…By starting with flour, pandemic cooks dodged all the preliminary stages of turning grains into flour. Even the few hardy souls equipped with metal hand grinders or tabletop electric mills started with cleaned, threshed, and winnowed grain. Forgotten were the thousands of years when grain was laboriously pounded and ground into something edible, usually by women. Although in most societies those labor costs have been effectively eliminated by successive spurts of technological innovation, in far too many others women are still condemned to the daily grind.
…The many virtues of the grains came with the accompanying costs of processing. That processing food post-harvest or slaughter was laborious was nothing new: the hunter gatherer way of life had never been one of leisure. What was new was the kind of cost of removing the layers of scratchy husks and tough hulls that make grains impossible to chew and to digest. This requires one, or more often a series of different kinds of violent mechanical processing depending on the particular features of each grain variety: repeated threshing with a heavy object to get rid of the outer layers; pounding by standing to lift a long pestle above the head and allowing it to fall into a mortar; and or kneeling to grind dry or wet on a stone. For hard grains such as wheat and barley, grindstones were essential. The people of Lake Kinneret placed their seeds on a flat stone, then thrust a second stone across them to reduce them to flour. While this lateral grindstone (or saddle quern or metate) has been abandoned in Europe and the Middle East, variants of it are still used elsewhere particularly where grains are soaked or boiled before grinding…My first reaction when I tried imitating Margarita was this is easy. While my movements were nothing like as practiced the stones worked efficiently and soon I accumulated a tiny heap of wet paste. Quickly, however, I began to feel queasy and light headed. Five minutes left me exhausted and breathless. Margarita allowed herself a little smirk when she saw that I could not possibly produce the 1 to 2 lbs an hour that she could turn out.
Quite how long it takes a woman to grind for a family, apart from the time husking and shucking the maize, collecting the cooking water, and shaping and cooking the tortillas, depends on her skill and strength, the age and number of family members, the type of masa, and the quality of the metate. My estimate is that it takes about five hours a day to make enough masa for a family of five. This may seem incredible but it is in line with other estimates for contemporary Mexico and Guatemala collected by Michael Searcy, with Arnold Bauer’s estimate for Mexico, and experimental estimates for Europe collected in David Peacock’s in The Stone of Life (201311ya), pg127. Since five hours is about as much as anyone can grind, the labor of one in five adults has to be devoted to making the staple bread.
…Why then were young women like Margarita still grinding at the end of the 20th century? Why are women in India still grinding flour and women in Africa still pounding maize? Why did what seems like a clear case of technological progress, of dramatic improvement in labor productivity fail to take hold? Culture is often invoked. Grinding and pounding was women’s work. In Mexico, husbands grumbled that tortillas made with mill-ground masa, let alone masa harina, did not taste as good. They did not want their wives gossiping at the mill, nor paying the miller’s fees. The very identity of women, many insisted, lay in their provision of the family tortillas…Until affordable and locally-appropriate improvements in grinding technology were introduced, women had no option but unchosen, mind-numbing, physically exhausting labor. And the locking up of so much of the talent and energy of these women in pounding and grinding grains surely impeded the betterment of society as a whole.