Taco Planet: Post Your International Sightings

JeffB wrote:I'll take that money....

I'm convinced that Mexican is still the greatest cuisine that's not everywhere. It also is very likely the one that sucks most off its native (including parts of the US) soil, owing to the unique need for good masa. (Unlike the relatively ubiquitous Italian, French, Chinese, Japanese, Indian). Maybe Thai is equally great/unknown.

JimInLoganSquare wrote:I recall seeing one or two Mexican restaurants in Buenos Aires when Mrs. JiLS and I visited there in 2008. We were by no means in the market for Mexican food on that trip, and the general distaste for much if any spiciness among the folks of BA (or at least their reputation for it) made me figure any Mexican style food would be tailored to the local tastes and therefore probably not very satisfying to us. But who knows what we might have been missing?

JeffB wrote:My travels suggest that Mexican is under-represented internationally in relation to it gastronomic "value" in terms of taste, complexity, variation and originality.

JeffB wrote: If this Board has taught me anything, it's that while not every nation or culture has a great cuisine, Mexico is among the small handful that surely do. But you don't see it abroad (outside Mexico and the US of course) as much as you'd expect, and when you do, it's usually God-awful fake Tex-Mex and way, way more off-base than overseas attempts at other great cuisines.

JeffB wrote:Exactly. What are they using for tortillas?

As late as the 1960s, tacos were virtually unknown outside Mexico and the American Southwest. Within fifty years the United States had shipped taco shells everywhere from Alaska to Australia, Morocco to Mongolia. But how did this tasty hand-held food--and Mexican food more broadly--become so ubiquitous?

In Planet Taco, Jeffrey Pilcher traces the historical origins and evolution of Mexico's national cuisine, explores its incarnation as a Mexican American fast-food, shows how surfers became global pioneers of Mexican food, and how Corona beer conquered the world. Pilcher is particularly enlightening on what the history of Mexican food reveals about the uneasy relationship between globalization and authenticity. The burritos and taco shells that many people think of as Mexican were actually created in the United States. But Pilcher argues that the contemporary struggle between globalization and national sovereignty to determine the authenticity of Mexican food goes back hundreds of years. During the nineteenth century, Mexicans searching for a national cuisine were torn between nostalgic "Creole" Hispanic dishes of the past and French haute cuisine, the global food of the day. Indigenous foods were scorned as unfit for civilized tables. Only when Mexican American dishes were appropriated by the fast food industry and carried around the world did Mexican elites rediscover the foods of the ancient Maya and Aztecs and embrace the indigenous roots of their national cuisine.

From a taco cart in Hermosillo, Mexico to the "Chili Queens" of San Antonio and tamale vendors in L.A., Jeffrey Pilcher follows this highly adaptable cuisine, paying special attention to the people too often overlooked in the battle to define authentic Mexican food: Indigenous Mexicans and Mexican Americans.

Bio:
Jeffrey M. Pilcher is Professor of History at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of !Que vivan los tamales! Food and the Making of Mexican Identity; The Sausage Rebellion: Public Health, Private Enterprise, and Meat in Mexico City; and Food in World History. He also edited the Oxford Handbook of Food History.