For many, mention of Mexican food brings to mind images of tacos loaded with liquid cheese, sodium-packed meats and calorie-dense burritos. While there’s definitely nothing wrong with a Mexican feast every once in a while (the cuisine is one of the more versatile, flavoursome and popular on the Latin American spectrum), in Australia it’s commonly considered to be a ‘special occasion’ cuisine – fiesta food – rather than a staple we turn to regularly.
According to San Francisco State University professors Luz Calvo and Catrióna Rueda Esquibel, this is a misconception that needs to be done away with, pronto. The husband and wife dream team have just published a new book called Decolonize Your Diet, in which they argue the ‘unhealthy’ aspects of Mexican cuisine (meat and piles of cheese) were added after Mexico was colonised in the 16th century. “If you look at a rural Mexican diet, it’s very plant based,” Luz tells The LA Times. “Meat is used in small portions. Real foods are the things we get excited about – quelites [commonly called lamb's-quarters] and verdolagas [commonly knows as purslane]. These are wild greens. They're super-healthy for you. [Food activist] Michael Pollan actually calls them the two healthiest plants on the planet. These were things that our grandparents knew how to forage and find.”
The intention behind Calco and Rueda Esquibel’s new book is to showcase the breadth of plant-based recipes Mexican food – real Mexican food – is famous for. “We started looking at traditional Mexican food like beans, and really looking at plant-based foods,” Calvo tells the LA Times. “Beans, nopales [cactus], verdolaga, quelites were things that stood out to us as really important foods for ancestors ate but maybe we didn’t.”
Bad Hombres is a Sydney-based example of healthy Mexican cuisine at its best. After opening last year with a 60 per cent vegan menu, restaurateur Sean McManus and chef Toby Wilson made the decision to switch to a 100 per cent plant based menu. As one of the few restaurants in Sydney offering authentic Mexican cuisine, Bad McManus and Wilson are leading the charge in the direction of healthier (and arguably more authentic) alternatives to Tex-Mex and Mexican fast food, which have both largely come to define Australia’s perception of Mexican food.
“Traditional food that’s served in Mexico today (especially in Mexico City) generally isn’t that healthy,” says Wilson. “Most things are pork-based, with vegetables cooked in lard. But if you take a step back through history to before the Spanish arrived, the Mexican diet was largely plant and grain based. Now we’re seeing chefs using fresher, healthier ingredients for Mexican food in California and in Australia too.”
While McManus and Wilson cite a wide range of influences for their menu – Chinese and Japanese flavours play a role at Bad Hombres, too – cooking in Mexican traditions allows a plant-based menu to shine.
“We’re not trying to be traditional,” says McManus. “But every week we’re moving more and more towards traditional Mexican cooking techniques and ingredients – it’s a progression we’re conscious of. We import real flour tortillas and the right chillies straight from Mexico. We’re probably one the closest restaurants Sydney has to the real thing right now.”
It’s the driving force behind a dish involving eggplant wrapped in banana leaf and slow cooked or 5-6 hours, but it’s also why their most popular dish (half a head of cauliflower deep fried with seaweed salt, served on a pool of cashew cream with coriander and raw onion) isn’t quite Mexican. Another thing it definitely isn’t is Tex-Mex.
Tex- Mex, of course, originated in Texas, which once formed part of Mexico. The dairy and meat products commonly found in Texas (while similar to what’s available in northern Mexico) are vastly disparate from what’s available in the majority of Mexico – hence the many iterations of Mexican cuisine. When we crave Mexican, it’s usually the Tex-Mex variety we’re after so we head straight to Zambrero, Guzman y Gomez and Mad Mex. But Sydney restaurant Mejico is working hard to change that, with their menu of nutrition-driven, upmarket Mexican food.
“The Mexican food I grew up with in the 90s was cheap, meat driven, saturated in unidentifiable sauces & topped with cheese," says Richard Prout, Mejico’s food and beverage operations manager. “Our menu at Mejico was created with an understanding of Mexican ingredients, cooking techniques and trying to utilise the produce we offer here in Australia to do justice to a cuisine offered poorly by so many over the years. We took everything people expected and discarded it, then we took traditional dishes from the Yucatan to the pacific coastline of Mexico, dishes that have been lost within the western world or not showcased well in Western cuisine and ensure that we did them justice and made them our own."
As with any cuisine, there are unhealthy elements to Mexican cuisine – it can often be high in salt, for example. But Prout points to the surplus of ingredients inherent to Mexican cooking that boast an array of health benefits. “Ancient grains, quinoa, chia, beans, corn for example are all ingredients that you will find in the aisles of your local health food store and all of these ingredients have been consumed in the Mexican diet for centuries,” he says. “Chilli itself contains up to seven times the vitamin C level of an orange whilst also laying claim to aiding digestion, muscle, joint & nerve pain and packed full of vitamins A, E and a number of other benefits, including being delicious.”
With restaurants like Bad Hombres and Mejico dominating the space, healthy eaters can enjoy Mexican cuisine – true, authentic Mexican cuisine. Sure, you can continue smothering your burrito with liquid cheese sauce and sour cream; but the end result might not actually be Mexican after all.
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