[Lifestle] In Mexico, carne is king – would eating less meat mean losing my identity?

[[~OMAR~]]

 

In December I received a phone call from my father, which, through no fault of his own, tends to fill me with dread.

“So … Mom says you’re vegan now,” my dad said. “You’re not eating meat or dairy at all? No eggs, no cheese?”

 

My shoulders eased up. I’ve lived far enough away from home for long enough to know that a phone call is often a precursor for bad news, the kind not fit for a text message. But, thankfully, this wasn’t that. This conversation wasn’t about tragedy or illness, but it still fell into the Serious Topic category: what I wanted to eat on vacation.

 

I had called my mom the day before and told her that I would only be eating fish on our annual holiday trip to Mexico to visit family. After a noticeable pause, she drummed up her usual enthusiastic support: “You know what, I think it’s great!”

 

The scope of my dietary experiment grew overnight in a concerned game of telephone. I hadn’t made a big deal out of it, but the stakes were perhaps a bit higher than I wanted to concede. I was risking confused looks and questions, and potentially even offending some relatives. Maybe worse: I was risking missing out.

 

“I’m just making sure!” my dad insisted, after I clarified that I was not vegan. “I just want to make sure we have enough food for you at Christmas.”

Like my mom, my dad made it sound easy. But in Mexico where my extended family lives, meat is first, revered, king. Monterrey, where I was born, is considered the capital of carne asadas. There, cabrito – or roasted kid goat – is a delicacy. I had tried going vegetarian once as a teenager, only for it to wreak havoc on our annual Christmas tamale order. As I grew older, my ties to my Mexican identity felt threatened by my wish to go meatless; I didn’t really think I could do it.

 

But living away grants you the discretion to experiment. I had only cut out meat on a handful of trips to Mexico. One year, with my dad’s help, I had plenty of quesadillas, cheese tamales and tortas de aguacate, as long as the aguacate – avocado – wasn’t scarfed up by another family member who didn’t realize it was my whole meal. But the truth is I have been flirting with not eating meat for a long time.

 

I’m an editor who works on the Guardian’s climate and environment coverage. While I know the climate crisis is not my individual fault, I can’t help but look at a cheeseburger and think about all the greenhouse-gas emissions that come from raising meat for human consumption. During the lockdown period of the pandemic, I found it easy to cut out meat and dairy at home. I stopped craving meat except for very special occasions.

 

This was harder to keep up when I went home, especially without adopting the formal title of “vegetarian”. My parents live in Texas, where Tex-Mex cooking still revolves around cuts of steak, chicken, pork. In my studio apartment in Brooklyn, it was easier. When my grandma called me to ask how I was doing, her first question was whether I had a good place to buy meat nearby. I knew she knew I was abstaining, even though I hadn’t announced anything officially, from the way she remained suspicious even after I answered, “Yes …?”

 

Guilt lingered. But the more I looked around, the more I realized: there is Mexican food before meat, and there is Mexican food after. And part of the joy is finding your way to the “after”.

 

Mexican food in the US isn’t a monolith. A burrito in El Paso, Texas, looks radically different from a San Francisco one. But po[CENSORED]r, Americanized versions of it are largely synonymous with meat (think: fajitas). And the idea that meat should be the centerpiece of all Mexican cuisine is pervasive in many circles – Anglo or otherwise.

Growing up in the border cities of Tijuana and San Diego, writer and recipe developer Andrea Aliseda was often told you couldn’t be Mexican if you didn’t eat meat.

“For some time, I’d try to be vegetarian during the week only to crack over the weekend, bowing my head to a taco,” she told me over email recently. “[T]hat act felt like the epitome of Mexican-ness to me, a communion culturally and gastronomically.”

These myths didn’t hold true for long. At 24, Aliseda went vegan, after a three-year stint of eating meat. In that moment, she said: “I definitely thought I was severing a connection with my Mexican gastronomy.” It was only later that she realized going vegan “opened the door to another side of the cuisine entirely”.

Aliseda’s forthcoming book, Plant-Based Mexican Food, joins a growing array of cookbooks and resources on how to veganize po[CENSORED]r Mexican dishes, like Edgar Castrejón’s Provecho. Her work, like that of other authors and cooks, shines a light on the long history of vegetarian foodways in Mexican cooking. Despite po[CENSORED]r ideas of what Mexican food should be, vegetables have a storied place in the cuisine. In pre-Hispanic times, milpa farming systems were used to grow corn, beans, squash and chiles. This ancient practice is still carried out today throughout Mesoamerica, providing a nutritious diet for its stewards.

 

Varieties of Mexican cuisine that prize meat above all risk eliding these histories. A few years ago, I rolled my eyes nonstop when a friend invited me to dinner at Jajaja, a vegan Mexican restaurant near New York’s Chinatown. The phrase “vegan Mexican” felt nonsensical to me, and I probably said as much. But I went back there last month and was amazed at the tofu drizzle on its mushroom taco. This crema felt true to the spirit and presentation of classic Mexican dishes.

 

New York gets a bad rap for its Mexican food offerings (when compared with Texas and California), but I’ve found that chefs and restaurateurs in the city are opening up ambitious possibilities for vegetarians and vegans.

 

At the Brooklyn-based cafe For All Things Good, owner Matt Diaz says he and his business partner never set out to open a vegetarian restaurant. They don’t bill themselves as such (it took me several bites to realize their tinga was made of carrots).

 

They consider the restaurant a molino above all else: a place that makes and sells fresh tortillas. The restaurant prepares these through nixtamalization, a process that soaks and boils corn in lime and water. This gives masa a higher nutritional value and a deeper flavor than traditional corn tortillas sold in stores.

 

Even as Diaz hewed to one tradition, he didn’t feel obligated to add meat.

 

“As I was developing the menu and writing the recipes, it felt like, if you really worked on the recipes, you could finish every single one before adding a protein – or a meat, rather,” said Diaz. “And then it almost felt like being lazy” to throw in chorizo or chicken.

 

Diaz projected their business would potentially triple if they added meat to the menu. But for now, the plan is to stay vegetarian.

 

“I like the challenge of keeping the menu vegetarian. If you’re creative, it can be really fun.

“And I feel better about it, morally,” he added, laughing.

 

Like me, Diaz isn’t vegetarian – but we both worry about eating too much meat. These days, there’s no end of ways for the not-totally-veg to identify: flexitarian, social omnivore. Ixta Belfrage, a London-based cook and recipe developer whose forthcoming book Mezcla offers new takes on Mexican, Brazilian and Italian fare, says she recently worked with someone who only eats meat 10 times a year.

 

[https://www.theguardian.com/food/2023/may/04/mexican-vegetarian-meat-cuisine-food-mexico]