Is the Genius of Indigenous Agriculture in Decline Due to Fast Food Culture?
The three sisters—corn, beans and squash— and the milpa growing system collide with the modern world
Hola, Amigos! Today is National American Heritage Day, a time to thank those that have tilled the land, nurtured it, lived on it for centuries and preserved it. Let us honor what they have brought to the world’s table. In rural Mexico, nearly every front yard boasts a small garden with basics of squash, beans, corn, an orange or limón tree. Learn why some Central American countries are experiencing a lack of ancient food ingredients for cooking, and why indigenous communities call three garden staples the three sisters. And though I am late to the party, I want to thank our first neighbors in Mexico, Laurie and Alberto, two Fulbright scholars, who were studying the milpa system—all those years ago, for teaching us about it, and a thank you to Robin Wall Kimmerer, who brought it all home. And thank YOU for being here! Please heart/like if you enjoy this post. It really helps others find it.
Native peoples speak of their type of agriculture—corn, beans and squash— as the three sisters. In Robin Wall Kimmerer's popular classic, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, the author explains how the three vegetables got this label. 1 These plants together, she writes, feed the people, feed the land, and feed the imagination.
The story of how the three sisters came into being is fanciful, and in a fable-like manner, acknowledges them as plants. As the tale goes, three women come to a villager’s dwelling on a wintry night and are seated by the fire, one dressed in yellow, one in green, and one in orange.
Even though food is scarce, the strangers are fed generously, their hosts sharing what little they have. In gratitude for their generosity, the three reveal their true identities—corn, beans and squash—and give themselves to the people in a bundle of seeds so that they will never go hungry again.
The genius of indigenous agriculture
For millennia, from Mexico to Montana, women mound up the earth each spring and place the seeds of these plants into the ground, all in the same square foot of soil. This is the genius of indigenous agriculture. In mid-May after planting, the corn seed takes water quickly and is the first of the three to emerge from the ground. Drinking in soil and water, the bean seed swells and sends its roots deep down. It breaks the soil to join the corn, which by that time has already grown to six inches.
Squash takes its time—it is the slow sister. It may be a long while before the first stems poke up, still caught in their seed coat until the leaves split and break free, writes Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass.
These three vegetables are not only the core of the Maya milpa and Central American Indigenous peoples. Native American tribes such as the Iriquois and Cherokee also acknowledge these vegetables as the three sisters because when planted together they nurture each other like family. The farming technique brings continuity and security to a culture’s food supply, nutrition and even the social fabric of a village.
But according to a Yucatán Magazine article, traditional Maya food staples are becoming forgotten and going extinct due to new eating habits replacing Maya food. 2
A warning
As reported to the magazine, Claudia Ruiz Santis, a native of the highlands of Chiapas, said ingredients for traditional Maya foods are disappearing.
“We’re seeking to preserve foods, especially indigenous people’s food, because these have great wealth,” Ruiz Santis said. She explains that the loss of an ingredient from ancestral cuisine affects many areas.
“We want to be part of this food conservation process so that not one ingredient of a dish is lost, because part of the culture and part of our identity is then lost,” she said.
Recipes have been quietly disappearing in Chiapas, Mexico’s state with the highest population of indigenous people. “We have become so consumerist. It’s displacing our traditional cuisine, not only in cities but also in villages,” she added.
Magaly Pech Chuc, from Xpichil, Yucatán, learned the secrets of Maya food preparation from her mother. Together they run a restaurant there but Magaly said it’s difficult to find ingredients such as ibes, a type of bean grown in milpas (cornfields).
“Some ingredients are practically gone. They come from the cornfield and now people no longer want to cultivate them.”
Ibes is an ingredient used in a tamale prepared for Hanal Pixan ceremonies, the Yucatán’s Day of the Dead. It’s cooked by burying the tamales in ovens sunk deep in the ground.
To counter-balance, communities in southeast Yucatán, have been active in long-term seed exchanges. Maria Bacab, from Chaksinkin, considers herself “the guardian of the seeds.” Along with 10 other milpa producers, they exchange seeds and store them. Their municipality has two seed banks.
The best seeds are selected and saved yearly, preparing for possible shortages. Each farmer plants different varieties along with multiple maize options (their main food source), including several drought-resistant maize varieties.
They have adopted seeds from both Chiapas and neighboring Campeche.
Time off between crops
In the milpa system the land rests in between plantings which leads to soil fertility, reduces the destruction of weeds, and helps control harmful pests. Though not a nomadic people, because of the time between plantings, the Maya require a great deal of land mass to achieve maximum production.
In pre-Hispanic times, land was plentiful and these communal ventures—with family members and neighbors joining in—much resembled the structure of the Maya ejido system.
And it was not restricted to planting vegetables. The milpa was diverse and could include orchards, livestock, timber harvesting for houses, medicinal plants, beekeeping, even hunting. This made for a varied system fully utilizing the land’s resources.
The milpa cycle
The actual length of time for the cycle involves two years of cultivation and eight years of fallow or secondary growth to allow for vegetation regeneration. As long as this rotation continues without shortening fallow periods, the system can be sustained indefinitely.
The milpa system, with three thousand years tenure, is so unique it has received worldwide recognition from the United Nations, as noted in Yucatán Magazine.
UN recognition
The UN was impressed by the ancient system for its complexity as a model that includes the combined cultivation of beans, squash/pumpkin, and mainly corn, the basis of regional food since ancient times.
UNESCO honors Mexican cuisine
Last year 32 traditional cooks from indigenous communities gathered in the Riviera Maya to warn about the loss of ingredients in Mexican cuisine. Along with the accolades from the UN, UNESCO World Heritage site has designated Mexican cuisine as a cultural world heritage. The only other other cuisine with that status is French cuisine.
The attendees, guardians of ancient Mexican cuisine recipes, discussed the misfortune of loss of ingredients that are the mainstay of rural communities’ diets.
According to Adriana Lizeth Fernández, a gastronomy expert and traditional cook from the state of Zacatecas, one of the biggest problems is current generations don’t consume the natural products that are the basis for Mexican cuisine.
And a teacher from Veracruz, Carmelita Altahua Xalamihua said, “Fast food has become an enemy of great cooking. There is a lack of interest, especially among younger generations, in not consuming things like chaya (similar to spinach), which is wild, found anywhere.”
The gathering served as a platform to raise awareness about the importance of preserving these ingredients and promoting their use in traditional dishes.
The appointment of the "Maya Milpa as an Important System of the World Agricultural Heritage for their Food and Agriculture Organization," also recognizes the traditional milpa for its resilience to climate changes, long life, and contributions to the conservation of the biodiversity and culture of the Yucatán Peninsula.
The “Milpa Para la Vida” project
Along with UNESCO and UN endorsements, non-government agencies have also taken an interest in indigenous agriculture’s importance. The Milpa Para la Vida project, funded by John Deere International, aims to alleviate obstacles small farmers face— hunger from underproduction and meager incomes due to lack of market access, states Global Initiatives. Hopefully, the project has the best interests of the indigenous milpas at heart.
Efforts such as these are particularly important in Mexico, where roughly a quarter of the population lives in rural areas, but represents roughly two-thirds of the extremely poor.
The importance of the milpa
To sum up the importance and magnitude of milpas, author Robin Wall Kimmerer says it best: "Of all the wise teachers who have come into my life, none are more eloquent than these, who wordlessly in leaf and vine embody the knowledge of relationship. Alone, a bean is just vine, squash an oversized leaf. Only when standing together with corn does a whole emerge which transcends the individual. The gifts of each are more fully expressed when they are nurtured together than alone. In ripe ears and swelling fruit, they counsel us that all gifts are multiplied in relationship. This is how the world keeps going." Amen.
According to an article in TicoTimes, last July, 30 leaders from Colombia’s Amazon basin region swapped strategies with local ethnic Maya farmers near Tikal, Guatemala, on how to live off this dense forest without destroying it. The beat goes on.
Robin Wall Kimmerer. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Milkweed Editions. (August 2015).
Editor. Yucatán Magazine. “Traditional Maya Food Staples Becoming Forgotten and Going Extinct.” (September 21, 2024).
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Backstory—Puerto Morelos sits within 100 miles of four major pyramid sites: Chichen Itza, Coba, Tulum and Ek Balam. By living in close proximity to this Maya wonderland we pyramid hopped on our days off from Alma Libre Libros, the bookstore we founded in 1997. Owning a bookstore made it easy to order every possible book I could find on the Maya and their culture, the pyramids, the archeologists who dug at these sites and the scholars who wrote about them, not to mention meeting archeologists, tour guides, and local Maya who popped into the store. I became a self-taught Mayaphile and eventually website publishers, Mexican newspapers and magazines, even guidebooks asked me to write for them about the Maya and Mexico. I’ll never stop being enthralled by the culture and history and glad there’s always new news emerging for me to report on right here in Mexico Soul. Please share this post if you know others interested in the Maya. Thank you!
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I watched a documentary not long ago on the adverse effects of fast food and the resistance of younger generations to traditional ways, which is resulting in the shrinkage of the Blue Zone of Coast Rica. I'm happy to learn there is cooperation in enlivening the three sisters.
Did not know this is what we’re taking about with Milpa. So cool to learn about the cooperation between Colombia and the Mayan nation to share best practices. (Fun side note: I wrote a few pieces for the Tico Times when we lived in CR.)