Tortilla Wars.

• Author: ROSS, JOHN
• Position: Mexican tortilla production

The Mexican tortilla is under siege by U.S. multinationals, NAFTA, government downsizing, and white bread. Mexicans cans eat lots of tortillas--3,650 a year on average, for each man, woman, and child. But averages are misleading. In Mexico, there are bread-eaters and there are tortilla-eaters. Bread people are most often members of the middle and upper classes and of European descent. Tortilla eaters are often poor and dark and of Indian and mestizo lineage. They are in the majority.

Tortillas can be eaten solo, wrapped around a filler of roast pork in a taco, or deployed in the tostada, the flauta, the chalupa, the sope, the zapato the chimichanga, and the enchilada. Tortillas can be as big as bicycle wheels (a Oaxacan specialty), as fat as a prized hen (Michoacan's gorditas), or as small as a poker chip (a treat sold on Mexico City streets). Most often, tortillas are fashioned from corn, but floppy white flour tortillas are featured in the north of the country.

For nine decades, Dona Teresa Garcia's daily routine has been governed by the tortilla. Arising in the frozen dawn, Dona Teresa, a Purepecha Indian matriarch who counts great-great-grandchildren among her descendants, chops wood, lays the fire on the hearth in the leaky plank kitchen, and sets about grinding purple Indian corn on her rough stone matate. Whipping a big clay comal (griddle) onto the morning blaze, she slaps out the tortillas (uchuskatas in Purepecha) for the first meal of the day.

Later, Dona Tere will set the corn to soak in big clay pots filled with a solution of cal, or quick lime. In the evening, she gathers her granddaughters around her and they shuck the new corn that has been drying on stalks down in the valley below this remote hillside hamlet. Teresa Garcia is one of the few women to farm her own fields here in Tanaco, 200 miles west of Mexico City. She keeps the rough-hewn cabin where she stores the harvest full to the roof.

Like most country fare, Dona Tere's tortillas are a lot more substantial than what most city dwellers eat. The seed stock of her maize has been protected for centuries, and the Indian "pinto" corn produces a thick, sturdy tortilla, while city tortillas are often thin as toilet tissue and fashioned from a corn-flour mix rather than the whole kernel.

Tortilla dough is manufactured in two distinct ways in Mexico today. The ancient way favored by Dona Tere now accounts for less than half the tortillas sold in Mexico City. The new way is to...