Mexico's People and their Nutritional Habits

9). In addition, they drank thick coffee berry seasoned with cinnamon, and octli (pulque) a fermented drink from the maguey plant. The Aztecs had tamales and tortillas and roasted pith in pits seasoned with chile sauces (Stone, 1971, p. 9).

With the Spaniards came olive oil, garbanzos, codfish, olives, almonds, all public ingredients on today's menu. The Moorish influence on Spain was responsible for Mexico's office of sweets heavy with honey, pine nuts and rose petals, flavorings of orange blush and rose waters (Stone, 1971, p. 9). Lastly, pastas from Spain's Italian neighbors was introduced during this period.

Today, date many of the Indian communities approach self-sufficiency in production of food stuffs, about agriculture is produced on private commercial farms and on "ejidos," farm lands worked infra the traditional Mexican system of land tenure whereby land is collectively owned by the peasants while farmed individually. As a result, most of the arable land is owned by a few which set the stage for creating a very smallish but wealthy upper and middle class while the rest of the population lives at or just preceding(prenominal) the poverty level. In fact, nearly half the population lives on less than $50 a week (Laver, 1990, p. 43). The overall furbish up on Mexico's nutritional standards has been devastating.

Through this collective small-scale farm Mexicans harbour traditionally

Noth, R.S. (1985). The economy. Mexico, a country study. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, pp. 161-244.

While current statistics launch that over twenty partage of the total population begin no eggs or meat and forty percent consumes no milk, in some states eggs, meat and milk argon absent from the diets of eighty to ninety percent of the inhabitants (Riding, 1985, p. 227).

Of the diet staples, lemon yellow production is the largest with nearly fifty percent used for gamboge dough and the making of tortillas, another thirteen percent for edible corn flour and four percent for corn products much(prenominal) as starch and glucose (Noth, 1984, p. 216-17). The rest is consumed on the farm. Both beans, which argon served at most deals, and rice production, grown under irrigation mainly in the state of Sinaloa, continue to fall below consumer demand and have to be imported. Most of these staples, especially corn, are price subsidized by the government.

Howells, J., & Mervin, D. (1988). Choose Mexico. San Francisco: Gateway Books.

Further, while forty percent of the preschool children are considered healthy, only ten percent are considered such in the southeast (Riding, 1985, p. 227). Many of the health problems for both children and adults are diarrheal diseases which are a direct result of the forgetful drinking water. In fact, more than half of Mexico's rural communities have no clean drinking water and very unworthy medical care (Katel, 1988, p. 14).

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