RESOURCES
The foods that define a city’s culinary landscape speak to its histories, cultures, ecological environments, politics and economics. The El Paso-Ciudad Juárez area has represented diverse culinary landscapes from a producer of grapes from which world renown wines were made in the 16th- century to being the birthplace of a world-wide known food company, Old El Paso. The resources offer here are to help to tell the story of how a city’s culinary identity develops and reflects ongoing connections that bridge geographical and cultural borders.
Sites provide information on diverse organizations within El Paso del Norte Area where knowledge from agricultural practices, general information related the diverse aspects of food culture, to where food can be obtained.
References provide a list, mostly but not limited to, books, journals, articles, and documentaries about El Paso’s area that serve as a place to begin exploring food’s far reaching ways of shaping the landscape of a community. Downloads provided when available.
EPFV’s Digital Maps illustrate El Paso’s culinary DNA. What creates this DNA is its residents’ food knowledge, practices, and memories A city’s culinary DNA leads to better understanding of its “environment and climate; [its] settlement history and ethnic demographic; [its] economic history; [its] sociological factors; [its] religions,” as folklorist Don Yoder explained when he first coined the term foodways to speak of the embedded complexity in all food systems (Yoder 328).