Planet Taco: A Global History of Mexican Food

Abstract

A well-known saying in Spanish declares, “Explain who your friends are, and I’ll tell you who you are.” In our own era, in which global food industries cater to mass markets while the upper middle classes partake in local food movements and post photos to Instagram of exotic meals, perhaps a more apt aphorism would be, “Tell me what you eat, and I’ll tell you who you are.” Jeffrey Pilcher’s most recent book shows that food is linked with identity, albeit in sometimes unexpected ways. Planet Taco provides a magisterial history of cuisine in greater Mexico from the domestication of maize to the present and includes detailed discussions of how food has historically functioned as a marker of social and regional distinctions. Nevertheless, the book at its heart is not intended as a history of Mexican cuisine. Rather, it focuses on the changing intentionality of people’s culinary choices by investigating how years of marketing, international displacements, and changing consumer tastes made Mexican food into a contested historical category.Pilcher illustrates this point by referring to a wide variety of Mexican dishes, including the humble but iconic taco. While people have used tortillas as a staple food and makeshift casing for victuals since pre-Hispanic times, the term taco dates only to the late nineteenth century, when Mexico City street vendors first started selling the pre-rolled tortilla snacks to the burgeoning urban working class. Although the national elite initially scorned the street-food delicacy, later generations, confronting growing Americanization during the mid-twentieth century, embraced it as “a rival and nostalgic national cuisine” (pp. 152–53). By that point, however, differences of opinion already existed about what constituted an “authentic” taco. Was it the soft, rolled tortilla version sold in Mexico City or the hard-shell one invented by Mexican Americans in the US Southwest and soon embraced by corporations such as Old El Paso and Taco Bell? The answer might seem obvious, but Pilcher undermines any pat conclusions. After all, Mexico City’s quintessential taco al pastor is filled with meat cooked in a rotisserie of Lebanese origin (hardly a pre-Hispanic technology), while hard-shell tacos have been around for nearly as long. Until recently, moreover, most of the world embraced the hard-shell variety, because US corporations, restaurateurs, and (predominantly Anglo) travelers took the lead in introducing Mexican food to the global marketplace.Pilcher traces the globalization of Mexican food beginning with the transfer of maize to the Old World during the Columbian exchange. The book quickly moves through the colonial era and to the United States’ violent annexation of northern Mexico, which represented a turning point because the regional cuisines of what was now the US Southwest lost their claim to real Mexicanness thereafter. These North American cuisines continued to thrive, however, and soon garnered the attention of outsiders, as Pilcher demonstrates through an extended discussion of the San Antonio “chili queens” who catered to the lunch crowd in the central square, much to the displeasure of the city fathers, and who eventually became iconic figures thanks to the growing cadre of culinary tourists eager to taste San Antonio’s exotic fare. Most of the book focuses on the twentieth century, when enterprising North American chefs and corporations popularized the foods they defined as Mexican, first in the United States and then throughout the world. The globalization of a cuisine with multiple national origins, regional variations, and even a binational heritage naturally sparked a backlash among Mexicans (and self-appointed culinary purists abroad) eager to define what counted as authentic Mexican food and what to dismiss as phony, mass-market fare.Planet Taco is a sophisticated work of history that will appeal to cultural historians, food historians, and specialists of modern Mexico. Yet it is oriented above all to broad audiences, including undergraduates. (Although currently available only as a hardback, the price is lower than many academic paperbacks and thus is not a barrier to course adoption.) Pilcher writes in a breezy and accessible style that combines ethnographic detail with complex analyses of topics such as cultural imperialism, globalization, and business history. The book even features recipes drawn from historical sources for those who want to taste what they are reading about. The book’s few weaknesses derive from its ambitious scope. Planet Taco sometimes jumps from one example to another for no clear reason, while at other points Pilcher’s justifiable debunking of authentic Mexican food leads him to flatten out the moral questions surrounding outsiders from Glen Bell to Rick Bayless, who have made fortunes by repackaging someone else’s cultural patrimony. Nevertheless, Planet Taco will be widely read, and deservedly so, because it complicates seemingly familiar historical categories—nation, ethnicity, and culture, among others— through a culinary idiom that his readers already think they understand.