The farmers market in the neighborhood I’m staying at in Mexico City seems nearly as large as a football field, with merchants coming from many miles around to set up huge stands of produce, sauces, meats, and everything you would need for a healthy and extraordinary diet.
The place is packed on Tuesday, with tight aisles and crowds and deal-making everywhere. It’s a mighty and thrilling feast for the eyes, a wondrous bounty straight out of a Renaissance painting. It’s too bad that you can only buy as much as you can carry back because, by any American standard, this has the look and feel of lost treasure. It isn’t easy carrying 25 pounds while walking a mile back home.
It’s all the more wonderful to see the real products, direct from the ranchers and farmers and chefs, without all the glitz and glamor of the typical U.S. grocery store, which stocks its shelves mostly with processed and packaged foods from mega-corporations that have worked for decades to monopolize food production in cooperation with government regulators.
My eye fell on a small booth operated by an older lady who sat there amid all the plenty selling just one thing: blue and yellow corn tortillas. Because my Spanish is so terrible, I asked a friend to ask her whether she made these herself. Of course, the answer was yes and daily, said with the utmost humility. She has no machine. She has only the flours, water, salt, and a bit of oil, and the work is done by hand.
I think I paid 50 cents for a stack of them, then I got them to my place. Then I examined them. Each is a unique work of art. They’re flattened by her own hands and shaped into ever-so-slightly imperfect circles. The thickness within each also varies, not by much but enough to reveal that these are made in her own kitchen. You can make out the vague impression on each of the last handprints that impacted the dough when they were finished before baking.
My preference for cooking these is to heat up salted butter in a skillet and throw them right in and flip them. Add some cheese, avocado, meat, or really anything, and you have an extraordinary feast that’s fresh and flavorful in ways that no American shopper can believe. The blue ones are especially thrilling, rich and dark. I found myself dreading the U.S. version when I got back.
I'll tell you this: This humble Mexican woman, making her own tortillas and selling them on the street, has some mad skills, born of the daily habits of generations. She’s more talented than 80 percent of the U.S. professional class, which is mostly skilled at exercising privilege, pretending to work, begging for benefits, and manipulating the bureaucracy. This is mostly what they do well.
Not one of these people could make a dime selling wares on the streets of Mexico, that’s for sure. Part of me understands why social reformers get so worked up about how it comes to be that a talentless market director for a major U.S. corporation—pushing out “woke” content—can make $250,000 per year and this mega-talented poor woman in Mexico who has incredible skills and savvy makes only $10,000 per year at best.
I can deploy every manner of fancy logic to explain it, but it still contradicts every intuition if you believe that merit and pay should have something to do with each other.
I could stand and watch street cooks make their stuff all day. In the mornings, you see the breakfast tacos go from dry ingredients to little balls of dough to round flat shapes to the grill and then filled with meats and vegetables and put in piles as passersby grab and go. It’s just a beautiful sight—people producing things for their fellow man and exchanging them for mutual benefit.
This is just one anecdote, and you can easily dismiss it, but the realness of the experience across the board is the standout feature of a visit here. The eggs are sold by the daughter of the owner of a 1,000-chicken farm nearby. In Mexico, as in most of the rest of the world outside of the United States, the outside membrane isn’t stripped so that the eggs don’t need refrigeration. Foreigners visiting the United States can hardly even believe that we refrigerate eggs; it’s a result of regulations from the Food and Drug Administration.
You want milk, cheese, and butter that’s raw from the farm, which many health experts recommend? You can get it here, but it’s illegal to sell it retail in the United States. It’s true of the beef. A local butcher gave me a tour of his two gigantic freezers holding grass-fed meats in various stages of aging. It was like a scene from the 19th century—and a far cry from the bundled packages you see in a Walmart case.
The entire time I’ve been here, I haven’t been asked for an ID once. This goes for using credit cards. It’s true for the pharmacies even with a prescription (which they look at only performatively). And it’s true of the dentist who cleaned my teeth yesterday for the best cleaning I’ve ever had. You walk in, get your teeth cleaned, throw down some cash, and you’re gone.
The commercial process seems largely free of big tech, big data, and big surveillance. Why do Americans believe that health comes only from huge expense and massive data monitoring? It’s utterly bizarre.
Yes, I know that this isn’t supposed to be a “first-world” country, but I struggle to understand what that means. If the diet is great, the medical care is wonderful, the streets are immaculate, you never feel the threat of crime, and there are flowers and beautiful points of architecture including churches that are actually pretty, as well as friendly, happy people, what else do you want?
Yes, I know there’s poverty here, and I’ve seen it here, but you see that everywhere in the United States too. And yes, I know, I write as a privileged visitor without a deep understanding of the plight of the larger population. Even so, my experience here highlights so much that has gone wrong in the United States.
In the United States, we’re supposed to get all fired up about Zuckerberg’s Metaverse and Google’s deployment of AI plus the latest pablum on streaming platforms. It was never worse than in lockdowns, when the U.S. ruling class luxuriated in their houses doing everything virtually—as the Great Reset said they should—while getting their processed food delivered to their doorsteps.
Indeed, most mainstream Americans—from a place that was once a great land of small farmers and merchants who knew them—have no idea what food is. They think it’s dirty and gross unless it’s sealed in a tight package with bright advertising and can be kept in the cupboard for months or years.
Aside from food, many Americans live within a world of their own mental creation and even acquire technologies designed to shut out reality as much as possible. That’s what extreme noise-canceling earbuds do: Their achievement is canceling out reality.
Indeed, the main technologies being marketed to us today are designed for the quick dopamine rush that comes from flash techno-experiences over authentic and more difficult but ultimately more fulfilling real experiences that engage our bodies and the world around us.
The virtual life is a ghastly one, devoid of meaning, genuine participation, and evidence of actual production and genuine living. Most American workers in the professional class believe that wealth comes to them as if by magic, and it kind of does if you consider money printing and financial racketing to be magic. They’ve even lost the ability to cook anything from their own kitchens. If this is what it means to be first-world, you can have it.
Apparently, there are many Americans who agree, because Mexico is now inundated with expats to the point that it’s annoying the natives. I get it, but it’s also instructive.
There’s a growing and still mostly underground movement alive in many countries that are resisting the Great Reset and looking to live lives that are more real, more connected to production and the physical world, and more satisfying spiritually and intellectually. I’m finding all of this here in ways that seem almost extinct in the United States, which is a terrible tragedy.
On my way back from the street food stand making breakfast burritos, I stopped by one of many pop-up bookstores on the streets. The bestsellers this morning—physical books—are Dante, Homer, Wilde, Shakespeare, the Brontë sisters, Spinoza, Descartes, Marcus Aurelius, Locke, and Aquinas.
I’m not sure what this means, but it can’t be a bad thing that average people in Mexico are buying and reading classic material that’s elusive or even unknown to much of the “educated” elite in the United States.
