A Feast of Silence

There are moments when the flavor of a dish is less important than the silence around the table. In Mexico, one of the most dangerous countries in the world for journalists, entire fortunes have been built on the promise of safety itself — where companies have won public contracts, often granted not through open contest but by direct award, to protect reporters and human-rights defenders. They deploy panic buttons, safeguards, and monitoring systems designed to keep people alive. And yet, time after time, those systems have failed. The pattern is no longer coincidence; it is neglect institutionalized and monetized.

They are not faceless firms, either. Behind those contracts stand familiar names — entrepreneurs who once sold protection to the State and now sell refinement to society. They attend tastings, sponsor openings, sit on cultural panels, and speak fluently of wines and bubbles but rarely of accountability. Their fortunes travel easily from public budgets to private banquets, from panic buttons to wine flutes. Over the years, several of the very people those mechanisms were meant to shield have been murdered. The buttons did not work. The guards were not there. The official reports called them anomalies. The families called them what they are — tragedies that should never have happened. And yet, despite each failure, the same companies continue to receive new contracts, renewed trust, and public money — as if repetition could erase responsibility.

And while the graves were still there, the same enterprises quietly changed clothes. They re-emerged in Mexico’s luxury circuit, sponsoring inaugurations, wine tastings, and boutique openings, speaking the language of culture and refinement as if the past could be rinsed away with bubbles. Meanwhile, much of the gastronomic press looked elsewhere. It photographed canapés and couture but not consequences. It praised “visionary entrepreneurs” without asking where their capital originated or what shadows it carried. Access replaced inquiry. Proximity became silence.

This silence has a cost. It is paid not by editors or publicists, but by citizens for whom the truth has become a luxury. The public deserves to know what hides beneath the glitter — and the press, especially the culinary press, must decide whether it wishes to document culture or decorate it. If the table is sacred, then who sits at it must matter.

This is not just about one company or one person. It is about an ecosystem that confuses visibility with virtue — where public contracts feed private glamour, and where public tragedy feeds private reinvention. When luxury becomes a mask for moral decay, the entire culture of taste rots from within.

Luxury, at its best, refines. At its worst, it conceals.

At The Epicurer, we believe in the former. We will not give our pages to those who use gastronomy as a stage to launder failure into prestige. We stand for the craft, the culture, the truth — and we invite our peers in media and hospitality to do the same. Integrity is not a trend; it is a foundation. And to those whose ambition is solely to be seen, let it be clear: this media is not their place, nor will it ever be. And somewhere, far from the dining rooms and photo calls of Mexico City, a panic button still doesn’t answer.