 Hello everyone. I've been at the AHS, I think three times before, mostly presenting my work on coconuts in the coast of Ecuador with Afro-Colorian communities and I'm thrilled to be here with my colleague Gustavo who is the director of this documentary that you're gonna watch today. We are representing the Seed Savers Network of Ecuador. We are part of the Seed Savers who are a group of farmers that grow food agro-ecologically throughout the country and you get to try the chocolate that one of the Seed Savers of our network make. So I'll tell you a little bit more about that, but I'm a cultural anthropologist, so I wanted to ask how many of you don't include a corn in your diet? So you're following a diet that, okay, so a lot of you. So this is what made me think twice before presenting this film to this group because I know how critical you all are with grains. But I decided it was important because it's a film about ancestral health. The ancestral health and the ancestral food traditions of Ecuadorian indigenous communities that are alive until today and you will understand what I'm saying when you watch the film. These are people that will probably die if they decide not to eat corn. So this is the reason why I'm presenting this film and I hope you enjoy it and we will be available for questions afterwards. I say a few more things about our work there as well. Thank you. I hope you enjoy it. It's 34 minutes long. So you guys can ask us questions. Also let you know that, like I said, we are part of the Seed Savers Network. The people that you saw on this film are also part of the Seed Savers. They are so important. So I'm going to start with you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. offering two opportunities to visit Ecuador and experience food and nature and culture there. The first one is a road trip and I'm running that program and I'm taking people through various regions in Ecuador experience, regional cuisine and the culture that surrounds it. As you can see our work puts a lot of emphasis on the history and the culture that surrounds food which is equally important for us in relation to health compared to the food itself. So I'm happy to answer questions about that. I have some flyers also that I have here in case you're interested. And Gustavo, he runs a program called Voices of the Forest which is another opportunity to immerse yourself in specifically in the Amazon region to hear the voices of the forest and make art. It's a program designed for people that wanna spark their creativity and make art in this opportunity to connect to nature. So we're happy to answer questions and I also let my colleague Gustavo say hi. Hello, do you hear me? Yeah, yes, yeah, yeah. Happy to be here. Yeah, so we're happy to answer questions or comments. Is this on? So we talked to you a little bit beforehand but I feel like everybody should hear it. What do you think of the corn in the United States? Well, personally I don't eat corn here. It doesn't taste good to me. I'm used to this corn from my country. I'm from the highlands so even though I grew up in the city, people continue to make recipes with all the different varieties of corn and for me that's the tasty kind of corn. The US type corn is just one kind and it's very sweet and it's not tasty to me. So that's what I think personally, yeah. Well, thank you, I really enjoyed this film. This was just beautiful to watch. And so I wonder like what are some of the forces that are causing people to move away from the countryside and what is bringing them back now? I mean, you said that they were working on continuing the culture and getting the kids involved and so on. Yes, sure. Well, I mean, this is a process that started around the 70s. Like, you know, the countryside becoming urbanized so up until the 70s, most of the country was rural and right now most of it is urban. So I think like the city invaded a lot of the rural areas and it influenced with its culture the communities. So I mean, I think that's part of the reason and then, well, in this case a lot of the people in the network belong to peasant indigenous communities but other people are people that grew up in the city and that they just decided to start growing food in an ecological way according to the traditions. So this is part of the movement that we are part of. I thought the movie was really beautiful and the representation of the knowledge of the indigenous communities really comes to life. So bravo to you both for that. One of the practices that you displayed in the movie is something that I understand is called, I may mispronounce it, Nishtimalization. The mixing of corn with ash, which according to some good friends of the Price Pottinger Nutrition Foundation and Bill Schindler who I interviewed in our last journal really releases the nutrients for our absorption. And I think that we all know the corn is the most grown crop in the world. And what I worry is about is that because in the United States at least the interests of profit and processing time often takes precedence over the proper preparation of foods that this Nishtimalization process has been lost on us and we know that so many societies around the world are dependent upon corn. And I'm curious about your thoughts on how you can feature that process as a means of bringing the nutrient value of corn back to the world. Can I answer that? I'm gonna let my colleague talk. Thanks. Yeah. In the seed guardian network, we think about seeds like having 50% of the information within like genetic and 50% having information around it like cultural and those both halves complete a whole seed. So the cultural part is essential for the seed to have its purpose in existence, in relationship with other species that it said that it builds with it that lives with it. So this kind of process like Nishtimalization really reminds me about the importance of getting back to other kinds of organization like in a social level. Because if you think about it, industrialization begins to lose everything about the culture and normalizing things like fertilisants, like petroleum variabates to grow like that are not good for human consumption. Instead, this example that we see in the film, this corn that this woman saw, it's organic, it's really made out of log. It's like, you see these people like getting together, having a little thing to drink. It's more cultural and made for a little community. Do you remember in the movie, they say like our corn is just for the people around us for our family, for our friends. So in this case, you are sure that that corn is organic, that it has no pesticides, you know. So, and you have that other process as well that you don't need anything more than just the ashes of the fire that you have cooked something with and you use that and you have this ready to eat and you can save it like four months if you dry it correctly. So this process reminds me that to go to the simple, to go to the little community and to save around the sea like all the information of the cultural information that goes with it. Thank you. Yeah, I'm curious as to what type of research, if any research has been done into the nutrient content of corn grown in these milpa type agroecological systems that have really rich and diverse polycultures with healthier soils. Do you know, Gustavo, if there's any research done? Have you done any nutrient content analysis comparing it to, you know, I mean corn grown more in a conventional monocrop systems as a benchmark? I don't have references in hand, but I know that in the Alpataruna website that it's the Guardian of the Seeds website, you can, maybe you can get something in there. Yeah, the Seeds Savers Network, have a publication which is called Alpa, and you can access it on redsemillas.org, R-E-D, Semillas, S-E-M-I-L-L-L-A-S, that or R-G, and they have access to their publication there, and our colleague Javier and other people write, they conduct research and they write about it in this publication. I believe in terms of like the analysis in the lab, unfortunately in Ecuador, there's not a lot of research conducted about food, which is unfortunate, but at the same time, I think there's a lot of interest to find out, again, what is the culture that is preserving the traditional ways of handling the corn, which have proven to preserve the nutrients and to take out the nutrients that we don't need, like in the case you saw with sprouting the corn. That's, I mean, it's an ancient technique that it's been proven in studies outside of Ecuador that it's necessary for us to be able to assimilate correctly some of the nutrients. So... What's kind of interesting here in the U.S. and in some other places is that there's been a, we have what's called a regenerative agricultural movement, which is actually re, some of it's new, but some of it's rediscovering a lot of the indigenous techniques that countries like Guatemala and El, and First Nations people have used, including integrated systems, polycrops, where you have healthy root systems where plants exchange nutrients, and what they're finding with some of the research up here is that the plants grown in these systems have much higher levels of manganese and magnesium, and so it's quite different nutrient profile than what you get with plants grown in conventional or even till the organic systems where there isn't as healthy soil systems. Yeah, I'm just gonna add one more thing that I think our contribution here is to really emphasize on what's the ways of eating beyond what's in the food, like the chemical or the nutrient composition of the food itself, because as we heard this morning, you cannot, really this film shows that you cannot separate the food from the way it's eaten. And so this also goes into the health outcome. So it's not just important to look at the composition of the corn, but how it is eaten. So how many of us celebrate around the crop that grows in the region that we live? Cyclicly, every year at the same time of year, the whole community comes together to celebrate that crop. I think that says a lot about health, which we are not discussing enough, and which is why we brought this film to this conference and thank you, Tess, and everybody that welcomed our work here. So thank you. I still have lots of chocolate available. It's also made by our colleagues in a network. And I'm happy to tell you about it. I have it outside. And yeah, I'm happy to answer questions. Also this film will be available on streaming. So if you want to stay in touch, you can follow us on Instagram. And also happy to... It was on the website. If you can show the slide, you can find it, all the information on our website. Thank you so much. Thank you, Gustavo. Thank you. Thank you so much.