Thursday mornings at La Princesita Tortilleria in East Los Angeles are devoted to making chips, so customers couldn’t get any piping hot tortillas when I visited last week. But CEO Enrique Rodriguez made sure two fresh batches of corn tortillas were available for what we were about to do. It was time for the Great Tortilla Folic Acid Test.
My older relatives have complained for years that corn tortillas in the United States don’t taste like they should, because most contain as many ingredients as the fine print in an infomercial. That makes them as palatable as the lickable part of an envelope. But over the last decade, a growing number of restaurants and tortilla makers have gone back to the basics — using just corn, water and lime in a process called nixtamalization — to promote the older, tastier, healthier ways.
Some, like La Princesita, never deviated from the practice and became beloved for it. Nevertheless, health advocates have argued for decades that fortifying masa with folic acid is necessary and have pushed to make it mandatory. They cite research showing that consuming it early in pregnancy drastically cuts down on neural tube birth defects such as spina bifida, and that Latina mothers lag far behind in their intake compared with other ethnicities.
Folic acid is so important to the health of a fetus that the Food and Drug Administration required its inclusion in 1998 in all enriched grain products , and Mexico did the same to corn masa in 2008. A subseque.