Please sir, Can I have some more... Corn?

As part of our research at the Centro de Esperanza, we have been weighing and measuring the children, using cranky old scales kindly donated by the Kellogg Foundation, and asking about their diets.

Most of them do not appear undernourished or thin per se. In fact, especially the older ones, walking with packet of greasy papas or ketchup-slathered hotdog in hand, are rather overweight. Walking along the road, you would never believe that many of these children do not get the nutrients they need to grow.

But when you work out their height for age, they are small.

Now this may just be because Mexicans are short people. However, the charts we use to work out their ideal height and weight are averaged for this population. So it must be their diet and lifestyle. I began to ask myself, and those at the centro, why this is so.

Some of the poorest families really do not get enough food to eat. I blushed ashamedly when I asked one small boy what he had yesterday, and he replied ´frijolitos´(beans). I pressed, what else, what did you have for lunch and dinner, looking enquiringly at his anxious looking mother fidgeting her her seat. ¨Frijoles´ she replied for her small son.

Others get enough calories, but of the wrong sort. The traditional diet is high in carbohydrates and fats: tortillas, tacos, quesadillos, rice, covered with cheese and beans and often fried for good luck, eggs eggs eggs every day, corn chips, corn on the cob coated in more cheese, cornmeal puddings, and now, cornflakes.

So the poor get protein and carbs, but hardly any fruit and vegetables, or good meat. The markets are full of produce but the problem is twofold: firstly, antojitos (snacks from roadside stalls) are cheaper than fresh produce, and easier when you have a large family to feed and not necessarily a home or kitchen of your own in which to prepare it; and secondly, the poor want to eat ´rich mans food´ as it follows that this food is good for you (not so, as we all well know) and they see this as the American burgers, chips and Coca Cola.

But actually, the cuisine of the better off in Oaxaca (plus the tourists) is rich, delicious and healthy. Chiles rellonos, peppers stuffed with chicken or nuts or the delicious fresh Oaxacan cheese (a cross between mozarella and goats cheese), mole, an intoxicating belend of chocolate, chile and spices used as a sauce for meats and vegetables, caldos, flavoursome stews full of tomotoes and herbs, sopas of cactus and squash, and empanadas stuffed with a multitude of different moreish mushrooms and courgette flowers, and wonderful fresh sweet fruit cocktails. It shames and disgusts me that I walk around being able to buy these delicious treats for what seems like pennies (I can get a three course lunch for $5, including drinks) whilst there are local children who have never even tried some of the cuisines of their city. I have given to handing over whatever snack I have bought to the children working selling trinkets; I would rather do this than buy tat I don´t really need from them, and whilst it is nowhere near enough, the happy smile of a seven year old I have just given a bag of mango, pineapple and papaya to at least allows me to carry on by without feeling sick to the knees.

The other interesting thing about corn is its trade. As a nation of corn lovers and prolific corn growers, you would expect that they are rather self sufficient in it. Not so.
Most of Mexico´s corn is shuttled north to the USA, where it is not enjoyed straight off the cob, turned into flour, made into spirits or used usefully. It is converted into ´high-fructose corn syrup´, used to sweeten the nation´s soft drinks and just about every processed edible thing in the vast supermakets - on average, an American consumes sixty-two pounds of the stuff each year. They use corn syrup (fructose) instead of sugar (sucrose) because it is cheaper. Sounds perfect. Also not so. In the human body, fructose acts more like fat than sugar does, so could be implicated in the rising epidemic of obesity and type II diabetes, both in America and in Mexico, as they copy their neighbours´diets.

The issue is not only health, either. Many of the Mexicans trying to cross into the US are doing so because, since the North American Free Trade Agreement, their country has been flooded with subsidised American corn, a disaster that the Mexican government estimates has cost two million farmers and agricultural workers here their livelihoods.

All this makes processed foods much cheaper than fresh, which means the poor eat it and feed it to their children. It used to be that the poor had gaunt and spavined bodies. Now obesity seems to be as sure a sign of poverty as thinness used to be. Instead of nourishing the poor, they are filled up with carbohydrates and fat. And instead of keeping independent and subsistence farmers on the land, it keeps the food processing industry in healthy profit.

Enough to make your stomach turn with the cob raosting over the fire.