Monday, May 01, 2006
What Makes Mexican Food "Authentic"?
Just found this article at HappyNews.com that gives some insight into the issue of what the term "authentic" means when applied to Mexican food. If anyone has further insights or opinions, please leave a comment.
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2 comments:
Well I'm not mexican, but I am latino (want to know from which country? check out my profile, or better yet my blog). This is something I can say about food in general:
Every dish, has an origin, a story, a country (or countries in some cases), a history, and a piece of culture.
Now mexican dishes are usually made in a combination of one or more of these main ingrediences: Rice, beans, wheat based food, corn, and a kind of meat.
(Am I trying to be stereotypical? Heck no. When it comes to food and different cultures, nobody is trying to be sterotypical, everyone is just hungry)
Look at those ingrediences, and tell me why do you think those are the main ones? It's because those were the main things they had to grow. Meat is in every culture dish. Wheat and corn are mostly based off of what the native americans that lived in the Mexican region harvested and ate (hello, they have a hot sun, they used it as their oven), and rice and beans can be found anywhere.
So if you want to know what authentic means when it's applied to Mexican food, it usually means it's a dish that has been passed down throughout the ages (no, not a burrito/taco. Those are fairly new) and it holds a high abundance of culture in it (from where all the ingrediences came from)
Thanks for your insightful comment, Marco.
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