to what truly is a field on the frontier of higher education.  We have designed the program to allow students to experience food systems in action – from a service learning seminar to travel immersion courses to problem- based research with faculty from across the University. (If you want to find out more about the MS program, learn more here.)

Why Higher Education Needs to Play an Active Role

As a teacher, I am truly energized when thinking about designing the most current, compelling and rigorous curriculum graduate curriculum on food systems. This is no easy task.  Though harvesting, cooking and eating food is a constant human experience, the teaching about food in higher education has been inconsistent and compartmentalized. Twenty years ago at a university like UVM, you could take a course on soil health and never learn about different agricultural traditions, or a course on human nutrition and never learn about different food processing techniques.

Meanwhile, many academic disciplines simply ignored agriculture (why consider the work of peasants?) and food (why take seriously women’s work?).

Now that current cultural sensibilities have turned towards these topics, higher education teaching and research needs to catch up and capture the complexity of food in the human experience. This is our task at UVM.

What makes me bullish about our work ahead is the deep roots and broad base that we have here. We are a land-grant university in a small, rural agricultural state with a vibrant food culture. We now have a number of faculty teaching courses using a food systems approach. We have all the right assets for developing a vibrant curriculum that can help create the sustainable food system of the future that so many Americans asking for every day.

What aspect of our food systems would you like to learn more about?

 

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UVM Libraries and Maple: A Sweet Partnership

Posted by Elizabeth Berman  |  April 20, 2012

image via racineur on Flickr “Dimanche des sucres” (sugar on snow)

 

Vermont = maple.

Vermont is the largest producer of maple in the United States, having produced 1.14 million gallons of the sweet stuff in 2011, or approximately 41% of the country’s maple syrup supply. (I’m also convinced that we are the largest consumer of maple syrup. True Vermonters travel with a half-pint “just in case” and offer it up for pancakes, bacon, even coffee! I just don’t have the statistics to back this claim.)

Maple has a long and storied history in the Green Mountain State. The Vermont Maple Sugar Makers’ Association, formed in 1893, is reputedly one of the oldest known agricultural organizations in the country. Research on maple syrup – and the sugar maple – dates back to the 1890s, when C.H. Jones studied sugar maple physiology to better understand the flow of sap.

In 1948, the country’s first permanent maple research station was built, Proctor Maple Research Center, which thrives to this day as a University of Vermont agricultural experiment station, sharing scientific advancements with producers across the state and beyond. Celebrating the community of maple sugaring, the Vermont Maple Festival has been going strong since 1966. In short, for the past 125 years, Vermont has been a leader in the field, producing seminal research on maple production, maple chemistry, and maple technology, but also in celebrating the joy and spirit of this truly local food.

To preserve this history, the UVM Libraries partnered with the National Agricultural Library and the Agriculture Network Information Center (AgNIC) to create the Maple Research Website. This website serves as a portal to a breadth of maple information, including the history of maple, maple collection and production technologies, and a maple recipe collection.

(left to right) Dr. Tardiff, Dr. Bois, Dr. Marvin, and Dr. Taylor

The highlight of this portal is the Maple Research Collection, which offers access to digitized primary resources that document the history of maple research at the University of Vermont. In collaboration with the UVM Center for Digital Initiatives, this collection includes the University of Vermont Agricultural Extension bulletins on maple research spanning 1890-1988. The collection also includes a selection of photographs from the Proctor Maple Research Center, taken between 1948-1957, that document the construction of the field station’s first sugarhouse, as well as their sugar bush and early maple experiments.

Adding to the depth of what is available digitally, the UVM Department of Special Collections displayed a wealth of historically, scientifically and culturally unique maple material in its 2010 “It’s Always Maple Time in Vermont” exhibit.

Check out the Maple in Special Collections (Flickr Slideshow). 

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Recipes From a 9,000-Year-Old History in Oaxaca, Mexico

Posted by Cynthia Belliveau  |  April 17, 2012

A concinera in Oaxaca, Mexico

I can hear the clacking of the looms long before I arrive at Pastora’s place.  Vida Nueva is a women’s rug cooperative nestled in the small Zapotec village of Teotitalan de Valle, Mexico.  Pastora is the head of the cooperative, which has 14 women weavers as members.  They make beautiful wool rugs reminiscent of Navajo weavings, but with more ancient symbols from their 9,000-year history.  The vivid colors are made from plant dyes and the famous red color from the cochineal larvae that cohabitates on the Nopales cactus.

The colors are as vibrant as the foods these women create; the interlinking weave of each rug as complex, yet intrinsically understood, as the recipes that have been passed down here, from generation to generation.

I am here in Oaxaca teaching a course called “Food, Culture and Health” with students from the University of Vermont.  Our role here is simple, but profound: We are recording recipes from these women in order to share them with English speakers, with our world.  My students are collecting the recipes by observing the women in their homes.

With comals over wood fires the women roast peppers, cacao beans, tomatoes, and corn kernels. On their metates, they grind the corn, canella, garlic, and fresh and dried peppers to a fine grain or paste.  In the cauldrons, they simmer black beans and chicken caldo.  Their facile muscle memory creates a “flow,” a choreography comprised of flawless, sub-conscious movements in food preparation passed down from mother to daughter for thousands of years.

Our UVM students engaged in recipe testing

You see, these recipes have never been written down because they never needed to be.  These “recipes” are ways of knowing – they make up a language that moves raw ingredient from the milpa to the plate – and we were there, generationally de-skilled Americans, to write down recipes for a blog site.

Chilies

Before I share the recipes, let me share what I learned as I watched these adept concineras.

  • The women of Vida Nuevo know nothing about measurements.  They eyeball everything with a precision developed through years of practice.
  • The students of UVM know nothing about measurement – as in how many teaspoons in a tablespoon, or cups in a pint, or ounces in a pound, let alone knowing anything about the metric system. The sad part is that they also have no generational practice.
  • A full boil requires thicker logs, about four 5 inches in diameter.
  • Simmer requires thinner sticks about four 2 inches and about 2 feet long (so they can stick out of the fire and be removed to control the temperature).
  • Dry roasting cacao or dried peppers requires some thick switches that burn quickly and heat the comal up just enough to roast gently.

  • Beans simmering

    Grinding something to a powder or paste requires major upper body strength and long hours on one’s knees.

  • There is no substitute for wood fire roasting, toasting or simmering.
  • Throwing a plum tomato into the ash of the fire to blister makes a dazzlingly delicious salsa roja.
  • Thickening beans with roasted ground corn give a texture and taste to the beans that should not be missed.
  • The concineras taste continually by spooning a tiny drop on the palm of the thumb.
  • Writing down recipes to capture the action and exactitude of the preparation is extremely difficult.

Besides a 7.4 level earthquake which shook the very ground on which we walked, we stood while watching pepper-roasting under a corrugated metal roof. We managed to capture, test and write down the recipes with great success.

Our taste test was a huge success

Here is one recipe for a delicious dessert:

Dulce de Manzana

  • 4½ pounds apples (small and soft, approximately 20 apples)
  • 3½ ounces canela (10 inches total)
  • 9 ounces of sugar
  • ½ gallon water

Cut four vertical slits in each apple (more for large apples). Place apples, canela, sugar, and water in pan and place on stove over high heat. Bring to a boil. Boil mixture for approximately two hours. Drain and discard canela. Serve apples warm.

Review all of the recipes that we collected.

Our UVM recipe recorders and the women of Vida Neuvo

Pastora and her group of weavers and cooks approve of our contribution, so please try some of them and contact Vida Nueva with your reviews!

Which recipe will you try first? Share your experience with us in the comments section.

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Why We Decided to Blog

Posted by Cynthia Belliveau  |  April 3, 2012

Cynthia Belliveau

Welcome to the UVM Food Feed, a blog that brings together the voices and expertise of the University of Vermont on a complicated and complex area of study, but one that affects us all – food.

We invite you here to gather knowledge about our food system and talk to us about your point-of-view, questions, and thoughts – all in order to improve our lives, and the lives of others. We want to bring together people who are passionate about re-creating our food system to make it more sustainable in its practice and more equitable in its access.

Knowledge is the vital ingredient we all need. It’s how we begin to understand not only where and how food gets to our plates, but also how it affects our health, our economy, our environment and our social world. I think you will quickly realize that everything is connected when it comes to food. It’s a mouthful!

Like other blogs out there, we’ll cover the tough topics: factory farms, obesity, loss of farms, migrant workers, food miles, scarcity, access, hunger, diet-related disease, loss of cooking knowledge, loss of diversity, GMOs, the Farm Bill, consolidation of supply chains – and on and on. I won’t lie — it will get depressing.  We will delve into the scary, but we’ll also serve up solutions. I’m fortunate to work with some truly smart and inspiring people here at the University of Vermont and the State of Vermont, who care deeply about these issues and have compelling alternative plans.

My role as a blogger will be to make observations about aspects of our food system and its relation to our global food supply. I come at it from a unique perspective: I’m from the front lines of the food world. I owned my own restaurant and taught at a culinary school before coming to the University. I travel extensively for work and pleasure, and study food ways with a passion. This background, matched with my academic role, makes me an ideal conduit to access and present heady information in a digestible way (pun intended).

I alluded to our problems above. Let me provide clarity on just how serious it is and why my colleagues and I have urgency to blog: There are nearly 7 billion people who need to eat. We have a global system that degrades our land, our health, and our humanity through short-sighted practices and policies that benefit a few at the top. In order to change this, a regional approach is necessary – an approach that is from the ground up, literally and figuratively; a more distributed system that’s innovative and proven to be workable, sustainable and inclusive.

So how do we begin to make sense of all this?

Here’s how: We created a frame by dividing the entire food system into 4 elegant quadrants. I know it’s bold to reduce something so big into just 4 areas, but let me explain: The 4 areas are environmental, economic, health, and social. These categories are wide enough for many interpretations, but narrow enough to allow us to focus.

Our guest bloggers will write from one or two of the frames (they do overlap all the time). When we discuss a particularly difficult issue, using this frame will help us create common reference points to keep the conversation from drifting, or devolving into murkiness.

We have a problem. The current American food system is ecologically, economically, and energetically unsustainable. Vermont and the University of Vermont have some answers.  Our people are positive deviators (see definition below) and ambitiously knowledgeable about how to create a healthy food system that can feed a hungry planet.

Read on. I’m excited to launch this blog for UVM and for you.

(Just in case you need some clues about vocabulary here is a quick glossary of terms for you to get up to speed.)

*Glossary of Terms:

(f)OOD SYSTEM Includes the whole ecosystem from the biological to socioeconomic processes and relationships involved in the production, distribution, marketing, preparation and consumption of food.

(r)EGIONAL FOOD SYSTEM Why? The current food system in economic terms is efficient and plentiful but there is increasing concern that this system is not working, in fact is seriously breaking down.  The increasing consolidation of power within the food industry (from seed to plate) has contributed to persistent food recalls, environmental degradation, obesity and hunger, and food shortages,  to the point where many people are now interested in finding ways to redistribute this power though a regional food system approach.

(s)USTAINABLE The capacity to endure; the long-term maintenance of responsibility, which has environmental, economic, and social dimensions.

(r)ADICAL Thoroughgoing or extreme; especially as regards change from accepted or traditional forms.

(p)OSITIVE DEVIANCE A behavioral and social change based on the observation that in any community, there are people whose uncommon but successful behaviors or strategies enable them to find better solutions to a problem than their peers, despite facing similar challenges and circumstances.

 

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