The Zona Diet

On a trip to Mexico, an experiment in sustainable eating turns into a lesson in regional cuisine.

By J.B. MacKinnon and Alisa Smith
Illustrations by Martin O’Neill

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It takes a village. This is the first lesson in cooking a tasty tikinxic. The defining dish of Isla Mujeres, an island just off of Cancún that is as easygoing as its mainland neighbour is energetic, tikinxic is a standout in the cuisine of Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula.

One week earlier, we had never heard of the dish and wouldn’t have dared to pronounce it ( teek-een-SHEEK, by the way). We were in Vancouver then, sitting out a winter made no easier by our one-year commitment to what we had dubbed the “100-Mile Diet.” For 12 months, everything we ate or drank at home had to have been caught, raised or grown within a 100-mile radius of our apartment. Our inspiration was an unsettling statistic: According to the Worldwatch Institute, a think tank based in Washington, D.C., the food Americans eat typically travels between 1,500 and 2,500 miles from farm to plate, an increase of up to 25 percent since 1980. In a world increasingly anxious about the political and environmental costs of dependence on oil, the 100-Mile Diet was an immersion in life without strawberries in January – and in a home terroir less muddied by global culture.

The only catch was an invitation to a wedding on a Mexican island. We’d just have to pack the 100-Mile Diet with us, somehow enduring two weeks of tropical fruits and other exotic treats. We quickly learned that finding local produce in Isla Mujeres’ covered market was about as difficult as locating Froot Loops in the big box grocery store back home. What to do with those ingredients was another story.

Beneath the tin roof of the cook’s shack at Playa Lancheros, “the house of tikinxic,” a gruff chef demonstrated how to cut the fish in half and then, using a hardware store paintbrush, how to paint the flesh with a mixture of lime juice and achiote, a ruddy paste made from the ground seeds of the annatto tree.

“Is it spicy?” we asked in our rusty Spanish.

“Not spicy!” he shot back, turning to his grills. “Tikinxic should not bite!”

All of which seemed simple enough until we mentioned our meal plans to everyone else. We were told to buy two balls of achiote paste – or 10. To mix them with lime juice or water or a little cooking oil. We were advised to add one bulb of garlic or warned that garlic must not be added. Grouper was the fish to use, except that snapper was the only acceptable choice.

In the end, the boatmen of the local fishing co-operative sold us four silver torpedoes of coronado. An elderly woman weighed the fish in hand and dropped eight balls of achiote into a bag. We bought a sack of charcoal and, in the next stall, a kilogram of still-warm tortillas for a dollar. A few hours after dark, we had a platter heaped with fish, its flesh bright red and smoky, with the delicate tartness of achiote. We ate it with bayo beans and tortillas and pineapple salsa and chalky local cheese, and 10 good friends walked away from the table, well fed and happy on a 100-mile Mexican meal.

To really understand Yucatecan cuisine, though, we had to go to Mérida, the capital city of the peninsula. So said Eduardo Seijo Solís of Orbitur Travel Service, the operator of the region’s pioneering gastronomical tour.

Cancún has cheerily bounced back from last October’s Hurricane Wilma, but driving the three-hour toll freeway to Mérida, we wondered how the Yucatán has any cuisine at all. The asphalt beelines through a chaos of brambles that sprout from the pits and pockets of a limestone moonscape. Not exactly a field of dreams.

“There are a lot of rocks in the soil here,” acknowledged Seijo over the phone. “In fact, there is very little soil.”

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