What to Do about the Food of the Poor: Mexico City 1940s and 50s
Sandra Aguilar, a Mexican friend who is completing a Ph.D. at the University of Manchester, just sent me a paper she published this month in The Americas called “Cooking Modernity: Nutrition Policies, Class, and Gender in 1940s and 1950s Mexico City.” You can find it on Project Muse.
In brief the story is this. In the 40s and 50s, a couple of large public dining halls were set up in Mexico City to serve three inexpensive meals a day to rural immigrants who signed up. The main meal consisted of soup, salad, meat, bread and fruit; supper was black coffee, bread, beans and leftovers; breakfast was fruit, eggs or meat, atole (maize gruel) or milky coffee and bread.
The kinds of main dishes that were served were grilled fish, hamburgers, macaroni bolognaise, Jewish veal (veal, in Mexico City, in the 40s!), smashed peas, ragout, meat with eggplant, grilled steak, pudding (presumably English-style) with raisins.
Diners were not enthused by the menu, wanting tortillas and enchiladas, nor by the rules and regulations, nor by learning to eat with knives and forks from plates. Although gradually vegetable soup, Mexican rice, lentils, chickpeas, picadillo, and meat in salsa were added, the dining halls never really took off.
It’s a paper that sparks reflection.
1. As Sandra points out, similar schemes were being tried in Uruguay, Argentina, Chile and Peru. In fact, these and other options for feeding the poor were being tried at this time or somewhat earlier in Russia, western Europe, the US, Japan and doubtless elsewhere. Urbanization everywhere created dietary problems.
2. As she also mentions, there was a worry that the poor were malnourished and not getting enough protein and vitamins. This of course was when nutritionists were promoting both. Again a global phenomenon.
3. Why not give the poor in Mexico Mexican food? There’s a lot going on here. I suspect the Mexican case has global parallels.
Technical Difficulties. Tortilla making machinery was still so primitive it could not turn out enough tortillas for large groups and those it did turn out were often horrid.
The Hierarchy of the Grains. It was widely believed worldwide that wheat was the most nutritious grains and white bread the best way to eat wheat.
Urban Kitchens. I would love to know more about the kinds of kitchens that poor rural immigrants had in Mexico City. I suspect that they could not have the kind of kitchen (the black kitchen) they had in the country for grinding maize and making tortillas. Nor were they likely to have had wood or charcoal-fired bench stoves. Perhaps they had no kitchens at all and relied on street food. Perhaps they had a gas or electric stove top or oven. In any case it seems likely that traditional ways of cooking would have been disrupted. Many were malnourished, as Sandra points out.
Trickle Down or Filter Up? Today many of us interested in food believe in a kind of filter up theory of culinary history where peasant food is refined into high cuisine. It seems mean to deny the rural poor their traditional foods. Then most people believed in a trickle down theory. It was good to offer the poor a chance to eat something more like what the rich ate.
The Actual State of Rural Food It’s changing rapidly now, but many rural people ate very basic food: tortillas, beans, calabaza, wild greens, and salsa of chiles. The “Mexican” food that appeared on the menu including picadillo and meat-chile stews, was probably not what the poor would have eaten when they lived in the country. It had much more protein.
Interesting. I have been reading some real success stories with UN food for poor kids programs, but nothing historical like this. Many thanks