Abstract
In spring of 2017, celebrity chef René Redzepi opened a pop-up of his famed restaurant, Noma, on the coast of the Yucatán Peninsula. During its run, Noma Mexico worked closely with the town of Yaxunah, a Yucatec-Mayan speaking community in the peninsula’s interior, hiring women to make tortillas and acquiring local ingredients for the restaurant. For us—two archaeologists interested in past and present Maya food and agriculture who have worked in the Yaxunah community for years—this made the 2017 field season a compelling time to engage in culinary heritage. We share on-the-ground perspectives from our work with Yaxunah community members during a decisive spring for rural Yucatán’s globalizing food system. These perspectives offer a candid contribution to this special issue’s archive of community-based and heritage-engaged archaeological work in the Maya area.
Highlights
IntroductionFor seven weeks in the spring of 2017, the Danish chef René Redzepi—whose Copenhagen restaurant Noma is revered in some gastronomic circles as the best in the world—opened a pop-up in
For seven weeks in the spring of 2017, the Danish chef René Redzepi—whose Copenhagen restaurant Noma is revered in some gastronomic circles as the best in the world—opened a pop-up inTulum, on the eastern coast of Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula
While the growing nonprofit FHMM cultivated a presence across the peninsula, a group of cooks who had worked for the archaeological projects in Yaxunah were mobilizing to tap into the networks first established by the earlier, unsuccessful, Fundación Cultural Yucatán (FCY) nonprofit organization
Summary
For seven weeks in the spring of 2017, the Danish chef René Redzepi—whose Copenhagen restaurant Noma is revered in some gastronomic circles as the best in the world—opened a pop-up in. Spectacularly useless”, nods to the tortilla-makers in his non-review: “Directly in front of the kitchen, four women from a nearby Mayan village make tortillas.” These women—as well as maize, eggs, vegetables, and herbs—came to Noma Mexico from the Yucatec Mayan-speaking community of Yaxunah, two-and-a-half hours’ drive inland from Tulum. Weare follow that context with a and knowledge artistry, stakeholders owe their celebrity to capitalism They products of the same system frank look at our experiences participating in culinary heritage production with the Yaxunah that has, for centuries, eroded Indigenous food sovereignty and dismantled traditional agricultural community during that eventful period. Though, we want to draw attention towards the ground-level dynamics of culinary heritage in Yaxunah and our participation in those dynamics as archaeologists We offer these narratives candidly, as a contribution to this special issue’s archive of on-the-ground insights into 21st-century archaeologists’ engagement with communities and heritage in the Maya area.
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