We started our tour at a stand where a street named Jose Izazaga T-bones into the market. The table features 25 different varieties of guisados (stews) which appear in cazuelas (clay pots).

My selections consisted of blood sausage with onions and herbs, and pork ribs in salsa de chile morita. I also got to sample the Street Gourmet’s taco de mollejas (chicken gizzards). All great.

We girded ourselves for the “running of the bees,” a term that Esparza coined to describe the thousands of buzzers that flock to the mountains of colorful candy.

We encountered pre-Columbian seed-lined discs, peanut-crusted cluster bombs, cored and candied orange peels and many more.

Esparza bought a box of camotes – candied sweet potato candies from Puebla – that came in flavors like pineapple, lime, strawberry, coconut and orange.

After our sweet detour, we entered one of the many buildings that form the mercado, all of them lined with narrow aisles and ingredient packed booths. Massive dishes contained the engorged corn kernels that are “afflicted” in wonderful ways with fungus to form the delicacy known as huitlacoche. Stateside, huitlacoche often comes in cans, but not at Mercado de la Merced, where it’s plucked from the husk in all its yellow, grey and black splendor.

Massive sacks contained uncooked beans of varying colors and sizes.

Butchers stand on high at their stands carving beasts – often pigs – to form fresh sausage, chops and loins, to name just three offerings.

It’s easy to imagine all the different ways that hook-hung pig heads would horrify small children or vegans in Los Angeles, but at Mercado de la Merced, the sight is de rigueur.

Old women spend long days scraping the piercing spines from cactus paddles (nopales) before forming impressive towers that rise above most shoulders.

We encountered walls of chicharron prensado – pressed pork parts – that are often shaved, pan fried and utilized in tacos. If one of these dense walls were to topple, shoppers would be in a world of porcine hurt.

After a warm, musty walk through the market, it was sweet relief to find jugs of aguas frescas in flavors like jamaica (hibiscus) and sandia (watermelon), which the vendor ladled into plastic cups.

It was educational to see the different chiles in their raw and dried form. I encountered several grades of guajillo, arbol, pasilla and ancho, to name just four varieties. A number chiles I saw are unimaginable in the U.S.

Our final snack involved water bugs, tiny crawfish the size of thumbnails, squeezed with lemon, crunchy and entirely edible.