The University of Arizona Press
April 9, 2025
México Between Feast and Famine: Food, Corporate Power, and Inequality provides one of the first comprehensive analyses of Mexico’s food systems and how they reflect the contradictions and inequalities at the heart of Mexico. Enrique C. Ochoa examines the historical roots and contemporary manifestations of neoliberal policies that have reshaped food production, distribution, and consumption in Mexico. Ochoa analyzes the histories of Mexico’s mega food companies, including GRUMA, Bimbo, Oxxo, Aurrera/Walmex, and reveals how corporations have captured the food system at the same time that diet-related diseases have soared. The author not only examines the economic and political dimensions of food production but also interrogates the social and cultural impacts. Read an excerpt from the book’s first chapter below.
Food as a Way of Being and Living
For thousands of years, the country now known as Mexico was a complex mix of diverse regions and societies. The numerous communities and civilizations that developed over millennia formed distinct ways of life, languages, cultures, and ways of knowing. Food sources, cooking methods, and even concepts of food varied regionally, contributing to the formation of different cuisines. The cultivation of maize shaped many regional and community identities in central and southern Mexico, fostering the creation of sedentary communities. Nevertheless, the diversity and autonomy of local communities and cultures remained strong. While scholars have recognized this diversity, the power of centralizing nation-states, capitalist markets, and conventional scholarship have obscured the history of this México profundo rooted in diverse Indigenous histories and constructed an imaginary Mexico that appears as a unified whole, in the words of Mexican anthropologist Guillermo Bonfil Batalla. This México imaginario undermines and erases the pluriverse of cultures, communities, and knowledges.
Beginning approximately eight to ten thousand years ago in Mesoamerica, including present-day central and southern Mexico and the Central American countries of Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica, food and cuisine were closely connected to the development of sedentary agriculture and the cultivation of maize. Maize was cultivated from wild grasses, known as teosinte, at least eleven thousand years ago (between 10,000 and 9,000 BCE). The earliest archaeological evidence of maize cultivation has been found in the current state of Guerrero, Mexico, dating back to 8759 BCE and in the Tehuacán Valley in Puebla (7900 BCE). The oldest “distinctly recognizable, unequivocally dated maize cobs” were found in the Valley of Oaxaca dated from approximately 6,230 years ago. It is believed that maize cultivation spread throughout Mesoamerica and then to North America and South America such that by 1700 BCE maize was found as far north as Ohio and as far south as Chile.
Maize cultivators developed the knowledge of which seeds do better in which soil depending on climatic conditions over generations. This knowledge and way of reading the land and the elements was central to how communities developed their worldviews. The taming of teosinte and the cultivation of larger ears of maize for various uses was the result of intentional seed saving, experimentation, and breeding processes developed over the course of millennia. The holistic science of maize cultivation that emphasized quality over quantity has persisted despite colonial and capitalist obsession with quantity above all else. At present, scholars identify at least fifty-nine landraces of maize in Mexico and thousands of different varieties.
The care with which communities cultivated and prepared maize and other crops reflected their importance both as ways of life and sources of nutrition. Maize developed as the basis of Mesoamerican cuisines and was consumed in numerous forms, including solids (tortillas, tamales, memelas, tlacoyos, totopos, gorditas, pinole, rosetas, and palomitas), and semi- solids and liquids (pozole, atole, tejate, rescalate, esquiate, chicha, tesgüiño, tepache), to name but a few. There were significant regional variations in the preparation of these foods. Tamales, for example, with masa (maize dough) as their base, included different ingredients reflecting on local history and agro-ecological factors, such that “the choice of tamale fillings was endless.” Hence tamales varied widely by region, as cooks creatively adapted them for different occasions.
The innumerable uses of maize are also reflected in the multiple names in Indigenous languages for maize in its different forms and stages of development. Early Spanish conquerors remarked on the diversity of names in Nahuatl, “when it is on the cob (mazorca in Spanish) it is called centli; after it has been taken off the cob it is called tlaullii; when the seed sprouts until it is an arm’s length it is called tloctli. . . . When the cob is . . . young it is called xilotli.” The numerous varieties of maize and the complexities of breeding maize for different uses, soils, and climatic conditions, naming different types of maize, and preparing it in innumerable ways attests to the centrality of maize in Mesoamerican communities.
Many Mesoamerican origins stories link maize to the creation of humans. According to the the Popul Vuh, the K’iche Maya book of creation, after searching for a good material to make humans, the gods decided on masa: “From yellow corn and white corn his flesh was made; from corn dough the arms and legs.” In Mexica or Aztec creation stories, humans were created five different times. On the fifth attempt, humans were nourished with maize, which helps explain why the world has lasted so long. Variants of Mexica lore explain that maize was introduced by the god Quetzalcoatl and served as the basic building block of Mexican civilization. Alfredo López Austin documented several Mesoamerican origin stories that center maize at the beginning of civilization: “many of these myths concerning maize have been passed down from a remote and imprecise time in ancient Mesoamerican history up to our present day, making it evident that rural maize has been of vital historic concern to rural communities.” Thus, the presence of maize created a common food history and culture throughout Mesoamerica despite the great diversities of peoples, histories, and cultures.
