Mexico: Food is Free and Meat Has A Mystique
Street food is everywhere (and meat is alive and well)
Hello, readers,
Until you travel, you think you know food, but then food surprises you.
Like the lyrics to hit songs, food is often misunderstood. Especially when we visit other countries. They speak another language, and they eat different foods.
Or perhaps they eat similar foods, but the food looks and tastes quite different.
Crossing the border into Mexico by road is like traveling back in time, to an era when food looked like food, and people weren’t afraid of it.
On the US side of the border in the town of Nogales, Arizona, the roads are paved, more or less. The yellow lane lines are freshly painted and clearly visible.
People don’t play in traffic, and restaurants stay a respectable distance from the street.
Then I entered the border crossing area, drove over the transnational bridge across the dry Nogales Wash, and passed through Mexican Customs and Immigration.
Food Is Free to Roam in Mexico
After entering Mexico on the other side of the wash, I felt like I was in another galaxy. The lane lines disappeared. The cars flowed around each other like water.
At the first traffic light, teenagers raced into traffic and peered into my car window, presenting trays of foods, drinks, and sundry trinkets for sale, while my dog barked furiously at them.
“Assassins!” he shouted. “No,” I said, “food vendors.” “In that case, buy some!”
Suddenly, food was everywhere around us. People sold food from hand-held trays, pushcarts, tricycles with coolers, and wooden stalls on the edge of the street.
Food had escaped and was on the loose, like a zoo animal that got out of its cage. Vendors could smell money, and they prowled the traffic lanes seeking a sale
It made me dizzy. I had to pull off the road for a minute.
I stopped to change money at a cambio, then spotted a man nearby. Waving my arm at the vendors of all sizes and shapes, I asked him to explain the scene to me.
“What,” I asked him, “are all these people doing in the street selling food?”
He gave me an odd look and shrugged, “They are working, señor.”
‘Yes, but why are they selling food in the streets?” I asked him, exasperated. “They should not sell it in the streets. Food should only be sold inside restaurants.”
Another shrug.
“They cannot afford to have a restaurant, senor. And they cannot come to your home. They do not know where you live. So, they find you in the street, señor.’
Suddenly, it made sense. But it still puzzled me.
“But there are so many kinds of vendors. Who are they? What do you call them?”
Pointing to the teens toting trays, he said, ”Those are ambulantes.” Then he pointed at the pushcarts. “Those are carritos.” A little further away, he pointed out tricycles. “Those are triciclos. The wooden shacks are puestos (stands)…,” he said.
He was on a roll. The list was growing longer.
“Some are called taqueros; the one in the pink shirt is a tamalera, and…”
“Ok, thanks,” I said, cutting him off.
Now, my head was spinning. No one warned me I would stumble onto a food carnival only minutes into Mexico. I knew that I would never go hungry here.
The smells were enticing, tantalizing. The primitive scent of meat grilling on charcoal fires floated through my car window. My inner caveman weakened.
It was a street battle, and food was winning.
Food had broken out of the boring, sanitized confines of the restaurants where it is normally held captive in the United States.
In Mexico, food is free and furious. It takes no prisoners, but it held me hostage.
Eating and Retreating
At lunchtime, I arrived in a small town and walked into a roadside restaurant. I sat down and looked at the menu, but had no idea what any of the items were.
The server stood there, pad in hand, smiling, waiting for my order.
I pointed at an item. Something with eggs (huevos). Off he went. Eventually, he returned. He placed a dish in front of me, then stood, waiting for my opinion.
I looked down and saw eggs swimming in a sea of red salsa.
I asked him for something. As soon as he left, I stuck the tines of my fork in the salsa and placed a speck on my tongue. It was scalding hot.
When the server returned, I asked for the dish “para llevar” (“carry out”). We fled.
The Mystique of Meat
We stopped for the night. I decided to go to a grocery store, but where could I find one? I typed supermarket into my phone.
Up popped a bewildering list of bodegas, tiendas, abarrotes, mercados, and supermercados. “What is all this?” I asked my dog. He stared at me blankly.
No help there.
I drove to the nearest mercado and walked inside, grocery list in hand. The dimly lit store was small. A tiny section of fruits and vegetables and partly bare shelves.
I went to the butcher counter in the back. There, I saw it: meat!
I don’t mean normal meat, like we have in grocery stores in the US, wrapped in plastic, on a Styrofoam tray, on top of a pad that absorbs any unsightly … blood.
No.
Piled up in a big metal tub, I saw big hunks of beef that appeared to be … leaking.
You know what I mean.
“Excuse me,” I whispered conspiratorially to the butcher at the counter, pointing down at the tin of raw beef. ‘I think someone may have murdered the meat.”
He stared at me, uncomprehendingly.
‘It’s not supposed to look like that,” I told him. “It’s bright red and … uhh … juicy.”
“It is beef,” he said, shrugging. “I just cut up a cow. Of course, there is blood.”
Oh my, he used that B word. I felt myself getting faint.
“But,” I protested, “That could be upsetting to some people. Like me.”
‘You want to buy meat, right?” he asked.
‘Yes, but not dead meat!” I whispered.
He pressed the intercom. “Cope de nieve en la carniceria,” (A snowflake in the meat department). A manager walked up and asked me what the matter was.
I said. “In the US, our beef does not look like it came from a deceased cow.”
“How does it come, in a wooden cow coffin?” he asked me.
He was close.
“It looks nice and safe, wrapped in plastic. It looks …” (Here I got poetic) “Like it’s sleeping peacefully on a white foam tray. With a little tiny pillow underneath it.”
“You think the meat is sleeping?” He looked at me skeptically.
“Let’s say we play along. We tell our children that cows are very emotional. They fall to pieces when they hear that we need beef. Some pieces are steaks, etc.”
“And your kids believe that?” he asked, incredulous.
‘I’m not sure. But it’s like Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. If you pretend to believe, you reap the benefits. But, your beef did not leave the cow voluntarily.”
‘Well,” he said, “Here, people want to see that the meat is red and fresh. They don’t mind. They know a cow has to be slaughtered for them to buy some beef.”
I found myself in a trap. Perhaps we indulged in a bit of meat hypocrisy at home.
But could I ask them to put on the same pretense here? Should Mexico create a charade to delude people about something that doesn’t even bother them?
You visit another country expecting things to be different, and then they are. The differences between food in the US and Mexico reveal a startling truth.
· In America, we think what we do is normal, healthy, and good.
· In Mexico, they think what they do is normal, healthy, and good.
Do you see the difference? Neither do I. Let me try again.
Food is a lot like language. There is a different word for everything. It looks different, and it smells and tastes different, but in reality, it’s mostly the same.
Is that clear now? No? Oh, dear. Do you feel funny about how some foods, like meat, look in other countries, compared to how they are presented in the US?
AFTERWORD
Food in Mexico is presented and handled very differently from in the US. Personally, I find it fascinating and almost thrilling that food is presented in so many places by so many kinds of vendors. It feels more alive and integrated.
But it can take a little getting used to, and some people may be taken aback by it.
I would love to hear from readers about your reactions to how food is prepared and sold, and served in other countries you visited, and how you felt about that.
Did seeing how it is handled elsewhere make you see things at home differently? I feel that selling meat wrapped in plastic, sitting on foam trays, seems very sterile.
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I was dragged kicking and screaming into a life of eating a plant-based diet about 15 years ago by my then partner, now wife. She made the change and it was just too difficult for me to try to prepare a separate dish at meal times, so I begrudgingly went along with it. Over the years, I was surprised that my taste in food changed as I was introduced to many types of food that I never knew existed. I also learned a lot about factory farm food systems, treatment and welfare of animals, how food production effects the environment, social justice issues associated with food production, effects of diet on health and aging, and many other things that I believe have enriched my life and understanding of the world we live in. Over the past two years, we have slowly reintroduced some fish, eggs, dairy, and beef or chicken. They all together make up less than 20% of our overall diet. People should be free to eat (almost) anything they wish, but it’s very telling the lengths the marketing companies and lobbyists go to in an attempt to obfuscate “where” and “how” meat and dairy get to your table. All of that is to say that I appreciate your observations about cultural differences regarding food and how people of different backgrounds view their relationship with what’s on the plate. Thank you for approaching the subject with wit and your unique voice.
Have you ever been in a real mercado? There you find chunks of beef hanging from hooks. And pork. And chicken. Blood drips.