REU Site -- Feeding the Family in Troubled Times: A Biocultural Study of Patterns of Work, Consumption, and Nutrition at the Household Level in Three Communities in Central Mexico

Hampshire College, Amherst MA

Investigators

Abstract

This international REU Site will involve taking 15 students to Mexico for eight weeks each summer. The core research the students will conduct is an interdisciplinary study of nutritional transformations and health status among Mexican farmers since the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement. In particular, the economy of corn has changed dramatically. It is now less expensive for Mexican peasants to purchase imported corn than to grow their own. Also, tortillas are increasingly being made with purchased flour (consisting of hybrid, often transgenic corn and ground cobs) and water, rather than the traditional process using locally grown corn ground with limestone, which provides the vital nutrient of calcium. The focus of the REU research will be on women's nutrition, given the centrality of calcium to women's reproductive and overall health and the impact of calcium levels on fetal development. This subject matter provides a rich basis for individual research projects as well. Students will be based in the city of Cuernavaca and, with Mexican mentors, will work with families in three sites in Morelos: the Sierra de Huatla and the Northern Highlands, two subsistence farming communities with very different physical and geographical conditions and levels of marginality; and the municipality of Emiliano Zapata, where the main commerce is foreign-owned assembly plants. At each site, students will collect a combination of social data (questionnaires, nutritional ethnographies, labor organization, time allocation studies) and biological data (body composition, bone density, calcium intake) that will be used to evaluate nutrition and health status in a comparative, social context. Students will complete papers on their research projects and prepare presentations for the field site communities on their findings. This award contributes to the Foundation's continuing efforts to attract talented students into careers in science through active undergraduate research experiences.