TORTILLAS

The traditional Mexican tortilla begins with a quantity of corn (maize) grains that soak overnight in a container of water in which lime has been added. During this time they swell and soften, and the lime not only causes the kernels' indigestible skin, or seed coat, to slough off, but also imparts to the corn a high level of calcium, increases the availability of iron to the human body, and liberates niacin for the body's use. When the resulting hominylike kernels are thoroughly rinsed, the moist, soft, puffy corn kernels are ground into a moist, cream-colored paste called masa. The masa is formed into thin discs that then are baked on a dry (no oil or grease) hot-plate usually referred to as a comal. The resulting baked item is a tortilla, the "bread" of traditional Mesoamerican cultures. The average Mexican meal is unthinkable without a pile of tortillas being handy. I eat them everyday, too.

But, the world of tortillas is changing. Especially in northern Mexico and in larger cities, many Mexicans are abandoning tortillas for spongy, wheat-based white-bread. Also, nowadays many corn tortillas are made from very finely ground, degerminated dry corn sold in packages as cornmeal. Commercially it's known as Maseca. Maseca looks and feels more like wheat flour than cornmeal bought in the US for making cornbread, but it tastes different. In the ubiquitous little family-operated tortilla-baking shops called tortillarías, every morning in nearly every Mexican community, tortillas are turned out by the thousands, and nowadays most of those tortillaría-made tortillas are baked from masa made not from corn kernels soaked overnight in lime water, but by mixing bags of dry Maseca with water until the masa has the right consistency.

My rancho Maya friends tell me that in backwoods, traditional little Ek Balam about 80% of the families -- where most older women wear traditional huipeles, and some younger ones -- still eat traditional homemade tortillas. However, in nearby Temozón, which is too small to have a stoplight but large enough to support at least the four tortillarías I've visited, about 80% of the families now eat Maseca-based, tortillaría produced tortillas. In larger towns with stoplights, fairly few families enjoy homemade tortillas.

To me, Maseca tortillas are anemic and tasteless compared to tortillas handmade from traditional masa. However, Mexicans buy them for the same reason I do: Nobody in the family wants to spend the significant amount of time and effort needed to bake homemade tortillas every morning. It's much easier, and cheaper if you place a value on the labor, to buy tortillaría-made ones.

All this is understandable and fits with how human culture evolves everyplace, inexorably toward doing things with greater efficiency of time and energy use, usually with a corresponding loss of everyday life's homey texture.

Here's another feature of the tortilla story I find worth thinking about: Most people I know from the US regard all tortillas -- even homemade ones -- as too bland and tasteless to fool with.

This is understandable, too, for the US diet -- and more and more the Mexican diet, too -- is heavy on processed foods in which additives provide industrial-strength tastes that simply blow away all subtle, nuanced flavors such as those a good tortilla brings to the table. Taste buds continually subjected to heavy dosages of chemical "flavor enhancers" become desensitized. It's the same way with all the senses: Too much stimulation leads to desensitization.

So, what happens in a society where everything bombards people all the time at high intensity -- tastes, odors, sounds, undisciplined feelings of all kind, and mass-media-disseminated thoughts all in heavy doses mingled promiscuously, creating a continually pressing roar of sensory white-noise? Might not there be something in the human spirit that absolutely needs features of life that only the most humble and understated of sensations can offer? What if the sense of rootedness, of feeling like you're part of a healthy community, of having a sense of self-worth and focus in your life... all are rooted in something that only generous measures of quietness, peace and steady self discipline can provide?

Just to have something to think about, the question can be asked what might be done if someone were to decide to reorient his or her life toward simpler, more subtle and nuanced, and meaningful things. How can the desensitization that already has taken place be undone, to enable the body and spirit to register and benefit from softer stimuli?

When I became a vegetarian in my late teens, at first all non-flesh foods were tasteless. But in a few weeks, new tastes and aromas I didn't know existed spontaneously arose in unforeseen places, such as fresh carrots. Same when I stopped eating highly processed foods. When I got rid of my car and decided to live where cars weren't needed, before long I fond myself spending much less money, and with more time to do what made me feel good, and made sense to me. On and on I could go, but you get the drift, and I suspect that on some level everyone already knows all this, just that our society makes it hard to make such choices, and family and neighbors don't like for us to be different.

Still, it seems to me that the reorientation being considered here is worth thinking about, and can be accomplished one step at a time, always consciously and purposefully walking toward the sunrise of simplicity, peace and self realization.