The mill row; a story between two narratives

October 20, 2022

The mill row; a story between two narratives

*What is in parenthesis corresponds to the pillars of the definition of food sovereignty that we detail later in this text. We did this exercise to make theory visible in action.

The row of the mill in Santa Ana Tlacotenco, a rural area of Mexico City (3. Localize food production*), it gets bigger. Santa Ana is the region with the highest number of miles in the Milpa Alta delegation. Milpa Alta is the only region in Mexico City that retains the modality of communal land as a form of land tenure. This means that the community members of Milpa Alta own the land and therefore decide what happens to it (4). No privatization of land*). This condition is perhaps the reason for the stories I heard from people waiting in line at the mill, and even that the mill itself could exist.

Behind me, I see a lady carrying a gallon bucket full of red corn that has already been nixtamalized (5. Autonomous technologies*). When I saw the red color of their corn, very typical of this area, I decided to ask what I was going to do with it. In the group to which I belong, we believe that red corn is not good for making tortillas. I felt that it was a good time to demystify our beliefs or perhaps to make sure of the veracity of that argument. “I use it for everything, for tortilla, for tamale, for atole, it's the same, it works the same, what changes is only the flavor,” he answers me and we keep waiting.

I keep thinking. Maybe it has to do with the way in which we are nixtamalizing what causes our red tortillas to break. It is possible that this technology is related to the elasticity of the dough. Less lime or more lime? or maybe it's the heat. More heat or less? I can't find an answer. How will I know the point of my nixtamal if my hands didn't grow up learning to feel the elasticity of the dough. How will I feel its humidity? When will I know how to recognize the “point of the dough” and know when to stop kneading it? (5). Transfer of knowledge*).

I can see that the lady is also immersed in her thoughts. He turns to look at me and says, all of a sudden: “well, sometimes the color does matter, my sister says that blue dough is not good for tamale”. I laugh to myself, because I'm waiting for ten kilos of blue dough to make pasta colada tamales.

My friend Juan de SEXTO once told me that the key to a good nixtamal is the relationship you have with your corn. I then ask him about the origin of his. “This corn is from my milpa, from what I have left from last year; this year we didn't plant because we saw that the rains weren't coming, I only planted a few seeds in my yard and in fact they didn't grow, they stayed small” (2. Native seed ownership, sustainable lifestyles*).

One more lady joins the conversation. “I've been planting since February, as my grandmother taught my mother and as my mother taught us, and the rain never came, my bushes didn't grow, only a few managed to give corn. That's where the moisture managed to accumulate.”

[...] are not responsible for the climate change, but they suffer its consequences more than those who promote it.

One of the great contributions of the Milpa Alta lineage is terrace technology. Since pre-Hispanic times, this technique has been used as a way to plant on slopes, prevent soil erosion and contain moisture in the water. In other words, creating terraces is a way of making the mountain arable land. It is said that in the past, up to two annual harvests were achieved due to compost generation capacity, reliable rainfall and moisture storage thanks to this technology. Nowadays, many times an annual harvest is not achieved (6. Collaboration with ecosystems*).

When you go, you can still notice the hill full of terraces, some abandoned; others planted.

Coincidentally, next to the mill is a Maseca tortillería, the industrialized mass that dominates the Mexican market (3. dumping -put a price below the cost to hog the market- for subsidized farming*). All decisions are political and contribute to the care of the territory, communities and our own bodies. Those of our collective lean towards the mass that the miller produces with the seeds of his milpa, cultivated in the region in a traditional way. Maseca's come from devastating practices, from monocultures that have ended diversity, from an intensive use of pesticides and herbicides that pollute land and water, and that at the same time, go completely hand in hand with the excessive use of fossil energy. The latter is a form of subsidized agriculture that floods the market for cheap corn and destroys forms of life rooted in the earth.

It's important to listen to what women tell us.

Stories are not trivial, they are the transmission of knowledge.

Human beings tell stories and stories tell us back.

With my hands carrying blue corn dough, I left the mill with new colorful perspectives. The pasta colada tamales were delicious, we still couldn't make a red tortilla that doesn't break.

Food security and sovereignty, vulnerability and good practices

Before continuing, it is pertinent to bring to hand two global concepts that have evolved and complicated our understanding of the right to food, and thus understand how this particular narrative is encompassed in institutional discussions, and how something so everyday is at the same time a space of resistance to government discussions when it comes to addressing policies surrounding the way of eating.

While one is neutral in its definition, the other is inclined to self-organization and local decision-making.

On the one hand we have the Food safety, which happens when: “all people, at all times, have economic and physical access to enough safe and nutritious food to ensure their caloric needs and food preferences, and thus lead a healthy and active life” (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), 2006).

On the other hand, we have the food sovereignty, whose definition I want to share here is in accordance with The Six Pillars of Food Sovereignty, during Nyéléni's declaration in 2007 (Food Secure Canada, 2012):

It focuses on food for people by: a) placing food needs at the center of policies; b) insisting that food is more than just a commodity.

Value food suppliers by: a) supporting sustainable livelihoods; b) respecting the work of all food suppliers.

Localize food systems by: a) reducing the distance between suppliers and consumers; b) rejecting the dumping and inappropriate food aid; c) resisting dependence on remote and irresponsible corporations.

Place control at the local level: a) place it in the hands of local food suppliers; b) recognize the need to inhabit and share territories; c) reject the privatization of natural resources.

Promote knowledge and skills by: a) building on traditional knowledge; b) using research to support and transmit this knowledge to future generations; c) rejecting technologies that undermine local food systems.

Working with nature by: a) maximizing ecosystem contributions; b) improving resilience; c) rejecting energy-intensive, monoculture, industrialized and destructive production methods.

It is important to realize that the most marked differences between these two concepts are the concern for the forms of food production and the interest in conserving power. While one is neutral in its definition, the other is leaning towards self-organization and local decision-making. These last understandings need to be reviewed with great relevance, since the monopoly of power of large multinational food production companies can, through Lobbying political (pressing for certain interests thanks to economic capacities), permeating public policies with the flag of food security.

It is important to mention that the mission of FAO since its creation is and has been to end the hunger of all beings that inhabit the planet - but understanding this mission much more rooted in the principles of food security than of sovereignty. Under this banner, public and private policies have been implemented, articulated and also removed. The green revolution is a good example; so is Maseca's change in consumption of criollo and native maize. That is to say, for the sake of food security, a series of measures are implemented that privilege the accumulation of wealth, which threaten food security itself, as well as cultural diversity and the ecosystems that support life on the planet.

Taking this into account, it is extremely important to put two things at the forefront: on the one hand, to highlight the way in which we are producing what we eat, by naming the urgency of finding first and foremost agroecological and regenerative models that collaborate with ecosystems to sustain ecological and cultural diversity. On the other hand, just as a healthy ecological system is needed for food production, a healthy social fabric is needed that allows communal political organization for decision-making that involves decent developments and a counterweight to globalized power, which is destroying the planet and the lives of the people who defend it.

What makes some of us hear the story of the mill and others hear the stories of FAO officials?

Now, if we read the narrative of the mill row from the previous definitions, we can see how in Milpa Alta the pillars addressed by the definition of food sovereignty are fulfilled. What makes this whole situation complicated is that while there is sovereignty, there is no security. And although the people who inhabit Milpa Alta, as well as almost any other territory, are not responsible for climate change, they suffer its consequences more than those who promote it. Just one example is the scarcity of rain. This places them in a situation of vulnerability with regard to their production capacity.

So here the question is: under a changing climate and with the vulnerability that this generates, how can we continue to achieve food sovereignty that guarantees food security? How should we think about food production and the sociobiological relationships that sustain this activity? This is where we most need to emphasize the urgency of political organization, since the easiest solution would be to import genetically modified seeds or ultra-processed food. From experience and from a certain historical memory, we have to remember that in the long run this implies a higher planetary cost and will only continue to worsen the vulnerability we face today. We need to emphasize the regeneration of ecosystems to mitigate climate change. Carry out certain practices such as restoring forests, through supporting communal brigades that work against logging and involving the local community in monitoring their resources; reforest from traditional practices supported by the original language to recognize the memory of a healthy territory; continue to generate terraces (and so on) nature-based solutions) to prevent erosion, safeguard organic matter, contain greater moisture and Take care of the floors; avoid at all costs the expansion of the urban scrub, in which gentrification is generating displaced people who have to move to the suburbs - as in the Milpa Alta case, which is becoming more and more loticized every day - fragmenting land and relationships, so getting involved in campaigns so that the price of housing does not rise is a form of defense of the territory, the one that nourishes us.

It is very important to understand that those who produce Food acts as guardians, caring for and protecting the territory, so it is vitally important to support them to continue to preserve their ways of life through the consumption of their food. Learn traditional recipes to be able to transform corn, to be able to eat the diversity of pumpkins, beans and Non-hegemonic foods it's good practice. Building bridges to provide spaces where they have points of sale, and taking control away from large food distributors in the city, is also true. It is necessary to rethink the transport, distribution and marketing system to give way to traditional productions, as opposed to industrial ones, and also to reduce the amount of pollutants emitted into the atmosphere as a result of the inputs needed to transport food from one side of the country to the other.

On the other hand, we must end the producer/consumer dichotomy, we have to understand that there is nothing farther from a sustainable future than to keep separating these two concepts. The necessary balance in generating food is as easy as a mathematical equation: everything you take away in minerals from the earth we have to return. Every time we eat something and we are not returning concrete wealth to the place of origin, we break that balance, since we are impoverishing the soils. Nowadays, common and harmful ways of returning this mineral are through the extraction of minerals in mines in peripheral countries, producing inorganic fertilizers under a model of depletion of fossil fuels, or stealing fertile land from other territories; in the long run there is a ceiling, an ecosystem inflection point where it is no longer so easy to recover land, so it is imperative to think about public policies that understand the urgency of transforming our waste into concrete wealth, to re-mineralize the earth. There are clear examples such as composting, making organic fertilizers and extracting organic matter from our drains. We have to visualize that our waste is the origin and life of many things.

It is pertinent to imagine new ways of relating to climate uncertainty, which in colloquial terms we know as Don't put all your eggs in one basket, but from a perspective of ecosystem diversity, by thinking about how we can connect different ecosystems based on solidarity and trust networks, and thus manage to distribute climate risk among different peasant communities.

What I mean by sharing the risk: in 2021, at the end of the rainy season, different hurricanes arrived from the Pacific and the Atlantic. This terribly devastating event for the coast allowed the central area of the country, such as the Bajío, to benefit from rains that resulted in greater development of corn, greater collection of water in the subsoil and better pasture for cattle. In this case, the perfect imaginary would be to think about how the coast receives support from the areas that benefited from these climates, assuming that in the future, when the coast has a beneficial production and the Bajío perhaps not so much, the coast can provide support at a time when the center is suffering from droughts. This is sharing climate risk through solidarity networks. It's looking for ways to organize ourselves to transform Biodiversity islands, in archipelagoes of interconnected ecosystems.

Gender Perspective and Food Sovereignty

More than 50% of the food produced globally is produced by women (ETC Group, 2017) However, they own less than 2% of the land in Mexico. In other words, women enter as slave labor, as cheap labor in food production, or they depend on communal land for a decent life. Therefore, the defense of water, forests, concrete wealth, the fight for the non-privatization of land, the fight for the common, is rooted in safeguarding women's lives. In this way, not including them in the definition of food sovereignty - much less think of that of food security - is completely wrong based on the data just given, so there is an urgent need to constantly transform this and all concepts, and to add a gender perspective to encompass the way in which we are managing to feed the world.

It's important to listen to what women tell us. Their daily activities have preserved life and food throughout human history. Caring for women is defending life, it's defending the earth. Stories are not trivial, they are the transmission of knowledge. Human beings tell stories and stories tell us back. Language is the foundation that makes us human. A recursive history of coordinating consensual actions in the history of human interactions results in language as a consequence of this operation (Maturana, 1982, 1988). With language we explain the world to ourselves and from language we configure with others what we want to do with the world in which we live. No word comes up just like that, so every story we hear brings with it worlds, teachings and ways of inhabiting.

The story of the mill row is not trivial. It explains the worlds we are inhabiting. Although we can say that this universe that is the mill row is very particular and corresponds to a very specific area of the country, it is also the same one that is experiencing the consequences that those other worlds have generated. Now I would like to refer to the fact of listening to these stories; to the action of listening to women in line at the mill. This listening is a position in itself, a way of standing before the world.

The anecdotal is also political, and as we know, everyone listens to the stories they want to hear or rather, the stories they can hear. So, What makes some of us hear the story of the mill and others hear the stories of FAO officials? A hierarchical decision? A monetary decision? Eco-friendly? Aesthetics?

In this case, the decisions of each listener - those who choose FAO and those who choose the experiences of the mill line - are contrary and yet, both narratives share the same theme: nutrition. Both work to feed a few and both succeed. Although these stories encompass a whole methodology of pillars created by global institutions, it is their specifications, it is their details, that will allow us to sustain life; the story I decide to hear is nixtamalization as a technology that allows us to transform corn for greater nutrient absorption, the creation of terraces as an agroecological form of production that regenerates soils, the communal memory about rains that allows us to evaluate the true cost of climate change.

It is urgent to start listening to these non-dominant voices, and to safeguard this information to ensure security, sovereignty and the care of the living.

About the author:

Martina Manterola has a degree in Economics from the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico and a diploma in agroforestry systems. Co-founder of “Colectivo Amasijo”, she specializes in analyzing the losses caused by the hierarchization of knowledge in doing and knowing. Within the collective, he develops the project “complex systems of daily life”, an archive of narratives through which he evaluates territorial degradation.

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