Let them eat cake
Hunger in Mexico’s countryside belies the wealth of its cuisine—and guess who is to blame? Review: México Between Feast and Famine, Enrique Ochoa, by Gavin O'Toole
México Between Feast and Famine: Food, Corporate Power, and Inequality, Enrique C Ochoa, 2025, University of Arizona Press
A contradiction stews at the bottom of the steaming bowl of contemporary capitalism giving off an unsavoury odour: hunger.
Hunger is the hidden paradox of developing and middle-income societies scrambling to jump on the imperial gravy train of global finance.
While Marx and Engels wrote explicitly about the contradictions cooked up by what have been called capitalist food regimes—plentiful production and expanding distribution alongside growing food insecurity and malnourishment—today the recipe is far more sophisticated.
And nowhere can it be tasted better than in Mexico, which has been progressively poisoned by a corporate food system nourished under neoliberal transformation that has had a devastating impact on diets and equality.
One the one hand Mexico has become the go to destination for foodies and unimaginative celebrity chefs serving up new takes on pre-Hispanic creations, while on the other Indigenous and campesino communities have been forced into poverty that now denies them access to the very dishes they invented.
Contradiction, of course, has always been capitalism’s main course, and the violent assault of colonialism is nothing new, having chipped away at the Mexican countryside for 500 years.
Yet the corporate attack on Mexican foodways has reached such an epic scale that what we associate as “traditional” cuisine may soon be little more than an historical memory.
To understand this central contradiction between abundance and hunger that continues to define food production and consumption in Mexico, you would do well to digest Enrique Ochoa’s book as your entrée.
México Between Feast and Famine serves up distasteful insights about how neoliberal capitalist globalisation since the 1980s has compounded half a millennium of destruction of Indigenous food systems.
As Ochoa writes: “Driven by Mexican and international capital in conjunction with shifting government policies, this process has led to a growing concentration of wealth as millions of Mexicans suffer from malnutrition and a growing junk food diet…”
Hunger has always been a sore point for successive Mexican governments, repeatedly forced into a nationalist reflex of denial despite blindingly clear evidence.
According to Mexico’s Consejo Nacional de Evaluacion de la Politica de Desarrollo Social (CONEVAL), an official body that measures poverty, only 57.8 per cent of the population can secure food for consumption, while 42.2 per cent (53 million people) experience food insecurity.
Approximately 8 per cent of the population (10 million people) encounter severe levels of food insecurity, represented by individuals unable to eat for a day or more.
Despite repeated government statements that food poverty will be eradicated, the official tally of those living with food insecurity has hovered between 18 and 24 per cent of Mexicans for at least the past decade.
And regardless of the lack of food itself, a growing number of Mexicans are being slowly sickened by a modern diet consisting of fast, salty, and carbohydrate-laden chatarra (junk food) as beans and tortilla consumption have declined.
According to the National Health and Nutrition Survey 2021, the prevalence of overweight and obesity in Mexico is 72 per cent among the population aged 20 and over, a rate that represents a significant increase from that observed in previous surveys.
Mexico now endures the ignominy of being the world’s second fattest country after the US according to the OECD.
The top three causes of death in Mexico are all diet related, with diabetes being the second leading killer with an estimated prevalence of 15 per cent (12.8 million adults).
These phenomena are no coincidence: they are directly related to the structure of economic and political power in Mexico under corporate capitalism and the policies of enrichment that have been prioritised by elites since the 1980s.
Food system scholars Alysha Gálvez and Gerardo Otero have both shown the connection between the rapid growth in nutritionally related diseases and changing trade and social policies associated, in particular, with NAFTA.
Otero has probably done more than most to apply the food regime approach to Latin America by characterising a distinctive neoliberal species of this shaped by market liberalisation and transnational agribusiness corporations that accelerate campesino displacement.
As a result, problems such as obesity in Mexico are a relatively recent problem, literally exploding in the 1980s as the country began to open its economy under pressure from Washington. Between 1990 and 2013, chronic kidney disease increased by 276 per cent, diabetes by 41 per cent, and coronary heart disease by 52 per cent.
At the same time, food production has been one of the main ingredients in transforming Mexican capitalism, generating enormous wealth for a few dynasties—from the González Morenos of Grupo Maseca, the world’s largest tortilla producer, to the Servitjes of Grupo Bimbo, the world’s largest baked goods and bread maker.
Neoliberalism has literally turned the country into a kitchen for some of the world’s largest food companies. According to Forbes México, in 2017 the assets of 12 of Mexico’s billionaire clans came from their involvement in the food and beverage sectors.
Yet alongside these mega-wealthy capitalists and their allies in the US who grow fat on the production and distribution of foodstuffs in Mexico, the very people who made the diet distinctive in the first place are marginalised from the food system while growing hungry.
As Ochoa points out, the production and marketing of tortillas serves as the most egregious example of efforts to erase Indigenous knowledge, especially that of women.
Their crucial role in inventing the “nixtamalization” preparation process—by which maize is turned into workable masa to become the Mesoamerican staple for millennia—has been marginalised amid the wholesale theft of knowledge.
Poverty and malnutrition rates are worse in the Mexican countryside, especially among Indigenous populations—who in some cases comprise the world’s poorest communities. Of the 26 million indigenous people in Mexico, a staggering 75 per cent live in penury.
They are plagued by hunger yet simultaneously ravaged by the colonialism of US junk food, unable to afford beans yet able to buy Coke and chips, with all the consequent effects on their long-term health.
The new pulpo of US imperialism in Mexico comprises the tentacles that its supermarkets, convenience stores and fast-food restaurants have extended throughout the country.
México Between Feast and Famine offers a brilliant introductory excursion into the social contradiction that is central to the country’s food history but remains relatively understudied.
It sets shifts in Mexico’s food system since the 1980s in the long history of coloniality and capitalist expansion with all their class, racialised and gendered impacts.
Ochoa provides a valuable theoretical and historical reference for those interested in this pressing topic, while also drawing attention to the wider relationship between foodways and capitalist world systems that gives this study huge relevance beyond Mexico.
Above all, he identifies the dramatic irony of how Mexico’s celebrated cuisine nurtured by Indigenous cultures over centuries is now all but inaccessible to communities that suffer high rates of food poverty and malnutrition.
At every point he is wont to remind us with eloquent flair that this phenomenon is merely one reflection of a longer and broader history of coloniality and capitalism.
He writes: “The attempts by foodies, chefs, and corporate interests in the Global North to untangle this richness and complexity of Mexican foods and package it and market it to a broad audience is the latest in a series of colonial endeavours.”
But at the end of the meal, Ochoa serves up a modest dessert of hope, pointing to acts of resistance against fast-food imperialism in Mexico and important Indigenous collaborations with agroecologists to reinvigorate native varieties of maize and other crops.
He writes: “The food system, and society, must be democratized. The pluriverse of communities who have fed Mexico for centuries and who maintained relationships between people and the land must be at the proverbial table.”
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