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Diana Kennedy worries about GMO corn in Mexico

There aren't many people who can tell Jose Andres — James Beard Award winning chef and proprietor of an acclaimed Mexican restaurant — that his tamales are lousy.
/ Source: The Associated Press

There aren't many people who can tell Jose Andres — James Beard Award winning chef and proprietor of an acclaimed Mexican restaurant — that his tamales are lousy.

"Bloody awful," cookbook author Diana Kennedy recalled during a recent forum at the National Archives as Andres laughed affectionately.

To listen to Kennedy is to listen to a woman obsessed. Tiny, impish and now 88 years old, the world's recognized authority on Mexican cuisine still braves one-lane mud roads through Mexican mountains in search of cloistered delicacies and chilies rumored to be better/hotter/more complex than others.

"It's tantalizing," she said. "I know a trip to find a certain chili will take hours and hours and lots of gray hairs."

Which is why she's published only a half-dozen books during her 50 years of preserving Mexico's culinary identity. That life's work culminated in the publication of "Oaxaca al Gusto" last year. More astute culinary anthropology than cookbook, its recipes for huitlacoche (corn fungus) and wasp nest gravy are likely to go unmade by most readers. Ditto for beef brains and a sauce made of flying ants (which Kennedy insists tastes "like hazelnuts").

But the book's rich photographs — many taken by Kennedy — offer a lush look at the biodiversity of Oaxaca and it's cooking that she has spent a lifetime protecting.

And that she now says is threatened. She told Andres that she is particularly concerned about genetically modified corn and the impact it could have on the country's native varieties of maize, which are rich and diverse. All of her research and notes on the country's ingredients and what they are used for, she said, are currently being incorporated into the Mexican government's agriculture database.

A native Briton who has lived more than half her life in Mexico, Kennedy says it was the food that hooked her. "I couldn't get enough in my hands to cook and start eating," she says. "There were so many things — the chilies, living things and crawling things. It was so exciting."

And apparently, still is.