Eating Huitlacoche, Tasting Decolonization
Doğa Tekin
University of California, Los Angeles
In a community farm in San Diego, People of Color Fungi Community (POCFC) organizers and members were gathered for a special cooking demonstration led by Mario, a Yaqui organizer, featuring the fungus, huitlacoche. As the organizers begin preparing the fungus, Mario recalls the first time he cooked with it:
The first time I cooked it, I wasn’t even sure I was gonna’ eat it… ‘cause I was like euuugh (mimicking disgust and uncertainty) … but then again, I was like, yo what I just went through to go get this? Gonna’ eat this I’m gonna’ like it, you know? So… reminding myself of Indigenous foods, the process that’s involved in bringing it, I think that makes me appreciate it. I think the smells and the textures and seeing it… to me it’s like the most decolonized food and like taste sensation that I’ve had… it felt like the aromas connected me to my ancestors and I felt like I could hear my ancestors with the food and like with the taste… it revived something in me.
Mario’s experience reflects a broader story. Huitlacoche is a fungus that has grown with teosinte grasses and their domesticated relative, corn, for tens of thousands of years, an ancestrally significant, culturally salient food and medicine for various Indigenous communities across North America (Villagrán et. al 2023), as well as a "heritage food" or "traditional food" across Mexico (Castellanos & Bergstresser 2014). To plant pathologists and industrial agricultural institutions in the United States, the same fungus is known as Ustilago maydis or corn smut, a pathogen that threatens the economic viability of corn (Zepeda 2006). To restaurateurs and culinary enthusiasts in the United States, it is known as Mexican truffle or corn caviar, a celebrated “exotic delicacy” (Newhall 1989). POCFC’s huitlacoche cooking demonstrations, by contrast, contest the pathologization and commodification of the fungus through semiotic interventions embedded in a praxis of storytelling, in which huitlacoche comes to facilitate sensorial connections to Indigenous identity.
Scholars have previously documented how grassroots movements use food to reconnect with ancestral practices (Coté 2016; Hoover 2017), assert sovereignty (Anderson 2013; Daigle 2019), and resist dominant agricultural systems (Peña 2005). In conversation with this work, this paper focuses on how food- and knowledge-sharing practices can mediate sensorial connections to land and ancestry, particularly in the context of diaspora. While doing participant observation and interviews following cooking demonstrations, I noticed that participants’ qualitative evaluations of their sensory experiences with huitlacoche were central to organizers’ framing of the demonstrations. Seeing, smelling, touching, tasting, and talking about huitlacoche were mediums through which both organizers and participants were making sense of a collective identity constructed through resistance to colonial food systems and ideologies. Later, I will delve into how organizers frame their knowledge-sharing around emergent qualia (singular: quale)—socially mediated, qualitative evaluations of sensual experiences (Chumley and Harkness 2013)—to help participants build semiotic relations between the fungus and their understandings of Indigeneity.
POCFC’s work is particularly significant when considered in relation to other discourses about/relationships with the fungus. In 1989, the James Beard Foundation hosted a huitlacoche-themed dinner in which the term “Mexican truffle” was coined, framing the fungus as a gourmet delicacy for U.S. audiences. While this modern appropriation contrasts sharply with earlier colonial descriptions, such as Spanish missionary Fray Bernardino de Sahagún’s 16th century account of huitlacoche as “dirt that grows on corn” (Sahagún 1963), both provide market-driven orientations to the fungus. The latter colonial framing contributed to centuries of efforts to control or eradicate huitlacoche, particularly in the U.S., where corn’s industrial commodification greatly suppressed cultural uses of and access to the fungus. Despite its nutritional value, agricultural scientists deemed huitlacoche a pathogen, even as fungicides developed to combat it proved more harmful to humans than the fungus itself (Zepeda 2006). Today, huitlacoche’s unavailability in U.S. markets is changing as restaurants and online vendors selling “corn caviar” at high price points are popping up around the country, as well as on social media platforms. This recent trend of commodification is ultimately what led POCFC to organize toward “reclaiming huitlacoche.”
POCFC formed in 2019 with the goal of creating spaces where people of color could deepen their knowledge of and relationships with fungi in response to their marginalization in mainstream mycological spaces. While the community remains porous, its core members are urban, diasporic Indigenous peoples, broadly from the U.S.-Mexico borderlands region and with various histories of migration. Since 2022, POCFC has been hosting huitlacoche cooking demonstrations in various community spaces across San Diego, for which they frequently travel to Tijuana to procure fresh huitlacoche given its scarcity on the U.S. side of the border. These demonstrations seek to “reintroduce” huitlacoche to a diverse audience, including individuals facing food insecurity, Indigenous chefs and farmers, and Indigenous sovereignty activists, by providing an opportunity to interact with the fungus while learning about its cultural significance, uses, and as Mario calls it, “Indigenous story.”
“Huitlacoche was this strange food that my mom used to make back in the day when I was a kid,” voices a participant at one of POCFC’s cooking demonstrations, “and I guess it was just the look that I didn’t understand.” This sentiment is a familiar one in encounters with huitlacoche—so familiar that Mario seeks it out in every cooking demonstration. At this event, he holds up a clear bag full of the fungus upon introducing it verbally and takes a moment to look at participants with a knowing glance as his facial expression mimics the reaction he is looking for: one of uncertainty at the encounter of “a strange food”. When he detects the reaction he was seeking, his eyes widen and a smile spreads across his face. “That’s the face I wanna’ see,” he exclaims as he turns and points at those participants.
How are we to understand this quale of strangeness? By establishing this reaction as an expected, normative evaluation of the fungus, Mario makes explicit the ideologies undergirding participants’ expectations of what constitutes “food.” As participants’ eyes meet a clear plastic bag with a dense mass of dark gray, slippery looking huitlacoche, he allows them to rely on their existing semiotic schemas to perform an initial evaluation, where its gray color or slippery texture do not resemble an edible, or for some, even touchable material. Mario uses this moment to invoke an axis of differentiation (Gal and Irvine 2019) within which huitlacoche is evaluated as “strange” in opposition to “normal,” bringing attention to participants’ initial alignment (or lack thereof) with dominant Western semiotic regimes linking certain textural, visual, olfactory, and gustatory qualities to edibility.
At every cooking demonstration Mario discusses the history and impacts of the fungus’ pathologization and commodification. He states, “to make it more appealing to American palates, they’re renaming it corn caviar, corn truffle, all these weird hip names… because people can’t pronounce huitlacoche.” “There’s a problem with that,” he continues, “we start to forget the people who grew this, the culture this came from... to me that’s Indigenous erasure.” This description illustrates that the relationship between qualitative binaries such as “strange/normal,” “foreign/familiar” or “unpalatable/palatable” resemble one another, but with different axial relations within different ideological orientations. The qualitative binary that is most fundamental to Mario’s framework is that of Indigenous vs. colonial, forming the primary axis of differentiation that the other invoked binaries can be nested within. In the semiotic regime that Mario is contextualizing as colonial (as opposed to Indigenous), when huitlacoche—whether the word, look, taste, or texture—is evaluated as “strange,” it is also evaluated as “foreign,” and “unpalatable.” I read this as an invitation to reflect on what ideological shifts it would take to build a relationship with this fungus that is not based in colonial frameworks. Through his use of the person-markers “they” and “we,” Mario positions himself and participants as subjects who can either choose to reify this schema and perpetuate Indigenous erasure or intervene by indexing the fungus’ Indigenous relations through voicing the Nahuatl phonemes that make up its original name (huitlacoche or “cuitlacochin”).
Mario’s framing of huitlacoche as explicitly “Indigenous” is deeply informed by his personal journey of coming to know the fungus. As he recounts in the excerpt at the beginning of this essay, his initial sensibilities of huitlacoche’s olfactory and textural qualities framed it as inedible despite his intentions of eating it. Overcoming this perception required a conscious semiotic intervention: reminding himself that it was an “Indigenous food” he had acquired through great efforts. This reframing enabled Mario to access qualia that had previously been out of reach. He describes eating huitlacoche as “the most decolonized taste sensation” he had ever experienced, noting that it allowed him to feel connected to his ancestors. By sharing this story, Mario opens the possibility for participants to similarly access qualia of decolonization and ancestral connection through their multisensory engagements with huitlacoche.
When I interviewed them about their experiences eating huitlacoche following the cooking demonstrations, many participants shared that it tasted “earthy,” even invoking memories of playing with dirt as a child. Multiple people described the sensation of eating it as “going back in time” or being “transported to another time.” Mario’s daughter shared that it felt like she was “part of the land again.” Unlike Bernardino de Sahagún’s use of “dirt” as a negative descriptor of huitlacoche, participants’ use of “dirt” and “earthy” act as nostalgic invocations of being connected to land—whether as a child, or in a pre-colonial spacetime. This is particularly notable given that the participants who shared these do not have established relationships with their ancestral lands due to generational histories of colonial displacement. Thus, such sensory associations not only challenge market-driven valuations of Indigenous foods, but also foster embodied reconnections to Indigenous foodways and ways of being, even in the context of diaspora.
In my conversations with POCFC organizers about their visions moving forward, they articulated desires for futures in which Indigenous ecologies are nurtured, and communities have access to healthy and traditional foods; a world where huitlacoche grows everywhere that corn grows. They intend to build a network of huitlacoche producers and consumers in the U.S. to subvert the current market and make it more accessible, especially to Indigenous communities that face food insecurity. Through POCFC’s work, huitlacoche becomes a medium for contesting colonial food systems, preserving ancestral connections, and imagining decolonial futures. In their cooking demonstrations, Mario’s careful contextualization of participants’ (and his own) sensory experiences with huitlacoche facilitates the forming of new semiotic relations in which Indigeneity emerges as a quale of the fungus, allowing them to sense Indigenous relations across time and space when tasting huitlacoche. Once huitlacoche no longer looks “strange,” it can taste familiar, evoking intergenerational memories. Once “huitlacoche” no longer sounds “foreign,” it can produce “the most decolonized food sensation,” carrying Indigenous histories of its cultivation alongside sacred maíz in its body and name.
Fig. 1: POC Fungi Community organizers Mario and Cristina alongside a few community members at a huitlacoche cooking demonstration in a community farm in San Diego.
Fig. 2: Cross-section of cultivated huitlacoche, taken at a POC Fungi Community cooking demonstration at an outdoor community market in San Diego.
References
Anderson, M. Kat. 2013. Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California’s Natural Resources. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Castellanos, Erick, and Sarah Bergstresser. 2014. “The Mexican and Transnational Lives of Corn: Technological, Political, Edible Object.” In Edible Identities: Food as Cultural Heritage, edited by Ronda Brulotte and Michael Di Giovine. Burlington: Agate Publishing Company.
Chumley, Lily Hope, and Nicholas Harkness. 2013. “Introduction: QUALIA.” Anthropological Theory 13 (1–2): 3–11. https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499613483389.
Coté, Charlotte. 2016. “‘Indigenizing’ Food Sovereignty. Revitalizing Indigenous Food Practices and Ecological Knowledges in Canada and the United States.” Humanities 5 (3): 57. https://doi.org/10.3390/h5030057.
Daigle, Michelle. 2019. “Tracing the Terrain of Indigenous Food Sovereignties.” The Journal of Peasant Studies 46 (2): 297–315. https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2017.1324423.
Gal, Susan, and Judith T Irvine. 2019. Signs of Difference: Language and Ideology in Social Life. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Hoover, Elizabeth. 2017. “‘You Can’t Say You’re Sovereign If You Can’t Feed Yourself:’ Defining and Enacting Food Sovereignty in American Indian Community Gardening.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 41 (3): 31–70.
Newhall, Edith. 1989. “Fungus Feast.” New York Magazine, September 25, 1989.
Peña, Devon G. 2019. “On Intimacy with Soils: Indigenous Agroecology and Biodynamics.” In Indigenous Food Sovereignty in the United States: Restoring Cultural Knowledge, Protecting Environments, and Regaining Health, edited by Devon A. Minesuah and Elizabeth Hoover, 276–99. Norman OK: University of Oklahoma Press.
Sahagún, Fray B. de. 1963. “Book 11 - Earthly Things.” In General History of the Things in New Spain: Florentine Codex. Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah.
Villagrán, Zuamí, Magdalena Martínez-Reyes, Horacio Gómez-Rodríguez, Uzziel Ríos-García, Efigenia Montalvo-González, Rosa Isela Ortiz-Basurto, Luis Miguel Anaya-Esparza, and Jesús Pérez-Moreno. 2023. “Huitlacoche (Ustilago Maydis), an Iconic Mexican Fungal Resource: Biocultural Importance, Nutritional Content, Bioactive Compounds, and Potential Biotechnological Applications.” Molecules 28 (11): 4415. https://doi.org/10.3390/molecules28114415.
Zepeda, Lydia. 2006. “The Huitlacoche Project: A Tale of Smut and Gold.” Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems 21 (4): 224–26. https://doi.org/10.1079/RAF2006153.