October 2026 Newsletter

Nourishing Roots: How Flowering Warriors Turn Food Bank Deliveries into a Living Tradition
By Jeanne Louise Riether
Accompanying photos by Albertina Reyes Martínez

Each morning, two local women rise early to make tortillas for five community kitchens, not from store-bought flour, but from criolla corn grown by families in the surrounding communities. The funding that makes this possible comes from FoodBank Lakeside. The impact of that support, say CreSer volunteers Albertina Reyes Martínez and Veronica Flores Saiffe, goes far beyond providing filling, nutritious meals.

Through its support of CreSer’s Kids’ Kitchens program, FoodBank Lakeside helps provide more than 60,000 hot, nutritious meals each year to children and families in six locations across San Pedro Itzicán, Mezcala and neighboring communities. CreSer is a registered civil association working with Indigenous communities in the northeastern region of Lake Chapala.

But FoodBank Lakeside’s support also helps CreSer address a deeper need: preserving the knowledge, traditions and cultural heritage connected to food, farming and the land. CreSer is developing a new education center, the School of Wisdom, which will be home to their program, the School of Flowering Warriors. This is “a living and moving, territory-based educational program,” Albertina explains, “meant to reconnect children with the lake, the mountain, the earth, and the ancestral knowledge of their communities.” The Flowering Warrior concept emphasizes inner development, cultural identity, connection with nature, community and responsibility for life.

Through this program, children and adults learn not only where their food comes from, but also the traditions and knowledge that have sustained their communities for generations. In this way, FoodBank Lakeside’s support helps address both needs: putting nourishing food on the table today while helping CreSer keep the cultural heritage behind that food alive for the future.

The stakes are real, as the region has one of the highest rates of chronic kidney disease in the world, a crisis their team links directly to diet and water. Studies suggest untreated industrial discharges, heavy metals like arsenic, and high levels of agrochemical runoff or bacterial contamination drive the disease. The organization’s workshops in health, safe planting, cooking, hygiene, and emotional support complement the meal programs, aiming to combat and reduce the spread of disease.

But the program is also about something harder to measure: dignity. Veronica describes an empowering shift she has watched happen in families who begin growing their own food. “That’s the problem of these communities, they feel they are poor. But when you grow your own food, that mindset changes.” There is deep pride found in self-sufficiency and knowledge.

Volunteers draw on a much older model: the calpulli, a traditional Nahua (Mexico’s largest indigenous tribe) space where community members learned to grow food, practice art, and study the stars together, and where anyone without food could simply come and eat. “We share it,” Albertina says. “We have to provide these spaces that bring hope.”

At the organization’s demonstration ranch, children take part in activities to help grow the very corn that becomes the tortillas served in the meal programs funded by FoodBank Lakeside, closing the loop from field to kitchen. The team has watched children’s attitudes change as a result. Veronica describes two young 

brothers who now work alongside the ranch’s caretaker, Diego: “You can tell they are very proud of working the land now that they are helping people in the ranch. They look much more secure of themselves.”

None of it works without FoodBank Lakeside’s support today, providing the ingredients needed to serve midday hot lunches to hundreds of children five days a week. The Flowering Warrior Program connects children and adults to the roots of their food and cultural heritage, while FoodBank Lakeside’s help ensures they have food on the table today. Together, we can nourish both body and heritage. For donors, that means support provides more than the ingredients for a meal. It helps sustain knowledge and traditions that might otherwise be lost, one child, one tortilla, one story at a time.