Mercedes’s work is a noble labor of cultural preservation fueled by her love of country, art, and, of course, food.
By Jose M. Ripol
In the summer of 2015, before the effects of COVID-19 kept people at a healthy distance, I agreed to meet the talented Venezuelan cook Mercedes Golip at a Union Square Greenmarket and give her a hand, serving sample-sized arepitas made with Iroquois corn from a local vendor. A farm-to-table enthusiast, Mercedes had charmed her way into the Grow NYC community of volunteers, and people flocked to her demo.
Topped with a delicious array of the market’s local ingredients and coquettishly decorated with nasturtium petals from Mercedes’s own garden, the samples of mini arepas were going like the hotcakes they were. After barely an hour, I gave Mercedes the heads-up that we were running low on masa. Her eyebrows arched up as if to say “already?” She pointed to a nearby plastic container filled with what I assumed was more masa, but found only corn—kernels, not cornmeal. Whole, white, and slightly wet, the kernels glistened, jewel-like. A manual grain mill sat next to them, at the ready. My eyes went back and forth from the kernels to the mill. Mercedes smiled.
What followed was confounding sorcery. Mercedes transferred the kernels into the mill and cranked it to produce what I thought would be cornmeal—but, instead, it produced masa, the humid, malleable product of nixtamalization where corn is cooked in an alkali solution to facilitate its milling and amplify its nutritional value. Sorcery, I tell you. The best kind.
Mercedes dedicates most of her free time to food. By day, she works as a project manager for the New York Times, but once her day is done, Mercedes nurtures a mounting social media following under the nom de plume @iambananista. The summer I volunteered to help her at the farm-to-market demo, she had recently launched a pop-up dinner series with menus designed to showcase Venezuelan dishes using locally sourced ingredients.
Fast forward to 2020: Mercedes and I were discussing over Zoom her largely autodidactic journey with heirloom (non transgenic, non-GMO) corn. “I guess it all started with the pop-up dinners,” she said. “I realized I had a ‘farm-to-table’ concept but the main ingredient was coming out of a package.”
As is the case within many Latin American cultures, corn is king in Venezuelan gastronomy—from the quotidian arepa to the festive hallaca and almost everything in between. Arepas are often referred to as Venezuelan daily bread (biblical pun intended). Yet ask any Venezuelan to name the main ingredient in arepas, and most will tell you it’s “Harina P.A.N.” and not corn.
Since 1960, Harina P.A.N.—an enriched, precooked cornmeal—has impacted and transformed Venezuelan identity and society. It’s national appreciation can be found within its original slogan: “No more pounding!” or “¡Se acabó la piladera!” This “no more pounding” corn signaled modernity and convenience, particularly for women, but it also unintentionally eroded a part of the culinary tradition around corn that has slowly disappeared with the passing of older generations and mass migration.
Realizing this cultural and gastronomic loss, Mercedes became an avid student of corn, learning about different culinary qualities represented in its rich biodiversity and identifying the best starchy kernels for making doughy masa.
As we continued our chat over Zoom, Mercedes told me all about her latest pop-up that featured a traditional Christmas menu with hallacas made from scratch, and how she was documenting her journey on her social media channels. That documentation was stirring others to experiment with heirloom corn.
Having known Mercedes since 2018, one thing that has always stood out about her is that she is never chasing the spotlight. She’s thinking about her place in a long tradition of Venezuelan food. So, when I asked her why she was so committed to what she was doing, she showed me several Venezuelan cookbooks she had collected over the years. Flipping through the pages, she pointed out the many food companies that sponsored the creation of the cookbooks. “Our gastronomic history has been told by brands” as though to say, “It’s up to us to change that.”
Mercedes’s work is a noble labor of cultural preservation fueled by her love of country, art, and, of course, food. “Venezuelans are largely divided. [However,] I believe we can sit down to eat and just talk about food instead of politics.”
At the end of the day, it’s our customs and traditions that unite us–corn that unites us. Mercedes is doing what she can to document and preserve them.
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Jose Ripol is a Venezuelan American advertising creative, writer, and NYU Food Studies scholar based out of Brooklyn, New York. His interests lie at the intersection of culture, history and identity. When he’s not writing, he spends time in his home kitchen, cooking for friends and family. You can follow him on Instagram at @ripall.