I'm super normal about food, but in the "i am lucky enough to have cooking as a special interest" way and I wish I could bestow this gift upon people who need it. I talk to people every day who can only see food as a Thing That Makes Them Fat/Unhealthy/Sick and it makes me so sad. Food is such a wonderful thing! It's chemistry! It's culture! It's art! And I understand why we have such a complicated relationship with it, especially in the Western world.
Now, my girlfriend is both Dominican and Mexican. I didn't think that much about tacos before we started dating, oh, seven years ago? Of course, I liked them. Who doesn't? But the taco derives from, first, the tortilla. Tortilla is a Spanish term -- in Nahuatl, the term is tlaxcalli, in Ancient Mayan cauhimich. (Modern Mayan languages either use tortilla or wah depending on the region.) It's made in the simplest way possible -- you take your corn and dry it, grind it, mix it with water, and fry it nice and thin. Flour tortillas are a later invention. Why are they flat? The Nahuatl and Maya walked (or more accurately, ran) everywhere. The wheel was never invented, or at the very least never used, and so when folks were traveling long distances, having something light and flat you could carry at your hip was extremely useful. Along the way, anything you could forage, hunt or catch was cooked over the fire and put right into your tortilla. Boom. Taco. Today, this looks like my girlfriend's dad taking tortillas with him literally everywhere, pulling them out of hammerspace at any non-Mexican restaurant because anything can be a taco. (He's very embarrassing and very dear to me.)
So, simple enough. But from there, we get a whole array of meats, fillings, sauces, traditions -- From Oaxaca, we get the mole tradition. 'Mole' is a word for 'sauce' (much like salsa) and gives us guacamole, mole negro (black sauce -- the one with the chocolate!) mole rojo (red sauce) mole amarillo (yellow/gold sauce) and a whole host of others. All but the first are made by toasting dried chiles, many of which can only be found in the Oaxaca region. In the Yucatan, the taco you'll find just about everywhere is the poc-chuc taco -- pork, beef or chicken marinated in 'sour orange' juice (Seville orange) and cooked on a spit much like you see at shawarma places. There's also pastor, which is pork belly cooked in achiote/annatto paste, and of course the chile of choice in the Yucatan region is the habanero. You'll also find chaya here, a plant that tastes kind of like an extra-flavorful spinach, and the local xcatik chile which I literally have never found outside of Yucatan. (It's mild at first but grows and grows into a lingering heat.) Sonora, Chihuahua, Baja California, Chiapas -- Every region of Mexico does it differently.
And then, of course, you have the way the taco has traveled. Ground beef tacos aren't very common in Mexico itself (to my knowledge and to the knowledge of my girlfriend, who is from Merida/Yucatan) but they're the standby for Tex-Mex. New Mexican and Texan tacos run on different rules. They add different kinds of cheese -- in fact, I don't think I saw cheese on a single taco while visiting -- less sauce, and may be the originators of the super-crisp taco shell.
You can make tacos with any kind of meat -- I made tongue tacos (tacos de lengua) just last night. You can make them with veggies and beans -- refried beans are the classic, or squash, or fried mushroom, or jackfruit -- or just cheese! You can make them gluten free incredibly easily. You can make them for a whole group of people. You can make them artisan with carefully placed leaves of cilantro and basil, or you can make them with very little effort and they'll still taste delicious. You can make them so greasy you have to lick your lips, or perfectly heart-healthy.
