Mexico Between Feast and Famine offers a historical contextualization of current food challenges by examining the consequences of coloniality and the commodification of food in Mexicans’ diet. Ochoa explores the paradox of having a national cuisine designated as “Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity,” while 25% of the population suffers from malnutrition and related diseases. To understand this, Ochoa takes us back to colonial times, the development of capitalism after independence, and the industrialization process that started with the Porfiriato and continued after the Mexican Revolution. By doing so, the author demonstrates how economic practices and policies have shaped the national food system.

A key contribution of this book is its focus on how food policy and industry have influenced everyday people, particularly women who have played a crucial role as both producers and consumers. Mexican cuisine is the result of the efforts of anonymous cooks, most of whom are women from Indigenous or peasant backgrounds, who have preserved cooking techniques and recipes across generations. Meanwhile, peasants, Indigenous peoples, and workers have traditionally been targeted by colonial and modern government policies aimed at altering their diets, which have often been portrayed as inferior compared with Western (European and U.S.) culture.

Ochoa analyzes the history of state policy and the development of food corporations to understand the consequences of capitalism and a postcolonial ideology that seeks to emulate the global North. To do so, his work revolves around three main axes.

First, he focuses on the process through which Mexican people have been dispossessed of their land starting in the nineteenth century with liberal legislation (Lerdo and Juárez Laws), continued by Porfirio Díaz up to 1910, and then by postrevolutionary governments, particularly after the 1970s, when many peasant families were displaced from the countryside, ending subsistence agriculture and creating a pattern that was exacerbated after the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994 and that continued through the neoliberal era. Second, he offers an analysis of how ideas about race and hierarchy created during the colonial era (1500–1810) have influenced modern understandings of race and class, and how these ideas ultimately affected the lower sectors of the population, especially in relation to the development of capitalism. A dominant “mestizo capitalism” (p. 39) sought to appropriate Indigenous women’s and men’s labor and knowledge for the benefit of an economic and political elite. And third, he draws a connection between land dispossession and malnutrition resulting from the growth of processed food corporations (Gruma and Bimbo) and supermarket and convenience stores (Walmart and Oxxo), diminishing the quality of food that Mexicans had at hand. These corporations offered a range of affordable food products high in empty calories, creating a false sense of freedom to choose from a variety of options, most of which led to malnutrition and health problems.

The rise of food oligopolies is central to Ochoa’s work as he traces the development of economic interests, their connections with politics and policy, and the negative consequences of “the neoliberal assault on Mexico’s food system” (p. 70). He provides a detailed social and economic history showing how corporations and the state have used a narrative of innovation of the industrial elite without acknowledging worker, peasant, Indigenous, and women’s contributions. Food oligopolies have limited the food offering on the basis of local and traditional ingredients. However, Ochoa also shows people’s agency and gives an account of popular movements fighting for food sovereignty and social justice.

Although scholars have explored certain aspects and periods covered in this book, no other work has incorporated all of them within the proposed time span. As a result, this book contributes to the literature of food studies in Mexico and Latin America by examining it from the perspectives of capitalism and neoliberalism and by employing a broader and interdisciplinary approach that spans from the colonial period to the present. In this way, Ochoa offers a unique historical perspective while highlighting the more recent changes that resulted from neoliberal economic and political policies and their impact on food and foodways.