Gastro-capitalism in Peru

The construction and promotion of a national cuisine in Peru are part of a broader nationalist project that has made food central to the nation’s economic development agenda (García Reference García2013). The gastronomic revolution—an effort to transform local culinary traditions and native ingredients into lucrative business opportunities—is expanding capital accumulation into new realms. As capital necessarily exhausts natural and labor resources, it must seek new spaces of extraction and accumulation, that is, new frontiers (Moore Reference Moore2011; Harvey Reference Harvey2001). Capitalist frontiers have come to be found at increasingly minute scales, as with the commodification of the genomic realm, while intellectual property rights are expanding to include collective cultural traditions (Sunder Rajan Reference Sunder Rajan2006; Coombe and Aylwin Reference Coombe and Aylwin2011; Hayden Reference Hayden2003). In the Andes in particular, the past decade has seen a dramatic expansion of commodifiable forms (Hirsch Reference Hirsch2022).

Peasant crops—those deeply embedded in local foodways and circulating primarily within household economies and local markets—represent one of the new accumulation frontiers. Sometimes called poverty foods, these products often provide essential sustenance for people living at the margins of a society where procuring a decent meal is a daily challenge (Garth Reference Garth2019). With the pursuit of novelty and authenticity increasingly driving high-end cosmopolitan tastes (Johnston and Baumann Reference Johnston and Baumann2014), local staples long shunned in Lima’s elite spaces and unknown to consumers outside Peru have become sources of significant potential profit. The “revalorization” of “undervalued” foodstuffs like quinoa typifies a larger reimagining of culture itself in Peru specifically, and Latin America more generally, wherein culture is no longer simply a set of beliefs and practices but a set of forms, artifacts, and symbols with the potential for commercialization.

While twenty-first-century Peru is an especially lively site for examining the revalorization of marginalized foods as they relate to culinary nationalism and spatial imaginaries, related dynamics are transpiring in diverse contexts across the world. Increasingly, wealthy Northern consumers seek out food “with a story behind it” (Guthman Reference Guthman, McDonell and Wilk2020), a trend that makes marginalized foods potentially lucrative sites for investment (Finnis Reference Finnis2012; Markowitz Reference Markowitz and Finnis2012). Entrepreneurs see particular local crops as potentially valuable export crops, a dynamic fomented by the rise of the folk category of the “superfood” (McDonell and Wilk Reference McDonell and Wilk2020). Recent examples that have undergone this transformation besides quinoa include teff from Ethiopia and fonio from West Africa.

Neoliberal multiculturalism and the commodification of culture lie at the heart of Peru’s gastronomic revolution. Neoliberal multiculturalism—Charles Hale’s term describing the ways Latin American states increasingly differentiate “good” expressions of cultural difference from “radical” ones—is ultimately about opening up new areas to capital accumulation (“culture”) while protecting other frontiers from local resistance (e.g., natural resources) (Hale Reference Hale2002). The Peruvian state punishes expressions of cultural difference or sovereignty efforts that threaten capital, evidenced by frequent clashes around water contamination and mining in indigenous territories (Cadena Reference Cadena2010; Bebbington Reference Bebbington2009; F. Li Reference Li2015; McDonell Reference McDonell2014). At the same time, state and private investors are funding profitable expressions of difference (e.g., traditional dances, food, music) with the aim of attracting tourism and building a national brand (Cánepa Reference Cánepa2013). Peasant crops increasingly represent a model of these lucrative expressions of culture.

Critical analyses of Peru’s gastronomic revolution have explored the phenomenon as a social project that seeks to reconstitute the nation through food. A number of scholars frame the gastronomic revolution as a form of performative nationalism, one that foregrounds a limited and elitist vision of the nation (Matta Reference Matta2014, Reference Matta, May, Sildali, Spiller and Tschofen2017; García Reference García2021, Reference García2023). Scholars emphasize contradictions in the discourse of inclusion espoused by the gastro-political complex and the new practices of exclusion the gastronomic boom has set in motion (Cox Hall Reference Cox Hall2020; García Reference García2021). María Elena García (Reference García2021) argues that the much-repeated promise of promoters of the gastronomic revolution to unite a fragmented nation elides a dark side: marginalization and violence against indigenous and nonhuman bodies. In this vein, critical scholarship has suggested that the conspicuous and hegemonic discourse of inclusion obscures an elite project based on long-standing dynamics of the appropriation of indigenous traditions, culinary and otherwise (Irons Reference Irons2022; Alcalde Reference Alcalde2009; McDonell Reference McDonell2019). In fact, Grey and Newman (Reference Grey and Newman2018) suggest that gastronomic multiculturalism in this context is actually better understood as culinary colonialism.

I join a growing number of scholars who contend that the gastronomic revolution is by and large a capitalist project (López-Canales Reference López-Canales2019; García Reference García2021; Grey and Newman Reference Grey and Newman2018; Seligmann Reference Seligmann2022). This article extends this conversation by centering spatial dynamics. I contend that the gastronomic revolution is a capitalist project and therefore a spatial project: the gastro-political complex creates value in part by reimagining space and the way capital can be extracted from it.Footnote ⁷ Despite a growing scholarly conversation around the gastronomic revolution’s failed promises and lively debates around its obscurantist politics, questions of space so far remain latent. Elsewhere, I have suggested that the gastronomic revolution reinforces power imbalances between capital and periphery, as the capital city of Lima is made into a gastronomic capital while the provinces are framed as places for speculation and discovery of raw materials.

Although some scholars gesture toward this asymmetry, existing studies have done little in the way of decentering Lima or specifying the spatial dynamics at work. Rather than looking at the phenomena writ large, focusing on a particular region outside Lima and a particular foodstuff helps us track more carefully the spatial dynamics and tensions at play. This article builds from existing scholarship on Peru’s gastronomic revolution to unpack how this process plays out in a marginal region of the country, one that is distant geographically, socially, and economically from Lima. By focusing on the intersecting capitalist and spatial dynamics that constitute a specific food in a specific region, we can better see how the construction of value in the gastronomic revolution relies on reimagining and remaking regional and national geographies. I follow Eric Hirsch’s (Reference Hirsch2020) claim that neoliberal national branding projects in Peru are not always accepted at face value and that some actors have complex relationships to these initiatives characterized by capitulation but also resistance and retooling (Hirsch Reference Hirsch2020). Ethnographic specificity helps tease out dynamics of contestation less visible in studies that center Lima-based actors and conceptualize the gastronomic revolution as a single cohesive project.

Creating a national cuisine always involves complex relationships with regional cuisines. Appadurai (Reference Appadurai1988) notes that the creation of Indian cuisine privileged some regional culinary traditions over others but also generated more self-conscious ideas about regional traditions. In Western Europe, efforts to develop national culinary identities and build senses of regional specificity have a long history. The codification of French food took place in the nineteenth century, a process that involved circumscribing “Frenchness” while developing reputations for specific products (e.g., Champagne) and promoting tourism around local products (Guy Reference Guy2003). These intersections of marginalized foods, culinary nationalism, and geographical imaginaries are exaggerated in Peru because of the centrality of spatial discourses to the larger culinary revalorization project.

Gastronomic revolution as a spatial project

When Diego Muñoz was appointed head chef of Astrid y Gastón in 2014, he launched an ambitious new tasting menu. At US$240 per person, the twenty-six-course sequence was the most expensive meal in Peru: a highly coveted experience for culinary tourists that also served as a status marker for Peru’s wealthiest residents. The menu was organized into five “acts,” based on a trip (viaje) through the imagined geography of the nation: the coast, the desert, the Andes, the Amazon, and finally, the altiplano. Instead of featuring upscale versions of regional platos típicos, the menu utilized ingredients associated with these regions to evoke “the feeling” of the five regions (Jiménez Reference Jiménez2014). Muñoz suggested that the menu was “about looking for the pure, the native—looking for oneself”; he sought to portray the basic essence of these different regions (Jiménez Reference Jiménez2014). The altiplano section of the menu, for instance, features stylized dishes with quinoa (and quinoa leaves), kañiwa, along with other native altiplano crops. Astrid y Gastón’s main competitor, Central, has a strikingly similar menu. Central’s head chef, Virgilio Martínez, names dishes on the seventeen-course tasting menu for the geographic area or altitudinal range he intends the dish to embody. For instance, a dish of edible clay is called Dry Andes, Coastal Proximity is octopus in chili broth, and Altiplano and Lakes features lamb with wild mustard and quinoa.

Peru’s gastronomic revolution is an explicitly spatial project. Stories of space and territory are central to the way the gastro-political leaders make value in Peru, as the menus of both restaurants underscore. The menus reinforce the same spatialized vision depicted in the La Casa de la Gastronomía Peruana’s natural resources map. Products hail from specific regions, and they derive their authenticity in part from their symbolic connection to particular places. Quinoa embodies the altiplano, and “authentic” quinoa is thus inextricably linked to this area. The territorialized origin stories are central to revalorization narratives of quinoa and other ingredients making their way into Lima’s elite culinary scene.

The dominant spatial narrative of Peruvian cuisine emphasizes incorporating ingredients from the entirety of Peru, a vision that is often celebrated as inclusive and multicultural. Yet this hegemonic framing obscures the centralist dynamics of Peru’s national cuisine. “The truth is that there are too many restaurants in Lima,” Ernesto explained to me as we chatted over a cup of espresso one afternoon in his restaurant that overlooked Puno’s Plaza de Armas.Footnote ⁸ For the past decade, Ernesto had run what was widely known as the city of Puno’s best restaurant: the one tourist guides and hotel concierges recommended their guests try, where well-to-do Puneños made reservations on special occasions. Menu prices were high for Puno but affordable compared to restaurants in Lima or Cusco and downright cheap for most foreign tourists. His comment on the overabundance of restaurants in Peru’s capital city fits within Ernesto’s larger story about his own professional goals and the way he sees Puno within the country’s larger gastronomic revolution. For Ernesto, building a reputation for his restaurant was about building a reputation for Puno as a culinary destination in its own right. This was an effort to seek validation and challenge the idea that one could eat well only in Lima, Arequipa, and Cusco: “Lima is obviously the starting point [for gastronomy in Peru] as it’s said to be the gastronomic capital of America. But people now expect a lot from the provinces and well. They have a lot to try in Arequipa, a lot to try in Cusco, so it’s to be expected that it will be the same for Puno.” As head chef, owner, and manager, Ernesto had worked tirelessly over the previous decade to create a menu and restaurant experience that met the growing culinary expectations of domestic and foreign tourists who visited Puno while also remaining relevant and “respectful” in the eyes of Puneños.

Ernesto’s vision of his work at once fits in the mainstream gastro-political complex’s efforts to codify and commodify Peruvian food while also challenging this project’s centralist tendencies. Ernesto wanted to push back against the prevailing ideas that Lima was the site of innovation and Peru’s provinces were mere extractive zones that simply provided the culinary raw materials for the gastronomic boom.Footnote ⁹ Instead, he hoped to show that places like Puno could be sites of innovation in their own right: “The gastronomic boom has encouraged us to do more creative things with our menu—to try to reach the level of restaurants in Lima. I know that Central, which is one of the best restaurants in the world right now, has a research center where they collect products from across Peru to feature. And that made us think, well, if they’re coming to discover products that we always had, why aren’t we doing that too?”

Ernesto suggests that it should be the responsibility of local chefs to exalt and reinterpret local ingredients and dishes rather than the exclusive purview of Lima’s celebrity chefs. His contention that it should be local chefs reimagining local ingredients fits in an increasingly dominant development model in Peru that positions local actors in the Andean highlands as potential entrepreneurs who, with proper training, can transform latent natural and cultural riches not wealth. Eric Hirsch (Reference Hirsch2022, 7) suggests that this emergent development model in the Andes centers what he calls extractive care, “the nurturing of marginalized bodies, livelihoods, ecosystems, terrains, and worlds in a way that ultimately primes them for extractive capitalism by transforming them into resources.” Ernesto positioned himself, a native to Puno, as a proper subject for reimagining Puno’s marginalized ingredients as high-end dishes. He in turn saw Limeño chefs as inappropriate actors for this work, a conviction that showcases the kinds of spatial and territorial frictions Peru’s gastronomic boom has generated. Although the gastro-political complex was dominated by elite Limeños and Lima-based institutions that arguably reproduced existing status hierarchies, actors like Ernesto challenged this dynamic.

As Ernesto’s position indicates, Puno was not considered a gastronomic destination in its own right, and instead, the region was framed as a set of resources of Lima’s chefs to experiment with. Puno was a source of natural (culinary) resources, of which quinoa was the most prominent. The gastronomic revolution’s reimagining of the altiplano as the quinoa heartland at once generated a new and hopeful vision of agriculture in the region while reinforcing long-standing ideas about race, culture, and geography in Peru.

Reimagining the altiplano’s potential

The altiplano has long occupied a special position within Peru’s colonial and postcolonial national imaginary. The Puno department encapsulates almost the entirety of the portion of the Andean altiplano that lies within Peru’s borders.Footnote ¹⁰ The historian José Luis Renique underscores how within Peru’s spatialized racial imaginary, the region is caricatured as a bastion of poverty inhabited by stubborn people who resist “progress.” Puno symbolizes the “Indian problem” that has defined national conversations about race, modernity and national identity since Peru’s inception (Mariátegui Reference Mariátegui1929). The region’s symbolic position is notably distinct from Cusco, the highland department renowned as the capital of the Inca Empire and home to the country’s most important tourist attraction, Machu Picchu. Cusco is framed as rich in the lucrative kind of cultural difference—the kind that attracts millions of tourists to Peru each year (Méndez Reference Méndez1996). Meanwhile, Puno has long been portrayed as the site of a different kind of cultural difference, one that is more problematic for the nation than profitable.

This perception endures among many Limeño elites into the present, something I encountered as a white North American through frequent warnings to “be careful” while in Puno. While I was at the Peruvian consulate in Chicago finalizing a research visa in 2016, the consulate employee casually asked where I would be spending time in Peru. Upon learning that I would spend a year in Puno, he began uncontrollably laughing and then turned quite stern, telling me to be careful and watch out for the “unpredictable” locals. Months later, during one of my visits to the capital city, a prominent figure in gastronomic journalism told me that I must try the kankacho (a lamb stew) of Ayaviri (a town within the Puno region known for this dish) and without pause went on to warn me to be cautious while doing so. He suggested that the “very strange, very distinct” (“muy raras, muy distintas”) people of the region could not be trusted and then shared a convoluted story of a time he felt his life had been threatened while traveling in Puno. In January 2023, and just days after the massacre of seventeen protesters in Puno department by state police, de facto president Dina Boluarte declared, “Puno no es el Perú,” a statement that drew ire from Puneño politicians who interpreted it through a long history of antagonistic relations with Lima’s political apparatus and a prevailing idea of Puno as not quite part of “Peru.”Footnote ¹¹

Since the colonial era, the altiplano has been economically defined as a mining region. A hub of mining investment and mineral extraction, mining continues to be a major economic activity in the region. Under Spanish colonial rule, the region was known for the lucrative Laykakota silver mine. Since then, a number of large mines owned by foreign capital, large informal mining operations like La Rinconada, and small informal ones have been developed. The actual minerals of interest have shifted over time, with long-dominant interests in silver and gold recently surpassed by interest in newly discovered lithium deposits. To this day, mining remains both a major source of local employment and a cause of social conflicts in the region (Zevallos Yana Reference Zevallos Yana2020; Paredes Bermejo and Maquera Maquera Reference Paredes Bermejo and Maquera2016; McDonell Reference McDonell2014). Despite vast mineral wealth, the Puno department has exceedingly high rates of poverty. In 2023, Puno had the highest poverty rate (43 percent) of all departments (Instituto Peruano de Economía 2023).

Beyond mining, the altiplano is considered a pastoral landscape. The region’s agricultural systems have been seen as valuable primarily for livestock production rather than crops. The hacienda system in the altiplano was dominated by wool-production operations, which expanded drastically throughout Puno in the early twentieth century as the export of alpaca fiber became an increasingly lucrative venture for intermediaries and wool processors (Slater Reference Slater1989; Orlove Reference Orlove1977; Jacobsen Reference Jacobsen1993). Extreme power asymmetries left by colonial legacies and reinforced by the hacienda system met considerable resistance from peasant movements, marked by frequent uprisings across the twentieth century (Renique Reference Renique2004). Peru’s agrarian reform, which began in 1969, sought to upend the landlord-tenant systems structuring much rural land tenure in the altiplano, and in Puno, led to the creation of massive cooperatives focused on sheep, and to a lesser extent alpaca and cattle. The degree to which the cooperative model restructured power relations for the better in the region is debated as the cooperatives were dismantled in the 1980s in large part because of pervasive internal corruption (Mayer Reference Mayer2009; Paredes Mamani and Escobar-Mamani Reference Mamani, Paz and Escobar-Mamani2018). After the agrarian revolution, the growing agricultural development apparatus in the region sought to continue expanding cattle herds for dairying along with sheep and alpaca.

Despite being defined as a region for livestock and mining, Puno has incredibly lively crop production. Puno is dominated by peasant farming, defined here as small-scale farms that supply goods for the family unit using primarily family labor, while selling surplus to markets. Typically, these are highly diversified and risk-averse household economies, with small plots of a number of crops in a carefully managed rotation, multiple varieties of livestock, supplemented by temporary informal employment for cash income.Footnote ¹² The region’s high altitude (3,500–5000 meters above sea level) generates a climate of extremes, with massive diurnal temperature fluctuations, frequent hailstorms, frosts, and a long dry season with exceedingly rare rainfall. Most nonnative crops fail here, and even hardy crops like barley do not reach full maturity in the altiplano climes. Altiplano societies have practiced agriculture for millennia, resulting in a highly specialized production system and carefully adapted crop varieties that work in these ecological conditions. Native grains like quinoa and the closely related kañiwa are high-protein foodstuffs that thrive in the high-altitude climate. A handful of tuber crops, including ulluco and oca, along with native potatoes (only special varieties of potatoes can survive in the altiplano) are also cultivated. Maintaining soil fertility often entails integrating a nitrogen-fixing crop like tarwi (a local lupine) into the production systems and strategically rotating fields to use as animal pasture. High-salinity soils and lack of oxygen further shape the region’s agricultural production systems and require complex crop rotations.

The kind of agricultural production possible in the altiplano is, in short, unproductive in a logic of capital. Diverse, small-scale agriculture is frequently framed as pathological and premodern, a view that has justified “improvement” regimes like the Green Revolution (Li Reference Li2007). Compared to livestock, which various agricultural development practitioners told me was like having “money in the bank,” Andean cropping systems do not easily translate into a capitalist form of wealth accumulation. Scholars have debated the degree to which highland peasants truly operate “outside” capitalist logics or whether this form of economic activity is actually a highly rational response to a particular position in relation to capitalism (Figueroa Reference Figueroa1984; Cotlear Reference Cotlear1989; Mayer and Glave Reference Mayer and Glave1999). Still others argue that peasant logics in the altiplano are not beyond or even adjacent to capitalism, but that capitalism developed in an idiosyncratic and “stunted” way in the altiplano as a result of the persistence of colonial power asymmetries (Jacobsen Reference Jacobsen1993). Although research has shown how smallholder farmers often symbolically and materially separate subsistence crops that are part of local meaning systems from market crops (Dove Reference Dove2011), the transformation of peasant crops into market crops is an increasingly common dynamic, fueled here by Peru’s gastronomic revolution.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, development projects in the region have focused primarily on making farming profitable. Attempts to capitalize altiplano agriculture include introducing new technologies while training farmers in profit-oriented production strategies and entrepreneurial logics.Footnote ¹³ Numerous projects have centered on livestock “improvement” and adding value to milk products, but starting in the 1980s, a concerted effort emerged to commercialize specific crops, especially quinoa. The Centro Internacional de Recursos Naturales y el Medio Ambiente (known as CIRNMA), a Puno-based nongovernmental organization working in agricultural development, was a pioneer in organizing farmers around commercial quinoa production in the 1990s. At the time, the center’s work was largely funded by external grants, and it was an uphill battle to convince farmers that it was worth their time to invest in commercial quinoa production when prices were so low. In 2014, the organization’s director described their defining the challenge defining their work in the 1990s plainly: “The problem was demand. No one wanted to buy or eat quinoa at the time.” Native altiplano crops like quinoa were considered unremarkable and even disagreeable outside the region. Their consumption was largely stigmatized among Peru’s urban middle class and upper classes, a dynamic that would change drastically when quinoa captured the attention for wealthy eaters outside Peru in the 2010s.

The boom: Quinoa as global commodity and producto bandera

The problem of a lack of demand for quinoa would change dramatically in the early 2000s as health-conscious foreign consumers grew interested in the grain.Footnote ¹⁴ Demand for quinoa in the United States and Europe skyrocketed at that time, such that between 2005 and 2014, exports increased from less than one thousand tons to thirty-six thousand tons as prices surged by almost 700 percent. Quinoa was increasingly sought after far from the altiplano; it had joined a class of foods that cosmopolitan eaters increasingly were willing to pay a premium for: “superfoods.” While some foreign consumers knew that quinoa originated in the Andes, and quinoa product packaging occasionally drew on a connection to the Inca Empire, many of the new eaters were ignorant of quinoa’s origins, and instead ate the grain for its specific nutritional attributes or more general “health halo.”

As a direct result of this growing demand, quinoa production was expanding beyond South America. While efforts to introduce quinoa production outside the Andes had been underway at an experimental level for decades, this work took on new vigor with the demand surge and the United Nations’ declaration of 2013 as the International Year of Quinoa. Among the International Year of Quinoa’s explicit goals was the expansion of quinoa consumption and production across the globe (Food and Agriculture Organization 2013; McDonell Reference McDonell2015). While actors who had been working to commercialize quinoa for decades appreciated the recognition and investment brought by the United Nations, the declaration also contributed to a much more competitive global quinoa market where the Andean countries no longer completely monopolized commercial quinoa production (Alandia et al. Reference Alandia, Rodriguez, Jacobsen, Bazile and Condori2020). By 2014, seventy-five countries were producing quinoa, many at a commercial level (Bazile, Jacobsen, and Verniau Reference Bazile, Jacobsen and Verniau2016). Quinoa was no longer exclusively an Andean crop.

Quinoa’s surging popularity with foreign consumers alongside increasing competition from new quinoa-producing countries corresponded to a sudden efflorescence of projects seeking to claim quinoa as Peruvian, a dynamic evident in government programs and product marketing alike. Around 2013, we see a push to territorialize quinoa at the national level—that is, to link quinoa to Peru in the eyes of foreign and domestic buyers and consumers. In 2013, Peru’s now defunct Mistura food festival, which boasted up to four hundred thousand visitors a year, introduced a special hall in the fair called Mundo Quinua that exclusively featured quinoa-based products and dishes. That same year, Peru’s Ministry of Exterior Relations claimed quinoa as a flagship product (producto bandera), joining pisco and ten other Peruvian commodities marketed as such (INDECOPI 2013). Soon PromPeru, a wing of the Ministry of Exterior Commerce and Tourism, was developing an official tourism route called the Ruta de la Quinua to capitalize on the success of quinoa abroad for tourism purposes.Footnote ¹⁵ That same ministry featured quinoa in its promotional campaigns at product expos across the globe, notably in the Superfoods Peru campaign, which imagined Peru as the “land of superfoods.” Meanwhile, Lima’s most elite restaurants, which cater to foreign diners and Peruvian elites and explicitly brand their food as Peruvian, were featuring quinoa prominently on their menus as a hallmark ingredient of national cuisine.Footnote ¹⁶

Quinoa, long distasteful to the country’s elites, was suddenly a lucrative object of national pride: a genuine Peruvian food. While globalization scholarship from the 1990s tended to predict that place-based identities would slowly take on less and less import, research has found precisely the opposite dynamic. Globalization leads local, regional, and national identities to take on more import (Wilk Reference Wilk2006; Parasecoli Reference Parasecoli2022). Indeed, it is with quinoa’s success in global markets and growing interest among foreign farmers that efforts develop to claim quinoa as distinctly Peruvian.

Although most commentary has underscored the rise in quinoa exports, internal demand was growing quickly as well. Official figures show that Peru’s domestic demand grew from twenty-eight thousand tons in 2000 to seventy-eight thousand tons in 2014, more than doubling per capita consumption (MINAGRI, DGESEP, and DEA 2015). Many upper-class Peruvians who previously shunned the grain were eating it with abandon.Footnote ¹⁷ Eating quinoa no longer signaled rural, indigenous identity in a straightforward way. Quinoa consumption expanded across social classes and regions, such that variation in how, where, and the form in which one ate quinoa became vital for signaling one’s class and racial identity. Quinoa transformed into a celebrated national food that helped urban Peruvians feel connected to an imagined rural past and a more authentic “Deep Peru.”Footnote ¹⁸ Quinoa derived its authenticity for Peruvian elites precisely from its origins in the altiplano and its production by indigenous Andeans.

Quinoa’s (re)construction as a “national food” also meant its conscious reinvention as an emblem of Peruvian identity writ large. To be Peruvian was to eat quinoa, as suggested by a T-shirt for sale in downtown Lima in 2015 that read Más peruano que la quinua. Critically, these sorts of national foods may symbolize national identity even when they are not an everyday dietary mainstay for the general population. Richard Wilk’s (Reference Wilk and Finnis2012) study of nationalism and diets in Belize, for instance, found much discrepancy between the foods people said represented Belizean food and the foods they actually ate on a daily basis. While rice and beans were constantly cited as the most important Belizean dish, hamburgers made up a much larger part of the daily diet (but were never mentioned as Belizean food). Quinoa in Peru increasingly occupied a similar role to rice and beans in Belize. Its discursive power as a symbol of the multicultural nation had to be constantly maintained through overt celebration. Wilk (Reference Wilk and Finnis2012, 26) emphasizes that constant reminders about the importance of rice and beans maintained its status as a self-consciously national dish: “Every public event or banquet that has any pretense to being cultural, in the sense of relating to local rather than global cosmopolitan values, must include at least a token scoop of rice and beans on the plate. This dish is like a flag, which must constantly be kept visible as a reminder that some values are more important than others.” Quinoa was increasingly a conspicuously Peruvian food.

Quinoa became a chief symbol of the gastronomic riches that lie waiting discovery in the Andes. The grain not only offers a highly marketable story of the undervalued and “lost” Peruvian food but also is easily adaptable to European dishes. Gastón Acurio, the celebrity chef considered the leader and main public face of the gastronomic revolution, explains quinoa’s versatility as key to its recent success with new consumers: “Famous chefs from around the world have shown us that this grain is not only able to adapt to diverse Peruvian dishes like ceviche, tamales, juanes, rocoto relleno, and tacu tacu, among others, but that it can be successfully work in the most exquisite dishes of other cultures too” (Acurio Reference Acurio2017). These dynamics together helped make quinoa a key symbol of the economic potential of Peru’s “undervalued” culinary cupboard and the altiplano as a source of culinary abundance (McDonell Reference McDonell, McDonell and Wilk2020).Footnote ¹⁹

Yet as the Peruvian state, Limeño restauranteurs, and quinoa exporters sought to territorialize quinoa at the national level, the view of quinoa as Peruvian did not proceed uncontested. During the quinoa boom, few, if any, quinoa industry actors in the highlands took issue with quinoa’s Peruvianization. The profits they enjoyed over those first years when the crop fetched record prices in response to international demand meant that they were generally willing to subscribe to the state’s claim that quinoa belonged to all Peruvians. Yet when quinoa’s price plummeted a few years later, competing claims emerged that sought to reterritorialize quinoa at a different scale.

Reclaiming quinoa as an altiplano crop

At the same time that quinoa production was expanding outside Andean countries, the production geography within Peru was shifting dramatically. With quinoa’s growing price, a host of Peruvian agribusiness leaders and politicians began to see a future for quinoa as a major cash crop. In 2012, Nadine Heredia, Peru’s first lady at the time, spearheaded a project incentivizing quinoa production among large-scale agricultural producers along the Peruvian coast. While these farms had been primarily producing rice at an industrial scale, quinoa’s soaring price attracted their attention, and the government’s offers of assistance further encouraged the adoption of a new, albeit risky, crop.

As global demand climbed, integrating quinoa into a “modern” capital-intensive production system appeared to ensure that Peru would become the global leader in quinoa exports. The altiplano’s complex agriculture landscape prevented economies of scale necessary to rapidly increase national production figures. Through technical assistance, training, and seed subsidies, Heredia’s Proquinua program helped develop commercial quinoa production outside the altiplano (AgroRural 2014). The initiative made clear that, for Peru’s central government, quinoa’s revalorization was not primarily an opportunity to provide incomes for farmers in the highlands. Instead, quinoa’s popularity abroad offered economic opportunity for Peru’s agribusiness sector and a chance to position Peru as the world’s chief quinoa exporter.

At the same time that Peru’s celebrity chefs were touting quinoa’s connection to the altiplano and constructing its authenticity based on its regional identity, the grain’s indelible link to the altiplano was being destabilized. In the short term, Proquinua and the larger effort to develop capital-intensive quinoa production outside the altiplano was a massive success. Peru’s coastal production increased drastically between 2012 and 2014. While the highlands accounted for more than 99 percent of quinoa production before 2011 (and Puno consistently produced more than 80 percent), by 2014, producers along Peru’s coast were growing 40 percent of the national total (MINAGRI, DGESEP, and DEA 2015). In just two years, Peru’s coastal regions—primarily Arequipa, along with La Libertad, Lambayeque, Lima, Tacna, and Moquegua—became major quinoa-producing centers (see Supplementary Material). Not only had coastal farmers replaced other crops with quinoa, but productivity was far higher on the coast. Whereas 1,000 kilograms per hectare (kg/ha) constitutes an impressive yield in the highlands, and averages are closer to 800 kg/ha, coastal producers reported yields of 4,000–6,000 kg/ha, owing largely to access to technology and an accommodating climate that allowed two harvests per year. By late 2014, quinoa was no longer exclusively a highland crop, biophysically speaking.

The dramatic increase in coastal production resulted in a glut. National production had surged from 44,200 tons in 2012 to 114,700 tons in 2014. Even though global demand was still rising quickly, the rapid growth of quinoa production in Peru had outpaced consumer demand. Prices fell accordingly. Quinoa’s farm gate price in Puno peaked in mid-2014 at US$3.20 per kilo and by mid-2015 Puno’s farmers were receiving less than a dollar per kilogram while Arequipa’s farmers reported prices as low as US$0.65 per kilo (MINAGRI, DGESEP, and DEA 2015). The expansion of quinoa production into Peru’s coast was undermining the altiplano’s industry.

While overproduction sent prices falling, contamination scandals began to erupt. Over the course of 2014 and 2015, the US Food and Drug Association rejected hundreds of tons of Peruvian quinoa found to contain pesticide and fungicide levels exceeding US Environmental Protection Agency limits (Ayma Reference Ayma2015). Highland farmers and most industry actors in Puno blamed the contaminated quinoa on coastal producers. While quinoa proved highly productive in the warm, oxygen-rich coastal environment, it was also found to be highly susceptible to the coast’s plentiful insects, such that it was well known that coastal producers had to apply chemicals to salvage their yields. The persistent chemical residue on exported quinoa meant that Peruvian quinoa in particular lost value as foreign buyers’ trust in the quality of the product ebbed. Peru’s quinoa was selling for less than Bolivian quinoa, and many highland farmers feared that the coastal fracaso had ruined the stature of Peruvian quinoa for good. Peru’s quinoa buyers and exporters lamented the tarnished reputation of Peru’s quinoa and the corresponding trust issue they were facing.

Altiplano farmers and other actors involved in the industry were upset about the tarnished reputation of Peruvian quinoa and more broadly the usurpation of quinoa by large-scale producers along the coast. This expansion of quinoa production into new realms led to an emerging discourse differentiating Puno’s quinoa from coastal quinoa. Beginning in 2015, farmers, researchers, and buyers I spoke with began to claim quinoa produced in Puno cooked or tasted different than other quinoa, something they justified with varying explanations from soil type to the “natural” production methods. While they at times contrasted it to Bolivian quinoa, they mostly sought to differentiate it from quinoa produced in other regions of Peru. Either way, Puno’s quinoa farmers and industry actors were increasingly talking about the region’s quinoa as distinct from Peruvian quinoa as a larger category that included coastal production.

In 2015, a group of industry actors in Puno, including quinoa processors, producer community leaders, and development practitioners, began convening to figure out a strategy to legally differentiate their quinoa that would conceivably protect them from the reputational issues brought about by linkage to coastal producers implied with the designation of quinoa as a Peruvian product. Place-based labels like appellations of origin and collective brands have become an increasingly popular strategy to protect agricultural producers from competition and to protect agricultural production systems (Parasecoli Reference Parasecoli2017). In recent decades, this strategy, which developed in Europe for products like Champagne and Roquefort cheese, has been expanded into contexts across the Global South, offering a new strategy to protect local agricultural producers from competition from abroad and sometimes internally.Footnote ²⁰

While conversations about differences between highland and coastal quinoa were rare during the boom times, the bust revealed that the commercial quinoa production in the altiplano could persist only if it confronted the increasing competition from coastal producers. Altiplano quinoa needed to be distinguished from the increasing supply of “commodity” quinoa entering global markets.Footnote ²¹ Rather than collaborating with other Peruvian producers, actors in the highland industry increasingly perceived Peruvian producers outside the altiplano as competition.

A small group of relatively savvy quinoa buyers, processors, and individuals linked to various sorts of regional government entities began working to develop a collective brand that would market Puno’s quinoa as authentic and natural. The idea was to allow only certified organic quinoa to be sold under the brand and to develop a highly regulated traceability system to make sure that only high-quality quinoa was being sold with the name. More broadly, the project was a confrontation to the nation’s appropriation of quinoa as a national product. Quinoa was not a Peruvian product; it was an altiplano product.

The effort began when Puno’s Mesa de la Quinua received a small grant from a federal government program and a Swiss development agency already working in organic certification of quinoa in Puno. They hired a consultant from Lima specialized in creating collective brands in 2016. The consultant was tasked with generating a short list of marketable names for the collective brand and creating the reglamentos that delineated the rules of operation for the brand. Yet this process of developing a governance apparatus for a collectively managed commodity proved challenging. Members disagreed about the process by which new members should be integrated into the marca, the way they would ensure quality of the product, and the funding mechanisms, issues that ultimately became intertwined as the contamination scandals began erupting in the highlands in late 2016.

Puno’s industry actors were not alone in pursuing this strategy. A handful of origin-based label projects for quinoa emerged across the Andes and beyond in the wake of the bust especially. Long a product tied to the Andes, quinoa was escaping physically and symbolically from the region as production expanded into new areas and growing demand appeared to be turning quinoa into another “placeless” commodity. Origin-based labels seemed to be the best way to keep quinoa Andean, or at least to keep substantial market share in the Andes. Bolivia, too, had been working to develop a geographic indication for Quinoa Real, and in interviews with Bolivia quinoa processors, it appears that they would be successful in legal terms, but the details of governance of the institutional arrangement were still being debated. In addition, a Cusqueño agronomist and French geographer who has also been one of key promotors of quinoa’s global expansion have been attempting to spearhead a pan-Andean collective brand that would include Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, Ecuador, and Chile (Chevarria Lazo and Bazile Reference Lazo, Allan and Bazile2017). At the same time, producer groups who only recently took up quinoa production also saw collective brands as a strategy to add value to their product. A group of farmers in Peru’s coastal region of Lambayeque, who only recently took up production, were launching a collective brand, Uiz Kik Peruvian Quinoa. A group of French farmers who also were new to quinoa production secured a collective brand for their quinoa, marketing it as “local” and leveraging the media coverage that portrayed the quinoa boom as harming Andean farmers. The bust brought a frenzy of efforts to territorialize quinoa at different scales, and within Puno, the primary goal was to distinguish Puno’s quinoa from other Peruvian quinoa.

Puno’s collective brand project has yet to be completed, more than seven years since it was initiated. There is not space to delineate the reasons for its failure here, but we can analyze the larger dynamic within the spatial contradictions of capital brought about by the gastronomic revolution. The effort to develop a collective brand was ultimately a project to reclaim quinoa as an altiplano product, to reterritorialize it. Gastronomic revolution logics imagine products produced in Peru as free for the taking, claimable as Peruvian. Yet the efforts to territorialize quinoa and reconnect it symbolically to the altiplano represent the contested nature of this discourse. Puno’s industry actors were not opposed to quinoa’s increasing prominence as a commodity, but they wanted benefits to accrue to Puno’s farmers and industry actors.