Corn And The Maya Guatemala

You are what you eat has an entirely different meaning for the Maya. The corn they have cultivated for thousands of years is not only a staple in every meal it is an identity and the basis of the Mayan civilization. They are people of the corn and consider the rest of us wheat people.

The Maya believe the Gods made several attempts to create people before they got it right. The first attempt was animals, the second a person made out of mud, followed by people carved from wood. The final and successful attempt was creating people from maize.

Everywhere we went in Guatemala there were cornfields. Some of the fields went on as far as the eye could see while others were small plots in the back garden of someone’s home at the end of a dead end road. The golden patches in the hillsides you see in the photograph are cornfields carved into the steep terrain of the surrounding volcanic landscape of Lake Atitlan.