San Sebastián (EFE).- The soup that Mexican writer Juan Villoro has never tasted better was a simple broth served in a plastic cup when he worked as a brigade member after the devastating earthquake in Mexico City in 1985 because “there is no better cook than hunger”, but also because it was an example of the “extreme community gift that food has”.
He has exposed it in Diálogos de Cocina, a multidisciplinary meeting with gastronomy as the axis promoted by Andoni Luis Aduriz, from the well-known Mugaritz (Guipúzcoa); the Basque Culinary Center and the Eurotoques chefs’ association held in San Sebastián.
“Eating in solitude never tastes the same, food is socializing, sharing,” argued Villoro, for whom those sips of a humble soup with pasta and herbs such as cilantro and epazote united him not only with the other brigade members who collected rubble in the streets , but to their city, because “the waste also belongs to us”.
Villoro has defended that “all culture is an act of ingestion”, that human beings are “as original as what they eat” and that food is not only a necessity but also serves to “make us think”, as chefs have proven. like Ferran Adrià, whom the Mexican interviewed in his journalistic facet.
“A chef’s heritage is to create recipes that do not exist and he imagined recipes in search of something that does not exist,” he recalled; In his opinion, Adrià’s “most interesting gesture” was to close elBulli because his formulas were spreading throughout the world and “when everything receives consensus it becomes routine; originality has to continue provoking”.
He has also highlighted that he returned the culture of eating with his fingers, which he considers an act of “cannibalism by sucking fingers, one of the great pleasures of this new cuisine, because we can be tasty by being made of what we eat”.
The writer has also spoken about Mexican gastronomy, with special prominence of corn and chili peppers as ingredients and some sauces “baroque due to excess flavors” in a country whose national emblem is “the only one in the world that has an ingestion: an eagle devouring a snake”.
He has pointed out the special relationship of Mexicans with spiciness – “the waiter who says that something is spicy has not been born, he will only admit that it is enough to give it flavor”, he jokes – because it is embedded in a genealogy that means that “every enjoyment has a component of suffering, as occurs with the National Soccer Team”.
But he has also recalled the words of Italo Calvino, who defined Mexican sauces “as an absolute aphrodisiac” in such a way that “the eroticism of food is not a mediation, but an end in itself”.