By Jane Bauer—

“Each food item in a typical U.S. meal has traveled an average of 1,500 miles….If every U.S. citizen ate just one meal a week (any meal) composed of locally and organically raised meats and produce we would reduce our country’s oil consumption by over 1.1 million barrels of oil every week.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

I live in a small village with a public address system where you still hear announcements like, “La señora Martínez tiene pollo a la venta.” These days there are fewer loudspeaker messages because most have moved to our community WhatsApp group. A typical post reads: “Hola, buen día. Ya les tengo a la venta los ricos tamales de frijol y chepil en el domicilio de la señora Mendoza.” It’s simply letting the neighborhood know that fresh tamales are ready and waiting at someone’s home.

Mexico is full of pop food stands. People sell bolis, sliced fruit, tacos, tamales, homemade bread, roasted chickens, and countless other foods. Economists call this the informal economy, but there is a misconception that “informal” means unregulated. As a restaurant owner, people often ask me whether businesses here need permits or pay taxes, as though selling food in Mexico is free from the bureaucracy found in the United States or Canada. It isn’t. Even street food vendors are typically required to obtain permits, licenses, and food safety training. What sets Mexico apart is not the absence of regulation—it is that we have not completely corporatized our food system.

This past May I was hiking the North Carolina section of the Appalachian Trail. The forest was magnificent, and there is no better way to reconnect with nature. But every time I left the trail to resupply, I was struck by how many hikers—and local residents—relied almost entirely on processed food. Frozen meals, convenience stores, and an endless parade of fast-food restaurants lining the highways have become the default way to eat.

The numbers are hard to ignore. The United States has an estimated 180,000 to 210,000 corporate fast-food restaurants, compared with just 35,000 to 45,000 in Mexico. McDonald’s alone has 13,706 U.S. locations, compared with only 380 in Mexico, more than 36 times as many.

Recently, I drove nearly 900 kilometers from Huatulco to San Miguel de Allende. Do you know how many corporate fast-food restaurants I passed? Not one.

That contrast matters. The recent U.S. Cyclospora outbreak, linked to contaminated shredded lettuce and affecting more than 1,600 people across over 30 states, illustrates the vulnerability of highly centralized food systems. When a single supplier distributes food across an entire country, one contamination event can quickly become a national public health crisis. Efficiency and scale have their advantages, but they also create fragility.

A few weeks ago I watched a social media video of a woman planting dried beans from a bag of mixed bean soup. The comments were filled with people insisting it was illegal to grow them. Whether or not those claims were true almost didn’t matter—the instinctive assumption was that growing your own food had somehow become suspect.

So the next time you see someone selling fresh food from a cart, a folding table, or the front of their home, recognize that they are preserving something valuable. Every tamale, taco, loaf of bread, and bag of fresh fruit represents a food system that is local, decentralized, and deeply human. Plant a garden. Buy from your neighbors. Skip the drive-through. Real food, sold by real people, is more than a meal; it is a quiet act of revolution.

See you in October,

Jane

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