En mi mero mole: una lectura antropológica de “Mole” en Chapters of food

Abstract

In Chapters of food, Enrique Olvera, a trendy mexican chef, states that mole tastes like mole, not like the sum of its ingredients because when you mix them, they all renounce to their proper flavors. The mole, although it is mole, is just because all its ingredients cooperate with flavors and because it is enough to dip the fingertip in the mixture to repair in each of them. To say that mole tastes like mole is to abstract the complexity of its flavors and that includes the cultural flavors that its confection involves. In Oaxaca, moles are a crucial part of the food culture of their people and each one has a particular configuration that goes beyond the culinary. Therefore, a mole is the condensation of multiple social relationships that coexist beyond folklorisms thatfetish, enchant and kill. In this text, based on my ethnographic work of almost two decades in Oaxaca, I provide an anthropological review of the “Mole” video, emphasizing the importance of commensality and textiles to highlight that, an ambiguous treatment of sociocultural content ends up being harmful to what we call our cultural heritage.