The main church, with its elegant arches, towers and tiled dome, dominates the skyline. On Sunday, when we were visiting Unión, an overflow crowd was attending services.

The bell towers look like a mashup of Moorish and Russian Orthodox architecture.

A mansion on the edge of town incorporates onion domes into its architecture.

The story goes that the owner visited Russia and returned to Unión with a vision. I love it.

Patty's relatives on her father's side, all 283 of them, live here. There must be only two degrees of separation between people here: they're either related to Patty, or they're friends with someone who is. Every third person we encountered stopped to talk.

Our main purpose in coming was for breakfast at her Uncle Jesús's carnitas place. He used to call it Carnitas Lupita, a wonderful name, but he may have renamed it since. It was here, in this unassuming storefront, that I abandoned all my misgivings about Mexican cuisine.

Carnitas Lupita redefines the meaning of casual dining. No tables, no chairs, but not exactly takeout either. Many people buy their food and eat it standing there. At one doorway, you can order carnitas tacos and other ready-to-eat meals. The near counter is intended for people buying carnitas by the kilo.

Customers so inclined are allowed to pick through trays of cooked pork, selecting morsels that take their fancy. This man spent a half hour, picking up every piece on the counter, examining each one from different angles. Some he put in his plastic bag. A few, he ate right away. The rest he threw back.

A van load of us approached Jesús's. Patty's mom and sisters immediately thrust their hands into the pans of carnitas, fishing out the more delectable pieces to hand to me.

Everyone should try eating chunks of greasy pork while taking photographs. Or maybe not. I spent about an hour the next day, cleaning fat out of tiny buttons and dials.

Uncle Jesús has been selling carnitas for many years. He raises his own pigs: his is a vertically integrated enterprise. Here he is holding a length of braided intestines. I've posted photographs of uncooked ones hanging in carnicerias a couple of times now, for the gross-out value and on account of the morbid fascination they evoke. This is the first time I've seen them in their cooked state, ready to eat.

Patty broke off a short length of gut and said, "Try them. They're delicious." I did, and they were. They were probably the tastiest pieces of carnitas I've ever eaten. Except for costillas (ribs). As long as I didn't let myself think about what I was eating, I was OK.

Once I got the intestines down, I was off to the races. Stomach (below, left)? No problem. Bladder? I hesitated; then I went for it. Chewy.

Now, enthusiastically rooting through trays of pork, there was no stopping me. Not, that is, until I picked up a pig's nose (above, right). Then I almost lost it. Guts, urinary systems, organs, ears—all that was manageable. But that cute little nose. It broke my heart, that pathetic little thing sitting there.

I'm closing in on having consumed all parts of a pig. I think it would be in poor taste for me to list the items I have to eat to complete my quest. Oh the hell with it: eyeballs, pancreas, lungs, testes, and the hardest of all, a cute little nose. A few more months should get it.

Jesús cooks carnitas in large copper (or stainless steel) pots set into a purpose-built gas ring. The process renders a lot of lard which he cools and sells. You ever wonder why those empanadas taste so good? The cook bought his shortening from places like Carnitas Lupita.

If you're worried about cleanliness, check out the stainless tubs in the background. At closing time, the whole kitchen looked the way they do—sparkling.

In all the posts where I mentioned carnitas, I've never put up a photo of someone eating it. Making up for that lapse, here we have sister Porfi enjoying a leg.

So that was breakfast: deep-fried pork. We had a package of tortillas fresh from the tortilleria, but they were as much for wiping grease off our fingers as for food. Somebody bought cokes at a tiendita. There was a five-gallon plastic bucket full of homemade salsa on the floor that you could dip your pork into before eating. No chairs or tables or plates, glasses or tableware.

It was delicious and satisfying. After we pigged out (sorry), Porfi took us around the corner to a paleteria, a place that sells frozen fruit pulp on a stick. These are not the usual boring strawberry or orange popsicles of our childhoods: Michoacán Paleteria offered maybe fifty varieties, all made locally, many exotic. You buy little ones so you can try several different kinds. I tasted several, including mamey, sapote and mango with chile.

In sixty years of living in the north, I became fastidious about food. As a kid, I helped my mother pluck and clean chickens. By the time we decided to move to Mexico, I was buying free-range boneless, skinless chicken breasts in styrofoam trays imprinted with warnings about proper food handling. I guess we're all safer that way, but chewing on a bone at Jesús's, I couldn't help thinking we've lost our connection with our food, that some of the heart has gone out of eating.