“French food isn’t more complex than Mexican food.”
In this clip, we unpack the cultural bias that treats French cuisine as refined while Mexican food is often expected to be cheap or casual. The truth is that Mexican gastronomy is deeply regional, highly technical, and rooted in centuries of culinary tradition.
From complex sauces to time-intensive preparation methods, Mexican cuisine is one of the most sophisticated food traditions in the world.
This clip comes from our full conversation with chef Carla Kirsch about Mexican food in France, culinary hierarchy, and how global food culture shapes what we consider “fine dining.”
The full episode is out now on the Fishwives of Paris channel.
#MexicanFood #FrenchCuisine #FoodCulture #FineDining #CulinaryHistory #FoodDebate #Gastronomy
2 Comments
Based on this short alone and not the episode as a whole: France was not historically a culturally or linguistically uniform country. Standard Parisian French was imposed relatively late, replacing a wide range of regional languages and identities that existed across the country. Because of that, French cuisine is deeply regional. Much of what exists outside Paris simply is not widely known internationally. That does not necessarily make it more “complex”, but it does mean the variety is far broader than the Paris centric version people tend to discuss. That is also why it feels odd to confidently categorise French cuisine without a French perspective in the conversation. Treating France as though it has a single unified food culture is already a misunderstanding. When you refer to the French as being “brainwashed”, it sounds less like an observation about France as a whole and more like a reaction to a very specific, globalised or Parisian version of French food culture. The rest of the country and its regional cuisines are far more varied than that.
Edit: I just started the full length video, i see you do have someone who cooks french cuisine on the podcast. Apologies!
What they say about Chinese cuisine is the exact same in french cuisine weeks for a mother to do the good food not complex she just never eat french and Chinese real food…only her greesy american "Chinese" an "French" food