Mexico's heirloom corn strains are resurging amid more demand

This reminds me: I&#x27;m currently reading &quot;At Home&quot; (Bill Bryson), and he says that the mystery of how ancient peoples managed to turn teosinte into something worth growing and eating. The scholarly research, e.g. [1] seems to be about maize <i>spread</i>, which is interesting, but it begs the question of how and why they made it into maize in the first place.<p>Even more amusing, he says there was a conference at the Univ. of Illinois in 1969 on this, and it was so contentious (even getting personal at times) that no papers resulted.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;Ub586" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;Ub586</a>

There was a corn variety that was semi-recently discovered to have a symbiotic relationship with bacteria which provides nitrogen to the corn plant, thus eliminating the need to use nitrogen fertilizer. It&#x27;s currently in development to be commercialized, and I&#x27;m sure some geneticists are already trying to splice other crops to gain the same ability.<p>There is a rich diversity of crops around the world that need examination, you never know what you&#x27;ll find.

The article indirectly references the company Masienda (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;masienda.com" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;masienda.com</a>). A lot of the restaurants in the US using heirloom corn (including every restaurant in the article) are getting it in part through Masienda. But Masienda also sell masa direct to consumer and I highly recommend it!

This gives me hope! I was reading some of Dianna Kennedy&#x27;s (&quot;The Julia Child of Mexico&quot;) books and she goes into some detail of the loss of heirloom varieties of different crops in Mexico due to cheap imports. The peppers were especially affected; the local Mexican industry was inundated by imports from China, which were often not even the pepper which it was advertised to be. This had a severe impact on the local pepper production, many of which depended on local microclimates for cultivation and are not available outside that particular region of Mexico.

What choice do they have? The US subsidizes corn massively, and dumps it tariff-free into Mexico. This is like micro-brews, but corn.

I wish that the &quot;nixtamal&quot; precooked form of corn would be more widely available in Europe. It really is a superior product compared to plain corn flour - I didn&#x27;t really like most corn-based dishes before I tried it.

Has anyone grown heirloom varieties in their home garden and is it worthwhile, e.g. does it taste good or is it more for the nostalgia factor?

If you want to try some (in the US), I highly recommend Masienda: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;masienda.com" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;masienda.com</a>. Expensive but flavorful.

One of the best things of traveling to Peru is to taste their enormous variety of corn and potatoes. We see how bland our diet really is.

native people in that area had a special relationship to corn for centuries before the arrival of the West. Short story is that corn was an early &quot;science&quot; target for genetically modified strains. A rough analogy to the conflict might be &quot;vegetarian civilization considers cows sacred for centuries; new rulers decide cattle branding and breeding control are just commerce&quot; .. something like that.. there is an emotional and cultural relationship to food, and long term residency in a place, that does not show up in commerce.

Interesting, I just met a group starting a co-op around heirloom varieties of plants etc. and promoting them &#x2F; selling food products made from them.