Coca-colonization of diets in the Yucatan

Tourism Geographies, 2002

The importance of creating backward linkages between tourism and agriculture is receiving growing recognition among tourism scholars. Most tourism and agriculture research is focused primarily on hotel food procurement patterns and does not address the principal force driving hotel purchasing -tourist food consumption and preferences. While the tourism and agriculture literature makes frequent anecdotal reference to tourist consumption patterns -particularly differences according to nationality and type of tourist -there is little empirical data available. This article seeks to address this lacuna: employing data drawn from a recent survey of 615 Yucatan Peninsula visitors, complemented by qualitative interviews, in an analysis of tourist food consumption and preferences. Study results reveal a relatively high level of demand among tourists for foods for which there is potential to produce in the region. While there are discernible differences in food consumption and preferences by tourist nationality and type of tourist, they are not as great as the literature would suggest. Contrary to popular perceptions, Americans do not demand signi cantly more home country food than do tourists from other nations. The study concludes that tourist food consumption and preferences do not represent a major obstacle to promoting future tourism and agriculture linkages in the Yucatan Peninsula. Mexican foods, tropical fruits and organic produce are identi ed as areas of signi cant potential for linking tourism and local agriculture in the Yucatan.

Ecology of Food and Nutrition, 2011

This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution , reselling , loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.

2018

Globalization has many definitions (Al-Rodhan, 2006). An anonymous author of a Wikipedia page writes that, "Globalization is the process of international integration arising from the interchange of world views, products, ideas, and other aspects of culture" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globalization). This international integration is the total of "...all those processes by which the peoples of the world are incorporated into a single world society" (Albrow & King, 1990, p. 8). Many anthropologists, including the present authors, doubt that globalization will unify hundreds of cultures and language groups into 'a single world society.' More likely, globalization works to unify economic markets via trade, the flow of monetary capital, the movement of human capital via rural-to-urban and international migration, and the targeting of investment toward financial profits. Globalization may or may not result in greater human well-being, health, and happiness (Graham, 2010). Food globalization integrates the products of multinational corporations with processes of dietary change. This integration influences the biology, social organization, and ideology of people. Globalization is also unlikely to produce a 'single world society' of food. The hundreds of human cultures, with their multiplicity of religions, social classes, and ethnicities, often demand that people eat culturally-specific foods. The diversity of physical environments for food production will likely mean that biological species available to eat and the final choices of edible items will reflect local bio-social ecologies. In addition, transport costs may make the price of imported foods beyond the means of the majority of the world's people, who are of low income. Archaeological and historical sources do, in fact, support the local nature of food availability, food production methods, and consumption choices (Bogin, 1998; Dufour et al., 2013). Despite this long history, a shift toward global foods may have begun about 300 ago. In his book Sweetness and Power, Sidney Mintz (1985) contends that in the 18th Century European Colonial powers practiced a trade of goods and slaves which marked the beginning of food globalization. The mass transport of the food crops of tea, sugar, tobacco and, to a lesser extent, chocolate and coffee, made these commodities the first mass produced, imported foods, of mass consumption. The production was done, primarily, in the tropical zone colonies and the consumption was principally done achieved in the metro poles of Europe. Today these same food commodities are part of a globalized trade. The products of tea, sugar, tobacco, chocolate and coffee are found in virtually all regions of the planet that have human inhabitants. These products are grown, manufactured, packaged, transported and sold through networks that are largely controlled by multinational corporations. Consumers purchase these products in containers bearing corporate logos, which aid and promote the instant public identification of the company. These corporate logos have symbolic meanings to the consumers of the products. Corporations use their economic, social, and political power to shape and enhance meaning to include notions of quality, purity, social good, social status, health, ethnic or religious identity, and more. The globalized soft drink Coca-Cola® is one well-researched example of the meaning imbued in a product and is corporate logo. We focus on Coca-Cola (also referred to as Coke) because the Mexican people are currently the greatest per capita consumers of Coca-Cola of any nationality (see data below). It is claimed that the Mexican State of Yucatan may have the highest Coke consumption of all Mexico (http://www.yucatanliving.com/culture/mexico-sweetmexico.htm). The Maya people of Yucatan, Mexico have been one of the targets of the Coca-Cola Corporation's sales campaigns for at least the past 20 years (Leatherman and Goodman, 2005; Verza, 2013). The globalization of Maya diets has not been caused by Coca-Cola alone, but this globally most popular of all carbonated, sugar-sweetened soft drinks is part of the story of the globalization of children's diets.

Ethnicity & health, 2018

The Mayas of the State of Yucatan in Mexico are the only aboriginal group with obesity and diabetes data before 1997. To analyze socioeconomic trends associated with the increase in obesity and diabetes seen in rural Yucatan from 1962 to 2000. Body weight, height and venous Fasting Blood Glucose (FBG) were measured in 263 rural Maya adults participating in a 2000 nutrition survey. Diabetes (FBG > 125 mg/dL) and obesity (BMI ≥ 30 kg/m) were 10.6% and 35.7%, respectively. These results contrast with those of a 1962 survey where diabetic prevalence was 2.3% and 0% in women and men respectively, with widespread adult pellagra and malnutrition. An important socioeconomic transition that took place in Yucatan during this lapse appeared to be associated to the obesity and diabetes increase. Rural Yucatan evolved from malnutrition conditions to high prevalence of obesity and diabetes in less than 40 years. This change was associated with the transition from an agroindustry-based economy,...

Debates Indígenas, 2022

Before the advance of the presence of the State, the Maya Máasewáal nation lived in times of abundance. However, schools began teaching that the milpa was “poor man´s” work, whiles mass tourism turned the Mayas into a source of cheap labor. The arrival of tourists to cities such as Cancun, Playa del Carmen and Tulum resulted in a market for drug trafficking and drug dealing in the region. In the same light, the mega-project of the (misnamed) Mayan Train is bound to have destructive consequences for nature. At the same time, the tourism industry will expand to rural regions that until now have lived from the production of the land and have not suffered from organized crime. Hope lies in community organization, resistance and struggles for the defense of the land. By Angel Sulub for Debates Indígenas.

Food and Identity in the Caribbean

Many twentieth-century ethnographic accounts of the rural Yucatec Maya analyze the accruement of culinary knowledge as a crucial part of the process of socialization, by which children become adults (e.g., Gaskins 2003; Greene 2002). Indeed, in the rural town of Juubche, fairly predictable culinary milestones continue to mark the lives of girls and women. Some young women, however, are using their access to new foods and related knowledge to challenge both local hierarchies of expertise and ideologies of racial difference. For many young women in Juubche, there is a link between consuming new foods and identifying oneself with larger Yucatecan and Mexican cultures. Yet, rather than disavowing their rural Yucatec Maya community, these women are establishing themselves as versatile and respected members of that community. Part of this process entails identifying oneself as someone who can manage new foods and successfully integrate them into the everyday rhythms of local life. In doing so, these women render themselves local culinary experts and expand the possibilities of alimentary pleasure for themselves and for their community. They are also reshaping a cosmology already in fl ux as they and these new foods complicate understandings of the body and the universe. The conditions under which these young women live are the product of a century of governmental efforts to economically and culturally integrate the peninsula into the Mexican nation-state, yet these conditions also refl ect centuries of ties with neighboring islands and an ecosystem more similar to that of those islands than to that of central Mexico. Though Yucatan's staple crops for centuries-corn, beans, and squash-are roughly the same as those in central Mexico and other parts of Mesoamerica, the local cuisine holds other daily foodstuffs in common with its Caribbean neighbors: habañero chilies, sour oranges, and sugarcane, among others. During the colonial period and even after Independence in 1821, the peninsula's remote location and powerful local elite shaped a strong regional culture that refl ected its cultural and economic ties-and a shared history of slavery-with Caribbean islands and the southeastern United States (Joseph 1986; Torres-Saillant 2006: 20).

Review of International American Studies, 2020

Translocality as originally used by Arjun Appadurai was an evocative con- cept that appealed immediately to anthropologists and others who study global-local connections. Its use has been widely adopted in religious studies, music studies, migration studies and food studies, but it has con- tinued to be rather undefined, which makes it difficult to apply to local data. Here, from the study of local food and gastronomy in the Mexi- can state of Yucatán, I investigate how translocality can help us look at the global in the local and the local in the global. I propose that when it comes to studying food and gastronomy in the Yucatán, translocality can help us understand the ways in which industrialization, which became both a production model and a way of life in the United States and Europe at the end of the nineteenth century, rapidly extended to food everywhere, and Yucatecans fondly took to the consumption of industrially produ- ced and processed foods, incorporating them into the local gastronomy. The results, in terms of taste, have been extensive but are not particu- lar to the Yucatán, since food and gastronomy everywhere have been impacted in similar ways. However, when we analyze the changes in local dishes and preparations, we can see how ubiquitous industrialized food has become and how it has affected the particular configurations of ingre- dients in Yucatecan cuisine.

Food and nutrition bulletin, 2008

Food patterns of population groups change and adapt under the influence of several factors, including those related to globalization, urbanization, and the nutrition transition. To document changes in food consumption and dietary patterns of Guatemalans, based on food surveys from the middle of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century. We accessed archival dietary data from surveys conducted in nine rural or semirural traditional Guatemalan communities in the 1950s and from two studies of nonindigenous Guatemalans and Guatemalans of Mayan descent conducted after 1998. The total number and types of food items and the nutrient intakes from the two eras were compared. We identified 210 distinct food items across time, including 108 items consumed in traditional indigenous and nonindigenous Guatemalan communities ("old" foods), of which 72% were still consumed by nonindigenous Guatemalans and 76% were still consumed by Mayan Guatemalans. Processed foods represent...

Anthropology of food, 2008

Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems , 2019

In Mexico, industrially grown and transformed foods have seen their consumption explode over the past half-century and soft drinks embody an emblematic example of the impact these shifts can have on health, traditional foodways, and family agriculture. This study compared the role of sodas with a traditional maize beverage, pozol, in the state of Chiapas, specifically among rural and urban secondary school youth. We found that students find sodas to be desirably “refreshing” and “tasty,” and associated them with wealthier social classes and an alluring vision of modernity. Pozol, on the other hand, was seen as “peasant food” or a poor-person’s drink. Nonetheless, most students have not abandoned its consumption and indeed, for many it represented their most significant daily liquid intake. Importantly, it was seen as more than refreshing libation, serving as a vital food source. We also found that within Chiapanecan society, pozol in fact represents a host of varying versions, whose consumption parallels ethnic, socioeconomic, and rural/urban factors. Ultimately, some traditional foods have maintained a certain resilience in the face of more globalized foods, in part because of their perceived nutritional and cultural value, thus helping to reinforce the resilience of the peasant agroecology they depend on.

Ecology of Food and Nutrition, 2013

This investigation examines maternal diet in rural Costa Rica in the context of recent political economic changes. Results show that increased availability of non-local food items, (i.e., pizza and processed foods) has influenced maternal dietary choices. Information pathways, which have traditionally provided women with knowledge about maternal diet from family members, are also shifting. Younger women turn to the local clinic and the media for information about maternal diet, and traditional practices, such as cuarentena (40-day postpartum period), are no longer being observed. Changing practices may be linked with shifting information pathways, as well as self-reported weight gain among women.

Material Encounters and Indigenous Transformations in the Early Colonial Americas, 2019

This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 License.

The Journal of Latin American and …, 2012

2016

This study explores the relationship between tourism, the nutrition transition, and prenatal dietary practices in the Monteverde Zone, Costa Rica. This rural tourism community, located in the central highlands of Costa Rica, has seen rapid growth and development since the tourism boom in the early 1990s, leading to changes in the local food system and increased food insecurity. This investigation added to this work by identifying the ways that prenatal dietary practices have shifted over time in the context of increased tourism and the concomitant nutrition transition, and by describing the relationship between food insecurity and nutritional status among pregnant women. In applying a critical biocultural approach, this study drew on both quantitative and qualitative methods. Pregnant women were recruited to participant in twenty-four hour diet recalls (n=21), the Household Food Insecurity and Access Scales (n=20), and semi-structured interviews (n=22). Women who had older children ...

Nutrition Reviews, 2009