Instruction

Meals. El desayuno is breakfast. La cena is the evening meal. The midday meal is where regions differ. In Mexico the main meal of the day is often la comida, eaten between about two and four in the afternoon, and it can be the largest meal; el almuerzo in Mexico may mean a late-morning snack or brunch. In Central America and much of South America, el almuerzo is simply lunch. When someone asks ¿A qué hora es la comida?, the answer tells you a lot about where they grew up. In California, school schedules push lunch earlier, and many families keep a large meal for the evening instead.

Foods and drinks. el arroz (rice), los frijoles (beans; las habichuelas in the Caribbean, los porotos in Chile and Argentina), las tortillas, el pan (bread), el pollo (chicken), la carne (meat, beef), el pescado (fish), el queso (cheese), los huevos (eggs), las verduras (vegetables), la fruta, la ensalada, la sopa. Drinks: el agua (water; it takes el but is feminine: el agua fría), la leche (milk), el jugo (juice; el zumo in Spain), el café, and las aguas frescas, drinks made from fruit, flowers or seeds, such as horchata and agua de jamaica (hibiscus).

Hunger and thirst. Spanish uses tener again: Tengo hambre (I’m hungry, literally “I have hunger”), Tengo sed (I’m thirsty). To say “very”: Tengo mucha hambre, mucha sed, because hambre and sed are feminine nouns.

Culture: the milpa. For thousands of years, farmers in Mesoamerica (today’s Mexico and Central America) have grown maize, beans and squash together in a field called a milpa. The three plants help one another: the maize stalk is a pole for the bean vine, the beans add nitrogen to the soil, and the broad squash leaves shade the ground and keep moisture in. Eaten together, maize and beans also give a more complete protein than either alone. The people of Mesoamerica domesticated maize, beans, squash, chile, tomatoes, avocados and cacao, and these foods then traveled across the world after 1492. Today Mexican cooking is so tied to this heritage that UNESCO added traditional Mexican cuisine to its list of Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2010 (UNESCO).

Words that traveled with the food. Several food words came into Spanish from Nahuatl, the language of the Mexica (Aztecs) still spoken by more than a million people in Mexico, and then into English: tomatl → tomate → tomato, ahuacatl → aguacate → avocado, chīlli → chile → chili, tamalli → tamal → tamale. In central Mexico a red tomato is often called jitomate, also from Nahuatl. In South America an avocado is una palta, from Quechua. Food vocabulary is a map of contact between peoples.

California connection. Many of California’s farmworkers, who harvest the lettuce of the Salinas Valley and the strawberries of Oxnard and Watsonville, are from Mexican and Central American families, including Indigenous families. Pupuserías from El Salvador, taquerías, Oaxacan restaurants and Guatemalan bakeries are part of daily life in cities across the state.

Reading strategy. Today’s text describes one family’s meals. Make a three-row chart (desayuno, comida, cena) and fill in the time and the food for each as you read.

Formative check

Work through these before moving on. They are not graded — they tell you, and your teacher, whether the standard below has landed yet.