Cookbook: 'Decolonize Your Diet' with Healthy Plant-Based Mexican Cooking Sarah McColl - TakePart
go to original November 20, 2015

They may not appear on the menu of your local Mexican restaurant, but cooks who know their way around the food of Mexico likely know his or her way around the two plants Michael Pollan heralded as the most nutritious in The Omnivore’s Dilemma. They’re cornerstone ingredients of the country’s traditional rural kitchen.

“When we go out into the community and mention verdolagas and quelites,” greens known as purslane and lamb’s quarters in English, “everybody has a story about how their family cooks them, how the young people think it’s weeds and don’t want to eat it,” said Luz Calvo, professor of ethnic studies at California State University, East Bay, who prefers the pronoun they. “But the elders in the community recognize it as a really important food.”

That kind of community-sourced information helped shape Calvo’s new cookbook, Decolonize Your Diet, cowritten with partner Catriona Rueda Esquibel, an associate professor of race and resistance studies at San Francisco State University. The book, based on ancestral knowledge gleaned from community and family members as well as old self-published cookbooks the couple has been collecting for years, shines a light on precommercialized Mexican food and features plant-based recipes made with native ingredients such as cactus paddles, the fruit xoconostle, wild greens, tomatoes, corn, and chiles.

“I always like to say without food from the Americas, Italian cuisine would not have polenta or tomato sauce,” which were introduced to Europe as a result of the Spanish Conquest and colonization in what is now Mexico, Esquibel said. As the name indicates, this is a cookbook with larger implications than the recipes themselves.

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