Job Discussion Forums

[Guy Courchesne]

What do you think about rising tortilla prices?

I had been under the impression that there were price controls, but apparently they were abandoned in '94 when NAFTA came in. I think they should have kept controls on such a basic foodstuff.

I find the argument interesting as to why prices have risen, though no doubt Calderon will be blamed for it. Higher commodity prices siphoning corn off to ethanol producers...linked to the energy sector, eh? That's going to come back to energy reform somehow I suspect.

[danielita]

Personally, I'm not too put out by the tortilla price increase, only because tortillas are not a staple in my household. If we eat 1 kg of tortillas a week, we are eating a lot. However, there are families that eat 1kg a day and I can see how this can really impact their lives. There are some families where a third of their daily income will be spent on tortillas and this is where the impact will be the greatest. I can understand the outrage....

[MamaOaxaca]

[ls650]

I think tortillas are really a great way to eat some tasty food. I love to eat a hearty breakfast of eggs and beans with a few tortillas and salsa. Mmm.

On my salary I won't notice any difference, but I imagine a few of my worse-off students might.

[Guy Courchesne]

Tortillas have more or less supplanted breads in my diet, both flour and corn. Like LS, I like em with breakfast. Lately, I've been putting hummus on them too, with a red hot salsa.

[mapache]

no me gusta las tortillas

rough trying to eat in Mexico if you don't like them - I don't hate them, I just am tired of them with every meal and think they are bland. Living in Southern Mexico, I can understand the impact of a price increase especially on the poor.

[chola]

Yeah, the price increase is a whopper for people whose staple food is the tortilla. I ate them when I was living in Mexico but did get a little tired of the monotony of having them day in and day out.(a complaint of being privledged). Now that i'm back here in Canada, even though I'm in a multi-cultural city, it's difficult to find fresh, hot, soft, delicious tortillas.Nothing beats walking 2 mintues to the tortilleria (sp) to get a half kilo of those fragrant slabs.

The ones at the supermarket are like cardboard and crack and crumble when heated. I just buy a bag of maseca and make my own when the fancy strikes. Nothing like a juicy gordita with some salsa of nopales to make me feel right. There's a salvadoran thing called the pupusa which is alot like the gordita and it satisfies. Delicious stuffed with cheese, frijoles or whatever.....man, sometimes i really miss mexico.

[gordogringo]

I like tortillas myself. At Gigante,the most convenient market near me, a bag of fresh tortillas, 10 per bag, is 20 pesos. Is that cheap? Or just one more overpriced thing in Tijuana?

[Ben Round de Bloc]

"Fresh tortillas" here means they've been made no more than a few minutes before purchase. Wrapped in brown paper, machine-made maseca tortillas are $9.50 pesos/kilo in Merida. Price has gone up twice, 1 peso each time, during the past 2 months.

[Guy Courchesne]

I caught a TV Azteca story about rising prices, and they had noted than TJ had the highest prices in the country.

[ls650]

[scottmx81]

Are you in Toronto, Chola? While back in Ottawa, I looked around and couldn't find maseca anywhere.

We found maseca and tortilla pressers in the Latino stores on Bloor St. in Toronto.

[Samantha]

We get our fresh tortillas from boys on motorcycles who pick them up at the neighborhood tortillaria and stack them into what we refer to as coolers. The coolers, being insulated, keep them piping hot and they run up and down the streets of our fracc. beeping annoying horns, right at the prescribed meal times and also when they expect people to be home from work - 7 and 8 pm. No such thing as a fresh tortilla from a grocery store! Ours are moments old when they hit the plate. I am not quite so anxious for them when their horns start beeping at 7 a.m. on Sunday mornings when they target the early church-goers!! The water guys seems to run on the same schedule, which is a whole other story (or set of sounds!)

[gordogringo]

The horn thing gets to me as well. Two nights a week I am working in the US so "day sleeping" is a challenge with the horns for propane, water, and ice cream in the summer. Then there is the car driving through 3 times a day with 8 speakers blasting the specials at Gigante or public service messages about water conservation and "keeping Tijuana clean".
It does work though. More than once have been woken up by the ads then called the gf and asked her to bring home the special for dinner.

[MamaOaxaca]

10 tortillas for 20 pesos? That's 2 pesos a tortilla! two years ago, I was still buying a half kilo for two pesos!
Now we buy masa, real masa, not maseca masa wanna be, which most people I know thinks makes terrible torillas, we pay 8 pesos for a kilo of masa which my housekeeper pounds out by hand so we eat really fresh tortillas. Though I must say, having not left the country for years, I am getting rather tired of tortillas, I need a nice long vacation, like maybe a month, from em, then I will like them again.
This weekend my mother-in-law and her sister, decided they'd round up the family and go out to the village and plant some corn this year in response to the rising prices. We are in danger of losing the family land, because it's in a "use it or lose it" community.

Around here tortillas are not just the staple, they are the silverware!