Avatars of food in Mexico.: The problem of ideological and power relations in agricultural production

Abstract

This paper studies the vicissitudes of food production and consumption to which indigenous communities and low-income social sectors in Mexico have been subjected over the last five hundred years. The origin of the ideological and power relations that influence agricultural conceptions, whose tendency tends to favor food consumption patterns specific to the power groups, while favoring commercial crops to the detriment of basic crops for the population in general, is schematically addressed. Reference is made to a “food ideology”, which from Europe had generated a confrontation between carnivores and vegetarians, and which in itself contradicts the “salvation theory”, implicit in most historiographical studies. The problem of the introduction of livestock and the tendency to import corn and beans is analyzed. Thus, the concepts of “food security” and “food sovereignty” are tangentially alluded to, in order to contrast the homogenizing agenda of the first case, with the interest of the second case, because each region produces what it has secularly produced according to its natural and cultural conditions.

            In the framework of a more or less broad discussion, which questions decisions such as importing corn, ignoring the fact that Mexico is a millennial producer of this cereal, the book Agriculture and food in Mexico. Evolution, performance and perspectives, by Cassio Luiselli Fernández, is taken as an example of the general analysis. Luiselli Fernández’s study serves to illustrate the continuity of Westernized and Eurocentric perspectives with which the food problem in Mexico continues to be addressed predominantly.