Tenth International Conference on Food Studies

Abstract

The food of Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula has been having a moment for at least a half of decade, exemplified by René Redzepi’s pop-up Noma outpost in Tulum and David Sterling’s two James Beard Awards for Yucatán: Recipes from a Culinary Expedition. While anthropologists and allied scholars have worked to critique the category of “Mayanness” since the 1990s, outsider appreciation for “Mayan food” still often rests on assumptions of authenticity and naturalness. Amidst all of this, the term is increasingly claimed by indigenous people themselves. This is happening in a multitude of ways, in ways that are sometimes clearly linked to the commodified value of Mayanness in the tourist industry but also in ways that suggest attempts to wrestle meaning-making away from regional and global elites. This paper explores the creation and recreation of a newer dish called “pastel maya” that consists largely of mass-produced and highly processed ingredients. The paper considers how the use of “maya” to describe this dish poses a challenge both to scholarly rejections of the descriptor and to outsiders’ attempts to romanticize or capture local foodways, and culture more generally.