What I knew about tacos before watching this series would have fit inside of one little tortilla. I thought I knew a lot about Mexico and the people there, but now I feel that I know the country and Mexicans much better. We are what we eat, after all.
I was watching the first episode one evening while I was eating a pizza I had made from scratch, a pretty darn good pizza, if I do say so myself. Looking at all of those wonderful images of tacos was making me hungry...while I was stuffing my fat face.
Don't get me wrong, I love the food of Spain and have adopted it completely, but I really miss the food of Mexico. I can make versions of it here. I even have a tortillera, or the press for making tortillas, although I don't make them very well. There are markets here that sell dried chiles, and we even have a stall in my neighborhood market that sells fresh jalapeños and habaneros.
Valencia is famous for its Mercado Central, but the views of Mexico City's Mercado de la Merced is like a revelation.
But what I really need is to take another trip to Mexico and really explore this world of tacos.
Or maybe I can just go to L.A. "Estamos aquí en la ciudad de Los Ángeles, una de las ciudades más mexicanas del mundo."
S02E04 was definitely the low point in the series for me. This was when they went north across the border and all of the food went to hell. At one point, some guy is dumping dehydrated onion into a caldron of meat that didn't look appetizing to begin with. All of the fast-food variations of the taco looked truly disgusting. Drive-in food is one bit of history that really needs to be forgotten, it's like being nostalgic for some diseased that's been cured.
