How this guide is preserving Maya culture through food

Using a three-foot machete, he cuts it with one effortless swoop. I dust off the excess mud and pop it in my mouth. Within seconds, my fingertips are stained fluorescent yellow, my taste buds gambolling with punches of pepper and earth. But he doesn’t stop at turmeric. For the next half hour or so, he hacks away at mint, okra, allspice and bird pepper, and introduces me to an abundance of medicinal plants that thrive across his two acres of forested land.

This is no ordinary garden tour. But Jose Mes is no ordinary man. The 44-year-old guide was born and raised here in Santa Cruz, a Maya village tucked deep in the jungle of rugged Toledo — Belize’s most southern and least populated district.

Jose is from the Mopan community, an Indigenous sub-group of the ancient Maya civilisation native to Belize and neighbouring Guatemala. I’m spending the afternoon with him and his wife, Hilda, to find out about the food culture of Belizean Mayans, who make up 11% of the country’s 400,000-strong population. By welcoming visitors like me into his home, Jose hopes to prove that although they “may be few” they’re certainly “very special”.

“Nature means a lot to us,” he tells me, guiding me through the shrubbery towards his kitchen. “We take care of our land, because the land takes care of us. Food, medicine… It’s the source of everything in our life.”

We trundle through the mud, pass the gumbo-limbo tree, native to Central America, and step into his kitchen. It’s a solitary, minimal room detached from the main house. The roof was hand-built by Jose using native cahune palm leaves, and the shelves, tables and chairs are made of local wood.

Hilda fires up the earth oven that will steam-cook our lunch before moulding corn dough into tortillas. One by one, she places the dough circles on a griddle that was brought to Belize, via Mexico and Guatemala, by her great grandfather. Jose turns my attention to the table, on which are a kaleidoscope of ingredients native to Central and South America — cassava, okra, pumpkin, heart of palm, tomatoes, habanero, cacao, green beans, chikay (shoots of the heliconia plant), as well as callaloo and wild chaya (both spinach-like plants).

“Everything you see here was harvested from my farm in the last 24 hours,” Jose says, adjusting his machete behind his back. “In this land, you don’t even have to plant anything. For example, we throw the okra seeds onto the ground in the dry season; when the rain comes, they grow!”

Jose then tutors me on the holy grail of Maya cuisine: corn. There are 13 varieties in Belize, the most common being red, white, yellow and purple. In 2015, researchers at the ancient site Uxbenka, just outside Santa Cruz, found evidence of Maya people consuming corn as far back as 6,400 years ago. But safeguarding a custom that’s been around since Neolithic times is no easy feat.

“Many of the younger generation don’t know how to use the land,” Jose tells me. That’s why Tumul K’in Center of Learning in nearby Blue Creek is trying to ensure Maya culture is preserved — young people are taught skills including planting, making fertiliser, traditional cooking and more.

Our lunch is tender pieces of cassava, chaya, chikay, callaloo and heart of palm, all served in a bowl made from a hollowed out calabash gourd. It’s all very warming: the heart of palm is subtle and chestnut-like, and the chaya is slightly milder than spinach, but enlivened with Hilda’s homemade habanero sauce. This is a typical family meal, Jose tells me. He then pours me a cup of steaming xocolatl (a bitter ancient ancestor of hot chocolate), proudly announcing that it was the Maya who first cultivated the cacao bean. We tuck in and fall silent for a few minutes, bar the sound of clucking chickens outside.

“My dad was a hunter and we grew up fishing and eating a lot of meat, snails and jungle vegetables,” says Jose, scooping up some cassava with a piece of tortilla.

Passing on skills such as cooking, harvesting and seed storing — important in the face of climate change and extinction — to his children and community is crucial to him, as is protecting the land and its people. Farmers from at least seven other communities in Toledo come to buy seeds from the local seed bank at Uxbenka, Jose says, but must return double what they buy, ensuring farmers in Santa Cruz are supported and make a decent living.

As I say my goodbyes, Jose leaves me with an ode to his community’s unwavering subsistence. “We’re the Indigenous people of Belize and we love to share who we are. Many people around the world don’t even know we’re here, but we are,” he says, gesturing to the land around us. “Still here. Still existing. Still living.”