Alyshia Gálvez, author of Eating NAFTA, took us to La Morada in the Bronx—using the ingredients in a traditional Oaxacan meal to demonstrate how a free trade agreement forever changed Mexican people and cuisine.

Alyshia Gálvez didn’t set out to write a book about the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). She’s not your typical expert on the economics of trade deals. At heart, she’s a scholar of people and place.

A cultural and medical anthropologist and professor of Latin American studies at the City University of New York’s Lehman College, Gálvez is the author of two books about Mexican immigrants. One is an ethnographic examination of the “Latina health paradox”—the phenomenon that Latina women experience less complicated pregnancies and more favorable birth outcomes than many other groups, in spite of socioeconomic disadvantage. The other is about Catholicism as practiced by undocumented Mexicans in New York.

But she knew she also wanted to write about Mexico’s obesity epidemic, its rise in diabetes rates, and the way cultural and agricultural shifts have impacted what and how Mexicans eat—in turn affecting their health. To her surprise, every path Gálvez followed in her research led in some way to the influence of NAFTA, the now nearly 25-year-old pact signed by the United States, Canada, and Mexico to eliminate barriers to trade and investment.