No Gringa Left Behind: Weddings, Exclusivity, and Food Sharing in Yaxachen

Yes, this is a food blog, not a pinterest account. But throughout my 12 month stay in Mexico, 6 months of which have been spent in a very small rural community called Yaxachen, I have come to understand the rural wedding as a relatively holistic expression of life in the comisaría. That being said, probably the largest component of the wedding celebration focuses on, you guessed it, the food.

Apart from the eating and celebrating, the Yaxachen wedding operates on an unadultered sense of hospitality. I have been invited to 4 different weddings in a six month time span. In two of these situations I have known the bride, although we had only met once. In zero of these situations have I known the groom. Unlike weddings in the United States where guest lists can lead to broken relationships among once close friends should the bride scratch your name out of her perfectly pruned address book, Yaxachen does not discriminate among its guests, not even among strangers.

The congregation inside the church. The outside parking lot was full as well. About 200 guests were estimated to have attended this wedding, something between 5 and 10% of the entire population of Yaxachen.

The US emphasis on the paper products of the wedding process, i.e. – invitations, engagement photos, and “Save-the-Dates”, does not exist in Yaxachen. Like most important life events in the town, weddings are broadcast over loud speakers attached to the top of a car. This car circles the community all day and well into the night, blasting out birthday wishes, listing the homes where food will be sold at night, and of course, screaming the names of the bride and groom and the details of their wedding.

It seems to me that word of mouth may be an even more powerful force in the spread of wedding details throughout the community. In my case and the case of my Italian roommate, Cecilia, a medical anthropologist working in the local schools and clinic, the word of mouth invite was the only one we got. It works almost like an open facebook group (work with me here) – if the group creator invites you, you then have the ability to invite whatever guest you choose. Cecilia was extended an invite from one of the teachers in the elementary school and then asked me to go with her, thereby inviting me as a guest of a guest of a guest.

You'd be hard pressed to spot more than two men inside the church. It seems as though the women are expected to sit through the ceremony and the sermon while the men hang out outside with the young children who get all dressed up to run around and play for a few hours. Except this poor guy. That's boredom if I've ever seen it.

In truth, you can walk by the church during the service and simply head inside. This was my first experience of a Yaxachen wedding invitation – in September, a fellow anthropologist and I peeked into the church just to catch a glimpse of the bride’s dress. We were caught by a woman manning the doors and then eagerly ushered to the front of the church, seated in a place of honor just behind the bride and groom’s families. The pastor made a point to thank us for our support of the young couple in front of the entire congregation. I never knew the bride or groom’s name.

Ulises (17) and his bride, Luceli (16), just before the rings were brought forth. 

A few details on weddings in Yaxachen:

• The groom’s family is expected to pay for the entire sha-bang.

• The groom, before asking his bride’s hand, has to present himself to the mother of the bride. At this time, he receives no answer to his request, but instead spends the next week painfully trying to take his mind off of his potential marriage/denial. At the end of this week, his mother goes to the bride’s family and again makes a request for the girl’s hand. If the parents of the bride say yes, a week later the boy’s family will bring 2000 pesos worth of gifts (milk, chocolate, chocolate milk, eggs, bread, flour, etc.) which the girl’s family will use to feed their own relatives in what can be considered an engagement party of sorts. The groom nor his family is invited to this event.

• Most folks in Yax get hitched at 15, 16, or 17 years old. If you’re a girl and you don’t have a marriage prospect by age 18, forget about it. Your new nickname is “abuelita” (little grandma).

• Some families claim that a wedding costs around 30,000 pesos, but of course this depends on the family. In lieu of an average, I’ll cite that number. That’s just under $3000 USD.

• There are always 8 bridesmaids, or damas. Four for the bride and four for the groom. There are no groom’s men.

The far-reaching extensions of hospitality in the case of the Yaxachen wedding are truly remarkable when one considers the issue of food preparation. There are no RSVP’s, no way to measure how many people to prepare for, and the immediate invites continue to grow exponentially up until the moment of the ceremony. How many tortillas do you make? How many chickens must be killed and prepared? How many three liters of coca cola should we import from Ox to quench the guests’ thirst (there are no other beverage options, certainly not any including alcohol)?

Product placement?

Making this problem especially difficult is the extensive cooking process of typical wedding dishes – rellenos negro and blanco, escabeche, and cochinita pibil. Relleno negro, for example, is a dish that traditionally requires two days to prepare. It begins with burned chiles arboles, a type of red pepper with a mild heat to it. On a comal, a flat piece of metal situated over the three stone hearth’s open fire and used primarily for tortilla making, the chiles are slowly roasted and then set on fire for a short moment before they are doused in a bucket of water. The smoke from the burning chiles is potent stuff – if you breathe it in, expect a coughing session full of peppery pain; if it gets in your eyes… well just the thought makes me want to cry.

The burned chile water mixture sits for about an hour. The chiles are then put through a meat grinder, along with all spice, whole cloves of garlic, whole peppercorns, cloves, salt, and the individual spice decisions left up to the señora’s discretion. This chile… mush is then split into two fractions. One half will be put in a pot with a chicken and boiled while the other will be combined with a mixture of ground pork and chopped up boiled egg whites. The latter fraction is then padded and formed into a ball, called the bút*, which features the tiny surprise of a hard boiled egg yolk in the center. The entire thing resembles an ostrich egg made of grayish-black ground pork, with the hard-boiled inner yolk adding a sense of eerie irony to the whole image.

The chicken-chile mush fraction of the dish is left to sit over night, meaning that the bút isn’t prepared until the next day, just before the dish is heated up and served with hand made tortillas. The caldo or broth has the type of peppery spice that hits the back of your throat in a playful surprise and the full-bodied chile flavor of the dish is unlike anything else I’ve ever tried. All of the incredible flavors are made all the more interesting when contrasted against the black, relatively unappealing look of the chicken, soup, and ground pork ostrich egg. Admittedly, I had to work up the guts before I could put black chile soup in my mouth and not fear regretting the decision. But having done so a thousand times now, I often list relleno negro as my favorite Yucatecan specialty, although that list is subject to feature a different dish depending on the day of the week and my palette’s mood.

Because I ate all my relleno negro before thinking to take a picture, here's a picture of the pot it would be cooked in. To give you a sense of how much food would be needed to feed all the wedding guests, the women estimated that five of these size pots would be used for the relleno negro. Mind you, they will also serve relleno blanco and typically one other dish. 2 large pigs, 50 chickens, and 10 turkeys were put to death for my gastronomic entertainment. 

Amazingly, everyone ends up fed at the wedding celebration. The Yaxacheneco’s ability to feed huge numbers of people on almost nothing is a continual surprise for me. Families of 10 or more are somehow sustained on tortillas, thin broth, and one or two chickens a day. Ignoring the logistics of the situation, families will always invite you to eat with them. Always. They will share the last of whatever food stores they have, even in the food crisis months of August and September. It should be no wonder then that the wedding, one of the largest social events held in the community, seeks to feed any and all who attend.

The condition for a gringa's invitation to dine with Mayans is to put your tortilla making skills to the test. Your tortillas will be heavily critiqued, you will be laughed at, and 4 year old girls will put you to shame. 

Many physical anthropologists argue that a distinctive characteristic of human life is our practice of food sharing. Over shared meals, humans reinforce kinship relations, gender roles, power structures, and communication. In Yaxachen, where many families’ daily work is nothing more than an effort to put food on their table, food sharing can be interpreted as the center of family life. Men work long and hot hours in their milpas to grow their family’s corn share, selling what little they can at an extremely low price (thanks to the competition of subsidized US corn sold at even lower prices, which many a Mexican campesino has informed me tastes like mierda [shit] in comparison to their own). Young girls in the community are held back from school past an elementary education so that they can stay at home and help their mothers with the washing, cooking, animal slaughter, and tortilla making – the activities that make up the very rigorous schedule of a woman’s day in Yaxachen. Although the types of food preparation activities are highly specialized across gendered lines, each family member is expected to do their part to keep the family unit alive, literally.

As far as the Yaxachen wedding is concerned, food appears to be plentiful, with the groom’s family pooling together their financial resources to put on the whole production. Although petty politics and gossip run rampant in the community (another blog topic, for sure), no one is excluded from the celebration. No one feels uninvited, no relationship – friendship, kinship, gringa-ship, or otherwise – is unaccounted for. It seems that the Yaxachen wedding aims to celebrate the creation of a new family unit in a town where the family unit is of utmost importance. Perhaps that is the key difference between them and us – perhaps the exclusivity of the US wedding is merely a projection of the exclusivity of our varied and numerous social circles. Therefore, in my opinion, the Yaxachen wedding does a better job at maintaining the social bonds of the community at large. The only thing they’re lacking is an open bar.

The new couple being introduced as husband and wife! Although the attendees laughed at me when I said it was common for wedding guests to cry during the ceremony, one thing definitely translates cross-culturally - weddings are happy times!

*Not an actual Mayan spelling, just how the pronunciation sounds to unpracticed ears.

Something Offal This Way Comes: The Experience of Carnita Tacos

Every so often, the universe sets a number of strategically coordinated events into motion and their combined influences culminate in a sense of obligation to DO something – also known as a drive, a motivation, a calling. I have been the victim of such a cosmic prank in recent weeks and the result is a burning desire to post another entry to this here blog. So let’s talk about one of my favorite food subjects a little bit more… meat.

Don Jose, the papa of the paleteria where I eat lunch Monday through Friday, is somewhat of a local celebrity in Oxkutzcab. Known for his delicious “tacos de carnita (al estilo Michoacán),” he sells these homemade delights on festival days, during the feria de naranja, and quite frequently during the winter months as the tacos make for another form of income when demand for paletas is low. Often there is an obvious logic backing his decision to sell tacos on a particular day – something like an expected influx of people in Ox that weekend or Mexican Independence Day.

But since we’ve been experiencing cooler weather and, in the past three days alone, nothing but an overcast sky and extended intervals of non-seasonal downpours, I’ve come to realize that the production of carnitas is a bit of a personal hobby for Don Jose. A guilty pleasure, if you will. Two days in a row I caught him washing pig ears in the kitchen sink with the counter tops lined with bags of tomatoes and 3 kilos of habanero, jalapeno, and serrano peppers (there’s enough capsaicin in that bag to kill a pig). Don Jose, a sheepish grin spread across his face, looked back at me with an expression making it plain as day that, no, he didn’t put a sign out front yesterday informing the public that he’d be selling tacos today. This was a spur of the moment decision.  

It’s as if some days, he can’t resist the urge to fry pig parts in a cauldron full of pig fat.

Don Jose frying pig parts in a caldron full of pig fat

I’ve tried to calculate an economic logic for cooking the carnitas with mathematically probing questions. The conversations end up going something like this:

“How much does the manteca cost?”

“Tres cientos (300) pesos.”

“And the pig parts?”

“Setecientos cincuenta (750) pesos.”

“How much is a taco? Or a torta?”

“Tacos son seis (6) pesos. Tortas, quince (15).”

“How much money do you make after selling all the meat?

“…no sé. (Insert characteristically sheepish grin here.)”

I’ve witnessed carnita-making-day in the past and found that while I thought my stomach capable of handling weird eats (consider my affinity for the meat market), the knowledge of what and how the meat has been cooked severely affected my ability to eat the final product and enjoy it. Without maintaining that mental separation between the two processes, that of the production of the carnitas and that of their consumption, my brain went haywire and did what brains do when they can’t reconcile binary opposites such as this one – nausea.

But any anthropologist worth their salt would be hesitant to offer an entirely structuralist argument for my initial reaction of wanting to vom at the thought of eating carnitas. We must also (and it pains me to write it) consider the psychology of the situation: Americans just don’t eat stuff like this.

To prove this point, and for science’s sake, let’s conduct an experiment. What’s your culinary gut reaction to this picture?

And this one?

I’d be willing to bet my bottom 13.5 pesos (a dollar) that the pig face creeps you out more than it makes your mouth water. That is, of course, assuming that you the reader (as if I have an audience that isn’t my mom or my boyfriend) are American and are only comfortable eating those parts of your meat when they’ve been chopped to tiny bits and squeezed into sausage skins or come in the form of a LSU Tiger stadium hot dog (don’t know about you, but that’s the only hot dog in the world in my book). And even then, you’d probably never admit to yourself that THAT’s what you’re eating. And at the very least, you certainly don’t want to see it.

Excuse me for making assumptions about you, dear reader.

When it comes to making carnitas, the rule of thumb is “cola a cara” – literally “tail to face”. Every part of the pig is used and Don Jose reminds me on a daily basis that the pig is the only animal that this can be done with, implying that we have an obligation to eat it and to eat it all. (Perspective: This is a bit of Don Jose and possibly rural Yucatecan wisdom not practiced by all cultures. Some societies find other animals acceptable “cola a cara” fare and others find the pig a complete abomination.)

Pig lungs being cleaned before their bath in the fat

When I say every part, I mean it – lungs, liver, feet, ears, heart, everything in the head and face (okay, exception – the brains. Those go to the hungry litter of local felines and it makes them go NUTS. Hopefully not literally.) 

Yes, I did. 

Having watched the carnita process for the first time a few weeks ago and failing in my duties as a cultural anthropologist by NOT trying them, I was thankful that Don Jose’s compulsion to make carnitas was especially tenacious this week. I had the opportunity to eat them on two different occasions and my good conduct even granted me the extra special privilege of trying tacos de cabeza de res (head of beef).

I spent all day Sunday shadowing Don Jose as he coaxed his cauldron of liquid pig fat (manteca) and roasted the bajillion tomatoes and peppers he uses to make his own salsas. In fact, I found that I could best participate in this whole process through the medium of salsa making because:

1. It’s one of my favorite things in the world.

2. Don Jose makes about five or six different kinds of salsas, each one specially made to compliment a particular kind of taco, meaning there was plenty to ask about and plenty to learn.

3. Someone has to peel the 30 cloves of garlic and rotate the tomatoes and peppers as they roast. And Don Jose had pig parts to deep fry.

For the carnitas, Don Jose makes three different kinds of salsas: a red salsa, green guacamole salsa, and a habanero picante salsa. The red salsa is “pura tomate”, meaning that Don Jose only puts roasted red tomatoes, cilantro, and 7 or 8 cloves of garlic in the salsa (and an absurd amount of salt; we have arguments about his salt intake). This salsa doesn’t have any added heat, but the combination of the roasted flavor of sweet Yucatecan tomatoes and garlic makes this salsa more delicious than anything you could imagine coming from your local TexMex joint. And I’m no Mexican food snob; it’s just plain fact that this salsa is GOOD.

Tomatoes after they've been roasted, waiting to be turned into delicious salsa roja

The green salsa, my personal favorite, has more of a kick to it. It consists of roasted green tomatoes, cilantro, garlic, roasted serrano and jalapeno peppers, a touch of vinegar, and avocado. There isn’t enough avocado in it to be considered guacamole, but it’s enough to slightly cool down all those serrano peppers aching to rampage on your taste buds. The effect makes this particular salsa dangerously addicting. 

Green tomatoes waiting to be blended into a spicy serrano salsa

Finally, the habanero salsa is just that… blended up roasted habaneros. Sure, there’s a bit of water, vinegar, and salt (we’ll be real, a LOT of salt), but for the most part, this thing is straight heat. It’s delicious.

I found that falling in love with each of these salsas opened me up to trying the carnitas for the first time. After all, the carnitas were intended to be a vehicle for these salsas and if I put enough of them on there, maybe I’d be able to forget the texture of a particularly chewy piece of something I’m not entirely comfortable eating just yet.

So I watched Don Jose hack away at various pieces of the parts, selecting mostly parts that I could identify as meat that I would normally consume but also carefully adding a bit of liver, something with a grayish color to it, and what was definitely piece of a heart valve. He chopped it all up on his butcher’s block, combining the pieces into a practically homogenous pile of what looked like pulled pork. I could maybe make out the various parts if I wanted to, but I tried my best to do otherwise.

And it was delicious. Truly delicious, with a deep rich fatty flavor only complimented by the three different salsas I had smothered it with and the chopped raw onion and cilantro Don Jose threw on top. I almost forgot I was eating a piece of heart valve. Almost.

This is how my dinners have gone for the past three days and I’ve slowly become more comfortable with the marriage of what I know I’m eating and what my tongue is telling me about what I’m eating. Having conquered the carnitas and cabeza de res, variety meats seem more and more like something I could enjoy. 

And then today, as I was checking the NPR food blog, The Salt, I came across this, an article titled “Chef’s Say Variety Meats, or Offal, Aren’t Just for Halloween”. Obviously intrigued, I hurriedly devoured the article, all the while suppressing the haunting feeling that April Fulton and Allison Aubrey have GOT to be stalking me.

(This is what I meant when I spoke of the universe playing its tricks. After reading about offal, the term used for parts of the animal that have “fallen off” the butcher’s block (as in, scraps), I felt as though the cosmos had presented my recent culinary adventures along side this article only to tie my hands behind my back and say, “You will write about this. And you’re welcome.”)

The article touches on this very subject but from the perspective of American chefs attempting to breathe some culinary life back into these neglected cuts of meat. It points out the comparably nutritious benefits of parts that we typically avoid (which made me feel better about how frequently I had been consuming these oddities, although I’ll bet the frying in pig fat part cancels those nutritious benefits out) and it echoes Don Jose’s argument for the economic sustainably that comes with consuming a whole animal. Chef Daniel O’Brien presents the consumption of offal as a moral obligation humans adopt once we’ve chosen to consume animals, quoted as saying, “If you’re going to cook an animal, you should make sure you utilize all the parts. It’s your responsibility.”

Don Jose taking out the brains from the tiny piggy skull. You can't see them, 

but the ktties are by his feet, anxiously awaiting their treat.

Our responsibility… to eat the lungs of the pigs we kill. Well, he probably didn’t mean that, specifically. The point is that if we’re going to take from the earth, we need to be responsible about it. Waste not, want not.

The article also provides the United States’ ranking among countries of the world in per capita consumption of offal. Not to my surprise, we’re being shamefully outdone, coming in at a measly 135^th place worldwide. I checked out the statistics site used to calculate that number and it provided HOURS of fun; they have everything on there, ranging from how many kg of cheese are consumed per capita annually for every country in the world to food price statistics and consumption habits of every continent for the past 50 years. It’s been bookmarked.

Anyway, I found out that the US consumes 1.14 kg of offal per capita annually. Mexico on the other hand clocks in at 5.50 kg of offal consumption each year, almost five times that of the US.

And just because it’s interesting - New Caledonia handled their offal most responsibly in 2007 with a somewhat nauseating figure of 21.67 kg. The country least likely to try a carnita that year was Maldives with only 0.03 kg and an apparently strong repugnance for anything that isn’t a filet mignon.

We can (and will) trace the US’s aversion to offal along a historical trajectory, ultimately realizing that the difference between us and Mexico comes down to money and scarcity – better cuts of meat are cheaper and more widely available in the United States. We could, in that same conversation, bring up a lot of interesting (and scary) issues that arise regarding actual meat quality as a result of the demand for better cuts and higher quantity. And we could consider how all of these things boil down to shape our culturally unique understandings of what is and isn’t acceptable to eat. But alas, that’s another blog post.

For now, I’ll let our thoughts rest on the carnitas… what they are for me, what they are for Mexico, and what they are for Don Jose.

What are they, you ask? Well for one, they’re delicious. They’re probably terrible for you based on commonly accepted standards of healthy food (the United States’ standards, that is). They’re a delicacy and a pastime. A hobby and a tradition. They’re made of both meat and offal (practicing our new vocabulary). They represent what some would call responsible consumption of an animal. They are a new experience for me in living abroad. And they’re a pretty solid product replacement for paletas in the wintertime, although we don’t really know that for sure.

The infamous caldron of pig fat. Don Jose will argue with me for hours, insisting that this isn't bad for you. 

He also will try and convince you that there isn't any fat in mayonaise, beware.

Ultimately, the opportunity to try things like carnitas – those strange bits of foreign cultures that have the ability to unnerve and run up against your sense of do and don’t, right and wrong, good eats and not eats – that’s what traveling is all about. And whether you loved what you tried like I did (those salsa recipes are getting put into my family recipe book) or even if you hated it, a lo menos – you tried it.

Buen provecho, y’all. 

Orange you glad...

It’s time for an orientation session for those unfamiliar with Oxkutzcab (Ox for short).

Oxkutzcab is a city along the routa Puuc in Southern Yucatan. It is also the name of the municipality that includes the surrounding comisarías, such as Yaxachen, Xul, and Xobenhaltun. There are about 12,000 people living within Oxkutzcab’s city limits and surrounding comisarías.

The city’s name is composed of three Mayan words – Ox, kutz, and cab, meaning three, tobacco, and honey, respectively. There are multiple translations for the words as well, so the area could also be named for a fruit called ramon (ox) and/or a turkey (kutz). The jury is out on which is the best translation for the city’s name, although most people recognize the double translations and embrace them in both artistic depictions of the city and in conversation.

The most notable aspect of life in Ox is the city’s agricultural production of citrus and other tropically adapted fruits and vegetables. The city’s central market is the largest in the region and it boasts an enormous fruit section. The market starts winding up for the day around 7 a.m. and women in huipiles, traditional Mayan dresses, will stay at their fruit stands until 3 or 4 in the afternoon some days.

The front of the market in Oxkutzcab around 10 a.m.

Before the locals from Oxkutzcab come out to shop for their fruits on Tuesdays and Fridays, fruit salesmen from surrounding cities travel to Ox in the madrugada, the early hours of the morning, around 3 or 4 a.m. in order to ship out the highest quality fruit to their towns. But for a higher price. The locals will often wait until later in the day to purchase their fruit for a cheaper price as the vendors are more willing to offer bargain prices as the day wears on and their product is waiting to be sold.

An interesting topic of study in Oxkutzcab is the relationship between the local food and regional identity. People around Yucatan are largely familiar with Oxkutzcab’s reputation as the citrus hub of the peninsula. When I travel to Merida on the occasional weekend off, the city-folk will ask me where I live and upon hearing the name Oxkutzcab they reply with, “Oh! Orangeland!” or “So you like oranges, huh?”

City monument in the central square

The focal point of the monument: a cart filled with locally grown fruits and vegetables

It is true that the orange is the crown jewel of Ox’s fruit selection, with both sweet and sour varieties produced in excess. Consequently, the orange has become a symbol for the city, representing both the economic foundation of the city and the prized product of day-to-day labor on the parcelas, or fruit farms. The green bulbs (many of the varieties of oranges in Ox don’t turn orange when ripe) litter the streets and crowd the back of pick-up trucks. 

Fruit transport, a common site throughout the city

The area embraces their relationship with the citrus and the central role it plays in the lives of the city’s populace. For one, the municipality’s crest features the fruit as the central image.

The municipality's crest. The left third of the crest features a "ramon" tree, the right third, a leaf of tobacco, 

and the bottom third, a honey comb. The crest depicts the items that make up the name of Oxkutzcab in Maya

with an orange joining them together.

The region is also well known for the annual Feria de Naranja, or orange festival. In October of each year the city gathers together to eat all things orange, admire larger-than-life constructions of buildings, people, and even trains made entirely of oranges, and to otherwise consume what seems to be an enormous amount of citrus, although the festival’s damage to the citrus product does little to hurt the overall epic regional production of oranges.

Giant oranges... made of oranges

And just for fun, check out the name of Ox’s well known baseball team:

Geaux Naranjeros!

I’m certainly looking forward to the festival in October but the anticipation is unable to mount to an unbearable level as the orange boom has already begun. In the paletería, popsicle shop, where I eat most of my meals, orange juice is fresh squeezed and ice cold, always waiting for me to scoop it into a giant glass and enjoy. Ten pound bags of oranges line the walls of the shop and assure me that no matter how quickly I can drink the orange juice, Ox will be ready and waiting to give more. The only worries I have now are the inevitable mouth ulcers and heartburn associated with excessive consumption of citric acid. It’s a rough life.

The Meat That Changed it All

In May of 2010, I traveled to Mexico for the first time with two professors, three students, and a government employed tour guide. For 14 exhausting days we traveled across the Yucatan peninsula, stopping at a number of colonial heritage sites, Mayan ruins, and major cities along the way. Towards the latter half of our trip, we trekked over to Campeche to enjoy the city’s seafood and bustling open-air market. More than any other part of the trip, the market in Campeche made my anthropological spidey senses come alive. In fact, it was in the damp and odorous Campeche meat market that perhaps the most concrete decision of my academic career was made.

Overlooking Campeche City from an old pirate fort

The meat markets, or carnicerias, in Mexico are a step or two away from how we understand the packaging and selling of meat in the states. In all the meat markets I’ve been to, from Merida to Oaxaca, numerous vendors set up shop in jam-packed, hardly ventilated rooms (although the pork vendors in Oaxaca were spread out along the exterior of the market which is both a unique set up and a great way to reduce the smell). Each one butchers their own meat and hangs it on meat hooks until it can be sold.

The cuts of meat themselves are quite a sight. Gruesome blood sausages, livers, and intestines adorn the meat hooks while huge sheets of back fat and skin are stretched across metal bars running over the butcher stalls. Tubs of liquefied reused pig fat sit next to the ever-popular treat, chicharrones, or fried pig skins which sit on paper sheets while the excess grease drains away. My personal favorite meat market delights are the whole pig heads that can be found at nearly every stall (although I found that if the pig head isn’t peering out at you in plain view, ask the butcher and he’ll usually have one sitting near his feet so as to keep this commodity a secret known to only his best customers).

The meat is not refrigerated and most butchers cannot be bothered to brush away the relentless swarms of flies that congregate past 9 or 10 a.m. With the Mexican heat beating down on the roof of the market and steaming up the streets, the odor from all that flesh begins to disseminate. Before you get to the meat section of any market, the coppery smell of blood and flesh, a smell that you can identify most easily, will welcome you.

Since my first trip to the meat market in Campeche I’ve found that the topics of meat consumption and regulation have consumed me (pun intended). In March I took an ecological anthropology class here in Oxkutzcab and chose to do my fieldwork in the meat market. There I became good friends with a father-son butcher team, Don Luis and Senor Luis. I spent quite a bit of time talking to them about their product, where it comes from, and who buys it. I also began to research the history of meat regulation in Mexico and the United States. I started to realize that I had identified the meat market as a fascinating representative of a much larger, much more complex topic of study: food.

Senor Luis (left) and his father Don Luis (right) at their stand in the Oxkutzcab meat market

Whether it’s the anthropology of food, ancient food ways, regional cuisines, nutrition and public health, food policy, socioeconomic determinants of consumption, or any other food related topic, I’m ready and willing to dive in and explore it. This interest has always floated just under the surface of my academic brain, bubbling up when appropriate, but never fully unveiling itself for fear of not being taken seriously. It took me traveling 1800 miles to the meat market in Campeche to realize that food is more than the topic of study at CIA and certainly more than just good eats. Food is rooted in the human condition at the intersection of art, science, linguistics, history, culture and society. It is a universal feature of human life. And now, for the next year, I’m in the perfect position to take a critical look at life and food in Oxkutzcab.

Buen provecho!