60% of the green peppers consumed in Mexico come from China, and only 4 out of 10 are produced in the country, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) revealed on Monday.
The NGO launched the "Dale Chamba" campaign, which promotes the conservation of more than 1,500 fundamental species of Mexican cuisine that have been lost due to the climate crisis and the invasion of foreign products.
The general director of WWF Mexico, Jorge Rickards, said: "We have a cultural wealth of more than 350 languages, 350 traditional knowledge that translates into cooking; more than 1,500 species are still part of the ingredients of the traditional diet of the people from Mexico."
The cultivation of several varieties of tomato, chili (such as chilhuacle, pasilla mixe, and poblano chili), thick pumpkin nugget, vaquita beans, ayocote beans, peach Creole, San Juan pears, and panochera apples have been put at risk because of society has restricted its diet to the fast-food model.
In addition, the loss of national products is also due to the fact that they are not highly consumed outside their region because they do not have popular aesthetic characteristics in supermarkets and there is a general lack of knowledge of how to use them.
"One can find very strange looking products in the local markets of Oaxaca or Yucatan; people think they were brought from other places and, since they don't know what they are, they don't cook them. That is very serious. We must revalue, rediscover our entire community kitchen, our historical cuisine based on the fundamentals of corn," chef Ricardo Muñoz Zurita told Efe.
Rickards said that people shouldn't only take care of the crops but that they should also protect the traditional cultivation system of cornfields. "Mexican cultivation is life. It's not only about the product but also about the concept of growing food, which implies pollination, microorganisms, and animals. It's a cultural event," he added.
According to the WWF, the Mexican bean varieties are disappearing from the country's kitchens. Mexico has 50 of the 150 types of beans in the world and nowadays only a few households continue to consume them.
Source: EFE