Food plants

The full entry is in Spanish, and here is why

What you have read above is this project's own summary of food plants. The full entry — the part that rests on the sixteenth-century sources — has not been translated, and that is a decision rather than an omission.

We chose not to touch the primary text. Those sections quote Sahagún, Durán and the codices in their own words, often in sixteenth-century Castilian. A quotation carried across stops being a quotation: it loses the register, the ambiguity and the exact wording someone might want to check against a facsimile.

In Spanish the entry carries:

• Plantas alimenticias
• Chian · la chía
• Nopalli · el nopal
• Metl · el maguey
• Epazotl · el epazote

Read the full entry in the original Spanish → Nahuatl names and terms are identical in both versions.