The United Nations of Food

3 hours ago

4 min read

It was 6 AM in Xochimilco just outside of Mexico City and the sun hadn’t quite risen over the winding canals yet. I was there for the flower and plant market which was a kind of sprawling, chaotic place that sweeps you away as palms, agaves and exotic vegetation dance gently in the breeze. I could smell the taco stand before I saw it with the seductive smell of birria snaking its way through the cool morning air.

It took little convincing to taste it despite the early hour, although the growing line of excited locals helped. Tender lamb, bathed in a rich and steaming broth sprinkled with fragrant cilantro, finely chopped onion and thin slices of radish all encased in a roasted corn tortilla. I devoured it before the light had even settled on the water.

I don’t know if it was the place, the time or the fact that I wasn’t expecting anything close to that good at this hour of the morning. But I do remember that meal from years ago like it happened yesterday.

I remember it with the same clarity as a 38-course dinner at El Bulli, Spain in Ferran Adrià’s final

year before the world’s best restaurant, numerous years running, closed in 2011 because the bar simply couldn’t be raised any higher. Every bite was a revelation. Every course a masterclass in reinvention.

A 20-peso taco and a $500 tasting menu, occupying the exact same shelf in my memory.

How does food do that?

Just the other day I walked past a Marcus Samuelsson’s restaurant Hav & Mar in Manhattan. A place I’d eaten at years ago where I had, without exaggeration, the single best cabbage dish of my life.

Years later, I still think about it. Not the rest of the menu we tried, the ambience of the room, not the wine. The

cabbage. Smoky and charred, soft and crispy at the same time.

Somewhere along the way civilization got very good at combining food and flavor for maximum satisfaction until it stopped being just sustenance and became art. A competition to reinvent, perfect, to refine. And somehow that competition produces something that changes how you think about a humble vegetable.

That’s the part that gets me. We took a form of survival and turned it into something that can haunt us in the best possible way.

Chefs and home cooks chase some ceiling that keeps rising the moment someone reaches it. Guilty pleasure reality TV shows like Top Chef and Masterchef aren’t designed to entertain and inspire but to get swept up in the beautiful chaotic creation of it all.

That’s how you get a restaurant like El Bulli closing at its absolute peak, because the chef running it decided they had reached perfection and there was nowhere else to go from there. The intense desire to cook better, tastier, more innovative food can break some people. And elevate others to culinary god status.

That’s also how you get a cabbage dish good enough to outlive the meal around it. But it’s more than a contest. Somewhere in there is the impulse to remember. Every dish worth talking about carries a story, a region, household, an ancestor who got it right first and passed it down exactly as they made it, or close enough. Recipes are one of the only things we hand each other across generations that stay almost entirely intact. A language shifts. A skill fades. But a grandmother’s recipe, cooked the same way fifty years

later, tastes like a direct line back to her.

The tasting menu and a taco. They’re not really competing on the same field. One is precision and reinvention pushed to its absolute edge. The other is a moment, a place, a time of day, done simply and done right. Both are food doing the same fundamental thing of holding on to us, and being held onto in return.

Food carries more than flavor. It transports history, heritage, region, city, our ancestors recipes handed down with enough care that they arrive at your table intact generations later. And it transports us too: everywhere we’ve traveled, everything we’ve been exposed to, reshaping what our palate reaches for without our permission.

Here in New York, I could eat a different culture’s food every day for a year and still not make it through everything on offer. That kind of access is a genuine privilege, and I don’t

think I’ll ever stop being a little amazed by it.

Because I love to cook and love to travel, I rarely land on one lane. I end up making some melting pot of a dish. A little of this, a little of that. And when people ask what my favorite

cuisine is, I genuinely struggle to answer. It depends on the time of day. The weather. My mood. I don’t gravitate toward one thing, and I don’t think I need to. That’s the whole point

of it.

The other night I made squid ink pasta with yuzu ricotta and Chinese chili crisp crab -Italian, Japanese, and Chinese, sitting on the same plate without a hint of tension. No borders. No conflict. Just harmony, and it was delicious.

Which makes me wonder if that’s not just a nice way to eat, but a small, edible argument for how the rest of it could work too. Maybe food doesn’t only teach us what tastes good.

Maybe, in its own quiet way, it’s been showing us how to exist together in harmony this whole time. We just have to notice.

Because that’s the thing about a plate like that. Nobody at my table asked the pasta to pick a side. Three cultures, three histories, three sets of hands that never met across centuries. And on that plate, none of it needed defending. It just worked.

We spend so much energy convincing ourselves that differences are a problem to overcome. Food never got that memo. It figured out a long time ago that the good stuff happens when borders disappear, not by enforcing them. That flavor gets more interesting, not less the more cultures lean into the same bowl.

So perhaps that’s the real lesson sitting on my dining table on a random Wednesday night. Not some theory about world peace. Just the simplest proof there is: remove borders and the concept of opposition, treat each one with respect, and they don’t just

coexist. They make each other better.