Feeding Mexico is a detailed story of the changing fate of the poorest segments of Mexican consumers. It traces the swings in public policy with painstaking attention to the modifications in the institutions charged with regulating urban food supplies. After a cursory review of official interventions during the colony and independence periods, we are taken through the changing bureaucratic structures and policy directives that determined the availability and accessibility of food to Mexico City’s poorest people during succeeding presidential terms. Only during the 1960–90 period did state intervention have any significant impact on these matters in other parts of the country, and then always less effectively than in the capital. With neoliberal reform, the effort is being terminated.
A Mexican politician’s suggestion of an alternative title, “Starving Mexico,” follows from his concluding chapter, “The Persistence of Poverty,” where Ochoa finds that “[t]he Agency was not created to eradicate poverty” (p....
