The smoke comes first. Before the salsa borracha, before the Argentinian chorizo splits its casing, before anyone cracks a Carta Blanca, there is the smell of mesquite drifting through a Monterrey colonia on a Saturday afternoon. Rubén Ramírez, a 50-year-old electrician, does not fire up the grill because he has weighed his protein options. He fires it up because his nieces are coming over. Because it is Saturday. Because this is what Saturdays mean here.
Nuevo León residents eat 66 to 77 pounds of meat per person per year. Mexico's national average is 33. That gap is not explained by income or access. It is explained by the fact that carnita asada in Monterrey is not a meal. It is the occasion itself, the architecture around which a gathering is built. Sol Campos, 22, has no World Cup tickets for June. She is making asada anyway, with her family, because the match on television is just another pretext for the ritual that would have happened regardless.
The debate over whether meat eating is cultural identity or personal choice has been framed badly, mostly by people who want the answer to be the latter. If it is just a choice, it can be swapped out. Oat milk replaced dairy for millions of people without anyone losing a grandmother's recipe. But carnita asada in Nuevo León is not dairy. It is closer to mariachi in Guadalajara or the Zócalo in Mexico City, which is exactly how Ramírez frames it: those cities have their museums and their tequila; Monterrey has its grill and its hospitality, and the two are inseparable.
When the Grill Becomes the Grammar
I will grant the personal-choice camp one real point: plenty of people eat meat with zero cultural weight attached, the way someone eats a granola bar between meetings. That is a choice, and it deserves no special protection. But conflating that with what happens in Parque Fundidora during a music festival, or in a Monterrey backyard with roasted potatoes and onions going soft in the coals, is intellectually lazy. The specificity of the ritual is the whole argument. It is not just meat. It is this cut, this wood, this salsa, this group of people, this Saturday.
The plant-based industry's real problem is not taste, which has improved considerably. The problem is that it keeps trying to replace an ingredient when what it actually needs to replace is a ceremony. You cannot swap a Beyond patty into a carnita asada and preserve what the carnita asada is doing socially. The food is the medium; the message is belonging.
What the World Cup Will Prove
Monterrey expects 500,000 tourists in June 2026 for the World Cup matches. The city's officials are not promoting its architecture or its nightlife. They are promoting the grill. That is a deliberate signal about what Nuevo León believes it has to offer the world, and it is not a marketing decision. It is a statement of identity made in smoke and char.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. promoting a one-meal-a-day carnivore diet is a personal choice, possibly a bad one, definitely a performance. What happens in Monterrey on a Saturday is neither. The distinction matters because how we categorize something determines how we respond to it. Personal choices get nudged. Cultural identities get respected, or they get fought over. Monterrey is not waiting for the nudge.
The smoke was there before the debate started. It will be there long after.
