Indigenous People's Day

It's 4:12 AM. The house is dark. Rain falls noisily on the metal awnings over the front windows. The rain here is coming from remnants of Hurricane Delta, which just tore up the gulf coast—the same gulf coast that got tore up about 6 weeks ago. The rain should be done with my neck of the woods later this morning.

Louisiana has seen 4 named storms this hurricane season: Tropical Storm Cristobal, Hurricane Laura, Tropical Storm Marco and Hurricane Delta. Hurricane Laura had 150 mph winds when it hit shore. Compare that to Katrina with its 125 mph winds.

On the less meteorological side, today is Columbus day. If you're texting with someone from Colombia (the country) don't ever spell it Columbia. They don't like that. Apparently, no one in the Hispanic world likes that. Columbus was not Spanish. He has long been thought to be Italian, but now evidence has emerged that indicates he may have been Portuguese and he adopted the name Cristoforo Colombo when he moved to Spain.

We all know that Columbus voyaged to the "New World" and "discovered" it, even though millions of people were already living here. In fact, people were living in the New World for 10,000 years before Europeans came here. They had their own civilizations and their own history. They made many discoveries, and some important ones were related to food. 

For instance, consider hominy grits, a food typically regarded in the USA as Southern. It is made possible by the discovery of a process called nixtamalization, a word derived from the Nahuatl language spoken by the pre-Columbian people of Mesoamerica (now Mexico and central America) who invented this process of soaking corn in an alkaline solution of calcium hydroxide made from slaked lime, lye, or wood ash. This process kills the germ, thus preventing the corn from germinating and therefore making the corn last much longer in storage than it would if not treated. It also makes several important nutrients in the corn more bio-available. Thanks to those people who invented nixtamalization 3500 years ago, we have grits and tortillas and tacos and burritos and quesadillas and nachos and enchiladas and—you get my point. And nixtamalization is just one of the many things developed or discovered by the pre-Columbian people of Mesoamerica.

In fact, I vote that we should not celebrate Columbus on Columbus Day, but those unknown people—the Aztecs, Incas, and Mayas—who developed foods, over thousands of years, such as maize (corn), sweet potato, sweet manioc, avocados, beans and chia, amaranth and squash, chili and chocolate, as well as a very long list of spices and flavorings. Plus, the short list of domesticated creatures is headed by the turkey and includes the dog as well as bees. We have many culinary delights thanks to the hard work of those Mesoamerican people of long ago. It's time we celebrated them with a Mesoamerican Day. Why not? I mean, who doesn't like nachos?

Oh wait, I almost forgot. We already celebrate a Mesoamerican Day. We call it Indigenous People's Day and it is celebrated on the same day as Columbus Day. So don't raise your nose at Indigenous People's Day. We have a lot of delightful foods thanks to their hard work.