The cost of eating well

“We're reclaiming natural tortillas,” shared Petra, the mother of a peasant family commercializing handmade tortillas in San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Mexico, where machine-made tortillas have dominated for three decades. She alternately deploys a Tsotsil phrasing, bats'i waj , translated as “real,” “true,” or “our tortilla.” In everyday Spanish, people often distinguish between tortillas de maíz and tortillas de Maseca , a distinction between tortillas made from freshly cooked corn and those made from industrially produced ready-mix flour (of the Maseca brand). I argue that the distinction between these categories marks a discursive boundary, endowing handmade tortillas with a quality of “naturalness” perceived as absent from their machine-made counterparts. As Daniel, another vendor, explained: “Some people say that we have the best tortillas in San Cristóbal because they are soft and 100 percent natural corn.” Asked what “natural” meant, he replied: “It's healthier. It doesn't have chemicals. Because Maseca has chemicals, but natural corn doesn't contain anything.” By taking handmade tortillas as a lens through which to understand shifting valuation processes of “naturalness,” I interrogate how food is mobilized as a material response to sentiments of ecological concern and how this, in turn, reconfigures novel forms of labor in the production of such “ecological food.”