In reading the introduction to ‘Planet Taco’, we can already see some of various obstacles Mexican people had to overcome to raise exposure for their food. ‘Planet Taco examines this conflict between globalization and the nation as a battle of images between how foreigners think about Mexican food and how Mexicans understand their own national cuisine’ (Pilcher 5). Here we this contrast demonstrated of how non-Hispanics perceive Mexican food. This is a common struggle we’ve seen that’s sure to arise without adapting the food to the taste of the ‘foreigners’. How do you promote your type of food to different people without altering it in a way that removes its authenticity?

Another hurdle for Mexican food early on was the ‘epidemics of pellagra followed the spread of maize in the centuries after 1492’ (9). This associated the food with a negative connotation that it would cause disease, so people further turned away from it. It’s not easy to convince people to try your food if they think they’ll get sick from it.

‘Planet Taco shows how images of authenticity have been invented to promote culinary tourism and nationalist ideology’ (16). This is Pilcher’s way of saying that many people will attach certain ideas about a particular culture in the form of judging its food. Pilcher argues that the taco is represented by some tourists as a ‘potentially dangerous’ symbol, which does the culture no favors in trying to further popularize it.

Pilcher, Jeffrey M. Planet Taco. Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.

Food has carried my culture in a way that has shaped a weekly tradition I’ve lived by for as long as I can remember. Every Sunday, my family comes together for dinner and my mom makes pasta and tomato sauce with meatballs for us. She uses store-bought pasta and tomatoes, but she has her own recipe for the sauce.

It’s at the point where if we have a different cuisine for Sunday dinner, it feels like something is off. Being an Italian, food, specifically pasta dishes, have always been a central part of my life. When my mom doesn’t know what else to cook for dinner during the week, it usually goes back to some form of pasta dish.

It hadn’t occurred to me the role of men in the cooking process until Dr. Alvarez brought it up today. In all my years, whether it’s been me, my brother, or my father, men haven’t traditionally been involved in it. Unless we include the cleaning up part, then it’s always been either my mother or my grandmother cooking.

Earlier I said, ‘it feels off’ if we don’t eat Italian on Sunday. I don’t mean to say eating other cuisines on a Sunday is wrong and we have done it on occasion. This is merely a custom we try to obey that my great grandmother carried down to my grandmother to my mother, and so forth. Sunday has just always been our ‘family day’, so to speak, but we’ll eat other types of food like American, Mexican, or Chinese during the week.

“I want not only to make you desire Mexican food, but also to understand it, to appreciate it further.” (Arellano 265)

Arellano certainly achieved this goal in ‘Taco USA’. He brought to light so many topics about the history of Mexican food I never truly considered. He writes, ‘every Mexican foodstuff has a story…’ and often times I forget this part and not just with Mexican food. Even as an Italian, I don’t yet feel like I truly understand the history behind the food of my culture. I love pasta and pizza, but too frequently I am consumed more by the taste rather than the story. I don’t feel like I’m a part of it. This book has inspired me to be more passionate about the emotion surrounding Italian food.

I appreciate what Arellano tries to do with ‘Taco USA’. His message isn’t solely to make the reader gravitate more towards eating Mexican food. It’s not about preaching or lecturing about how good the food of his heritage is. It’s more so designed to be an informative piece. It explores the past of Mexican food and how it has been changed over time to accommodate our American appetite. It also demonstrates how it’s been altered and taken advantage of merely for the sake of business and money-making.

Arellano, Gustavo. Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America, Scribner. Kindle Edition.

‘Noboby hates tacos’- Roy Choi

This was the perfect response to David Chang’s question in the ‘Ugly Delicious’ episode we watched. He asked why a taco is the best method to represent his voice as well as the voice of other immigrants. Choi also considers the taco ‘portable vessel of love’. That made me smile. 😊

Chang explains the Kogi taco experience couldn’t have commenced anywhere else other than in that Los Angeles truck. The food doesn’t necessarily taste Korean or Mexican, as it seems to have its own specific identity. Choi then replies by discussing how other cultural experiences can’t possibly be recreated in places other than where they were originally rooted. He brought up the ‘Italian American’ experience in New Jersey.

This entire episode continued to be eye-opening for me as we saw the different way Mexican food is produced in America and in Mexico. In places like Los Angeles and New York, the most authentic eateries tended to be of the ‘street taco’ variety from food trucks. The cooking process in Mexico at the very end of the episode, however, was amazing to me. Being able to actually partake in the procedure and seeing it happen naturally adds a completely new layer of emotion to the food. You don’t feel that way with the food in America whereas you almost feel a part of the food in Mexico.

‘Doolin—a health fanatic who kept his family on a vegetarian diet—had hoped to see his product become more than a chip, but that never happened. Doritos joined Fritos in being relegated to junk food status—popular, of course, but still junk.’ (Arellano 209).

When I posted on Instagram a picture of my bags of Doritos on Super Bowl Sunday, Dr. Alvarez had commented that there would be more on the topic of Doritos in ‘Taco USA’. I was quite interested to see how Arellano would implement them in the text. This quote references the founder of Fritos, the company that produces the likes of Doritos and Tostitos, Elmer Doolin, who passed away in 1959.

Arellano claims that his goal was to perhaps produce Fritos products that were healthier alternatives to salty chips. Instead, we saw Doritos, ‘little golden things’, break ground seven years following his passing in 1966. Let’s just say, Doritos aren’t exactly the healthiest snack around, but admittedly aren’t the least healthy option either. Doritos had instant success and remains one of the most popular snacks today.

It makes me wonder if Doolin would be fully proud that a great portion of success for his business stems from something like Doritos. It didn’t seem like his objective was for Doritos to become the go-to option for junk food for many folks. After all, however, we understand the position of a business and making money as the ultimate aim. The creators of Doritos certainly were on to something with this invention despite it going against what their founder may have envisioned.

Arellano, Gustavo. Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America (p. 209). Scribner. Kindle Edition.  

When I had the ‘Mission Bay’ burrito at Ho’Brah in Brooklyn, I just thought the name was made up to fit the theme of the restaurant. Little did I know, mission burritos are actually their very own style of burritos. The first aspect I noticed was the sheer size of it; it resembled that of an American football. Sure enough, according to Wikipedia, mission burritos are known for their largeness in proportion as well as added rice, which also stuck out to me when I ate this burrito.

They initially became popular in the 1960s in San Francisco. I understand they are generally steamed and placed in aluminum foil, but mine looked like it was grilled and also did not come in foil. I probably could have used it because the integrity of the tortilla eventually started to fall a part due to its weight. It does stay consistent with its original form in that it is comprised of rice, beans, and a choice of meat.

“Tacos originally migrated to California and Texas in the 1920s, and only made it into scattered Mexican cookbooks written by Americans in about the 1930s”.

It amazes that it took this length of time for Mexican food to gain recognition in America. Looking back, Arellano believed that Mexican food made its American debut at the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893. So, if we look at this timeline, it took between 30-40 years for Mexican food to rise onto the scene in America after it was initially introduced. As is the case with many new styles of food, it takes time for people of a different background to become acclimated with dishes they’re not accustomed to.

An additional wrinkle here is that Arellano says Mexican food wasn’t easily accessible across the nation until Taco Bell rose to prominence in the 1960s. Obviously, the food sold from Taco Bell is a poor and inaccurate representation of the way tacos are made in Mexico. That’s unfortunately what Americans have gravitated towards, however, while smaller ‘mom and pop’ shops with authenticity tend to be neglected because they may be unestablished or not a ‘household name’.

Arellano, Gustavo. Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America (p. 53). Scribner. Kindle Edition.

We learned from the Mexington video that Laura traveled from Mexico to America at the age of 16 and it was a difficult transition for her and her family. Not being surrounded by other folks who speak Spanish played a huge part in this hardship. She also particularly missed the authentic Mexican food back in her homeland because the way it’s made here is very different. She looked to change that.

The Ramirez family, Laura and Alberto, took a gamble and opened their own restaurant in Lexington, Kentucky serving the recipes they learned from home. Not only did this end up satisfying the Hispanic community in the area, but it also accommodated the Americans in the area. Alberto even said that some of the people would look at these “funny” items on the menu, but they ultimately came to enjoy it.

This part sticks out to me because I feel like the Ramirez family didn’t open the restaurant with the expectation that the American demographic would give them a lot of business. It seems like the intention was to unite the Mexican people in the vicinity with original food from Mexico, which they certainly did succeed in doing.

Not many other Mexican people have this opportunity to showcase how Mexican food was designed to be served because so much of it has become overshadowed by the Americanized variety. I’m glad that they took the risk and opened their business to try and promote what legitimate Mexican food looks and tastes like.

“For here in the Second City, more than a century ago, legend has it that Mexican food made its national debut at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, better remembered as the Chicago World’s Fair” (Arellano 31).

Arellano here is referring to a fair held in Chicago commemorating Christopher Columbus’ expedition to America in 1492. The part that sticks out to me about this is that Arellano cites an American event as the first true showcase of Mexican food. The fact that it was overlooked until this point is a glaring discovery to me. It was at this fair that something as prominent in American cuisine today as the hamburger was also unofficially introduced.

Appropriation sticks itself into the scene again, however, and the food here has that asterisk attached to it. Like most of the Mexican food in America, the food served at this event was not the same stuff you’d find in its original home. Although, Arellano does admit that “this Chicago tamale possesses an earthiness, a sweetness its Mexican cousin can’t reach” (30). From here, it gained its popularity in America and become just as frequent in this culture as hamburgers or pizza.

Arellano, Gustavo. Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America (p. 30-31). Scribner. Kindle Edition.

“Chili con carne, now plain ol’ chili, was a harbinger of things to come for Mexican food. It was a Mexican dish, made by Mexicans for Mexicans, but it was whites who made the dish a national sensation, who pushed it far beyond its ancestral lands, who adapted it to their tastes, who created companies for large-scale production, and who ultimately became its largest consumer to the point that the only thing Mexican about it was the mongrelized Spanish in its name” (Arellano 37).

I was surprised to hear Dr. Alvarez say that chili is not a Mexican dish in one of our first classes. I don’t think I was alone in thinking all my life that it was Mexican and this excerpt further touches on this concept a bit. Arellano specifies that it was initially a Mexican meal, however, it was white people who altered, or even doctored, it in a way that popularized it for business and mass production.

This falsification stripped what was originally regarded as “chile” of a great deal of its Mexican authenticity. “Chili con carne” is at least moderately more related to its original form, but even that name doesn’t necessarily fully provide it with justice. This is yet another example of cultural appropriation and how whites have manipulated a meal intended to be “made by Mexicans for Mexicans”.

For these reasons, it’s quite likely Mexican folks would take great exception if someone like me said to them that chili is Mexican. There’s a sort of an underlying meaning to it as well; “chili” is an Americanized version of “chili con carne”, but more importantly, this tampered-with style was utilized merely as a money-maker in spite of what Mexicans designed it for.

Arellano, Gustavo. Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America (p. 37). Scribner. Kindle Edition.