Intact Foodways
One of the main reasons I want to shift to a land-based lifestyle is to have the ability to grow food and other useful plants.
When I used to interpret for unaccompanied Tzotzil minors in government-run shelters, their counselors would ask them questions like, "What do you like to do for fun? Let’s say you have the day off; what do you do?" Without fail, these youngsters would answer that what they did for enjoyment was cook and eat together with friends and family. “I would go with my family or friends to get stuff to make a nice chicken soup, make the meal and eat it.” To which the follow up would be, “That’s it? There’s nothing else you would do?” And the answer would be No, that’s it. To the American social workers’ ears, this was scarcely believable in its humble simplicity as an activity one would choose above others. To westerners, food is seemingly just an everyday necessity, nothing special, nothing especially emotionally satisfying about it. Yet to their wards, hailing from a culture with intact foodways, the preparation and enjoyment of traditional, health-giving food is still the center of family and community life.
Consider how much people say they want community in the west, and yet have no actual reason to show up for it. It’s actually enough for most people to give lip service and say that they value community, because it’s really not clear what it means or where it exists anymore, and one of the reasons for that is the loss of connection to subsistence lifestyles (!!).
We modern people have too many options of what to do with our time and this keeps us separate in a way people whose lives center on the same basic (food) needs are not. If you live in a village where everyone has to boil corn, grind corn and make tortillas daily, those tasks can be done together; they bring people together. If your work is something wholly unique and your interests are your own to choose and pursue, what is there left that will bring you towards others in a consistent way?
For example, in the village I am most familiar with in Chiapas, the vast majority of village members have the same daily routine and recurring tasks that center on food (corn, more specifically). Women rise early to grind the corn they boiled with lime the night before, and turn the masa into tortillas that they cook on a round griddle over an open fire. This will be the staple food for the family for the day, eaten in quantity at every meal where it can accompany beans, greens, and all other foods. Because the women are going to the mill and making tortillas at the same time every day, they also tend community and family relationships in their diurnal rotations, and have a lifestyle in which it is possible to do their common work together.
The more specialized work becomes in more “advanced” societies, the less we are able to be together and take joy in the essential tasks of life–which used to be growing or gathering, processing and cooking food. In intact Mayan foodways, tortillas are made fresh everyday from corn that is grown, harvested and processed usually by the family in whose bellies it ends up. Corn is considered so especially nourishing and strength-giving that Mayans say humans were originally made from corn. In that sense, eating the staple food at each meal renews the very substance that we are, reminds us and reminds our bodies of how to be human. It is satisfying like no other food and brings people together not only in the eating of it, but in the cultivating and the making of it. At all stages of the corn’s life cycle, people also come together cyclically.
Many times during my fieldwork, women said to me, "Your life is easy. You don't have to turn out tortillas every day." And for that ease, possible though a life centered on money, we pay in isolation.
