Eating in Mexico City

How I learned to love meat — more or less.

So here it is. Hot, steaming, animal protein: the meal that’s going to change my life, laid out in its full meaty glory. Pork, chicken, beef, lamb. And bits of something that look like prop intestines from a zombie film, floating in a soup. The gang’s all here.

“There are some vegetarian things here too,” says Nicolas, poking around solicitously. Among the glistening piles of flesh piled high on sopes (a kind of Mexican pizza with pinched-up edges), bowls of offal and maize soup, sliced limes and the myriad other condiments of a Mexican table, there’s a single mushroom sope.

It’s not that it looks bad, but I’ve had 20 years of this already — the last thing left on the table, the dietary refuge of sensitive teenagers and food phobists: the veggie option. I’m finally ready for meat.

It’s a busy Sunday in one of Mexico City’s oldest neighbourhoods, Santa Maria la Ribera, and a table of small elderly people dressed in their best to my right are fiercely gumming down plates of food while staring around them like hawks.

Sunday, in Mexico, is synonymous with eating — specifically, eating barbacoa, a whole sheep roasted underground in maguey leaves and then theatrically displayed in a wooden box with the unwrapped leaves hanging down around it while the cook hacks off chunks of meat with a cleaver.

“Everything here is organic,” says Nicolas. “But that’s not because it’s a college-educated hip thing. Well-known restaurants have their own farms. This one has organic sheep, and that’s just the way they’ve done it for 50 years.”

Generations of families are crammed around pushed-together tables, which have the menu printed onto their plastic tabletops, requiring only a quick wipe-down afterwards by the staff – which consists of two bright-eyed, efficient teenage boys. Drinks come in misty glass bottles, and a range of neon shades. “Old-fashioned restaurants have old-fashioned soda,” notes Nicolas. The Pozolería La Casa de Toño is one of the oldest. Located in a mid-19^th century house, its walls are covered in murals and it features a typical hacienda-style internal courtyard garden as well as the original mosaic floors.

However, I’m still worrying about the meat. I mean, it’s been two decades. Do you get heart palpitations? Cold sweats? Spontaneous evacuation? I’m already the only person I know who hasn’t had a stomach complaint here, and I’ve been eating everything — weird fungus, ceviche, home-made cheese from unrefrigerated market stalls — everything except meat. Am I pushing it?

Nicolas Gilman is a food blogger and the author of Good Food in Mexico City. A former New Yorker who first crossed the border south with his artist mother at 14, he’s now been living here for 22 years, and in 2005 traded in his American passport for “both practical and moral reasons,” he says. “I own property here and I wanted to be able to vote. It didn’t feel good to be an outsider.” He’s one of a small handful writing about the country’s culinary culture for an English-speaking audience, and I’ve persuaded him to spend his Sunday taking me out for lunch, rather than at his house in the country. It would be rude to back out now.

And that’s how, in September 2010, Mexico and I both wound up celebrating watershed moments. The 112 million inhabitants of the country were waving their hands in the air, and sometimes also giant novelty sombreros daubed in the red, green and white of the flag, over a landmark for their national identity – Mexico’s declaration of independence from Spain two hundred years previously. In my personal, scaled-down version, I declared independence from the veggie option.

It started 20 years ago, when I was a grumpy teenager staging a passive-aggressive protest. Having but one crap menu option, or the ordeal of discovering the bacon bits my friend’s mum slipped into my dinner merely confirmed my suspicions the world was a cruel place. But let’s face it, when you’re a teenager, the dining options are pretty limited. In 90’s Howick, it was Sizzler or Valentines. At home, spag bol and chicken stir-fry ruled.

There was a moral reasoning behind it, of course. I had my icon: Morrissey. I had my text: Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Animal Rights. I had my ‘I Don’t Eat My Friends’ t-shirt. The problem was, over time my moral boundaries faded from a stark black and white to a mature spectrum of greys. Hitler was a vegetarian. Martin Luther King wasn’t. Confusing, right?

I got fed up with the meekness involved in always saying “no”; the meat-eating fraternity just seemed so much more rock and roll. By the time I got to Mexico, I was already in the same ethical camp as A. A. Gill, Anthony Bourdain and the Vogue food writer Jeffrey Steingarten who, in his book The Man Who Ate Everything, traveled to the country to eat ant-egg tacos and fly caviar. I felt, in much the same way he did, that this was a good opportunity to get over my irrational food biases. In short, curiosity finally got the better of me.

And it’s obvious: if you look at it from a cultural perspective, there’s nothing that screams “Let’s PARTY!” less than vegetarianism. Nearly every culture around the world kills something to eat at happy points in the social calendar, from the Christmas turkey, to the fatted lamb, to the Mayan ritual of celebrating war victories with a communal dish made from the bodies of their adversaries.

Which brings me back to la Casa de Toño’s eponymous soup. Pozole has a curious position in the Mexican food lexicon. Ostensibly a humble meat soup, a traditional comfort food containing the large white kernels of hominy maize and offal, its origins are actually quite the opposite of comforting. Corn being sacred to ancient cultures, it was consumed ritualistically and communally — and originally made with human flesh. That’s probably a shade too far for this rehabilitated vegetarian, though idealogically, I’m not 100% opposed.

Barbacoa is rubbed with herbs and chillis, then cooked until it’s falling off on the bone and served on a large platter surrounded by salsas, tacos, coriander and limes. The taste is, well … meaty. I don’t have much to compare it to, to be honest. Afterwards, I do feel kind of high, though that could just be adrenalin.

“It’s basically concentrated lamb,” clarifies Gilman. “In the countryside, it can be gamey and not for the fainthearted, but here it’s part of the larger meal.” The thing about meat in Mexico, he says, is that until recently it’s been scarce. “Not many people could afford it, so traditional cooking is not about a big hunk of meat. The chicken in a mole is just a conduit to get it into your mouth — it’s not the French concept of having a beautiful piece of meat as the centerpiece.”

Because of this, today meat stands for affluence and success. Mass production creates cheaper meat, so middle-class families can afford to eat it regularly — leading to the obvious pitfalls. “It’s become a status symbol. People on the street are getting fat — like, really fat. Twenty years ago they were not fat, but now they’re just behind the UK and USA. It’s ironic in a country that has so much beautiful fresh fruit and vegetables, and fresh drinks, that people here consume more soft drinks that anywhere else in the world. You eat a carnitas, drink a Coke … no wonder.”

Carnitas — literally, “little meats” — is pork stewed in its own fat and served in a soft taco. Gilman pauses. “It is delicious, actually.” But then, good food is everywhere here. Wherever you look, there’s someone making a tall pile of uniformly circular tacos by hand, a man selling home-made ice-cream out of an insulated cardboard box, a woman roasting corn over a propane-fired grill. He hardly ever cooks Mexican food at home. “The taco stand outside my yoga class is amazing. Mole from the market is better than you can make yourself. It’s fun to make it, but there’s no reason to do it.”

Gilman has brought us to Santa Maria La Ribera for its traditional atmosphere, but also because it’s due a revival. It was originally rather genteel, with turn-of-the-century mansions, wide streets and the beautiful art nouveau Museo de Geología. After it was swallowed by the rapidly growing city in the 1950s, and more social housing was built after the Mexico City earthquake in 1985, it’s been rather down on its luck despite the 1,040 listed heritage buildings within its borders.

The first part of our interview takes place in a cab without seatbelts, hurtling 30 minutes north of the Condesa neighbourhood, where I’m staying — a formerly working class inner-city area that gentrified in the 1990s, becoming the city’s bohemian district, and also the place to go for a contemporary take on Mexican food.

Yaax, a high-end restaurant combining traditional ingredients with Mediterranean techniques is here, and the rooftop restaurant at the Condesa DF design hotel, which acts as an unofficial clubhouse for the city’s bright young things, has a Japanese chef who produces sushi rolls with palmito (palm hearts) alongside tempura prawn tacos served with chipotle mayonnaise and pickled ginger. A Japanese-Mexican fusion isn’t as nuts as it sounds on paper; in culinary terms, the two have a lot in common, including the use of chilli, citrus fruits, avocado, seafood and, of course, rice as a staple.

Similarly to Spain, France or China, food is an intrinsic part of what it is to be Mexican, and regional food a part of regional identity. “Other ways of being Mexican have disappeared,” says Gilman. “People dress the same and listen the same music you can hear anywhere. The international, middle-class people speak English. But the food stays. I hate the word ‘authentic’, but there’s more authentic food available now at every level. The fact that a fancy restaurant would serve tortillas now is a measure of that. People are proud to be Mexican. For better or for worse, this is a nationalistic country.”

A couple of days later, this is spelled out on a grand scale. On my third day in Mexico, I went in search of street food with some expat friends, and with half a million locals, we also watched the Independence Day parade, a suitably massive affair converging on the central boulevard of the Paseo de la Reforma: five kilometres of flag-waving, street food-eating crowds, watching a seemingly endless march-a-thon of military uniforms across the whole camo spectrum, guns, tanks and dancing horses.

Amid fears of attacks by drug cartels, there were also 14,000 police officers on duty that day — not that they had much to do. In eight hours walking through packed crowds, we didn’t see a single drunk person, no pickpockets, not so much as a voice raised in anything but good cheer. The most controversial sight was a sweet old gentleman holding a sign shaped like a dove reading “Amor y paz para todos” (Peace and love for all) and looking sternly at the procession of military muscle.

“Of course, everyone will go back to their pueblos tonight and get totally hammered on mescal,” said my friend David Vaner, a German architect who moved to the DF two years ago.

But during daylight hours, the most intoxicating substance on offer was tamarindo, a nerve-jangling sweet, sour, spicy and salty snack made of tamarind paste rolled in bright red chilli powder and served in a plastic cup. There’s a time and a place for vernacular food. You can bank on the fact that the retsina in a cobbled Grecian back-alley won’t taste the same at a suburban barbecue back home. Into this category — let’s call it the Marmite Category — I’d also put both tamarindo and huitlacoche.

In English, the latter is corn smut, a cancerous fungus that turns neat, yellow ears of corn into bulging, grotesquely blackened parodies of themselves. In Europe, they’re trying to eradicate it, but in Mexico it’s considered a delicacy. Like a poor man’s truffle, it has an earthy, vegetable flavour vaguely recalling corn, and served in a quesadilla with the local homemade queso, a crumbly fresh cheese with the smell of day-old laundry, it’s surprisingly likeable.

Then there were carts carrying clear plastic cases of what looked like tortilla chips, each the size of a sheet of A3. Initially, I was confident the right time to eat one of these oversized snacks would arrive. The look of alarm I got from David persuaded me otherwise. “They’re actually pieces of pig skin that have been deep fried. They sit in those boxes in the sun. Sometimes, they still have hairs on them …” He trails off. “I wouldn’t eat them if I were you.” Good to know.

On the other hand, you can trust a lady with a bucket of salsa. “You’re much safer eating that food than from the kiosks and some of the restaurants,” he says. “Those people often live in places without a fridge, so it’s all made fresh that morning, and when it’s all sold, she goes home again.”

Wealthy people, he says, would be celebrating today at house parties. The people around us were predominantly working class, so the food that we ate was simple, portable and cheap: the equivalent of 30c snagged us a sope of frijole sauce, palmitos, coriander, queso and chilli sauce from two women surrounded by buckets of salsa, again in the national colours. “Mexicans are really proud of their food. They won’t ask you about whether you like Mexico, they’ll ask if you’ve had proper Mexican food yet,” said David.

For Gilman, living here has given him a life that’s vastly different to anything he could have had in New York. “I grew up in Little Italy surrounded by Sicilians and Neopolitans,” he says. “I was aware of ‘the authentic’ from the start and the first time I came to Mexico at 14 I remember asking for real tortillas. How could I know that at 14? So the search for the real and indigenous is exciting here, because there are all these ancient hole-in-the-wall places that haven’t changed in 40 years. I go on treasure hunts and find these institutions and, since no-one else is doing it, it’s an incredible opportunity.”

Eating Out in Mexico

The magazine is on newstands Monday the 6th February. BOOM.

She loved pop-up books as a child, worked at a greetings card company after graduating from Central St Martins, and rather than a sketchpad, she uses Post-It notes, which she moves around to build up the finished product.

She also works on personal book projects that play on our relationship with everyday paper. For example, The Imp of the Perverse requires its readers to tear and fold pages to reveal sections of the text — everything you were always told not to do to a book. Her most recent, For Matters of Life and Death, is a well-designed series of cashier’s dockets and entry tickets for surreal situations.

Friel works from the Papered Parlour in Clapham, an artspace inhabited by a group of like-minded artists and designers. (I recently interviewed her for a Swedish design industry title). Find her online at www.helenfriel.com

I do spend a lot of time comparing Auckland’s transport network unfavourably with those of other cities, though. The first story on the introduction of all-electric cars to our fair isles was in Element’s launch issue, here, and the next, on Auckland’s transport congestion, here.

I don’t wish to sound smug, but I can’t remember the last time I was in a traffic jam. Oh wait — actually, I am OK with sounding smug on that one small point, as I’m usually the person waiting 20 minutes for one of Auckland’s ghost buses, or experiencing a damp near-death by SUV at the Ponsonby Road pedestrian crossing because when it rains in Auckland, the road rules are replaced with THE LAW OF THE JUNGLE.

So I am basically The Young Ones‘ Neil, in a lady suit. Just an umbrella and that large chip on my shoulder to keep me motivated.

Now, those are words I thought I’d never type. Generally, the words “christian” and “centre” together in one phrase are enough to slightly raise the hackles. Particularly faced with the result of the Church’s attitude to contraception, in this impoverished country with a 98.5% fully paid-up churchgoing population. Grrr, right?

The CCC is, intentionally, down the road a clip, across a few bridges and down a long, branching series of dirt roads in a plantation. This is what our last-minute written instructions amounted to, as the location is a sort of semi-secret. This is the only women’s refuge, or women’s refuge equivalent, in a country that surpasses itself in its casual violence towards women and girls.

As Andrew Catford, the World Vision head, pointed out, pidgin — a language with a limited vocabulary — has a lot of words to describe violence against women. It may be that domestic violence is the only thing the Solomons truly excels at.

The project organisers are even slightly concerned about the taxi drivers taking us there, so we don’t talk about anything relating to the centre on the way there or back. Over the course of the next two hours, we hear sickening, tragic stories — the girls in their early teens who are ambushed on their way to school by gangs of boys bent on rape; the woman forced to pay compensation for being raped and bearing the child of her rapist. I meet a girl now suffering severe emotional trauma who had her father’s child, only to see the same child abused in the same way by the same father, and a woman carrying a beaming two-year old on her hip, whose husband tried to kill her last week.

The funny thing is, while they are soft-spoken and hesitant, all of the women and children warm to us at the first sign of a smile. Before long, the programme manager is reading the kids story books in a corner while the women are telling us their life’s story. It’s clear that within the quiet, peaceful and fenced confines of the centre, they feel safe. Even children who come in withdrawn and frightened are running around and playing within a couple of weeks, say the staff.

Sister Doreen (pictured), the cheery, pint-sized leader of the centre, sometimes physically drags women away from violent husbands and abusive relatives. This morning she faced down a man who had followed his wife to the centre and showed up at the front gate armed with a big stick.

Has anyone ever hit her? “Ha, no!” she says. “I’m a nun.”

The RAMSI police officer with us tells me later that if anyone laid a finger on a nun for any reason, they’d be lynched. “That person would pretty much not be around any more,” he says. “So sometimes religion can also work as a protective force.”

Annie, the chairperson of the centre and the only married volunteer we meet, has a face totally devoid of guile and a crackling wit. Our discussion about her life and experiences of domestic violence is punctuated by hoots of laughter, particularly the story about her perpetually “cross” husband coming into the bank where she worked and tipping over her desk so documents went flying everywhere. “It was quite embarrassing,” she says, her mouth already twitching. When I apologise for laughing at what must have been an humiliating personal incident, she contradicts me. “No, it is funny now.”

Five years ago, her husband had a stroke and seemed to rethink his attitude, she says. While he regained almost full health, he doesn’t hit her any more. He even does the dishes. “Though not very well,” she says, giggling again.

And then there’s Helen. In true real-life-story fashion, that is not her real name. The stitches have just been taken out of the gash on Helen’s forehead where her husband punched her so hard the skin broke, and she has volunteered to talk to us about her experiences. This is relatively rare, as we’ve found. Women, teenagers and occasionally also men, are reticent about coming forward here; many have never been asked to express an opinion in their lives. But Helen seems to have made a habit of breaking traditions.

She’s a high-school teacher with her own income, and her own property in her home province of Western Malaita. She comes from a high-achieving family, with siblings who are also teachers and a sister who is studying financial administration at college. “Income gives you safety,” she tells me. It means you don’t have to depend on a man. “I always tell my brothers and sisters, work hard. You have to work hard to stand alone.”

She’s 31 and she didn’t actually want the baby she is now carrying — also unusual in a country where teen mothers and families of eight or ten children are the norm. “I had really big plans,” she says. “I wanted to go into further education, keep studying.” She’ll still be able to do that, though it will take three years of working before she can qualify for assistance.

However, this is the second time she’s been in the Christian Care Centre. Her husband is calling her and begging her to come home. “You know, I am tired of him,” she says with a gusty sigh. “I never loved him, but he chased me. He is a good man, it’s only when he’s drinking he is bad.” They met at Teachers Training College and work alongside each other; he drinks fortnightly, on payday. If she brings police charges against him, instead of taking it to the Magistrates Court as she did last time, he’ll be fired. He was fined $1,000 (NZ$162) originally, paid to Helen’s family as compensation. She’s worried he can’t afford to pay another fine, as he still owes $5,000 (NZ$810) of her bride price after four years of marriage. She paid for him to attend college, and now she buys things — a TV, a new veranda — to keep him at home instead of drinking beer and running with the other men. But they only hold his attention for so long.

Clearly, in the Solomons it’s not as simple as “Kick that loser to the kerb, girlfriend”. The ability of these women to care is what astonishes me. Why did Annie stay with her husband for so long? She’s 56 now and that’s a long time to roll with the punches from someone who is supposed to care for you and whose eight children you’re giving birth to. Why does Helen care if her infantile husband gets fired? Should I send them my TLC and Beyoncé CDs? Self-sacrifice and unconditional love are beautiful, but this seems so unbalanced to me. I’m in danger of seeing all the women here as saints and all the men as feral oafs, though I’d rather not.

So, we left moved and excited. Everyone, even the people who do this kind of thing regularly, seemed quite jazzed by the experience. This afternoon we’ve finally got some time off. All my paper is damp from the humidity and I’ve lost my Raybans. Tomorrow, we find out where all the gays are, and who’s looking after the saltfish, AKA the sex workers. Can’t wait.

Having recently decided I need to absorb more ambient information, and lacking colleagues, free Tube papers, sandwich boards and water-cooler conversation to keep me informed, I tuned in to National Radio. One of the first things I half-listened to while I pottered about was a story about a pioneering female journalist (exact name now lost to brain fog) working in war-torn or developing countries. There was a moment where I stopped, looked over at the radio and thought, “That’s what I’d really like to do”.

On its own, that wouldn’t have been the most amazing revelation, had an email not suddenly arrived the following day from Family Planning International, via a friend who works at the Aids Foundation (well, I guess they have condoms in common). The FPI were looking for a journalist to join a research tour to the Solomon Islands, studying women’s development, rights and sexual and reproductive health. I fired off an email, expecting little. Less than ten minutes later, a response arrived from the FPI director, wanting more information. Turns out, they were actually quite excited about getting a freelance journalist to come along, because it means more outlets for the stories I generate. Three weeks on, I’ve just got shots for hepatitis A, typhoid, influenza, measles and yellow fever. My Facebook status update reads: “One dead arm closer to the Solomon Islands.” I also spell hepatitis wrong, which is embarrassing.

Here’s what I knew about the Solomon Islands three weeks ago: they are an archipelago in the Pacific.That’s pretty much it.

A note on Facebook asking for information garnered the following responses:

Phillip: “Lots of gingers, strange kind of pidgin English is spoken, church may last all day.”

Rose: “They have awesome warlords.”

Claris: “I heard they have Friday night fights where they set spiders against small mice.”

Christine: “What do you want to know about apart from spiders? And if I were you, I’d be more worried about the shower toads.”

I also got slightly more useful offers from a doctor who did a three-month elective there, and a fellow journalist who has family there and written a number of stories about the islands — one of which included interviewing said warlords while doing fieldwork with the army.

Here’s what I know today. There are over 1,000 islands in the archipelago. (I am never going to get tired of saying that word.) Inheritance is matrilineal, from mother to daughter. The islands were never colonised, as such, and so don’t suffer from the colonial hangover of other Pacific nations like Vanuatu and New Caledonia. There are two dominant local cultures, the Melanesians and the Malaitans, who are Polynesian. Life is very, very simple. As the journalist told it, people outside the capital, Honiara, live in leaf huts, and wash in streams or under a communal tap. There’s plenty of seafood and the land is very fertile — which is lucky, as the population is very poor.

Tension between the majority Melanesians, and the Polynesians, who hail from some of the outlying islands but are represented in high numbers in Honiara as well, led to a civil war in 1999, which only calmed down when the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI) arrived. This included police and troops from Australia, New Zealand and other Pacific countries, and is still the Solomons’ primary security force.

I also know that there’s a “tank graveyard” somewhere full of scrapped American military equipment from the Second World War, and that if you swim out of a particular bay at low tide, you can stand on the nose of a sunken Japanese fighter plane. That would be awesome.

I still don’t know what shower toads are, though.

As Amanda says, this stuff has already survived the last fifty years or so intact, and its rough aesthetic is a big part of its charm — though Julien, having worked in the industry for so long, knows a design pedigree when he sees it. It’s a favourite with architects and designers, and as for me, I’ll be saving up for some of those brightly coloured cafe chairs — though I hardly need to. A quick comparative browse of the Freedom Furniture website gave me “cheap” MDF-looking knock-offs of some of the Vitrine’s pieces … but for $100 more each.