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+Nothing is so tightly woven into the fabric of existence on earth as food. Food touches every aspect of life in a way that almost nothing else does. Food powers economies, shapes ecologies, dictates religious rituals, causes wars, drives the explorations of the unknown, determines the size and shape of our bodies, how much energy we have, how much life we have. Food is in many ways the story of everything. This notion is what drew me to food, to cooking, to restaurants.
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+In the United States there's no holiday that celebrates food quite like Thanksgiving. It's a celebration of excess that's become, perhaps naturally, excessive, and given the future treatment of the native North Americans who made the first Thanksgiving possible, a deeply troubling holiday, but, it's what we got. Sometimes you have to make do with what you have while you search for something better.
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+For Thanksgiving this year we abandoned all pretense of traditional American fare and went full Mexican -- tamale pie, chayote squash, ensalda pepino and plenty of salsas. This was partly because none of us like turkey anyway and partly because we wanted to eat what was around us. To me if you aren't eating what's around you, if you're always hunting out the familiar foods from back home, you're missing out on one of the best things about travel. 
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+Food has always been a big part of our travels, even if I don't often write about it. Sometimes we refer to places we've been by which foods were really good there. Colorado, the Palisades peaches. The UP and its cherries. In Mexico it's the guavas and the green apples and the strawberries. 
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+I tend toward the slow, systematic approach to exploring food. I go find things I don't recognize and start trying them, one at a time, usually starting with fruit because there's really no such thing as a bad fruit. Then I move into vegetables and meat cuts. I'm currently exploring various cheeses, working my way through a variety of queso oaxaca, quesa fresca, and some other round one I haven't even learned the name of yet (let alone what it tastes like or what you do with it). I'm also on the hunt for a good cotija cheese, but I haven't found one yet. It's not just a variety of food either, it's trying it from each vendor to see who has what I like the best, at the best price. I recognize that this is a little odd to most people. 
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+I head over to market generally every day, partly to get out of the house, but partly because there's still so much there I don't understand yet, so many foods in so many stalls, it'll take me months to get through them all, and that's only one market in one town. It would take years just to even scratch the surface of one place. Because after I figure out what I like and where to get it I like to figure out where it's coming from, who's growing it? What do they do? Why? How? You pull at one tiny thread and you can follow it forever. Like I said, I recognize that this is a little odd. 
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+Sometimes I really miss Anthony Bourdain. Even though I never had time to watch his show much, it was nice to know that there was someone else out there who loved wandering around exploring markets and tracing food around the world. It made me feel a little less like a weirdo when I do the same. 
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+Luckily my kids are usually game to go with me and try new foods. I came back from the big market outside of town the other day with a cup full of dried, salted, chili-covered sardines and they all had one. Only one of them actually like it, and in this case, I think she liked them more than me, but it makes me happy that they're at least willing to try them. That's long been my motto: try anything twice.
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+One of the more bizarre things to me about the modern world is a simultaneous obsession with, and yet a complete fear of, foreign food. Several times I've overheard tourists around here telling each other not to the street food, but yet they go to the restaurant up the hill and sit down to a dinner made from the same ingredients, from the same markets, coming from a kitchen they *can't* see. That's far more likely to get you sick than the stalls in the market where you can see for yourself every step of the process. 
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+Sometimes it blows my mind how little people understand food and, more importantly, food preparation. I do have an advantage here, having worked in the restaurant industry for about six years, but most of what I know actually comes from just learning the basics of microbiology. All the restaurant experience did was provide practical examples of microbiology in action. 
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+Contrary to what you've probably seen on TV, most of running a restaurant does not involve cooking. There is some of that, but mostly you stand around and wait, chopping stuff, but after a few years you can do that without thinking about it. So really you're just standing around. Then for about three hours you're so busy and focused it feels like only ten minutes went by, but mostly you wait. You smoke a lot and stand around a lot. And for me, standing around smoking, I needed something to read. There's not a lot to read in restaurant, so I read all the bizarre food industry trade magazines that would arrive every day in the mail. 
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+One of the things that you learn from reading these bizarre magazines -- which would have cover stories on strange things like how to entice millennials with foods that remind them of their favorite sitcoms -- is that real food poisoning, the outbreaks that the CDC tracks, not the ones where you mistakenly attribute some diarrhea to whatever bizarre food you ate most recently, the real outbreaks, almost always come from vegetables, particularly vegetables that grow on the ground and have to be harvested by hand. Because the people harvesting the food don't get paid enough to take bathroom breaks, so, well, you do the math. From my anecdotal observations, if you really want genuine food poisoning, a bout of salmonella say, eat asparagus, preferably raw. 
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+Which is why I find it hilarious that so many people here are deathly afraid of street food, but in the next breath tell me how they don't need to wash their veggies because they get them at the organic market. WAT?!
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+And no, I never say anything. It's not my place to shatter anyone's carefully constructed delusions. Though I did write this. So now you know. Wash your veggies, eat where you can see the kitchen. You'll mostly likely be fine.
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+That said, I eat unwashed strawberries all the time and regularly get gorditas from a place where they use dirty rags from god knows where to sop up the grease just before handing it to you. But I have a stomach of steel. I don't know which came first though, my stomach of steel or my willingness to eat anything at least twice.
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+But more importantly than a strong stomach, I eat at that place because I see the people around me doing it too. They're still here so it must be fine. That's the part of food that a lot of people seem to forget -- ingredients are nothing, people are what matter. I could spend the next ten years practicing making tamales, but I'll never be as good at it as the abuelas sitting on every street corner here (don't buy their tamales though, they aren't selling the good ones).
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+To me that's the point of exploring food in another culture, to get to understand the people growing it, selling it and making it. It's a way into a culture, for me particularly I guess. I'm not always that outgoing so sometimes I can make connections with people through food much easier than through talking. And to me there is no better way to start to understand the daily lives of the people around you, than to go to the local market and see what's there, the food, the people, how it all fits together.
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+When I first got here I went to the center of the market, bought a couple tacos and a coke and sat and just watched. I watched what people bought, how they examined it, what they picked, what they reject, what they asked the vendor to get, what they insisted on getting themselves. I watched how they handled it, what was delicate, what was not, who was careful with what they were picking out, who was not (the latter were probably buying it for someone else). I came back the next day and spent another half hour watching. Then another. Then I walked around the every stall, looking things over, figuring out who had the best of what, how things changed from day to day, what time the new stuff arrived, how it was rotated, who cared if you grabbed the fresh stuff in the bins under the display and who didn't, who pulled their their borderline fruits and veggies who didn't, which butcher got whole animals and cut them down, which got the halves and quarters already cut. All these details tell you stories about the people behind them, and if you want the best possible local ingredients you have to go out and learn these stories. Sometimes of course you do things even though you know better. I buy most of my fruit from a woman who is slow to rotate things and I have to carefully look over every piece I buy, but I like her, she teaches me the Spanish words of veggies I don't know and I sometimes help her translate words in her daughter's English homework. 
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+When I finally had a few ideas about what was going on in the market, I dove in. I started to buy all the things I didn't recognize, didn't understand, and didn't normally eat. I figured out how to eat cactus -- it's delicious, though tricky, like a strange combination of asparagus and okra -- then I went for chayote, except that while I was studying it there on the counter at home, trying to decide what to do with it, Corrinne dove in and fried it up with potatoes, onions, garlic and mint. The kids, who had never seen a guava until about two months ago now plow through about 10 a day. At first we scooped the seeds out, but then we noticed the locals never do that so now we just eat them whole, seeds and all. They're also big fans of the *elote*, boiled corn on the cob you can get on just about every corner.
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+When thanksgiving rolled around we wanted the foods we were excited about and that happened to be tamales, chayote and tomtillos, so that's what we made, and man was it good. So good it makes you thankful that you have the opportunity to explore food rather than be ruled by it, by the need for it, as so many are here and everywhere. Thankful that another country would even let you come to it, let alone have free run of the place to meet it's people enjoy it's foods. Thanks Mexico, we are in your debt.