Pati Jinich has always had to move between worlds — as a Jew growing up in Mexico, and as a Mexican immigrant to the US, where she first worked as a policy analyst. “It wasn’t until I switched to cooking,” she tells us this week, “that I was finally able to make sense of all the pieces of myself.” Since that transition she’s spent a decade documenting Mexico’s vast and varied food cultures in her cookbooks, and on her PBS show Pati’s Mexican Table, which is watched by more than 65 million people around the world. Her new docu-series, La Frontera, is more political, examining the US-Mexico border, and the people who navigate the two worlds between it. It’s also her most personal work yet. She talks with Dan about why this show is so important to her. Plus she peers into his fridge over Zoom, and tells us about a deep fried quesadilla in Jalisco that she’ll never forget. //

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Transcript available at www.sporkful.com.