Culinary Tourism

Chapter 3. From "Montezuma's Revenge" to "Mexican Truffles": Culinary Tourism across the Rio Grande

CHAPTER 3 From "Montezuma's Revenge" to "Mexican Truffles" Culinary Tourism across the Rio Grande Jeffrey M. Pilcher President Jimmy Carter arrived in Mexico City for a state visit on February 14, 1979, and proceeded to recall for his hosts a previous encounter with Mexican culture, decades earlier as a naval officer, in which he had contracted what he described as "Montezuma's revenge." This indelicate reference to tourist's diarrhea became something of an international incident ; Mexican President Jose L6pez Portillo insisted that his country be treated with respect, while the local press denounced the remark as a "typical Yankee slur."I Culinary tourism thus transcended a private experience to become an important facet of inter-American relations. By inspiring such visceral reactions, encounters with exotic foods have long helped to construct national identities. Justifiably proud of their sophisticated regional cuisines, Mexicans resented being stereotyped as underdeveloped by the people who had created such gastronomic marvels as the microwave oven and the drive-through window. For their part, many in the United States considered wholesome, industrial processed foods to be one of the great advances of capitalism and civilization. Nevertheless, such views were far from homogeneous in either country. Visitors from the United States have often embraced the exoticism of supposedlyprimitive Mexico as a release from an overly materialist society. The practice of culinary tourism has meanwhile helped to construct social identities within Mexico, as Hispanic elites went in search of previously disdained indigenous foods. This essay examines the historical evolution and contemporary expression of these encounters, with particular emphasis on Jeffrey M. Pilcher I 77 the Native American subjects of the tourists' gaze. Native efforts to mediate the contradictory demands of culinary tourism have been a vital part of their survival strategies, as individuals and communities, when confronted with the present-day globalization of commodities and identities. Any discussion of tourism, whether culinary or otherwise, must always consider the multipleperspectives on the site of tourism. That Mexican self-images and views north across the Rio Grande have influenced the attitudes and stereotypes held by U.S. tourists becomes clear in the history of the so-called "Mexican truffle." Unlike the prized European mushroom, which grows unobtrusively in forests, the Native American fungus (Ustilago maydis) infects ears of corn, making it the bane of midwestern farmers, who burn whole fields to prevent the spore from spreading. By contrast, the pre-Hispanic inhabitants of Mexico, having no domesticated animals except for turkeys and small dogs, valued it as a source of protein, along with a variety of insects, small animals, and lake algae. As corn worshippers, they referred to the black fungus with the Nahuatl word euitlaeoehe, meaning roughly "excrement of the gods." The Spanish conquistadors found the indigenous appetite for spores and animalitos to be proof of the superiority of European civilization. Affluent Mexicans still considered eating euitlaeoehe to be a disgusting Indian habit until the 1940s, when gourmet Jaime Saldivar first devised an acceptable way of presenting the fungus in crepes with bechamel sauce. French haute cuisine thus cleansed it of the lower-class stigma, and by the 1990s it became all the rage as part of the nueva eoeina mexieana. European-trained chefs in Mexico City created endless variations of euitlaeoehe mousse, and farmers in the United States purposely injected their corn with spores to supply upscale Mexican restaurants in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles . A Mexican elite eager to claim a distinctive place on the buffet table of international cuisine had rehabilitated the formerly disdained smut as a New World truffle. U.S. tourists who overcame their fear of "Montezuma's revenge" to savor the"excrement of the gods" thus followed a path already marked by their Mexican counterparts.2 The social controversy surrounding corn smut can be clarified analytically using Lucy Long's distinction between the cognitive category of edibility and aesthetic quality of palatability.3 For lower-class Mexicans, including mixed-race mestizos, who were often erroneously assumed to be Native Americans, euitlaeoehe was a palatable food-delicious when used as a filling for the corn pastries known as quesadillas. Even before the nueva eoeina became fashionable, the Mexican elite recognized the edibility of euitlaeoehe-one might even buy a quesadilla from a street 78 I "Montezuma's Revenge" to "Mexican Truffles" vendor as a form of slumming-but moral restrictions prohibited serving such an Indian food to family or guests...