225 – ENG

Diana Kennedy (United Kingdom, 1923) is one of the great chroniclers of national gastronomy, responsible for putting traditional Mexican cuisine on the culinary world map. 

Her vocation for research and her love for food have led her on a journey, spanning for more than 50 years, during which she has visited the least explored corners of our country. Almost always alone, she traveled along paths and roads; sometimes riding a donkey or driving her legendary white Nissan truck, in search of the knowledge, flavors, odor and colors of traditional cuisine.

Inspired by the work of the great Mexican cook and researcher Josefina Vázquez de León, her collection of adventures and knowledge, a dozen unclassifiable books were born —because they are simultaneously a travel log, a cookbook, a photo album, a chronicle and ethnogastronomy treatises—, among which are My Mexico: A Culinary Odyssey (1998), The Essential Cuisines of Mexico (2004), and Oaxaca al gusto (2010).

After becoming “The Queen of Mexican cuisine” and receiving recognition including the Order of the Aztec Eagle, she is now focused on other things such as the loss of food authenticity due to the voracity of the industry and the abandonment of the Mexican fields, in addition to the extinction of ancestral ingredients.

She fights for her cause from the orchards of “La Quinta Diana”, her ecological house, located in Michoacán, where she shelters for their study and preservation more than 200 species of herbs, plants, bushes and trees, many of them in danger of extinction.