Indigenous agroecology & foodways | Amaranth comes home to the milpa

Photographs of Mesoamerican vegetables, fruits, tubers, and grains

courtesy of La Jornada del Campo.

Restoring heritage
cuisines begins with native crops & how we grow them

RETURNING
AMARANTH TO ITS RIGHTFUL PLACE IN THE THREE SISTERS-PLUS COMPLEX

Devon G. Peña | Seattle, WA | April 16, 2017

Today’s post is part of a continuing series on
the discourse and practice of what my colleagues—among them Luz Calvo and
Catriona Esquibel—call the decolonial diet. From our
vantage points as farmers, gardeners, and cooks, the decolonial diet begins with
the native crops we grow in the garden or milpa
(subsistence farm or garden plot). How
we grow them is also a vital factor. For example, annual native crops like
corn, bean and squash are companion plants and should also be cultivated with
perennial biodynamic herbaceous plants. This biodynamic approach is a vital
factor maintaining the ecological health of the soil and thus the nutrient
density and chemical composition of the crops.

                         

Indigenous diets across the first nations of Abya
Yala (Turtle Island) have always been principally plant-powered although
natural meats have also been important, for e.g., wild-caught and pond-raised
fish, deer, javelin, reptiles, hares, turkeys, and other species obtained via hunting
or foraging. A principal element of the plant diet in Mesoamerica has long
included the various species of the Amaranth plant. In Mexico, Amaranthus cruentas (among the Maya) and
A. hypochondriacus (among the Colhua
Mexica) were important sources of balanced proteins and amino acids and were also
considered sacred plants.

The arriving settler colonists, or conquistadors
[sic], allegedly banned the cultivation of this sacred grain by hyperbolically associating
it with human sacrifice. Actually, there may not have been an official edict from
the Crown to ban amaranth from the milpas but religious authorities frowned on
and suppressed the planting of all the varieties which they posited in their
colonial imaginary as a basis for the fabrication of grain cakes mixed with human
blood for sacrifice events (a rare
practice among some religious
authorities in the past).

I have translated a just-released report on the
importance of the resurgence of Amaranth as a cultivar in Mexican milpas which
addresses the obesity and diabetes epidemic in Mexico. It was prepared by two
ethnoscientists from the Mexican Ministry of Health, José Alejandro Almaguer
González and Hernán José García Ramírez and posted to La
Jornada del Campo. The original document of the milpa diet can be
requested via email from: jalejandro.almaguerg@gmail.com.

This report deserves to be widely read and discussed
because it poses several significant issues reminiscent of the so-called Michoacán
Paradigm championed by UNESCO to promote the preservation of Mexico’s
legacy of regional Indigenous cuisines, which the UN group proposes must be
protected in tandem with the defense of the native land base and the
agroecological, ethnobotanical, ethnogastronomical, and spiritual traditions in
which these foodways are embedded.

The new report, prepared by the director of Mexico’s Traditional Medicine and Intercultural
Development department and the deputy director of Complementary Systems of Health Care both in the Ministry of Health, suggests that the crisis of
obesity in Mexico is a by-product of the collapse of the Indigenous diet. In my
view, this seems especially the case rather recently and in many ways dates
back only over the past 20 years or so with the approval of NAFTA which ushered
a flood of fast food merchants of death across Mexico’s foodscapes.

Beyond focusing much needed attention on the
well-studied, and yet widely misunderstood, interrelationship of genes, food
(diet), and culture, the report offers a smart and workable solution—one
involving a return to the Indigenous diets of our antecedent Mesoamerican
civilizations. Basically, they are championing deep food against fast food.
This is a good development, coming from within the federal health ministry.

The ministry’s proposals are based on sound
science but also involve a rare call for the political will to act in the face
of continued disputes over what the authors define as “interculturality” or the
relationship between the criollo-mestizo
racial formation in the Mexican state (a legacy with roots in the perverse
assimilation-recognition policies of indigenismo)
and the survival of the autonomous heritage of Mexico’s diverse first nations among
60+ language family groups.

I note with great interest the list of Mesoamerican
plants in the report that are part of the milpa diet and how these include a
variety of plants with anti-inflammatory and anti-cancer phytochemicals and a
slew of slow-release plant foods that increase resistance to high glycemic index
spikes such as the mucilagenous nopalitos (cacti).

Restoring the milpa diet

José Alejandro Almaguer González* and Hernán José
García Ramírez**

*Director of Traditional Medicine and
Intercultural Development of the Ministry of Health **Deputy Director of
Complementary Systems of Care of the Ministry of Health
jose.almaguer@salud.gob.mx; Educeverhg@hotmail.com

Mexico’s National Health and Nutrition Survey of 2012
(ENSANUT) revealed that there is a prevalence of 73.9 percent of obesity in the
country (64.5 percent in men and 82.8 percent in women) and indicates that one
in three adolescents 12 and 19 years old is overweight or obese. We are first
place in childhood obesity and obesity in adult women.

Due to the magnitude and importance of the cases
of diabetes mellitus, on November 1, 2016, the National Center for Preventive
Programs and Disease Control of the Ministry of Health issued a declaration of
epidemiological emergency.

In order to contribute to a response to this
situation, in the General Directorate of Planning and Health Development of the
Ministry of Health, through the Directorate of Traditional Medicine and
Intercultural Development (DMTyDI), based on its attributions to conduct the
policy of Interculturality in this sector, we are developing and promoting a
healthy and culturally relevant diet proposal that we have called “the milpa
diet.”

This proposal, inspired by the ancestral
knowledge of Mexicans and the diet of the Mediterranean, is a regional food
model recognized by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organization (UNESCO) because it strengthens public health and has a cultural
foundation that favors its application to promotes the values ​​of coexistence.

The milpa diet represents a culturally relevant
diversified diet proposal and is based on our regional culinary tastes and customs; on healthy combinations of Mexican foods; on scientific
research on plant nutritional properties; and evaluated in isolation or when consumed as a whole.
Most are foods of Mesoamerican origin that are based on milpa culture and must be
understood as vital parts of an expanded production system. All this gives a sense of cultural
belonging, which will facilitate wider acceptance.

The objective is to spread a model of healthy
eating that has a positive impact on the health of both healthy people and
those suffering from diseases in which food plays a primordial and sometimes
defining role. Such a model takes into account the availability of food for the
urban or rural population and favors the consumption of Mexican regional foods,
which supports sustainability in production, distribution and supply, with a
reduction in costs.

It consists, in the first place, of favoring the
consumption of all vegetables of Mesoamerican origin which are easily
accessible, more economical, geographically closer,  and culturally appropriate (pumpkin, chile,
nopales, quelites, quintoniles, verdolagas, green beans, romeritos...); Legumes
rich in proteins (beans, lentils, beans, chickpeas); Oilseeds (pumpkin seed,
chia, peanut, pine nut); Fruits (tuna, black sapote, chicozapote, mamey, guava) rich in vitamins, minerals, antioxidants and micronutrients, and
starch-rich tubers (sweet potato, cassava, chayotextle).

The role of whole grains, in particular maize,
preferably nixtamalized, and amaranth, classified as “pseudo-cereal”, are
essential because, combined with other foods, they provide us with a very rich,
varied, healthy diet without the detrimental effects of excessive consumption
of animal protein (especially red meat and sausage) and processed foodstuffs.

The amaranth was consumed throughout Mesoamerica
before the arrival of the Spaniards. As vegetables have properties similar to
spinach; Its seed is rich in high quality proteins (between 14 and 19 percent)
and highlights its abundance in lysine, an amino acid that is rare in other
cereals. It contains vitamins like E, B, B1, B2, B3, and is a rich source of
calcium, iron, folic acid, phosphorus and potassium. Amaranth oil has
properties for the prevention of cardiovascular diseases.

Although there is no evidence that amaranth was
formally forbidden during the Colony, it is estimated that the decrease in its
use may have been due to some kind of censorship on the part of the religious regime because of its use in rituals, in addition Spaniards
showed deep contempt toward this plant because they imagined it as a “bad weed,” calling it “bleda” which is a reference to a crude, wild, and weedy plant.

Fortunately, for about 30 years there has been a
resurgence of amaranth due to its nutritional properties and versatility in the
ways in which it can be used in multiple preparations, for e.g., to make alegría (amaranth and nut wafers flavored with honey and and unsweetened
chocolate); as a seedy cereal; the horchata drink; as flour for baking, or as cooking oil.

For these reasons, the proposal of the milpa diet
promotes the use of amaranth, considering regional differences and affinities.