2004 Annual Meeting - Abstract


Taco Bell, Maseca, or Greenpeace:
A Postmodern Apocalypse for Mexico’s Peasant Cuisine?

Jeffrey M. Pilcher
Department of History
The Citadel
171 Moultrie Street
Charleston, SC 29409
843-953-5064
pilcherj@citadel.edu

Critiques of globalization have focused particular attention on food because of its vital role both in forming individual identities and in sustaining societies economically. The fast food industry has been particularly successful in creating a global image of modern desirability. Indeed, third world countries have generated their own fast food industries to compete with multinational corporations such as McDonald’s and Coca Cola. Confronted with the seemingly inexorable advance of such industrial processed foods, environmentally conscious members of the middle class in Europe and the United States have proposed “slow food” as an alternative to unsustainable agro-industrial practices, thereby seeking to ensure the survival of traditional peasant cuisines. Nevertheless, first world agendas, based on romanticized images of the peasantry, fail to account for the living conditions of workers, particularly in the third world, who lack the luxury of leisure time for “slow” cooking.

This essay uses the case of Mexican cuisine, both inside and outside Mexico, to examine the complex encounter between fast and slow food in the contemporary world.
Mexico, like many other third world nations, took the initiative in modernizing its own traditional cuisine. At the turn of the twentieth century, rural women still made tortillas by hand grinding maize on a stone metate, a laborious process that could take up to a third of their workday. In the decades around the Mexican Revolution, mechanical nixtamal mills capable of grinding the wet dough sufficiently finely to make tortillas gradually replaced the grinding stone, at the same time helping to incorporate largely self-sufficient peasants into the cash economy. By mid-century, tortilla factories had been developed that completely mechanized the process, freeing women to engage in employment outside the home. Thus, only on festive occasions could cash-strapped workers indulge the “slow food” of hand-made tortillas; ironically, only the rich could now afford this “peasant” food on a daily basis.

The “McDonaldization” of Mexican cuisine took place later, in the 1960s, in Southern California. George Ritzer has theorized McDonaldization using Max Weber’s concept of rationalization, whereby technology heightens efficiency, standardization, and control. Glen Bell certainly followed this model in transforming roadside taco stands into fast food restaurants by pre-frying tortillas, thereby creating the forerunner to the taco shell. Bell’s genius was not simply saving time, but also lifting the taco out of its ethnic community, based on the production of fresh tortillas, and allowing it to be shipped around the world--albeit with some breakage. On a global level, Mexican food became a variant of American industrial cuisine.

This cultural appropriation did not go unchallenged in Mexico by the Maseca corporation, a multinational in its own right. The company developed a formula for dehydrated tortilla flour, thus streamlining the Mexican food chain. Small-scale nixtamal millers competed successfully against the company until neoliberal reforms of the 1990s ended their corn subsidies, making them dependent on Maseca despite considerable consumer resistance against masa harina. By 2000, Maseca dominated the Mexican corn market and sought to build markets in the United States and Europe. Decried at home for undermining the national cuisine, the corporation ironically became a champion of authentic Mexican in these foreign markets. Nevertheless, the Mexican branch of Greenpeace took over protests against the company, not for undermining the livelihood of millers, but for using genetically modified corn.

The paper will conclude by considering the slow food movement as yet another manifestation of imperialism, operating with benevolent concern for uplifting the Third World masses, but without much input from them, who had more pressing concerns than the presence of GM-grain in their tortillas. It will also speculate more generally on the future of peasant cuisines in an industrial society.