Traditional Mexican Cuisine added to UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage List

We don’t usually post mid-week, but today we simply had to post a note of celebration about UNESCO’s addition of traditional Mexican cuisine to their Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, just this week.

The Intangible Cultural Heritage List “includes traditions or living expressions inherited from our ancestors and passed on to our descendants.” Examples include oral traditions, festive events, traditional crafts, and of course cooking. The central value of these traditions that UNESCO seeks to recognize is “the wealth of knowledge and skills [transmitted] from one generation to the next”(UNESCO).

UNESCO’s page highlighting traditional Mexican cuisine, explains that it “is a comprehensive cultural model comprising farming, ritual practices, age-old skills, culinary techniques and ancestral community customs and manners. It is made possible by collective participation in the entire traditional food chain: from planting and harvesting to cooking and eating.” Read more about Mexican cuisine (and see a slideshow of some delicious food!) on UNESCO’s website.