Rick Bayless, an American chef who’s famous for his Mexican food, answered our questions about corn, cooking, and (of course) pie.

Let’s talk about corn. In the United States, we have a pretty dysfunctional relationship with corn, which is hiding in lots of our foods. How does Mexicans’ relationship with corn compare to ours?

If you asked Americans how much corn they eat, they would say almost none. So we don’t really have a relationship with corn, we have a relationship with processed food. And processed food gets the way it does because there’s a lot of corn stuff in it. But when you say “corn” in the United States, people only think of fresh sweet corn. And that’s not even the kind of corn that’s grown for any of these processed things. It’s field corn or grain corn, and if you say that to people, most of the time they don’t quite know what you’re talking about.

I know this first hand because I teach a lot of Mexican cooking, and in Mexico they only eat the field corn or the grain corn. But people in the United States don’t quite know what that is, or that it exists. 

So I think fixing our dysfunctional relationship with corn maybe needs to start with some relationship with corn. Now in Mexico, they don’t know sweet corn; they only eat the field corn or grain corn. And that grain corn is considered to be the dietary staple. I think that most Mexicans have this sense that they came from corn. The creation myths of the Aztecs and the Mayans both included coming from corn. And that, I think, says something about how precious corn is in the everyday diet.

As you move up the socioeconomic ladder in Mexico, people try to break their strong relationship with corn. They want to say that they don’t eat much corn, because that makes them seem like they’re less international. In the international world, they’re supposed to eat wheat. And of course, that’s the big push/pull that’s been in Mexico since the Spaniards arrived. It’s kind of funny, because when the Spaniards arrived, they needed three things. They needed wheat, they needed grapes for wine, and they needed pigs to slaughter. And they found none of that, obviously, in Mexico, but they brought some with them. They needed wheat and wine because those were the sacraments of the Catholic Church. They needed pork because the Spaniards had just finished eight full centuries of Arab domination, and the Arabs wouldn't eat any pork products. So the rallying cry amongst this new generation of Spaniards that had come together to throw all of the Arabs back into North Africa was all around pig. We have to have bread and we have to have wine and we have to have pig, they would say.

So they came to the Americas, and in Mexico they found this incredible culture that was based on another trinity, and it had no meat in it. It was all about corn with beans and squash, although it was really more the squash seeds—they’re like pumpkin seeds—than it was the squash flesh itself. The squash flesh doesn’t have a very high nutritive value, and it’s not as palatable as the seeds, which are beautifully flavored but also densely rich in all kinds of nutrients. And that trinity—they often call it the “three sisters”—has a symbiotic relationship in the earth. The corn takes a lot of nitrogen out of the soil, and beans put nitrogen back into the soil. Plus the beans can grow up the corn stalks. And they would usually run the squash plants all the way around the periphery of the milpa, the plot where they grew the beans and the corn.  So when you think about corn, beans and squash in that way, you see the pre-Columbian Mexican trinity of nutrients and flavors, and how incredibly different it was than bread, wine and pig. And of course, over the centuries, those two trinities were fused together to create what we think of as Mexican food today.

So people in Mexico think about corn as part of this complex system. And they have what’s called a “perfect protein”—if you eat corn and beans together it gives you all the amino acids you need for making proteins. Even though you have to eat more of it than you would eat of meat, it will give you the same kind of nutritive value. And that’s the reason such great civilizations arose in Mexico, because they had a great way to sustain themselves nutritionally.

Do we in the United States have a dysfunctional relationship with corn, or with food in general, because we don’t have that feeling that it’s part of our heritage?

Well, I think that comes out of our weird relationship to nature. We have this sense that we are not part of nature, but that part of ourgoal in life is to tame it, to make it do what we want it to do.

In Mexico the most holy day of the year is the Day of the Dead, on the first and second of November. During those days you are communing with those who have gone before you. The whole idea is that as one cog in the wheel of nature, you are celebrating what people have contributed to your life who have gone before—whether they were ancient ancestors or just the next generation back. You see yourself as only part of a flow of life, a flow of creation, a flow of nature. But in the United States we want to see ourselves as completely unique beings, individuals.

You used to study anthropology. Is the culture of Mexico what drew you to their food in the first place?

Actually, I grew up in a family of restaurant people and I always made my living cooking. But I was always really interested in cultural studies. When I was young, I got a chance to go to Mexico and I just fell in love with the culture. So I began studying language and culture in Mexico. And halfway through the dissertation for my PhD, I decided to take a year off and see if I could go down a related but different path, and study the food and culture in Mexico. And that’s where I ultimately found my passion.

I wasn't trying to do anything to the cuisine. I was just trying to capture the food that I ate in Mexico, because it was so good and I couldn't find anyone who was making it here.

When people go out to a restaurant, they might have Mexican food or Italian food or French food—but is there such a thing as “American food”?

That’s a big discussion that happens in the food circle all the time. Is American cuisine just what you can find at McDonald’s and Arby’s and KFC? When you travel around the world, that’s what people understand to be American food. We’ve done a really, really good job of exporting it everywhere. Those of us in the United States don’t necessarily want to claim it as American food! But unfortunately, we have to admit that it probably is.

Back before the “green” revolution, pre-WWII, there were regional cuisines in the United States, and the way that people ate in one area was very different from the way they ate in another.

When we first started our restaurant, about 20 years ago, we bought from a local farmer, a really interesting guy. We met him when he was about 75. He had grown up in a farming family on the western side of Chicago, and when he was a kid, back in the 1930s, for 12 months a year they raised not only all the food that they ate, but all the food they drove into the market. If you said that to most Americans now, they would say that’s absolutely impossible. But they knew how to do it, because they had to. They obviously had much, much less stuff to eat during the wintertime, but he said that just made the springtime all the better, because they couldn’t wait.

That guy could tell you how to start crops so that you could get your first harvest in March, and he talked about growing things all winter long in barns, and I found that all very interesting. That was before they had any kind of technology that would allow them to heat the ground with electricity or anything.

Your charity, the Frontera Farmer Foundation, does a lot of work to support small local farms. Why is that so important to you?

First of all, I’m a chef. I want to offer the guests at our restaurant the best food that I can possibly offer to them. And that means it’s going to be fresh, unique, and varied. But in the United States things are typically grown to all look the same, and to be picked before they’re completely ripe and shipped long distances. And I got tired of that. So I started working with some local farms.

When we opened our restaurant there were no farmers’ markets in Chicago. And now they’re just everywhere. It took us years to find farms that could stay in business, and could supply us with the quantities we needed, and were willing to work with us. But over the years we’ve developed, and now we use local ingredients very heavily, even in the middle of the winter. At the height of the season, say in August, we’re probably using 90 percent locally grown ingredients.

That means our guests can come in here and have an experience they can’t reproduce anywhere else. We’re giving them the height-of-the-season freshness; we’re giving them ingredients that we had raised for us, that are specifically grown for the kind of cooking we do. I want them to leave the restaurant knowing that this is an experience you can only have right here in Chicago. In any town where chefs rely a lot on local ingredients, they’ll reflect the agriculture and the climate of that specific patch of land in a way that’s unique, and makes you want to go back and have that flavor again.

Is eating locally something that’s becoming more popular these days?

I think it’s huge, and it’s spreading fast.

I think people often don’t realize how hungry they are to have some kind of direct connection with the source of their food. That’s one of the reasons that farmers’ markets have become so incredibly popular over the last few years. They gave us something that collectively, as a culture, we didn’t realize how much we missed.

Do you think that the growing popularity of local food and farmers’ markets will lead us toward a new kind of “American food” that’s not just burgers and KFC?

Yes, it has to, because you can’t actually reproduce McDonald’s and Wendy’s and Burger King and KFC at home. You have to eat that out, because it has to be processed that way. And when you go to the farmers’ market, they’re selling you zucchini and tomatoes, and you have to know what to do with them.

When I was a kid, there was still that knowledge out there in the general public of how to cook stuff. But now we have a group of people who really don’t know how to cook; there’s not that basic understanding.

But then we got the Food Network and a lot of the how-to shows on public television that focus on food, and now many of the othercable networks are starting to do a lot more with food, so we end up now with a lot of knowledge being put out there. It’s not knowledge passed down from your mother and your grandmother, it’s knowledge that is coming to people that are hungry for it.

Since a lot of people don’t know how to cook, it seems like there’s a lot of worry about what we’re supposed to eat and not supposed to eat, whether you’re trying to eat healthy, or vegan, or low-carb . . .

Well, that whole thing fits into our relationship with food as nutrient. Michael Pollan calls it “nutritionism.” We’ve only had that for a generation or so. And it could only happen because we cut our ties with the source of our food.

Actually, the nutritionists are the ones that are fueling the processed-foods world, and I’ll tell you how they’re doing it. They tellyou that you need to know what is contained in your food. You need to know how much fat there is, how many calories, all that sort of stuff. So the food processors love that, because then they can sell you all this processed food that’s low in carbs, or low in sugar, or low in salt, or low in fat, because they manufacture it to be that way, and put it on a label so you can read it.

When you walk into the grocery store, I tell you, most people don’t even know what’s going on, like “Wait, is there a high-fatvegetable?” Most people are so ignorant about the real food in the grocery store that they will just step away from it, because they don’t know whether it’s healthy for them. They think that if they don’t eat the one thing they've been told about—which is boneless, skinless chicken breast—that the rest of the stuff is all bad for you. Well no, none of it’s bad for you! What’s bad for you is a lot of the processed foods that people rely on, their 100-calorie snack packs and all that sort of stuff. Actually, if they would just eat an apple, it’d be way better. But the apple doesn’t have that nutritional label.

Do you have any advice for people who are trying to make good choices about what to eat?

Yeah, it’s pretty simple. What I say is that during the week, you should really rely on what you find on the outside perimeter of the grocery store. That will lead you through produce, milk and dairy, the meat counter, and usually there’s bread back there someplace. And stay away from everything that’s in the middle. That gives you a little guideline that’s very, very simple.

Then on the weekends, have fun. Eat anything and everything. There are no bad foods. If you love McDonald’s, eat it on the weekends. The problem is when you let that creep into your everyday cooking. If your everyday food is fresh fruits and vegetables and meats and dairy and stuff like that, you’ll be fine.

MUSE is “the magazine of life, the universe, and pie throwing.” Do you have a favorite kind of pie?

Oh, I’m a huge pie lover. Peach. When I was growing up in Oklahoma, that was our family’s special dessert that my grandmother always made: peach pies. Part of the tradition in our family is that we would all go out with my grandmother to pick peaches in the summer, and then we’d come in for two or three days to “put up the peaches.” We’d make peach jam, pickled peaches, peach butter...

Did you say pickled peaches?

They’re super good.