213: Turning into Corn

Some of you have been asking for family updates. Here they are:

Sergio:
Sergio joined the U.S. Marines as a new recruit four weeks ago. Although this has been a near-lifelong dream for him, it's been tough going. Not surprisingly, he writes that the military-issue boots hurt his feet (by contrast, he only wore sneakers and sandals in Africa); that the heat and humidity have become a daily torture (quite a change from the dry weather back home, especially given the rigorous work-outs every day), and above all, his long and unpronoucable name is killing him... (Poor guy! Unlike Elsita who took up our offer a few years ago to legally change her name, Sergio chose to retain the hyphenated double-surname we mistakenly inflicted on our children. You can imagine - Much as we loved the egalitarian ideology of our approach at the time, now we feel very guilty for the hardship we caused!)

In general, Sergio reports having a lot of second-thoughts about the path he has chosen, but at the same time he is determined to make it through the process. Bravo to him! This would be no mean feat. Within the first three weeks of Boot Camp, his group of recruits already dropped from over 80 to 72 -- with three-quarters of the training still in front of them.

Elsita:
Meanwhile, what we hear from Elsita is absolute delightful. You can read her whole blog at Elsita's Blog, but we have excerpted a few paragraphs below (with her permission):

Corn, or “Maíz”, as it is called in Spanish, is the staple food of El Salvador... In fact, during the course of my time here in Central America, the presence of corn has been almost overwhelming in my day to day life (in a good way). As I may have mentioned before, my work placement is with a Salvadoran non-governmental organization in the field of sustainable agriculture and food security. From what I can tell, my work here basically involves becoming a corn farmer.

At the moment, in the rural communities with which my organization works, farmers buy hybrid corn seed to plant every year. Hybrid corn is nice because it is bred to give high yields, resistance to diseases and other desirable characteristics. Due to a biological phenomenon known as hybrid vigour, the crossing of two inbred corn lines results in the first hybrid generation showing the best of the parents´ most desirable characteristics. Breeders manipulate the pollination process of inbred lines in order to achieve this. However, in the second generation, mediocre characteristics of the grandparent corn resurface, so yield and disease resistance decrease. What this means is that seeds collected and replanted by farmers for the next year do not become particularly productive plants, so the farmers inevitably become dependent on purchasing the seed every agricultural cycle. In addition to this, they also must purchase fertilizers, insecticides and herbicides that go along with the hybrid seed, and as you might imagine, the costs add up quickly. Why do farmers buy hybrid seed? Apparently, seed companies operate intense propaganda schemes that lead to the notion that hybrid corn is intrinsically better than open pollinated varieties. Similarly, transgenic (genetically modified) corn is also on the rise. It is the most expensive seed available, and also thought to be better than other varieties. Transgenic corn also requires chemical inputs (fertilizers etc), and it is genetically engineered to not produce viable seed for replanting, so again, farmers depend on buying the seed every year.

The overarching goal of my job is to find sustainable alternatives to all of these practices. My main project is to figure out ways to productively breed Creole Corn (a non-hybrid variety), or to put it more specifically, to figure out how to select the best, strongest, healthiest seed for replanting next year. My first assignment at work was the reading of a 400 pg manual in Spanish entitled ``El Maíz en los Tropicos: Mejoramiento y Produccion´´ (Corn in the Tropics: Improvement and Production). Slow reading but fun stuff. Since then, I have done lots of online research, and put together a short manual with descriptions of possible techniques. In the upcoming months, I will be going into the field and testing out the theory. Hopefully the experiments will then be the basis for development of solid breeding methods that can be used by future farmers as an alternative to buying expensive hybrid seed and related inputs. My biggest worry aside from actually carrying out this project, is making sure that it can be sustainable after I leave, given that I´m here for only one harvest. Thus, I want to work very closely with the farmers who know a lot more about planting corn than I do, incorporate their normal cultivation methods in the Creole Corn experiments, and through that process hopefully generate a lot of interest in the results.

And in case you thought I would gloss over the most well-known symbol of Latin American cuisine you will not be disappointed as I further describe my food adventures. I refer of course to the tortilla – the staple, the bread, the unfaltering companion to all meals, the beginning and the end, the little yellow disc of warm toasted goodness. Between the tortillas, the pupusas, the elotes (corn on the cob), the atols (hot corn drink), the tamales (doughy corn dish) and other popular meals, I rapidly realized that not only am I turning into a corn farmer, but I am in fact, turning into corn myself.

But I digress… The tortilla! The tortilla is an unleavened circular corn-bread that is hand-flattened by women everywhere I have visited so far. Unlike the North American tortilla, it is slightly thicker and much smaller. Within my first week of cooking at home, I embarked on my very own food adventure: trial-and-error tortilla making. With disbelieving roommates in attendance, I started my first tortilla attempt by slowly adding water to “harina de maíz” - corn flour – to reach the consistency that I had admiringly observed at street stands all over. So far so good: I rolled the dough into balls, then flattened them into discs and fried them in oil. Very tasty, but wrong! In fact, there is no need for the oil frying. Locals place tortillas on “comals” - large sheets of metal, heated from below that permit tortilla-making by the dozens. Now I leave the tortilla dough on the pan at low heat, flip over a few times and then eat the tortillas hot with veggies, meat, and sauce. Practice makes perfect: My roommates have concluded that I am genetically predisposed to know how to cook tortillas.

Bernd, myself, and more:
We’re doing well. We found a beautiful camping spot last weekend and enjoyed some great vistas – also an onslaught of curious creatures known (of all things) as the Namibian Corn Cricket. Their six-legged coordination and bobbing antennae were amazing to witness, as you can see from the photo below.

Next week I'm off to New York, Washington and El Salvador for a 3-week combination of work and vacation (the latter being girly-girly and mother-daughter stuff – just fabulous!). This is Bernd's gift to me after his trip to Mongolia and Elsita's graduation last year -- but I'll miss him a lot.

Finally, I want to update you on a completely different matter: You may not believe it but our Kosher-meat rabbi from Israel is back in the country (you remember: the one who wanted to convert all the local abattoirs into producing kosher meat for export and then ran afoul of the political authorities). Now he decided to export long curlicue kudu-antelope horns to become shofarim (for blowing on Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur in the synagogue) – apparently, with great initial success. Fortunately, he has given up his bid to become Chief Rabbi of Namibia, so this time everyone is happy. (Except maybe for the kudu, although he only takes the horns from those who already died.)