The Industrialization of Mexican Food Sources

[gnkindrick]

Hello to all. My Mexican boyfriend and I have recently gotten into several heated discussions about the industrialization of Mexican food.

When he lived in Mexico, he did not shop very often at large supermarkets, such as Gigante, Wal Mart, etc. He preferred to shop at mercados and tianguis (is street vendor an accurate translation for this?). At these venues in Guadalajara, he asserts that it is possible to find good quality produce, meats, and dairy products from organic and local sources.

He lived in Mexico for almost thirty years and claims that what we know as "organic" and "natural" here in the US, is the norm in Mexico.

I believe that at one time it was the norm, indeed. But now? I really do not know.

Does anyone have any insight into this?

My theory is that Mexico is on its way to heavy industrialization of food. Akin to what is described in Fast Food Nation. The kind of stuff that many people here in the US have rejected in the past years, such as factory farming, the use of pesticides and hormones, etc.

I have a hunch that in Mexican supermarkets, the majority of the chickens and the meat do come from factories, just as here, but it's only a hunch. But do most people in Mexico shop at these places or are they really only affordable for and accessible to the small middle class?

******

On a side note, he also would like to know why he cannot find "crema" here in the US as he knew it in Mexico (which is much thicker and is really a solid in my opinion).

[Ruth in Condechi]

Hello to all.  My Mexican boyfriend and I have recently gotten into several heated discussions about the industrialization of Mexican food. 

Having just shopped in the Tuesday Tianguis of Condesa here in Mexico City I can say that the open air markets are still going strong! From prehispanic times to the present they have doggedly served the mexican communities by providing for the smaller merchants a venue for farm product "just picked".

We must remember that when the spanish conquistadors arriveded in Mexico City ,the fabled Tenochtitlan, they found a market that surpassed anything that they knew of in Europe. It was not only a food market but the central place of commerce for all things produced. The extent of this great market is represented in the murals of Diego Rivera in the Palacio Nacional here in Mexico City just steps from the Zocalo which formed part of the tianguis. The remnants of this great market can be seen in La Merced market and in the tianguises which occur throughtout this city on various days. Yes today the "mercado en ruedas" or market on wheels still serves neighborhoods and can be as small as one street or run to 20 or so streets which is the case in the southern part of the city, which still retains some of the indian traditions. It is not unusual to find that your vendor is of indigenious raices and is naming her fruits,vegetables and other products in her language and not in Spanish.

As to the industrialization, some of the vendors may buy product from the Central de Abastos, the citys central market, but that would be expensive and the secret to the success of the tianguis is that everything is fresher, cheaper and BETTER as I have found.

Must go, will try to post later in day.

[rancho_gordo]

Here's a link to a depressing story on the state of Mexican tortillas.

By 1996, Maseca had drawn the attention of Archer Daniels Midland, the world's largest corn broker. Itself no stranger to government largesse, ADM spotted a good business model from across the border, and bought a 22 percent stake in GRUMA, Maseca's parent company. Today, ADM's formidable board chair G. Allen Andreas sits on GRUMA's board of directors, as does the company's CFO, Douglas J. Schmalz.

GRUMA now controls 70 percent of Mexico's corn-flour market. As NAFTA opened the Mexican market to cheap, highly subsidized U.S. corn and dismantled Mexico's support for its farmers, the price of corn in Mexico plunged, providing a windfall for GRUMA and despair for Mexican corn growers. Maseca now imports 30 percent of its corn for tortilla production from the United States, according to an Oxfam report

More and more "fresh" tortillas are made from Maseca masa harina rather than masa. One taste will tell you this isn't progress.

[kalypso]

He lived in Mexico for almost thirty years and claims that what we know as "organic" and "natural" here in the US, is the norm in Mexico. 

I believe that at one time it was the norm, indeed.  But now?  I really do not know.

Does anyone have any insight into this?   

My theory is that Mexico is on its way to heavy industrialization of food.  Akin to what is described in Fast Food Nation.  The kind of stuff that many people here in the US have rejected in the past years, such as factory farming, the use of pesticides and hormones, etc. 

I have a hunch that in Mexican supermarkets, the majority of the chickens and the meat do come from factories, just as here, but it's only a hunch.  But do most people in Mexico shop at these places or are they really only affordable for and accessible to the small middle class?

←

I don't know that I have insight as much as I have a lot of experience with markets in Mexico. While Sam's, Wal-Mart and Costco have made in-roads in the Mexican grocery business, the local marcados appear to be very much alive, well and thriving. One thing to remember is that the pricing at Sam's, Wal-Mart, Soriano and Gigante can sometimes be beyond what many Mexicans can afford. The tianguis and mercardos are not. It is possible to eat extremely well and economically by shopping them.

If you read the USDA rules and regs for organic you'll find that they allow for quite a bit of wiggle room in interpretation. There are a number of organic farmers who feel the USDA rules are very watered down and not true to the roots of the organic movement. I think it's highly doubtful that Mexican farmers are growing to U.S. organic standards.

Generally, I've found the quality, variety and selection of produce in Mexican tianguis and mercados to be very, very good. It is usually very ripe and ready-to-eat, not having been picked green or underripe for shipment halfway around the country or the world to reach market. This may actually be the point your boyfriend is making, i.e. that the fruits, vegetables, cheese, yogurts and meats have a better chance of having been produced locally in Mexico than they do in the U.S. (as the recent e.coli 0157 outbreak in spinach has so aptly demonstrated). I think it might be more accurate to equate Mexican mercados and tianguis with the local farmer's markets in the U.S. than to organics.

I recently spent a few days in Guadalajara last month in which I visited the Tianguis del Sol in Zapopan, the Mercado del Mar (fish market) in Zapopan which happens to be the 2nd largest in Mexico, and the infamous Mercado Libertad. All of these are extremely well patronized by Tapatios of all social and economic classes. Vast quantities of assorted food products move through these markets. All 3 of these market visits are documented here - The Dining Diva blog. There are photos of the meat stalls at the Libertad, and yes, some of the meat - mostly tripe and intestines - is coming out of boxes labled IBP or Excel, which makes it imported from the U.S., not produced locally. There is also a photo of the chicken vendor at the Tianguis del Sol, probably selling locally produced chickens.

OTOH, last year in Michoacan I was driving into the small town of Capula and passed a small cinderblock building that was the local meat packing house. There was a lone cow in the holding pen. It wasn't there on the trip out of Capula a couple of hours later, most likely having met it's fate and ultimately filling a community's carneceria cases.

In 2004 I had the opportunity to visit a barbacoa specialist in Teotitlan del Valle in the State of Oaxaca. When we arrived the family was just finishing up the skinning of a cow that had been brought to them to be dispatched and converted into barbacoa for a quinceñara (spelling?). The lamb I had come to see prepared had been killed the day before and was hanging on a hook. As we were leaving another cow was being led down the road to end up as barbacoa for a baptisim. This family's sole source of support was dispatching animals and turning them into barbacoa for family and/or community festivities that mark the passage of time and life in small Mexican towns. Sometimes they kept the skins and hooves, sometimes they didn't, it just depended upon what they negotiated with the person putting on the party and bringing in the animal. And they weren't the only barbacoa specialists in town! Clearly, this activity was the norm.

A few days after the visit to the barbacoa specialist I found myself at the Friday market in Ocotlan. Being the week before Dia de los Muertos the market was packed, absolutely packed, with people selling and buying. Women were shopping for new dishware, flowers abounded, and even though the bulk of the produce probably came out of the Abastos in Oaxaca, there were mounds and mounds of it, most of it gorgeous and almost all of it perfectly ripe. Mountains of freshly baked bread and tortillas were being purchased as quickly as it came out of the oven or off the conveyor.

The point is that these mercados and tianguis are so ingrained into the fabric of life, even in large cities, that shopping at them becomes second nature to the residents. They patronize one vendor over another, prefer meat from one stall and not another, or the bolillos from this baker rather than that. Interestingly enough, I've found that my own buying habits here in San Diego reflect my Mexican experineces. I buy my meat from a butcher, my fish from a fish monger, visit farmer's markets and specialty produce markets for fruits and vegetables. What is under one roof (or one sky as may be the case) in Mexico, I have to drive all over town to find.

This is a generalization, but Mexicans have better understanding of the food chain than do many Americans. There is a line in Tony Bourdain's book Kitchen Confidential where he says he knows that when he picks up the phone to order products, mostly likely something on the other end is going to have to die in order to satisfy his order. Most American's don't think like that, they go to the store, the nice package is there, no muss, no fuss and meat/poutlry/seafood gets put on the dinner table. More Mexican's understand this type of connection.

Yes, there is absolutely big agribusiness in Mexico, and yes, it will continue to grow. I don't think, however, that it will become what you are envisioning. The tianguis and mercados are alive and vibrant, though they may not be quite what your boyfriend remembers. Because of the economic impact and safety net they provide in helping keep the nation fed at a reasonable expense, their demise is not imminent. Reality is probably somewhere in between what you think and what your BF thinks

[esperanza]

I think both things are true: there has been tremendous industrialization of food in Mexico over the last 25 years, and it's still possible to find the sort of shopping your boyfriend remembers.

Like Ruth of Condechi, who lives in a very upscale colonia in Mexico City and shops at her neighborhood tianguis (the Nahuatl word for street market), I live in Guadalajara (a block and a half from the Templo Expiatorio, for anyone who knows the city) and shop almost exclusively at a local tianguis. I buy all of my fruits, vegetables, spices, eggs, fish and other seafood, chicken, flour tortillas, rice, beans, nuts and dried fruit, cheeses, and (ah yes) crema there, as well as most of my clothes. While the majority of the gorgeous fruits and vegetables come from the Abastos in GDL, there are still lovely fresh things that come from other, more individualized sources. For example, during the last two weeks I've seen baskets of absolutely stunningly beautiful huitlacoche, tiny green-striped calabacitas in shapes I've never seen before (like baby gourds, like ribbons), and the smallest tomate de milpa.

The tianguis vendors do not sell meats such as beef and pork (other than longaniza). Nor do they sell staples such as milk, cereals, crackers, flours, soft drinks, etc. For those, I depend on supermarkets like Gigante, Comercial Mexicana, and even the reviled Wal-Mart. For corn tortillas, there is the tortillería half a block from my house.

Unless you are in a fairly rural area, chickens no longer have the run of the patio until they are needed for today's comida. One of my favorite memories of rural Mexico is arriving unannounced near time for my friends' midday meal and being greeted with, "Ay qué milagro que llegaste, ya casi está la comida--solo me falta matar la gallina!" (Oh what a miracle that you're here, dinner is almost ready--I just have to kill the hen!) Today, the Bachoco company literally rules the roost. I recently heard a GDL radio station commercial urging listeners to continue to eat national chicken. For those who aren't aware, much chicken from the USA is currently being imported into Mexico; you can always tell the difference: USA-raised chickens are pallid, thin birds while the Mexican chicken meat is deep pink, plump, and yellow-skinned.

The pig being raised at the back of the garden (or running loose in the byways of a small town) is also going the way of the chicken, in urban areas. But not far from any urban area there is a rural area still thriving on the old ways.

Beef comes, by and large, from feedlots and the rastro municipal (slaughterhouse). However, I still have friends who would no more eat beef from a cello-wrapped package than fly to the moon. If it wasn't raised by their friends and killed that morning, forget it!

At Friday night's Independence Day party, the conversation turned to tianguis shopping. Two of the guests, Mexican yuppies, decried shopping among the populacho. "Why would you go THERE?" they screamed, horrified. "Because THERE is where the best things are sold, where everything is the freshest, where the best bargains are found, where..." my answer trailed off when I saw that they weren't really listening. And those middle class young urbanites are the wave of the future: the wave of pre-packaged lettuce, 'stoplight' peppers (a packet of three, one green, one yellow, and one red), sub-par produce, and dependence on Wal-Mart.

The urban dilemma, however, includes wanting to shop in the old and much more personal way, when the new one-stop shopping is so convenient. When I shop at the supermarket, I can get in and get out of a sterile shopping trip, bim-bam-boom. When I shop at the tianguis, I know the vendors: whose daughter just had a baby, whose husband has gone to the north, whose mother was just diagnosed with diabetes, whose son got himself arrested. It takes longer to shop this way, but what of it? Once in a while I'm the recipient of a bit of this vegetable ('Ay señora, la guardé para usted.'), a bit of that conversation ('Mi abuelita siempre lo preparaba así...') that simply does not exist in the supermarkets. It keeps me connected to the community and to the earth. To me, that's as important as what I'm buying and who I'm preparing it for.

Hello to all.  My Mexican boyfriend and I have recently gotten into several heated discussions about the industrialization of Mexican food. 

When he lived in Mexico, he did not shop very often at large supermarkets, such as Gigante, Wal Mart, etc.  He preferred to shop at mercados and tianguis (is street vendor an accurate translation for this?).  At these venues in Guadalajara, he asserts that it is possible to find good quality produce, meats, and dairy products from organic and local sources. 

He lived in Mexico for almost thirty years and claims that what we know as "organic" and "natural" here in the US, is the norm in Mexico. 

I believe that at one time it was the norm, indeed.  But now?  I really do not know.

Does anyone have any insight into this?   

My theory is that Mexico is on its way to heavy industrialization of food.  Akin to what is described in Fast Food Nation.  The kind of stuff that many people here in the US have rejected in the past years, such as factory farming, the use of pesticides and hormones, etc. 

I have a hunch that in Mexican supermarkets, the majority of the chickens and the meat do come from factories, just as here, but it's only a hunch.  But do most people in Mexico shop at these places or are they really only affordable for and accessible to the small middle class?

 

******

On a side note, he also would like to know why he cannot find "crema" here in the US as he knew it in Mexico (which is much thicker and is really a solid in my opinion).

←

[Gabriel Lewis]

I just love the descriptions of tianguis' (could someone tell me how to pronounce this word) and other more traditional food sources several of you have described. Living pretty much smack in the middle of a large urban city, I am surrounded by large-scale industrialization of food distribution on all sides.

What is under one roof (or one sky as may be the case) in Mexico, I have to drive all over town to find.

How well I can relate to this! I would be a far less busy person if I had access to all my products under "one roof". I am fortunate enough to have some lovely farmer's markets, but of late I am having mixed feelings about them. It seems too many of the vendors are middlemen who have no qualms about adding sugar to their sample platters of fruit or the like.

If it wasn't raised by their friends and killed that morning, forget it!

Do you mean this literally? It was my understanding that beef that has not been hung and aged is not very palatable.

Thanks again everyone for sharing your experiences. I have been to Mexico before but was too young at the time (and not as food-obsessed) to appreciate or seek out the things you describe. When I make it back, my priorities will be clear.

[esperanza]

I just love the descriptions of tianguis' (could someone tell me how to pronounce this word) and other more traditional food sources several of you have described. Living pretty much smack in the middle of a large urban city, I am surrounded by large-scale industrialization of food distribution on all sides.

If it wasn't raised by their friends and killed that morning, forget it!

Do you mean this literally? It was my understanding that beef that has not been hung and aged is not very palatable.

Tianguis is pronounced tee-AHN-geese.

Yes, I mean it literally. What my friends say about their beef is that it has to be ´recién matada´--recently killed. And by recently, they mean that morning. It´s really unusual to find beef here that´s been hung and aged. Most national (i.e., Mexican-raised) beef is fairly tough, unless it is prepared properly.