Meet Pepsi Retro, Pepsi’s brand new calorie-free beverage elaborated with pure sugar cane and bottled in retro-looking cans and bottles. (Somehow it looks like something you could have found in your abuela’s kitchen cabinet.

But don’t get too excited. Pepsi Retro is available only in Mexico and proudly pitched by the local Pepsi franchise as “a Mexican-made product made specifically to give Mexicans the taste they were waiting for.”

What better companion to a good crispy tacostada from the local Taco Bell?

Ajúa!

And speaking of non-Mexican Mexican food, restaurant chain Qdoba has partnered with Dr. Alan Hirsch, director of the Smell & Taste Treatment and Research Foundation (ha, ha, ha), to conduct a study aptly titled: “You Are What You Eat,” which concluded that preferences for Mexican foods such as tacos, burritos and quesadillas can indicate very specific and unique personality traits.

“With Mexican food preferences, we were able to find a correlation between which food people most enjoyed and what that meant about their underlying personality,” said Dr. Hirsch.

Gosh, am I a quesadilla-type of person? (someone who is dependable and a true friend; content being one of the crowd.) Or maybe I’m more like the chips & salsa type: aggressive, successful, achievement-orientated, and natural leaders. Am I leaning towards being a burrito?

So I went ahead and took the Qdoba Identity Test. Sadly, I have to report I am nothing but a Taco Salad-type of chick: “well-adjusted, empathic, understanding, and a perfect spouse, parent, and friend.”(Oh well, at least I am not a Nacho-type: “shy, quiet, reserved and introverted.”)

So what are you waiting for, you potential burritos? Go ahead and try the test yourselves. Heck! what else is there to over the weekend anyway?

Ok, my friends. Turns out the U.S. is not the only country with a twisted view of Mexican food. In fact, General Mills’ Old El Paso Fajita Dinner Kit (yes, a kit!) is the biggest selling “ethnic” product in the U.K., worth upwards of £12.5 million each year.

“It’s no accident that Old El Paso is the clear No 1 in the Mexican food category in the UK. Innovation is vital, even within a thriving category, to safeguard its ongoing and long-term success,” Andy Foweather, Sales Director for General Mills UK, told Thinkretail.

Wondering what’s in the kit? Here it goes: (I’m reading directly from the box. No joke.)

10 flour tortillas: Water, partially hydrogenated vegetable oil with mono-and diglycerides, glycerin, corn syrup solids, baking powder (baking soda, corn starch, sodium aluminum sulfate, calcium sulfate, monocalcium phosphate), salt, potassium sorbate and calcium propionate (preservatives), monoglycerides, fumaric acid, L-Cysteine hydrochloride.

Fajita seasoning mix: corn starch, maltodextrin, hydrolyzed corn and soy protein, sugar, salt, spice chili pepper, onion powder, citric acid, artificial color, silicon dioxide (anticaking agent) natural smoke flavor (?) sulfiting agents and ethoxyquin.

Mmmmmm… sodium aluminum sulfate seasoned with silicon dioxide and a natural smoke flavor? That will surely make you scream ¡Ajúa!

A tamal (from Nahuatl tamalli, plural tamales)

As a Mexican immigrant in this country, I truly appreciate the efforts of the so-called “general population” to embrace the so-called Latino culture (chips and salsa, burritos, chimichangas, tortillas, tequila, etc.) But people have got to stop calling the singular of tamales a ‘tamale,’ when we all know it is really a tamal.

A recent story, aptly titled Tamale is a Hot Choice for Yule, a customer at a local tamal factory declared: “I love them, and I’ve never had a decent tamale in Arkansas.”

OK, that is nice, but just for the record: next time you want to talk about one and not several, keep in mind it’s one tamal, two tamales, three tamales, etc.

My friend Mariana sent me this picture that shows, once again, that despite the efforts of past Mayors to turn this city into the new Disney World, there is still some hope that diversity will live on.

Foto: Mariana Carreño King

This week McDonald’s triumphantly announced the launch of a half-pound, culturally-relevant burrito: the McSkillet, which the media is tauting as as the McLatinization of the breakfast menu, mainly due to its “Mexican influence.”

I beg to differ. I am as Mexican as it gets, and though my mother sometimes fed us with some weird concoctions, I don’t ever recall having a rolled flour tortilla stuffed with Jack cheese, red, green peppers and onions mixed with scrambled eggs and hash browns for breakfast (I don’t even think my mom or my abuela know what the hell hash browns are.)

According to Advertising Age, the sausage McSkillet has 610 calories and 36 grams of fat, making it McDonald’s third-most-fattening breakfast, behind the Big Breakfast and the Big Breakfast Deluxe.

William Lamar, CMO McDonald’s USA, told AdAge that “it was important for McDonald’s to have more burrito-based options as Mexican food becomes increasingly popular and schedules get tighter.”

Yeah, right. People are getting fatter and time-pressed, so blame it on the Mexicans!

You can say -and think- whatever you want about Venezuela and its president, but one thing is undeniable: Venezuelans are truly creative people. Take Coromoto, an ice-cream vendor in the province of Merida, which is pitching a ‘Viagra’ ice-cream for the sexually challenged.

Coromoto, who has even made it to the Guiness World Records, offers 840 flavors, including garlic, beer, corn, black beans and… Viagra. But don’t get too excited (pun is intended): Coromoto’s Viagra ice-cream is not made with the famous blue pill, but is a mysterious mix of honey and plants. Oh… if we only knew the recipe!

After the three-day food and wine smogasbord a.k.a. Thanksgiving, we were too broke to keep spending precious dollars in fine Bordeaux and Burgundy so decided to finish the weekend supporting the patria with this 2005 Jubileo Meritage, from the wine-rich area of Ensenada, Baja California.

Despite its creative tagline —¡Viva el Vino! ¡Viva México!— Jubileo looks better in the bottle than feels in the stomach. However, we tip our hats to the wine’s creators for the festive logo and the jubilant, barefoot Mexican dancer who raises to the jubileo occasion in pure emotion. ¡Ajúa!

It’s amazing what you can learn from reading the newspapers online. Take the Houston Chronicle, which this week did a sort of “food review” on the new Crispy Melt Pizza from Domino’s Pizza. In it, Houston Chronicle writer Ken Hoffman presents readers the following, puzzling question:

Is the Crispy Melt Pizza really a pizza? Or is it merely a cleverly disguised Mexican quesadilla with some pizza trappings?

After tasting the 340-calories-per-slice creation, Hoffman safely establishes that though the Crispy Melt is shaped like a pizza and has some tomato sauce floating in there, “its taste, texture and grab-ability of a Mexican quesadilla.”

Go figure.

Just when I thought I had seen it all…. It turns out that a Houston-based company called Voyava has teamed with a Mexican cooperative to fortify coffee with folic acid and other stuff to give to the children of Chiapas, the country’s poorest state. ¿The idea? to give them nutrients that otherwise they won’t get ’cause they’re too damn poor to eat anything else.

Thankfully, some Mexican officials are hesitating about the plan, saying they don’t believe elementary school kids should be drinking coffee (duh!), fortified or otherwise. (This despite the fact that a 3-year-old this week told the Associated Press “I do like coffee!”)

Besides, I’m not sure I trust these people: Voyava Republic founder Michael Sweeney is an electrochemist, and he is credited with developing a technique to fortify coffee with iron and folic acid. Can they at least put some milk in the damn thing?

Photo: Sylvia Romo