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come to eat
Mexico
n Gloria López Morales
UNESCO has recognized Mexico’s delicious traditional cuisine as
Intangible Cultural Heritage. Now we must care for it because it
is, and always has been, the foundation of our country’s survival
and development.
Although this is an era of globalization, there is an urgent need to affirm our
unique cultural features in the vast map of cultural and natural diversity.
Mexico has traditional farming and harvesting methods for the food that is
transformed in the kitchen into the same dishes our ancestors made.
Mexican cuisine is based on products from the milpa—the core of the
agricultural system: corn, beans, chile, and about sixty other products.
They are grown everywhere in Mexico and through time have been the basis
of our diet.
While it is true that greater diversity enriches cuisine, it should be
pointed out that Mexico boasts considerable culinary creativity that
distinguishes its regional cuisines. Beyond the superb quality of the
ingredients, this creative capability is what enables the special touch of
expertise that a cook or chef brings to cooking to shine through.
In this country people have always had a joyful vision of food. What
changed with the unesco recognition was the level of awareness that we
now have about this cultural heritage: the understanding that good cooking
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