There must be only very few people my age growing up in 1980s Mexico City who did not loathe that moment when we were sent to the tortillería (tortilla shop) for a kilo of tortillas. Often, that occurred in the afternoon, when it was clear that we did not have enough tortillas at home for la comida, the main meal of the day in Mexico, usually eaten around 2 PM, when the best cartoons were on TV. Not going was not an option. A meal without enough tortillas cannot be called comida. To lessen the affront of being separated from the TV set at the best moment of the day, on my way back from the tortillería I would invariably stop at the tiendita (corner store) near my house to buy arroz con leche in a little plastic cup for dessert after the meal. I also did so to gossip a little with Caro, the shopkeeper’s daughter who was my age and with whom I got along very well.
While many Mexicans continue to buy their tortillas in the dwindling number of tortillerías, many others buy them by the package at the supermarket or by the kilo at the supermarket tortillería. In both cases, these are tortillas made with maize flour instead of nixtamalized maize. Likewise, instead of spending a few minutes catching up with a friend on the latest neighborhood gossip at the tiendita, Mexicans now get similar products from a chain of convenience stores that prioritize the idea of modernity and efficiency at the cost of community. Enrique C. Ochoa’s México Between Feast and Famine: Food, Corporate Power, and Inequality explains when and why this dramatic transformation occurred.
Ochoa’s book examines how Mexico, a country with a diverse and locally controlled food system, tied to millennia-old agricultural and culinary knowledge, was transformed into a market-driven, industrialized system that feeds some very well while displacing millions off their lands and leaving vast swaths of the population in poverty and malnourishment. His central argument is clear: the acceleration of capitalist development in late-20th century Mexico further concentrated resources in the hands of a few elites, while systematically dispossessing Indigenous peoples, campesinos, and working-class communities. In this process, Western racialized ideologies and technocratic discourses were mobilized to justify and normalize the dismantling of traditional foodways, portraying Indigenous and campesino food practices and knowledge as inefficient at best and backward most of the time.
Ochoa draws on an impressive and wide-ranging body of sources. These include newspapers, magazines, government and corporate reports, nonprofit studies, advertisements, archival materials, and interviews. Particularly valuable are the oral histories from community activists, which give the book a human depth that might otherwise be lost in the complexity of economic and political analysis. Voices like those of the inhabitants living near the Teotihuacán pyramids—who opposed the opening of a Walmart Bodega Aurrerá at the entrance of the national archaeological site—and those of Mexican and international intellectuals who joined them, ground Ochoa’s analysis in their lived experiences and ensure that his narrative never drifts into abstract theoretical models. He also builds on the work of scholars and food justice practitioners working within and beyond Mexico, weaving their insights into his own analysis with care and clarity.
The book “aims to construct and analysis that links political economy, coloniality, cultural knowledges, and nation-building to capitalist inequality, government policies, forced displacement, malnutrition, and their class, racial, and gendered impact.” Ochoa’s success lies not only in navigating this complexity but also in producing a book that is remarkably readable.
The book unfolds over seven chapters. The first examines how colonial and early post-independence authorities (from the 16th to the 19th century) sought to impose a homogenized, Europeanized food system by undermining Indigenous knowledge and practices. One of the most emblematic examples is the dismissal of the nutritional value of corn tortillas—and the nixtamalization process required to make them edible, a process born of Indigenous women’s ingenuity—in favor of European-style wheat bread, which was considered more nutritious. The second focuses on the 20th century, highlighting how the postrevolutionary state shaped the national food system, particularly through agrarian and nutrition policies. These chapters set the stage for the book’s core: a deep dive into the neoliberal restructuring of Mexico’s food system and its disastrous social and ecological consequences.
Chapter three details the environmental and labor exploitation at the heart of Mexico’s corporate food economy, along with the country’s increasing reliance on transnational companies and imported food. It makes clear how state policy, trade agreements, and deregulation have made healthy, culturally appropriate food increasingly inaccessible to working-class and rural communities. Chapters four, five, and six—arguably the strongest in the book—present three case studies that illuminate the workings of predatory corporate expansion. In chapter four, Ochoa traces the rise of GRUMA and its flagship product, Maseca, showing how corporate narratives around the tortilla erased Indigenous women’s expertise and reframed maize as a modern, industrial commodity produced by the industriousness of men and machines.
Chapter five analyzes the Mexican food company Grupo Bimbo, dissecting its Catholic, paternalistic corporate culture and the ways in which it markets a vision of modernity steeped in gendered whiteness—implicitly contrasting its image of cleanliness and order with racialized portrayals of Indigenous and Black Mexico. One example is the Marinela and Negrito cakes. In 1956, Bimbo rebranded its packaged Keike (a phonetic Spanish rendering of the English word “cake”) as Marinela, named after the founder’s youngest daughter. The Marinela line featured the image of a smiling blonde girl in a flowing blue skirt and red blouse, holding a Chinese umbrella and a basket, resembling Goldilocks. A year later, in 1957, Bimbo launched Negrito, a chocolate cake that was part of the Marinela line. Its packaging depicted a presumably African child wearing only a yellow skirt, along with a matching anklet and choker, thick lips, a bone in his hair, and holding a spear—drawing on long-standing associations in Mexican culture between Blackness, savagery, and the jungle. Chapter six turns to Walmart’s Mexico division, Walmex, and the Mexican chain Oxxo, showing how state-backed supermarket colonialism has devastated tienditas, tianguis (open-air markets), and traditional vendors, replacing them with homogenous, placeless retail environments designed to maximize consumption while minimizing community interaction.
The final chapter returns to the broader picture, exploring how this long arc of colonial and capitalist intervention has generated growing inequality, but also catalyzed a variety of grassroots alternatives to industrialized food systems. Still, Ochoa warns, these movements are often co-opted or diluted by corporate social responsibility programs and neoliberal state policies that frame justice in market-friendly terms. In other words, this chapter delves into how corporate social responsibility is also commodified.
This is an ambitious book—one that tries to do many things at once. Ochoa succeeds most convincingly in tracing the connections between public policy, state formation, and the expansion of private capital, while highlighting the ways Mexican and international elites have shaped and benefited from the transformation of Mexico’s food system. He also offers important examples of community resistance and adaptation, underscoring how people continue to preserve and reimagine their foodways despite ongoing structural assaults.
That said, the discussion of these alternatives is relatively brief. Readers may come away wanting to learn more about the many community-led projects and food sovereignty initiatives flourishing across Mexico. Similarly, the early chapters on the pre-Hispanic, colonial, and early republican periods, while compelling, might not fully capture the longue durée and complexity of the historical processes Ochoa aims to connect with the present. The book’s ambition and its broad temporal and thematic scope mean that some sections—particularly those on historical foundations and popular resistance—feel compressed.
Nevertheless, México Between Feast and Famine stands out as a compelling, rigorously researched, and deeply accessible monograph. Despite the vast amount of data and the range of analytical lenses employed, Ochoa’s writing remains fluid and engaging. Each chapter, especially those based on the GRUMA, Bimbo, and Walmex/Oxxo case studies, could stand alone, making this book particularly useful for undergraduate teaching. For scholars and students interested in racial capitalism, corporate power, food systems and justice, Ochoa offers a timely and powerful contribution to the field.
Viridiana Hernández Fernández is an assistant professor of History at the University of Iowa. Her book manuscript uses avocado cultivation to show how Indigenous and mestizo peasants, not just elites, shaped rural change in 20th-century Mexico through technology adaptation, migration, and engagement with global agribusiness, with lasting social and ecological effects.