If Breakfast Is Your Only Meal for the Day, Make It Count
If Breakfast Is Your Only Meal for the Day, Make It Count
Guajolota in D.F.
I arrived in Mexico City after two years in Cairo, from the belly of one beast to another.
Mexicans are not all that different from Egyptians. We laugh mostly at the expense of others and our main pastime is teasing each other until we forget what it is we were doing. Our governments operate under the semblance of democracy while seething with corruption, and our cities’ infrastructure turns old and derelict a little too fast. There is one thing, however, that Mexicans do differently; breakfast.
Mexico has one of the highest obesity rates in the world, and in the city of 21.2 million, Mexico’s greasy diet and guilty pleasures are proudly on display. Tacos, tortas, carnitas (pork barbecue), asados (meat stews), sopes, quesadillas, pan dulce, emanate an aroma like no other. But the concoction that caught my attention was not the massive pots of pork stew; it was the guajolota, a tamale in a sandwich. I left the house at 7 am to witness Mexico’s middle and working class rise from their slumber. I was after a guajolota and champurrado—a chocolate-based hot drink made from corn flour—for breakfast. This idyllic breakfast is popular among the thousands of industrious men and women who seek to have a cheap, calorific breakfast that will satiate them until lunchtime. Around 8 million people ride the subway every day. Groggy men and women jump into already full cars and thrust themselves against the masses inside, pressing against each other compliantly.
I follow the crowd obediently; careful not to disrupt the mechanic flow that animates the city so early in the morning. Women around me began applying makeup on the platform and inside the cars. Within minutes they have curled their eyelashes with a spoon, applied eyeliner with a surgeon´s steady pulse, added mascara, foundation, and blush. Back in the streets, food stands and carts sit on street corners, some encompassing entire blocks. People eat sitting down, standing up, or on the ago. After an hour of public transport and hunting for my tamale sandwich, I finally spot one. The guajolota stand is one of the most inconspicuous in the street-breakfast buffet. It doesn’t captivate you the same way a taco stand does; neither does the smell entrap you like that of carnitas. A tin pot for the champurrado, a cooler that keeps the tamales warm, and a pile of bread is all that lures the eye.
Undeterred, I ordered a guajolota filled with mole and a chocolate champurrado, aware that I was eating around 800 calories—half the day´s calorie intake— in a single meal for less than $3 USD. I painstakingly finished my guajolota and instead of going to work like everyone else, I rode the metro back home with the certainty that I would not eat until the next morning, but regretting nothing.