8 Articles to Read about Food Across the Americas
Every few weeks, I open up a google tab and do my best to pass over the map of the Americas by memory with one search after another: food + “country name”. These searches are rarely fruitful. Very little is dedicated to meaningful, deeply felt stories of food in the Americas that falls outside the framing of hunger and violence under the grips of unstable governance.
Before I started MATAMBRE, I wondered what the future of travel media could look like in a post-COVID society. The biggest challenge is eliminating travel, an industry that caters to the privileged white gaze, from the editorial equation all together. US-media struggles to imagine foreign culture coverage outside of the realms of consumerism and tourism, the latter of which is an industry that refuses to imagine exploring a world that even remotely distresses the comforts that are afforded by a strictly white gaze.
The pandemic offered the perfect out. With much of the world forcibly pushed towards a moment of reflection and borders shut to tourism (and traveling parachute journalists), international culture and food journalism had no more excuses but to seek out more nuanced storytelling from experienced writers across the region. In a way, I thought, the pandemic could act as the much needed push for legacy magazines, large alt publications and independent editors to move away from explicit travel stories and move, at the most basic level, towards storytelling that humanizes ‘foreign’ spaces and ultimately encourages visitors to do the same.
Yet Travel and Leisure encouraged travel to Uruguay in August 2020 when the United States had a daily infection rate that Uruguay’s total rate only recently caught up to and AFAR regularly announced loosening travel restrictions across the Caribbean, particularly Puerto Rico, where US citizens can easily enter. I don’t particularly care about the Conde Nast masthead but there is no denying that large legacy magazines have a profound impact not only on travel but the way that newsrooms across the globe turn culture into a consumable aesthetic.
I want to destroy the Conde Nast style guide and all those that aspire to paint travel as an aesthetic. I want writing that seeks nuance and understanding; writing that encourages us to embrace differences as a means to better comprehend the world around us. At some point, I do want this project to highlight work from writers across the country and the Southern Cone and eventually across the entirety of the Americas. I’m not there yet (re: $$$). In the meantime, I will be putting together bilingual article compilations that I admire from a distance and hope that you will to, which in the future will likely be sent monthly and on a weekend. Read, enjoy and throw your support in their direction.
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From Brazil, Patricia Moll writes for Mongabay about a fungal outbreak that ravaged the cacao plantations of the northern state of Bahia. For centuries, sharecroppers were victims of large plantation owners who systematically kept their sharecroppers ignorant to the intricacies of cacao production. When the ‘witches broom disease’ devastated cacao crops and plantation owners abandoned their lands, communities of farmers moved in and re-established farming techniques that regenerated soil health, protected native forests and allowed them to sell directly to large chocolate brands. (English)
From Peru, Leslie Moreno Custodio writes about the community kitchens that popped up across Lima’s urban sprawl during Covid. The beauty of this story can be felt even for non-Spanish speakers in the stunning black and white photographs. Spanish-readers are doubly lucky to read Custodio’s prose. She affectionately captures the myriad of ways that community-building and survival are thrown onto the backs of women, often with the least resources, and spits fire when revealing how solidarity is fatally misconstrued as a privilege of choice and thus responsibility of regular people: “This is not just a question of solidarity, it is much more basic: the understanding that without this work, countless people would have no means of survival.” (Spanish)
From the Bay Area, California, Minyoung Lee interviews Louis Trevino and Vincent Medina for Taste. Up until the pandemic, Trevino and Medina ran the globe’s only restaurant dedicated to the foods of the Ohlone people indigenous to Northern California. Trevino and Medina really beautifully explain their dedication to respecting their legacy, comfort foods and the paradoxical emotions behind ancestral dishes that forcibly evolved underneath colonization. Pair this with Illyanna Maisonet’s love song to Spam and the ways that colonized peoples have to constantly justify and reconcile their adoption of foods brought by settlers. (English)
From Buenos Aires, Argentina, Soledad Barruti’s longread for Anfibia about foreign tech interests and cultivated meats making big bets on the Southern Cone, where countries like Chile and Argentina are the world’s two largest meat eaters per capita. Chilean-Argentine company Not Meat received big bucks from the likes of Jeff Bezos to develop tech meat and take over the market before a market for fake meat develops. Barruti is one of the country’s leading voices on veganism, the industrial food system and food sovereignty. Here she weighs out the need for plant-based foods against the potential dangers of blind food consumption of a new (and better branded) industrialized model. (Spanish)
From Puerto Rico, Israel Meléndez Ayala rewrites the history of the mojito for Whetstone Journal. Ayala is a historian, anthropologist, bartender and bonafide rum scholar. Here he corrects the narrative failings behind the emblematic Caribbean cocktail, the Mojito, that unravels into a history lesson that demonstrates the way that colonialism lives on, even in the everyday minutiae of an evening cocktail, long after the settlers have left. “The mojito is a variation of "mojo," a sour citrus sauce in Cuba made by enslaved people from Africa; the drink could also take its name from “mojado,” the Spanish word for “wet.” Even the name that it is now called comes from a misunderstanding by the European colonizers.” (English)
From Mexico, Alejandra Sánchez Inzunza writes about the power of chiles for Vice en Español. This is part of an eight-piece series that Vice produced last year about Latin American plants that also include ayahuasca, cacao and poppy. Inzunza turns to science to understand why Mexicans are so obsessed with chile peppers, breaking down the history and symbolism of peppers in Mexico across the country's indigenous religions, languages and cuisines. (Spanish)
From the United States, Amirah Mercer’s longread for Eater about the long-standing history of plant-based diets in Black communities across the United States. Wrapped into Mercer’s personal vegan journey is a rich history of plant-based diets that originated in West Africa and were transformed during slavery under the whims of plantation owners and launches into the politics of the Black Panthers and modern Black food activists. I was reminded of the work of artist and gardener Syd Carpenter who dedicates much of her work to reclaiming the history of gardening and farming that was lost during the Great Migration. (English)
From Córdoba, Argentina, Luciana Peirone-Cappri writes for El gato y la caja about the science of fire. Fires engulfed an estimated 1.1 million hectares across 22 of the country’s 23 provinces. Córdoba, the edge of Argentina’s fertile grasslands region, was amongst the hardest hit. 180,000 hectares burned of which 90% of the affected land contained native vegetation, forest and pastures. Fires are not unusual in Córdoba, both naturally occurring and man made, but property development and agricultural practices related to livestock are polluting cities with smoke, creating floods and endangering indigenous plants and animals. (Spanish)