Everything that pained me about the Great British Bake Off’s ‘Mexican Week’ episode

Living in Washington, DC, it’s pretty hard to get decent tacos — or at least what I consider decent tacos, given that I spent much of my childhood in my mother’s native Southern California and my father’s homeland of San Antonio, Texas. Nevertheless, I am by no means a taco snob. I’ve had decent tacos at sit-down restaurants and had excellent tacos from a truck while standing up late at night.

My favorites? The ones my mother makes when she cooks the ground beef, folds the tortillas and then proceeds to fry them in the beef fat, so you get the best parts of a soft inside tortilla and the crunch of a hard shell tortilla. It’s one of the first things I ask her to make for me whenever I go home.

I also celebrate the taco’s status as an ambassador of Mexican heritage across the globe. I believe even people who are not of Mexican heritage or who have never been to the United States or Mexico can learn about this food, enjoy it, and even become master taqueros.

At the same time, I am not oblivious to the fact that many people can enjoy Mexican food while at the same time denigrating Mexican heritage.

Hence, when I saw that the Great British Bake Off had an episode about tacos, my thought was: How bad can it be? I haven’t binge-watched as many episodes as some of my friends, but I have enjoyed the few ones I have watched, and if people want to learn about making tacos, who am I to stop them?

So imagine my horror when I heard Paul Hollywood pronounce pico de gallo as “gallow” rather “GAI-yow.” His pronunciation of “tah-co” didn’t bug me as much since I get that accents are hard and I barely speak any Spanish. To his credit, he is actually right that heating a tortilla is a skill in and of itself, since nobody wants it too soft or cold but also a charred tortilla is impossible to fold.

But the show later showed everyone on the show mispronouncing “pico de gallo” while the narrator pronounced it correctly — which shows a laziness from the show at best and an unwillingness to educate at worst. That is to say nothing of the poor woman who called guacamole “glockymolo.” And I do wonder who told Channel 4 that guacamole was supposed to be “tangy” — “refreshing” or “spicy,” sure. But not “tangy.”

Nevertheless, it’s not the biggest problem. Language gaps happen. Where I took issue was seeing hosts Matt Lucas and Noel Fielding joking about whether Mexico is a real place. Yes, folks, it is, and England tried to invade it in 1862, though it’s true that the nation of Bake Off eventually recognized Mexico’s sovereignty and withdrew (to make yourselves feel better, you did better than the French, who didn’t withdraw and who Mexico beat in the Battle of Puebla, which is why we celebrate Cinco de Mayo).

But white people’s exoticization and trivialization of Mexican culture enrages Mexicans and Mexican-Americans alike. Seeing Mexico as a fantastical place that exists only for the amusement and the consumption for the gringo has a long and problematic history.

The hosts of Bake Off paraded around with maracas while wearing zerapes and sombreros as if they were holiday costumes or subjects of humor, even jokingly saying to each other that they can’t make Mexican jokes before asking, “Not even one?” The truth is that the only jokes in that episode were those sorry excuses for tacos.

None of this is to say that the British can’t enjoy tacos or even learn about Mexican heritage. Learning to cook another culture’s food or simply eating it can be a means of gaining a better understanding, especially when you don’t speak the same language. Seeing what someone finds delicious can be a way of seeing what they value.

But it always has to come from a point of respect and a recognition of what is important to that culture, rather than simply donning it like a zerape. Otherwise, you can come dangerously close to looking like you believe you’re “reinventing” that culture for the better — and it should go without saying that, when it comes to Brits and Mexican food, they absolutely aren’t.