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THE IMPORTANCE OF NATIVE FOODS |
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PERMACULTURALIST ED MENDOZA SHARES HIS KNOWLEDGE
BY CARRIE CLOUGH
Ed Mendoza sorting mesquite with kids
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(Reprinted by permission of author and Edible Ojai magazine, Issue #23, Winter 2008, www.edibleojai.com)
I met Ed Mendoza last fall at a Santa Barbara fundraiser for Indigenous
Permaculture de Aztlan, of which Ed is director and a Permaculture
design instructor. I arrived early at La Casa de la Raza, as I am a
member of the Santa Barbara Permaculture Network and had volunteered to
help out. This gave me a chance to talk with Ed before the festivities
began.
He was unloading many beautiful bags of tepary beans, roasted Pueblo blue corn, an heirloom variety of wheat, salsas and various chiles and chile powders. All of the food had been grown in Arizona and New Mexico, some on his own farm.
As I talked to him, I noticed that he had the kind of quiet wisdom you often find in those who have spent most of their lives with their hands in the soil. He has a kind of thoughtful intensitya natural reserve. It is unusual, however, to meet someone so humble and so peaceful and then to learn about all of their extraordinary gifts.
Ed Mendoza is what some might call a renaissance man. He is a farmer, a poet, a Permaculturalist, an activist, a teacher, an actor and a spiritual leader. A person with all of these talents might be expected to be a largerthanlife character, but that is not what Ed Mendoza is about. He has a deep understanding of where he comes from.
Ed is a descendant of both Mexican and Aztec ancestry. He grew up in Santa Barbara before he settled, about 20 years ago, in Arizona. Growing up in Santa Barbara, Ed learned from his father how to garden. He was about 10 when he started growing his own tomatoes, chiles and radishes. As he grew older, he learned about how to grow plants in different soils and about how to use manure to build stronger, more productive plants.
While Ed was studying agricultural science at Cal Poly, he met Rafael Guerrero, who eventually became his adopted grandfather. Rafael taught Ed how to plant corn in a way he hadn’t connected with plants before. “He taught me how to pray for the corn when I planted it,” Ed remembers.
This spiritual connection with growing food gave him a greater understanding of farming. After earning his degree from Cal Poly, Ed eventually went on to do graduate work in education at Arizona State University.
In 1993, Ed became an agricultural advisor for the Traditional Native American Farmers Association and started training in Permaculture and New Mexico, some on his (PERMAnent agriCULTURE, a design system based on ecological principles for creating sustainable human environments. It was around this time that he started working for the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona, where he was farm manager at the Gila River Juvenile Detention Center. During the seven or eight years he was there, he would work with about 60 kids each year of the 80 who were incarcerated. He would take five at a time out into the field, showing them how to farm and grow crops as well as teaching them aquaculture. Some of these kids had very little selfrespect but oftentimes, when he took them out in the field, he could see dramatic changes in their behavior within a week. They had found a new purpose, which was a deep connection to their own survival.
“Trying to teach these kids, what has been most rewarding to me is when some of them come up to me, years later and now adults, and ask if I have any seeds for them. After all these years, knowing that they are still interested in growing food is my greatest accomplishment.”
Gila River is known for growing alfalfa and cotton, as well as durum wheat that is largely exported to Italy. Ed’s mission gradually became mostly about teaching people, particularly native peoples, about growing food to feed themselves and not just about growing food for profit.
Ed helped to establish the VahKi Cooperative Gardens (or “Casablanca,” meaning “White House”), which consists of members of the O’odham tribe. He is now working in this community one to two days per week, helping them to grow traditional crops and teaching them about nutrition. While encouraging these tribes to build stronger roots by eating more traditional foods, Ed developed a relationship with Native Seeds ( www.nativeseeds.org), whose mission is to conserve and distribute wild and heirloom varieties of agricultural seeds to cultures of the American Southwest and Northwest Mexico.
“Traditional foods have spiritual value, which you sense when you eat them,” Ed said. His work with Indigenous Permaculture de Aztlan has encouraged his travel around the United States, Mexico, Central and South America to assist indigenous peoples to become economically selfsufficient and to reestablish respect for culture, ceremony and the health of the land for future generations.
“Native communities have got to create more farmers,” Ed said. “It’s a question of food sovereignty.”
With the Traditional Native American Farmers Association and with Indigenous Permaculture de Aztlan, Ed has taught Permaculture courses to a number of young students.
“Everywhere you go, farmers are the older generation,” Ed said. “We need to train the young ones, so we can feed ourselves and maintain our traditions.”
Each year, about 25 students complete classes in gardening, nutrition, habitat restoration, water harvesting and solar design. “The kids learn the oral histories of farming in their communities. They work with elders to preserve, revive and perhaps continue to develop the agriculture that has sustained their people for centuries.”
Ed has also partnered with Slow Food and was invited to an International Slow Food conference in Italy, learning farming methods from around the world. He has been invited to Colombia, Thailand and Argentina to demonstrate sustainable farming techniques, and will be teaching a workshop in Baja California in the early part of 2008 on rainwater harvesting. He will also be helping the Seri tribe with their annual mesquite bean harvest.
My boyfriend and I bought some of the roasted Pueblo blue corn atole (finely ground cornmeal) from Ed at the event in October and it is one of the most incredible foods I have ever tasted. I asked him about the process of roasting the corn versus the usual cornmeal you can buy anywhere. Ed said that he had learned how to process corn with the Hopis and the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico, who have been processing corn in a particular way for centuries.
“When the corn is at its peak milky stage, you roast it. In the process of bringing ash to the corn in the roasting process, it adds enzymes to alter the properties in the corn, making it more nutritious.”
I asked him how it was different from masa harina, which is made by boiling the corn with an alkali like limewater (slaked lime), or water mixed with calcium oxide.
“When masa is treated with lime,” he said, “it removes the outer covering of the corn kernel, which is different than what happens when you roast the corn.” This process, called nixtamalization, actually affects the protein structure and increases niacin, making it more nutritious in this sense, but it is not a whole food. It also does not have the flavor of atole, which has a distinctive roasted flavor that is unparalleled. Most commercial masa harina, sadly, is made from genetically modified corn.
Corn, as it exists today, is very different from its distant relative, teosinte. It wouldn’t exist at all without human intervention, which proves just how valuable it is as a calorie crop. Michael Pollan illustrates the prevalence of corn in the modern diet in his recent book The Omnivore’s Dilemma (e.g., corn oil, corn syrup, corn starch, to name a few ubiquitous ingredients). It is the most genetically modified crop in the modern diet, which makes the demand for heirloom or wild varieties of corn so important. Genetically modified corn has no place in our diet and there’s no telling what it can do to alter the human genetic code.
I asked Ed what he thought about corn being used as biofuel and he said he thinks it is eventually going to fade out. Indigenous peoples in underprivileged nations are not going to have a choice in the future about growing food for profit versus growing food for themselves. They will not be able to afford importing food from elsewhere. They will have to know how to feed themselves.
When I asked Ed about his thoughts for the future, he said: “Well, we survived the Spanish Inquisition and we’re revitalizing our spiritual selves. We’re going to continue to survive and bring back the spiritual revival of our people.”
Ed recently won a place in the Writers Place contest for his poem “As the Peaches Come” and has a newly finished manuscript entitled Mud & Blood. He reads often at Art in the Alley in Casa Grande, Arizona, and has read in New York and New Mexico. The following is an excerpt from one of his poems. This poem is a tribute to his adopted grandfather, the late Rafael Guerrero:
I came to your home
You fed my family in your humble wood shack
Overlooking the Pacific Ocean,
It was like my home too
And my daughter, unafraid, took a nap
Secure with warmth
And in time your voice got weaker
But the message strong
You told me to go be with my song
Even though no one might listen
To pray with the blue corn seeds you gave me
You said to me
I am with the eagle as my spirit rises
And I did come home,
David SanchezDad and
Colonel Rafael Grandpa.
We stood strong and even Eddie came around
As we offered grass and earth to the colonels grave
In the “kernel” style we spoke the truth
Carrie Clough is a native Santa Barbaran who has recently moved to Ojai. She is a certified nutritional chef and has her own personal chef business, MANZANITA, specializing in nutritious cuisine. With a great love of native plants and seasonal produce, she seeks to meld the two worlds of ecology and gastronomy into one beautiful, edible tapestry. Visit www.manzanitachef.com .
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