Gastropod · Cynthia Graber and Nicola Twilley

Talking Taco

September 9, 2025·43 min·3 clips

Cornish miners brought the pasty to Mexico — and may have accidentally helped invent the taco.

Mexico City comes first. Cynthia and Nicola open at Por Siempre Vegana, ordering tacos and letting the fillings do the early work. Then the episode gets nosy in the best way: if tacos seem obvious now, what counts? Burrito, fajita, chimichanga? The answer starts with corn, tortillas, and that "vitamin T" base that makes a taco feel plain until it suddenly is not. Mexico City becomes the meeting place. Tacos from Michoacan, Baja California, the Yucatan, and elsewhere bring their own ingredients and habits. Carnitas gets a proper turn. So do shrimp and fish tacos, plus cochinita with annatto, sour orange, pickled onions, and habaneros. Then al pastor barges in. The hosts connect it to Lebanese migrants in the 1920s, when tacos arabes used lamb, flour tortillas, and shawarma-style vertical roasting. The taco keeps changing: pork replaces lamb, chiles and adobo reshape the seasoning, and Mexico City makes it feel local. Pineapple is still the odd little mystery. Nobody explains exactly how it arrived, but pork and pineapple make their own case. Nicola stays out of the pizza fight. Cynthia defends Hawaiian pizza with the certainty of someone enjoying a ridiculous tangent. By the 1960s, al pastor had taken over Mexico City. Within a few decades, tacos had gone from unfamiliar to everywhere there. After all the migration, taxonomy, and history, the episode lands where it should: on a taco good enough to joke about marrying.

As heard by us

Gastropod turns the taco into a lively history of migration, adaptation, and Mexico City street food.

Gastropod treats the taco as both pleasure and argument, starting at a Mexico City stand before asking what, exactly, counts as a taco, and why a food built on the ancient tortilla appears much later as a named form.

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Why you'd press play

You've ordered al pastor a hundred times without knowing it started as Arab tacos made with lamb.

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