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THE CREATION OF CORN AND FOOD

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The gods were attentive to the development and perfection of life in the Fifth Sun. They worried about the food for the living beings. For this purpose, they commanded Quetzalcoatl to provide food for the created beings. Since ants are hard workers and live underground. Quetzalcoatl observed a red ant coming up to the surface of the place where the food for the living beings was hidden. He asked the red ant to tell the truth. The red ant confessed corn and other grains were buried inside the Mountain of our Sustenance. Then, Quetzalcoatl transformed himself into a black ant and together with the red ant they went to search for the food for the human beings of the Fifth Sun. To the Old Grandparents, the metaphor of the red and black ink, means wisdom.

 

Accordingly, with wisdom and labour, our ancestors extracted from the earth all our food.

 

Quetzalcoatl carried all the corn he could take from the Mountain of our Sustenance and took it to Tonachan - Place of Origin – so the gods could taste it. Everyone agreed it was delicious and decided to place it on the lips of Oxomoco and Cipactonal – equivalent to Adam and Eve – to grow strong. Since the gods discovered that corn was an excellent source of food, they decided to grant the Mount of our Sustenance to human beings. To accomplish this, the gods ask that one of them should send lightening to open the mountain. From the four corners of the world, the Tlaloques – Rain gods – arrived: The Tlaloque of the Blue South, The Tlaloque of the White West, The Tlaloc of the Yellow East and the Tlaloque of the Red North. All four together succeeded, with their rain, to fertilize the corn in the Mountain of Sustenance, then one of them sent a powerful lightening that split the mountain causing the corn to spill together with the other grains. All these became valuable food that have been the basis of our sustenance for more than eight thousand years. In the matter already explained, the people received corn of all shades and colors, beans, chia, chilies, squash, tomatoes, nopales, cacao and avocadoes, just to name a few of the many food the gods granted to the people.

 

The Old Grandparents developed through the centuries an excellent and nutritious balance cuisine. They learned to cook beans, make corn tortillas, salsas, tamales, atole and chocolate. They added honey, grasshoppers, ants, worms, and other insects. Fish was included in their diet and eaten regularly. Once in a while, an especially during important festivities, they ate venison, turkey, ducks, rabbit, armadillo and snake as well as hairless dogs called Xoloescuincle, considered a delicacy. Without this rich diet for sustenance, the people of ancient Mexico couldn’t have been able to build the pyramids, temples and other buildings and attain such wisdom and knowledge in nature, architecture, cosmology, medicine, etc.

 

The domestication of corn, that is to say, the genetic transformation of the grass called Teozintle into the present plant known as corn, the use of corn fields and irrigation canals and other complex methods of irrigation, permitted our Old Grandparents to lay the foundation for the development of what later on would be known as the splendor of Ancient Mexico.

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