Mexico City’s Mercado Gigante

Edible Geography posted a fascinating piece on La Central de Abasto last week. La Central is a mostly-food dominated marketplace in Mexico City. To call it “large” would be an extreme understatement. Sitting on more than 800 acres, the market has about 100 passageways and its own police force.  Approximately $8 billion exchanges hands at the market each year.

Its goal is to be “the axis of the country’s food supply system” and to ensure a sufficient supply of quality food to residents for the benefit of producers, traders and consumers.

In addition to conveying the sights and smells of the market, the article details La Central’s history and highlights the significant role food plays in life and in politics. Here’s an excerpt:

If the construction of La Central tells us a fascinating story about the evolution of governmental attempts to control food in order to tame cities, the market’s declining market share, down to handling between twenty and thirty percent of the nation’s food supply from eighty percent when it was first built, is testament to radical shifts in scale within the food business.

In other words, La Central was built to be the giant hub that tied together smallish farmers and merchants with smallish tianguis and restauranteurs. Food flowed through a single site that connected producers to vendors in a process that theoretically created greater efficiency and more competitive prices.

But following on from NAFTA in the early 1990s, food producers and vendors have consolidated and expanded in scale, shrinking the role of the hub in the middle. Walmart has set up its own supplier relationships and distribution networks; Smithfield Factory Farms is perfectly capable of finding customers without trucking its pigs all the way to a covered market on the outskirts of Mexico City.

Read the full story here.

Related posts:

1. New Household Food Security Report is Out
2. Food Deserts Could Bloom With City Hall’s Help
3. Local Visits to Food Banks on the Rise

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