“I am equally happy making holiday cookies and Mexican food” (Rick Martinez).

I think this statement provides another important takeaway from Martinez’s visit today. Rick is a Mexican American who specializes in cooking the Mexican cuisine. With that said, he still holds a special place for another passion which is making holiday cookies.

Just because he’s Mexican, that doesn’t mean he only has to like making Mexican food. This is an ideology even my family exhibits. We’re Italian, but we don’t only eat that cuisine all the time. My mom loves to make Mexican food at times, for instance. We enjoy having Chinese food once in a while as well.

Sure, we always go back to Italian food as our predominant meal of choice, but our palates are not exclusive to that culture solely. There’s no reason to feel unhappy cooking or eating the food of other cultures besides your own. Perhaps the following is a bit cliché but my reaction to this quote can be summed up in one simple idea. Food should be viewed as universal symbol which binds everyone together regardless of culture.

“You don’t choose food, food chooses you” (Rick Martinez).

This was a statement Rick made early on during his visit in class today. It was one of the most prominent ideas that I took away from his entire talk. The quote was his way of saying that cooking is not an easy profession and it mandates a certain level of passion to be successful at it. The field of food will seek you out if you love it enough. Perhaps one could even call it destiny if the enthusiasm is that strong.

Rick had a good marketing job that he walked away from to work in a restaurant. He said he constantly had food on his mind while working and thought perhaps it would be just a hobby, but it was something more.

He told us how he questioned his own decision as certain adversity hit where he wasn’t working with the greatest people. His passion ultimately became stronger, though, as it acted as a learning experience. He learned to develop and process recipes while interning with Food Network. Martinez shared the being a home cook is different than being a chef. Cooking food for yourself and those close to you may be easy because you know what you all like. It’s accommodating for the palates of the varying audience members you serve where it becomes much more difficult to manage.

One prominent takeaway I have from American Taco is just how far-reaching the taco has become. A dish that originated and is so deep-rooted in Mexican culture has traversed so immensely beyond that boundary over the years. I didn’t even know there was such a thing like Korean or Jewish tacos!

This then brings up the question of authenticity which tends to arise time and time again. What’s an authentic taco and what’s not? An important idea I think I’ve learned from this course is that authenticity may be more subjective than it seems. In class today, Dr. Alvarez brought up this ‘territorial’ mindset people may embody of their homeland’s food. They can have a bias towards their food and deem it authentic just because it’s theirs.

I saw this line of thinking in my last assignment when two authors argued which is better: the San Diego or mission-style burrito. Some of their reasoning lies within the idea that it was them who created their own dishes. Sarah Wyer, another writer I discussed in the assignment, uses this phrase, ‘inauthentically authentic’ when talking about these disputes.

Sometimes I believe that’s the best terminology to use when debating food. I’d potentially use this term to describe a dish that is regarded as authentic due to a territorial partiality. The people of that culture may think it’s authentic, but others may argue against it. There’s nothing wrong with those folks standing firm that it’s authentic; it’s ultimately going to a personal feeling regardless.

“Food is very important, it’s what we do in terms of gatherings, it’s always the most important thing. It’s important to us because that’s how we come together as a group; around the table” (Misty).

This closing thought from the video we watched today on hominy and fry bread stood out to me. This is a sentiment that I echo and hold particularly close to home. Food has always brought my entire family together. It has been this symbol of unity in my house for as long as I can remember.

Similarly, food seems to be the ‘most important thing’ for us, too, in that it serves as the item that binds us all together. We don’t spend as much time with one another if food is not involved in the equation, which is an interesting thought to me. We don’t sit around the table if we’re not eating, therefore we’re away from each other quite a bit.

Governor Cuomo also mentioned this notion a week or two ago during his coronavirus response for the city. I don’t remember how it came up, but he said that his grandfather would always say that his ‘vacation’ was when he was eating at the table with his family. When he was working, this was what he looked forward to when he went home. Having dinner with my family is equally as important to me as it acts a temporary distraction from all the other anxieties of life.

“Poverty becomes defined then as the inability to deal adequately with the anticipated and unanticipated turns of life, to overcome adverse events through strategic deployment of credit” (Galvez 139).

The issue of poverty becomes even more magnified with this excerpt from the “Eating NAFTA” text. Poverty for these folks, like the day laborers, is wrongfully and unfairly practically considered a ‘choice’. It becomes a ‘survival of the fittest’ scenario, but they stand no chance in doing so under these conditions.

They get no government assistance, so they are unable to have the financial opportunities that other wealthier people may get. Even the topic of obesity falls under this category. Many people cannot afford to eat anything other than stuff like junk food products, which can then cause health defects like obesity.

Another aspect of this I took note of was how it was kept ‘hush-hush’ and concealed when one of the workers had drowned in the canal. It goes to show the lengths these companies will go to hide and keep unexposed the inhumane conditions these laborers experience. That’s an extremely sad and frustrating thing to see.

Dr. Alvarez left us with the final point that even if we don’t become activists for problems like these, it’s important to at least think about how this may have altered our lines of thinking. It certainly left me with second thoughts regarding so many products my family purchases as to what circumstances were exactly involved to produce them.

Class today was centered around the issue of poverty, particularly the hardships of day laborers in Mexico. The people in the video experienced deprivations in a disheartening fashion to witness. They essentially serve as slaves to these corporations, like Driscoll’s, who pay them next to nothing to toil under some of the harshest conditions imaginable with no benefits whatsoever.

We saw that one mother who locks her children in a shed of some sort to protect them at home while she goes out to work. She still hardly makes any money and is forced to leave her kids in such dire conditions that’s also a fire hazard.

These are the same people who produce the items that are shelved in our grocery stores. Some of them are even small children who have no business being required to fill that occupation at their stage of life. It makes you wonder as a consumer when you purchase such products if it was made by someone like these people. It ultimately gave me a different life perspective and something extra to think about when I’m in the store.

We were joined today in class by taco journalist Mando Rayo as he discussed his work and activism. Dr. Alvarez posed the question to him; how do you bring together both activism and food? Rayo replied with a two-part answer, stating that it’s about “learning about the struggle” of the culture as well as “getting people to go outside their bubbles”.

It’s not about critiquing the food and telling the people how to cook. It’s more important to understand the culture and to also learn beyond the ‘Instagram filter’. I interpret his response as pushing aside the taste of the food initially and prioritizing the amount of work required to bring it to relevance.

It was an endeavor to make it possible to serve the food at all, so it’s vital to first grasp this struggle before even thinking about the flavors. Additionally, we may even objectify the food with these Instagram filters for splendor. It’s exponentially more significant to comprehend the story of the culture and the people the food represents instead of just being eye candy for social media.

Thinking about the second part of this equation, Rayo pointed out it’s crucial for us to sometimes step out of the comfort zone. I look at local Mexican places in my area and I sometimes think that’s the pinnacle of the experience. It’s not though, and I don’t think I spend enough time trying and supporting other mom and pop shops.

I do also think something like eating barbacoa in the Rio Grande Valley would get me outside my bubble. It still amazes me how they cook the meat in a hole in the ground! We also saw this in ‘Ugly Delicious’. Experiencing something like this would be unlike anything I’ve ever done with Mexican food in New York.

“Organic is a marketing label” (Galvez).

Today, we were joined by Alyshia Galvez, author of Eating NAFTA, and she discussed some of the components of the book. Anthony asked her the question regarding what it means for food to be considered organic and when that happens. She first responded with the above statement.

This got me thinking more about this idea. Organic is not necessarily meant to be merely a label for the ‘elite’ consumer, as Galvez called them. It’s designed to be a tag that demonstrates a lack of chemical inputs in the food, but society has construed this differently. In general, organic foods tend to be healthier for us, but I feel like a lot of the time people don’t even realize what exactly makes it better for us.

People will just see that ‘organic’ designation and they think it places them in the group of elitists that have such high esteem for their well-being. It’s become a social status more than anything else. It’s also used for the sake of profit and business. Anthony also brought up the tag of ‘authenticity’, which is thrown around blindly quite a bit for this same purpose as well.

‘Organic’ and ‘authentic’ have almost become downgraded to buzz words to attract the eyes of most consumers. People like to say they eat and drink organic stuff to show how much they care about their health. That’s a great sentiment to have (better than the other way around, of course), but they may do this without even grasping what separates it from inorganic products. Business, in kind, have taken advantage of that by billing more and more items as authentic and organic.

“When a food is elevated to cuisine, it is not about its power to fuel the human body, or even its capacity to bring people together around a table, but its function as a vehicle of value that enables some to profit wildly by it” (Galvez 44).

Starting our reading of Eating NAFTA today, Dr. Alvarez asked us to think about some potential questions the text poses for us to come up with. This excerpt got me thinking a little bit about how to interpret it. Galvez brings up this concept of differentiating food versus cuisine, which is a phenomenon I hadn’t seriously pondered until seeing this quote.

It made me wonder: when and how does a food transition into a cuisine? What does that mean for it? I interpret this as Galvez explaining the occurrence when food becomes perhaps more closely related to foodways. We sometimes identify the entity of food merely as fuel and necessary nutrition. A cuisine, however, has a culture associated with it that also includes the people and the experience. Galvez also looks at the potential business benefits of this as being able to make money by serving these cuisines in a way that satisfies a certain group of people.

Today in class, we thought about ‘junk food’ types of products such as Doritos and Coca-Cola. I’d personally say those are more related to being foods, or drinks, rather than cuisines. Even places like McDonald’s and Chipotle make me think a little bit. They do serve a specific cuisine, but can we say those franchises maybe have their own cuisine separate from the original culture? Does that make it just food, then?

Gálvez, Alyshia. Eating NAFTA (pp. 44-45). University of California Press. Kindle Edition.

“Tacos entered the national cuisine in the late nineteenth century and were seen as a potential danger to both health and morality. Although appearing at a time of industrialization, when labor migrants filled the streets, they were perceived not as an expression of modernity but rather as part of an indigenous invasion of Mexico City” (Pilcher).

My last blog post on Planet Taco, I mentioned some of the obstacles Mexican food faced as the makers attempted to expand its exposure. We’ve seen it time and time again with the most popular Mexican food chains tampering with original ingredients to appease a certain culture for the sake of business. This quote explains a different issue, though, that’s unrelated to its literal tastes and flavors. It also refers to an issue that relates within Mexico City.

Tacos did not seem to be warmly welcomed in Mexico City during the late nineteenth century. Some people believed they threatened one’s well-being as well as their virtues. The ‘labor migrants’ were not perceived as a positive for the city becoming more contemporary. They especially jeopardized ‘Porfirian order and progress’, which refers to the regime of the Mexican general who was in power as president of the country during these times.

It particularly sticks out to me that tacos had a difficult start even in a place like Mexico City. I last wrote about how maize early on misrepresented the pellagra epidemic; perhaps that is associated with the health concern here. The symbol of tacos being a barrier to ethics in this area is even more surprising to me. It ultimately further demonstrates the various hardships Mexican food experienced in the beginning to become accepted.

Pilcher, Jeffrey M. Planet Taco (pp. 81-82). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.