Why Does Cuisine Need to Conquer?
Is validation from the Western world overstated?
Why do we often insist that a country’s food needs to conquer? That it needs to expand and reach new soils. To find economic success and approval from someone far away to make it relevant?
Again and again in food media, particularly in Latin America, I see some variation of the headline: “Chef/Ingredient from X Conquers X.” Here are some examples:
“El Pisco conquista Australia gracias a chef peruano” (Enterados): Pisco conquers the South Pacific.
“Conquistadores, la serie sobre cocineros peruanos que triunfan en el mundo” (El Comercio): An entire series about “conquering” chefs.
“Jaime Pesaque: el chef que busca conquistar el mundo con la cocina peruana” (Cronista): I know him. He’s not trying to conquer anything. He’s just making smart business decisions.
“Martín Milesi, el cocinero argentino que conquista Londres con dos cenas semanales y un estilo único” (Cucinare): A major city destroyed by two weekly dinners.
“Chef peruano Juan Chipoco conquista el paladar de Miami con su ceviche” (The San Diego Union Tribune): So he’s conquering a palate? How does that even work?
“¡Lúcuma peruana conquista a 41 países del mundo!” (AgroPeru): Lucuma is the next Genghis Khan.
“Acurio, Olvera, Méndez y otros latinoamericanos a la conquista de España” (7 Canibales): Star chefs invade Spain.
“Chef chileno conquista el torneo de golf más importante del mundo” (CNN Chile): I don’t even know where to begin with this one.
I could list these all day, but you get the point.
For many years in Latin America, it seemed that the expansion of a Lima restaurant chain to Madrid or a Mexican restaurant’s Michelin star in New York was seen as the pinnacle of that country’s cuisine. Or that approval from food writers abroad, in places like Tokyo or New York (people like me, for example), signified the official molting of some inferiority.
Don’t misunderstand me. There is nothing inherently wrong with a Bolivian or Colombian or Salvadoran restaurant opening in some far-off corner of the world. It’s a good thing to share one’s cuisine. To have people interested in the culture and biodiversity of a place. To tell those stories and help them understand it and dream about going there one day. I love writing about these restaurants and ingredients, and interviewing brilliant people like Valerie Chang or Victoria Blamey that are carrying their culture with them wherever they go and are using it as the foundation of how they interpret their own cooking. But why does their success abroad mean validation at home?
Why do we act like a Chilean, Guatemalan or Ecuadorian restaurant opening in Los Angeles or Amsterdam is more important than the women who have been fighting to preserve the food of places like Chiloé, Alta Verapaz or Esmeraldas and are dying out because of old age with no one to carry on their legacy?
Why aren’t we spending as much time talking about the chef from Bocas del Toro, Panama that worked in some of Paris’ best restaurants, but decided to cook on the same island he grew up in and help strengthen the archipelago’s foodways instead of a cook that might open a bistro in Le Marais?
Why is so much more air given to a cevichería in New York getting a good review when there are places like La Patarashca, in Tarapoto, a restaurant that has been protecting and promoting the recipes and ingredients of the Upper Amazon for thirty years as of this year?
Does a win at the World Gastronomy Awards truly mean your country is the greatest culinary travel destination or is it just among the countries who are willing to pay £399 to £499 to submit a nomination and sponsor a marketing campaign to get voter support? Why is endorsement from the United States or Europe so important? Should the breadth and beauty of the cuisines of the Americas really be defined by a framework created by the places that have historically and consistently tried to dismantle them?
What does it even mean to conquer?
It means to take over.
It means to erase.
That erasure might not always be occurring where we think it is. In most cases, though there are exceptions, the expansion of a cuisine into other territories doesn’t help support small farmers back home. It does the opposite. Most of the hundreds of Peruvian restaurants in South Florida aren’t buying ají amarillo or purple corn from small farmers, but industrial ones. That surging demand for quinoa across the world for the past few decades, as a prime example, has resulted in tons of quinoa to be planted on the coast of Peru, often forcing indigenous farmers in the Andes to make tough decisions in continuing their ancestral agricultural practices to attain a high quality product or to try and compete with the cheap, industrial ones that lack the same nutrients and are sprayed with pesticides.
What really determines the strength of a country’s cuisine? How far it travels? Or how resilient it is?
Is it better to reverse the effects of colonialism on a country’s cuisine by embracing the very mindset that caused them. Or by ridding ourselves of it altogether?
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Come to Peru with me and Itamae’s Valerie Chang!
Join Itamae Miami's’s Valerie Chang and I next May on a tour of Peru through Modern Adventure. For 7 days and 6 nights, we will move from Lima to the Sacred Valley as we try to understand what makes Peruvian cuisine so special. We’ll visit some of the country’s top restaurants and bars, explore Andean farms and markets, cook in earthen ovens, tastes piscos and local wines, and much more. There will even be a partial hike of the Inca Trail en route to Machu Picchu. It will just be a small group and space is extremely limited. Bookings can be reserved now. Here’s the full itinerary.
Oh and your Perú tour looks amazing! 🇵🇪🏔🙌🏽
Everything you wrote. Cien por ciento. At one level, I think of a reverse conquest, from Latin America to the US or Europe. Instead of colonizing like those countries did, we do it through food. But perhaps a better, less inherently violent, term is needed.