Mexican Smut: The Story of Huitlacoche

by Jose Magaña-Salgado

PDF | EPUB

Huitlacoche—often dismissed as a blight, celebrated as a delicacy, and misunderstood almost everywhere in between—sits at the intersection of agriculture, culture, and perception.

In Mexican Smut: The Story of Huitlacoche, Jose Magaña-Salgado traces the history, biology, and cultural meaning of the corn fungus known as huitlacoche, following its path from Indigenous foodways to modern fields, kitchens, and markets. Drawing on farming practice, food history, and firsthand experience cultivating huitlacoche in an urban community farm, the book explores how ideas of purity, value, and contamination shape what we grow, eat, and discard.

Part agricultural meditation, part cultural history, this book invites readers to reconsider what counts as food, who gets to decide, and how knowledge is preserved—or lost—across borders and generations. Grounded in soil, fungus, and corn, Mexican Smut is a quiet argument for curiosity, attention, and respect for the systems that feed us.