Peace, Love, and Tacos

23 years ago, in the middle of a 15,000-mile road trip around the U.S. to find a good home for us, with my three young sons (ages 7, 5, and 3 at the time) and densely packed into my youngest sister’s VW Golf hatchback (my own compact car at the time not reliable enough for the journey), after endless cases of peanut butter crackers and string cheese and juice boxes to sustain us over the hours of weeks in our seats, we stopped for fresh food at a grocery store on the south side of Austin. The boys and I walked into Central Market—part of the Texas chain H-E-B—for the first time, and I called R. from my flip phone as I wandered in a dreamlike haze among the bounty of its fresh produce, the mountains of vegetables and herbs and fruits, marked by where they had grown, many of them organic. “This is where we need to move to,” I told him, “like right here, into this grocery store.”

Although I am clearly food-motivated myself, I also knew I had ahead of me at least fifteen more years of relentless food production for my husband and sons in our home kitchen, and in every place across the country we had considered, I had sought out probable sources for our raw supplies, the primary building blocks of my growing boys’ bodies, but that had been a sad and disappointing process. I continued to narrate the Central Market terrain in wonder and awe as we moved through the fish and meat departments (entirely missing styrofoam and plastic wrap), the bulk sections (nuts and grains and chocolates), the simplified dairy, and the oh, glory, bakery, the offerings often warm, bags of sample pieces set next to the most elaborate options (cheddar jalapeño loaf, prosciutto and black pepper ficelle, white chocolate and apricot brioche), and piles and piles of in-store-made tortillas (flour, corn, whole wheat, green chile, on and on), many still steaming in their bags, little squares of waxed paper separating the rounds. Here in Central Texas, when I was 35 years old, is when I first learned the wonder of a simple wrap of a soft tortilla—or, soon after we moved here, from farmers at the weekend markets, a lightly steamed collard green leaf as a substitute—around any sort of savory filling, from the minimalism of a kielbasa to the maximalism of so many breakfast ingredients the “wrap” as a verb becomes impossible. Growing up when (in the 70s and 80s), where (Alaska and otherwise north), and how (white) I did, “tacos” meant mostly tasteless and definitely hard-shelled. Here—with their wide variety among locally owned and run sources, the endless inspiration and improvisation of their forms, the salsas and quesos and guacs each unique to their purveyors—tacos have become my favorite food, a Saturday morning tradition, a ceaseless object of gratitude.