When you eat Mexican food, your brain releases endorphins and dopamine. Capsaicin, the compound in chili peppers, binds to pain receptors in your mouth. Your brain reads this as a threat and counters with feel-good chemicals. The burn in a good salsa triggers the same pathway as a runner's high.
This is all happening on top of a food tradition more than 3,000 years in the making. The tortilla in a chicharron taco exists because of nixtamalization, a process Mesoamerican cooks developed roughly 3,200 years ago. Corn kernels are soaked in lime water, which releases niacin, a B vitamin that corn otherwise locks away in an indigestible form. Without this step, corn-heavy diets cause pellagra, a B-vitamin deficiency that killed around 7,000 Americans per year at its peak in the early 20th century. Southern sharecroppers were eating corn without the process Mexico had preserved for three millennia.
In 2010, the UN added Mexican cuisine to its Intangible Cultural Heritage list, the first year any national food culture had ever qualified. The application covered seed preservation, farming customs, ritual preparation, and thousands of years of cooking knowledge passed through communities.
The diversity inside that designation is hard to picture. Mexico has 59 varieties of heirloom corn, more than 60 distinct chili pepper types, and 32 states with cuisines different enough that Oaxacan mole negro (a dark sauce from dried chili and chocolate) and Yucatecan cochinita pibil (slow-roasted pork in a smoky red spice paste) share almost no ingredients. Oaxaca alone has more than 20 types of mole. Mole poblano uses more than 20 ingredients, including several chili varieties, dark chocolate, and cinnamon, in a single sauce.
Chicharron fires three systems at once. Fat carries flavor deep into the palate. The crunch comes from pork skin dried, then dropped in 375-degree oil. The trapped moisture turns to steam, puffs the skin, and produces thousands of flavor compounds through the same browning chemistry that makes coffee and seared meat smell incredible. Then the salsa lands capsaicin on top of everything and the dopamine kicks in.
The "best food ever" reaction has a chemical basis. You are tasting dopamine from capsaicin, browning chemistry from pork fat at high heat, and a tortilla built on a process 3,200 years old. These flavors were engineered to do exactly this.
Part 2. You've eaten Mexican food every time you've had pizza, curry, or chocolate. The tomato, the chili, the vanilla, the cacao: all from Mexico, all taken and renamed by others.
When tomatoes arrived in Italy in 1548, Italians thought they were poisonous. A Tuscan herbalist had published a book that very year claiming the fruit caused harm. For the next 150 years, Europeans grew tomato plants as garden decoration, admiring the color but refusing to eat them. Marinara sauce did not exist until the 1700s. The ingredient most closely associated with Italian cooking spent its first 150 years in Italy as an ornamental plant.
Chili peppers reached India via Portuguese traders around 1542. Before that, Indian cooks had used black pepper and long pepper as heat sources for thousands of years. Chili was cheaper, easier to grow, and more powerful than anything India had tasted before, and within a few generations it absorbed into the cuisine so completely that the older spices faded. In Kerala, the local word for red chili pepper is kappal mulagu, meaning "the pepper that came in the ship."
Vanilla took a different route. The Totonac people of what is now Veracruz, an indigenous group with centuries of cultivation knowledge, had mastered the vanilla orchid long before the Spanish arrived. When colonizers brought vanilla seeds to the rest of the world in the 1500s, every attempt outside Mexico failed. The vines grew. The flowers bloomed. Nothing happened. The reason was a single bee: the Melipona, which exists only in Mexico and is the only insect that can naturally pollinate vanilla flowers. For 300 years, Mexico held an accidental monopoly on one of the world's most wanted flavors.
In 1841, a 12-year-old enslaved boy named Edmond Albius, on the French island of Reunion in the Indian Ocean, discovered that you could pollinate vanilla flowers by hand using a thin stick. He was solving a 300-year agricultural puzzle without knowing it was a puzzle. Today his technique is the only method used to grow vanilla outside Mexico. Madagascar now produces 70-80% of the world's supply.
Tomato from tomatl, chocolate from xocolatl. Avocado from ahuacatl, chili from chilli. These are Nahuatl words, the language the Aztecs spoke, still embedded in every restaurant menu and grocery receipt on earth. The ingredients traveled the world. The words naming them traveled with them.
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"A drone maker backed by President Donald Trump's two oldest sons is trying to sell to Gulf countries while they are under attack by Iran and dependent on the U.S. military led by their father," per PBS
You gotta remember. They use you to their advantage, then they carees you, then they push you around, then they see you as a threat because of your pay and bonuses.
At the end of the day, it's just a contract between you and them.
Oracle executives are getting DEATH THREATS after that 6 AM email massacre and Larry Ellison just hired Blackwater-level private security
30,000 workers butchered via automated email while Oracle posts $6.13 BILLION in quarterly profits
I'm hearing Oracle leadership is now working from "undisclosed locations" because former employees are showing up at headquarters with printed copies of their termination emails
Sources saying the Redwood City campus looks like a military compound. Armed guards checking IDs. Parking garage access restricted. Executive floor completely locked down.
Oracle spent more on executive protection this quarter than they'll pay in severance to 30,000 families
The same company that automates human termination emails can't automate executive safety
Larry Ellison's yacht has three security boats following it. Safra Catz hasn't been photographed in public since the bloodbath.
Meanwhile former Oracle workers are posting TikToks outside Ellison's $300 million Malibu compound
One terminated engineer drove 800 miles from Austin just to stand at the gate with a sign reading "I BUILT YOUR CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE FOR 12 YEARS"
Oracle's AI algorithms can eliminate 30,000 jobs in milliseconds but can't predict when desperate people stop playing by corporate rules
If you're still at Oracle, your executives are literally hiding from you behind armed security while counting the money they made from destroying your career
The revolution isn't coming through the front door anymore. It's coming through the fucking walls.
Tesla Insurance = Terminated.
It was a great first month, decent second, and outrageous third. Let me know when they stop basing a monthβs entire premium on < 1 manually driven mile out of > 2500 FSD driven.
One of my most captivating memories growing up. When you created your happiness out of nothing. Making kites out of plastic bags and tree sticks, slingshot out guayaba tree trunks, darts out of staws and bobby pins. When you knew nothing about wealth and buildings. Life.
People are quick to forget that if it wasn't for $TSLA, we'd never have EVs on the road at the scale that we have today.
That being said, if you worked at Fremont during any S, X launch, you should feel proud of what you have accomplished. You helped change thaw world π β€οΈ