On the other hand, having lived in Mexico for almost a decade now, these explanations tend to merely be nothing but the unholy combo of pedantry + incorrect, with a big component that smells a lot like "I just traveled to exotic lands and I will tell you how those people eat" or "I had a taco during my layover in <some Mexican city> and can tell you what all tacos are".

Because the reality is that you can find tacos and food items of many variations in Mexico (or wherever) that the people there will call a taco, and they'll do it without any of the sort of snobbery you find in these comments.

Like, tacos are a single ingredient food item? Then why can I find people slopping on any number of side items down the street in Guadalajara? And it's still labeled a taco? They really need to read HN and become illuminated. They're wrong.

Frankly, the idea that Mexican cuisine (or whichever cuisine) was frozen in some snapshot back in history—and anything they do eat since then is "incorrect"—does more to erase reality than pointing out that maybe the cuisine is much more varied than someone on HN thinks.

And all of this is said before even getting into regional variations like what happens to cuisines once they cross borders into different cultures. Americans eat hard-shell tacos? It's a lot more interesting to me to explore why that is than to roll our eyes at how people are ugh doing it wrong. Maybe artifacts of one culture changing when they enter other cultures is the beauty of culture rather something that needs to be corrected.