La comida que cura

Several years ago I took a wonderful anthropology class in my last semester at Metro, a medical anthropology class taught by a delightful professor who’d worked in health care in New Mexico and was well acquainted with the delicate and difficult task of blending western and traditional healing for the patients’ benefit. One of the major themes in the class was the concept of food as medicine/medicine as food, which harks back to earlier lessons in Anthropology 101 in which we learn that we don’t all perceive “food” the same way cross-culturally. Well sure, food is what you eat, what you ingest with the general idea that it will sustain life, while medicine (in its oral indications, anyway) is what you will ingest in the hopes it will restore or maintain vibrant life. Many cultures build grand rituals and subcultures around their gastronomy. Look at the French. Mmm, the pastries, ooh la la. . .but I digress. Food is what you eat, but what will you eat? What do you and your culture define as “food”, suitable for ingestion under quotidian circumstances? What would you ingest as medicine that you’d push away on a plate or in a chilled glass, and which foods’ “curative” powers would you doubt, because they’re only food?

Why do I bring up all the anthrobabble? Two days ago while walking past a taquería on the south side of downtown, beyond the well-scrubbed picturesque plazas between the cathedral and the opera house and into the gritty, sweaty, noisy, human neighborhoods, I spied a pile of pig snouts waiting to be chopped into fine pieces and shoveled into tortillas and laden with salsas and pickled carrots for a clientele who seem not bothered in the least by the origins of their fare. Anyway, the snouts were easily identifiable and in plain view, right behind the glass up again the sidewalk, so any Fulano who stops for a quick snort, I mean bite, knows what he’s buying, so I can only assume there’s no trickery here, except maybe a horrid sacrilegious joke on a blind, hungry Jew or Muslim who can’t see what’s they’re serving him. Yet another reason for me to avoid the pork tacos, at least in that neighborhood. I promise there’s a point to the pig snouts, I’m not just testing your stomach. Moving on: a few blocks later I walked past a market where, a few years ago while wandering the folk medicine/witchcraft section (I still don’t consider love spells “medicine”) I happened upon a serpentine mess of what appeared to be desiccated, skinned, and decapitated carcasses hanging down long and precariously from the edge of a stall. ¿Cascabeles?, I wondered. I verified the identity of the suspect remains with the proprietress and in our subsequent chat she swore to me that rattlesnake, ground up and served as a tea, alleviates the sufferings of cancer patients and in some cases even cures the disease itself. I was doubtful, but having seen loved ones bear the ravages of chemotherapy in hopes (often vain, I might add) of a cure or a respectable spell of remission, I promised myself at that moment that if it came down to it, I’d try a few swigs of her rattlesnake brew before submitting myself to chemo.

Am I really less disgusted by drinking reconstituted snake powder than the possibility of running across a pig booger in my taco? Honestly, yes. Ponder the swine mucous for a moment and you’ll come around. Would I eat the snout tacos if I thought they might cure cancer? Hmm. That’s a tougher decision. How much would I have to eat, and for how long? Here chemo might come out on top. On the flip side, I’d do snake as medicine, but I’d only eat it to be polite or if I were raving hungry and had no other options. Sure it’s “food”, it’s muscle tissue, and more appetizing than a pig’s septum, but don’t look for me to be ordering rattlesnake tenderloin (because snake have “loins”, don’t you know) at a Cowboy Old-West theme restaurant. I grew up in the mountain west eating wild game and I have nothing to prove.

Mexicans eat menudo, some because they like it and others only to stave off or diminish hangovers. Many people in the US don’t like Jägermeister strictly because it reminds them of NyQuil. My husband and other more easterly-bound travelers than myself tell me that Russians despise root beer, because their cough syrups have the same flavor. What would they think of Sonic’s recent promotion offering free root beer floats to kick off the summer? Who doesn’t like root beer floats? Go ahead, say it—“That’s just plain un-American”. Of course it is.

So back to the original point of this unappetizing reflection: food is what you eat, but what will you eat, and why do you eat it? Do you detest broccoli and salmon and dark chocolate but eat them anyway because your doctor told you to? What else would you eat if you thought it might cure or prevent illness? What would you eat to be polite? During study group or even in a less seasoned anthropology professor’s lecture, this topic can quickly degenerate into a gross-out-fest in which students compare the nastiest thing they’ve ever eaten. Even in that discussion, though, listen up, because everyone’s “worst food” is likely to be an animal product, and probably from an animal or body part that your culture doesn’t consider “food”, or in an unacceptable condition (raw, rotten). Sorry, but no one’s going much impressed by even the worst tofu burger, not when the other contestants are blood sausage, fish heads, and goat with the singed hair still attached.

Anyway, this morning I went back to that same crazy market, Mercado Libertad, with another seasoned Guadtrotter to show it to a newbie in the city, and she was duly amazed by it. (I also rode the subway for the first time here, which was fast but extremely crowded as one expects a subway to be). I looked around again for the rattlesnake hocker, and found her again in the same spot, but the rest of that brujería section of the market has sadly diminished since my last extended stay here, and most the area is now filled with DVD pirates. I also looked and looked for a pile of pig snouts to illustrate this entry, but alas, found none. I did, however, capture some pigs feet, and a creative use for limes and a defleshed goat skull (doesn’t it look like those drawings of El Chupacabras?). If you're interested, the going rate for pigs feet is 18pesos/kilo. That's about 80 cents a pound, guys, cheap animal protein! I’ve spared you the more graphic images like the skinned lambs’ heads and piles of hearts and tripas, but if you want to see them, you know where to go.

Eat up, friends. Lola’s having salad for dinner.