NEO-GATHERERS: Nopalitos (various ways), tunas, pulses, chicatana ants, and coffee-roasting.
Cooking Heroines Part II
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Skining nopales to eat their meat: overcoming the challenge of its thorns: tackling-on the desguised attack, proper of the ahuauhtli who defend the sweet, juicy pulp of the tunas —are the deeds of a town not only hungry, but ingenious; not only frugivorous, but daring. And surgical. If it had not already been stated by the skill they show to flay others in the beautiful ceremony of the tlacaxipehualiztli, enough would have been evidenced through the proficency in which the Mexicas dared to eat that tuna and that nopal —with out stinging their hand. Or… even if they did.
Salvador Novo
I saw an image on Instagram this week that keeps coming back to my mind; it was a harrowingly beautiful scene about a woman diligently peeling potatoes on a balcony with her daughter by her side, and a devastated city of Beirut in the background. It was taken in 1982 by photographer Steve McCurry, but it could have been taken last week, and the determination of the woman to put food in the mouth of her children, in spite of whatever terror surrounds her, would have been exactly the same. It is about the universality of pain, and feminine resilience, and human nature.
Women nurture; it is not a cultural construct or social imposition: it is natural instinct (other animals do it, and they don’t give a shit about gender issues). As I referenced in last week’s newsletter, within hunter-gatherer societies, women were responsible for 80 percent of food provisioning. “Because food collection required a thorough knowledge of plant and animal growth, maturation, and fruition or reproduction,” says scholar Vandana Shiva (Staying Alive. Women, Ecology and Development, 2016), “women have been credited with the discovery of domestication and cultivation of plants and animals. Food-gathering inventions attributed to women are the digging stick (precursor of the plow), the carrying sling, the sickle, and other knives. The mortar, the pounder, the drying, roasting, grinding, fermenting technologies, the storage of food in baskets, or day-lined storage pits are all inventions connected with food processing and preservation that are still alive in self-provisioning societies”, which is the case of the YouTube traditional cocineras whose recipes are portrayed in these series of newsletters (read the first one here): they preserve the same kind of relationship with their surroundings and their responsibility as main food providers.
As you watch some of the videos, you realize that a majority of ingredients that these women use in their recipes, specifically the ones that yield the most nutrients, are self-provided; either gathered, grown or domesticated. It is as their home-centered economies where a spontaneous reinterpretation of overlapping systems: they are gatherers, they are farmers, they are merchants, they are employees, they are receivers of remesas (it is common in their communities to have relatives working in the US as migrants), and they seem to have successfully incorporated into the online business (I seriously think we should take them as an example).
These four domestic-economies are probably a very good representation of what anthropologist Anna Tsing describes as “collaborative survival” and “patchiness” (The Mushroom at the End of the World, On the Possibility of life on Capitalist Ruins, 2017), and what she means when she talks about thinking through “precarity” to change our perception of social analysis. There is nothing about the lives of these cocineras that resembles poverty to me (at least not in a Western-minded point of view), on the contrary, but they do know a lot about working hard to get-by, about negotiating with change without letting go of what has worked for centuries, about resistance, and about how life is not about controlling nature but adapting to it.
According to anthropologists Richard B. Lee, and evolutionary biologist Irven DeVore (Man the Hunter, 1968), of the estimated two million years that cultural women and man have existed, they have survived as hunter-gatherers 99 percent of that time. It is only in the last 10 thousand years that we have developed agriculture, domestication, industry, and technology. And, if we fail to come up with a plan on how to revert the damage that we have inflicted upon nature or find other sound alternatives for survival soon, “interplanetary archaeologists of the future will classify our planet as one in which a very long stable period of small-scale hunting and gathering was followed by an apparently instantaneous efflorescence of technology and society leading rapidly to extinction”.
The videos that I have selected for this newsletter are a combination of recipes, plants, and food-gathering activities…
Olguita (Teotitlán del Valle, Oaxaca)
Collecting, cleaning, and cooking nopales.
Chintextle (chile paste with dried shrimp) and nopal agua fresca.
Soul-reconstructing nopales and smoked fish soup (I reproduced it and added some annotations below).
Lupita (Costa Chica, Guerrero)
Hierba mora (pulse) a la mexicana.
Carne asada, nopales, guacamole and cebollitas.
Tarcila (Michoacán)
Chilacayota preserve (variety of wild pumpkin) and atole blanco.
Collecting coffee, toasting, grinding, and making café de olla.
A walk through her beautiful flower and herb garden.
Lupita (Mexico City/Central Valleys of Oaxaca)
Fish and crab stew with nopales.
Recollection of pitayas (red tunas) in Santa María Xochitlán, Oaxaca.
SOPA DE NOPALES Y PESCADO AL HORNO
Olguita makes this súper healthy soup with a kind of smoked fish that is popular in many parts of Oaxaca (follow her recipe), she gives some options for substitution. I used a combination of a dried fish from Oaxaca that I bought from Milpa Oaxaca (a non-profit organization that works with local producers) and an oven-baked red snapper filet.
I also substituted the green peas for fava beans and added cacahuazintle corn because it is in-season.
TUNA PALETA HELADA
(makes 6 small paletas)
Since tunas are also in-season I made paletas heladas…
You’ll need:
4 tunas
Around 1 cup of water.
Blend. Fill the molds. Freeze.