Tokyo’s Toyosu is thought because the world’s largest seafood market. Given town’s location on a bay, this makes excellent sense. The world’s second–largest seafood market is in a metropolis that’s tons of of miles from the closest shoreline, which makes rather less sense.
Simply as Toyosu changed a barely smaller Tsukiji, Mexico City’s La Nueva Viga changed the outdated Mercado de la Viga, beforehand the most important seafood market within the Western Hemisphere. For those who eat tuna cooked carnitas-style in a Mexico Metropolis restaurant, it’s more likely to have come from the Sea of Cortés, fished by crews from Sinaloa or Baja California Sur. If in case you have swordfish al pastor in Puebla, it might come from Pacific coastal states akin to Nayarit and Oaxaca.
Regardless of the lengthy distances between all these cities and fishing ports, it’s nearly sure that your meals made it by means of La Nueva Viga sooner or later. As the primary wholesale seafood marketplace for the tens of hundreds of thousands of individuals residing in Mexico Metropolis, its affect extends into the larger Valley of Mexico and the various different cities and cities inside. La Nueva Viga additionally ships among the greatest specimens from Mexican waters abroad. On the flip facet, specialised Mexican cooks typically come to La Nueva Viga searching for uncommon components from overseas. As is the case in virtually all Mexican markets, the commerce isn’t restricted to the sale of components. Seafood snacks and meals are on supply at lots of the stalls.
Some theorize that the capital’s urge for food for fish and crustaceans pre-dates its institution as modern-day Mexico Metropolis. The Aztec/Mexica capital of Tenochtitlán sat on a sequence of lake islands and its inhabitants routinely ate wild and farmed freshwater animals akin to acociles and axolotls. After the lake was slowly drained and stuffed over following the Spanish conquest, even the New Spain inhabitants continued to get pleasure from these animals, now introduced from rivers and seas additional away. Some remnants of this historical lake stood the passage of time as canals, together with the prevailing Canales de Xochimilco and the now-gone Canal de La Viga, after which each the outdated and new La Viga markets have been named.
