Karolina Żyniewicz

2019

One of the best ingredients of Mexican culture is food/cuisine. Many traditional dishes are prepared and served on the street. The street is not just an eating place. It is a place where life and death take place. It is not just the life and death of human beings. It also involves many visible and invisible non-human actors. Regarding food, we must consider many bacteria participating in food production or being present in places serving food. They are invisible, so we do not think about them while eating. Maybe they are responsible for the unique taste? What would it be like if we made them visible? Would they appear as a kind of stranger? The framework of the project is to make non-human culture producers visible and known. We did cultivate bacteria from samples taken beforehand from places of street consumption located in 10 districts of Mexico City: 1. Azcapotzalco, 2. Gustavo A. Madero, 3. Miguel Hidalgo, 4. Cuauhtémoc, 5. Venustiano Carranza, 6. Álvaro Obregón, 7. Benito Juárez, 8. Coyoacán, 9. Tlalpan, 10. Xochimilco. Having inspected bacteria on petri dishes, we used them to produce one of the typical Polish food products - sour cucumbers (one jar for every district), giving bacteria a chance to produce Mexican and Polish culture simultaneously. <br
In collaboration with Tadeo Valencia
Scientific support:
Maria Cristina Rodriguez Sánchez, PhD - Facultad De Medicina Veterinaria y Zootecnia, UNAM
Roman Alfonso Castillo Diaz, Laboratorio De Biologiá Molecular, UNAM