Manuela Ramírez Pérez
In 2020, I had the opportunity to visit Celele, a Colombian gourmet restaurant in Cartagena. As an adult, this was my first taste of a restaurant that had been so critically acclaimed. As a passionate follower of “foodies,” or food and cooking influencers, for more than 10 years, I thought it would be a good idea to try out Celele, which was highly recommended on social media. The restaurant, which has won multiple awards, exudes warmth and comfort, similar to the kind of hospitality found in a traditional Colombian home. It is decorated with murals depicting the diversity of the country.
Thinking back to a little over a decade ago, I remember my family’s tradition of celebrating special dates (birthdays, graduations, mother’s/father’s day) at different highly acclaimed restaurants. My sister and I would read about these restaurants in various blogs and magazines. In particular, the blog called “Salchichitas Cocacola” written by two Colombian women who loved to taste new foods—just like us—and who went around Bogota to try different restaurants. Inspired by these two women’s culinary travels and delicious words, my sister and I also wanted to offer our own “culinary recommendations speaking with our mouths full and from the heart.”[1] However, at that time, I did not know much about restaurant awards or critic lists. Back then, it was enough to know that even just one person thought a restaurant was good in order for us to want to try it. From time to time, these restaurants would surprise us in the best of ways, and on other occasions, they left us with a bitter taste in our mouths and stomachs—a feeling similar to a heartbreak, the taste of deception or delusion.
With time I was increasingly acquainted with the emerging gastronomic boom in Bogotá led by restaurants such as the emblematic Leo Cocina y Cava, and more recently, El Chato, Criterión, Mini-Mal, Mesa Franca, Andrés Carne de Res, or Salvo Patria. The chefs of these restaurants take pride in promoting the cultural diversity and biodiversity of Colombia by reflecting such diversities in the variety and richness of Colombian cuisine.
Returning to my experience at Celele in 2020, as a now adult anthropologist, I recall being seated immediately, ready to order the tasting menu. The waiter began explaining the restaurant’s motto: “to reinvent or deconstruct the imaginary of Colombian Caribbean cuisine, which is fried fish, coconut rice (arroz con coco) and fried plantain (patacón).” They brought to life the motto magnificently. Each dish was an exploration of flavor and color. The first dish was mussels escabeche, avocado, sea purslane, seaweed, and pork skin soufflé. The second dish was an “homage” to the immense variety of Caribbean beans (not in casserole as they are usually consumed in the country) with eggplant, moringa leaves, and fried costeño cheese (in tassels). The third dish was Pateburro snail, which is typical of the island of San Bernando del Viento, prepared with varieties of corn and sorghum. The fourth was inspired from La Guajira with goat or chivo stewed in coconut milk served with sundried shrimp’s rice from La Guajira and a shrimp cookie. The dessert was Arhuaco chocolate, guaimaro, carob tree, corn and sweet pepper.
The meal was so pleasurable that we spent a little over three hours enjoying the food! The tasting dishes were small and could easily be finished in an hour, but every time I took a bite, I wanted it to last for hours and surprisingly, it did. During the dessert course, I was fortunate to exchange a brief conversation with Chef Jaime Rodríguez, who provided further details and stories behind some of the ingredients used in the restaurant’s recipes. I had never eaten many of these foods or preparations before. I felt that I was discovering my own country through each bite. After this delicious culinary experience, I was inspired to return to my roots in research: food.
Because of my scholarly background in anthropology and my personal experiences working with peasant communities in different parts of Colombia, my experience at Celele, in addition to being delicious, especially sparked my academic interest and raised many questions for me: Did these recipes really originate from peasant communities, to then be reinterpreted by the chef? Did both the chef and the peasants attribute the same meaning to these “unknown” varieties of beans or corn served at the restaurant? Were the peasant communities who sourced the restaurant benefiting from the restaurant’s success? In sum, what were the relationship dynamics between the chef and these communities? From my privileged positionality as a Colombian white-mestizo woman from the capital city of Colombia, eating Caribbean cuisine unaffordable to many local communities, I began to think more critically about these questions. These questions formed the basis of a research project conducted during my second master’s degree in anthropology and sociology. I was able to interview some of the peasants in a region called Montes de María, where Celele sources their ingredients. In addition, I was able to delve into what scholarship was written on this phenomenon in the fields of the anthropology of food, cuisine, and Colombian history.
Although Latin American gastronomy is recognized worldwide, not much was known about Colombian gastronomy until recently with the emergence of a movement of new chefs, who have attempted to renew the local cuisine.[2] From the perspective of a global audience, Colombia is known for its coffee and fruits, but little is known about its varieties of corn, beans, plantains, and potatoes. Contemporary chefs have worked profusely to expand the gastronomic offerings based on an “exploration” of these local products.
The success of Colombia’s gastronomic scene is reflected in the increasing inclusion of local restaurants in critic lists such as the “50 Best Restaurants in the World” in recent years.[3] Chefs and social science academics alike have argued that this phenomenon is due to years of different disciplinary studies—ranging from traditional historical research to culinary exploration of ingredients and cultural heritage—seeking to recover recipes and ingredients of Colombian cuisine.[4] As a result, more and more chefs use local ingredients and reproduce dishes and flavors from regional cuisines that many diners were previously unaware of, which has allowed these chefs to position themselves as “authentic” interpreters of regional cuisine.
Colombia is composed of six macro-regions: Caribbean, Andean, Pacific, Orinoco, Insular, and the Amazon. Known as “one of the world’s ‘megadiverse’ countries” that sustains about “10 percent of the planet’s biodiversity,” Colombia ranks “first in bird and orchid species diversity and second in plants, butterflies, freshwater fish and amphibians.”[5] Despite such biodiversity, the country is immersed in one of the longest internal armed conflicts in the world which has caused the country to remain poorly connected. Transportation between rural areas and the cities is a challenge that hinders the distribution of raw materials, which causes these products to have higher market prices. However, some of the “new wave” Colombian chefs attend to this challenge by positioning themselves to respond to this challenge by establishing commercial relationships directly with producers. In some cases, this has naturally led restaurants to have dynamic and changing menus based on the availability of the different harvest seasons.
Montes de María, an area where Celele sources its products, has a history marked, in part, by the armed conflict raging in Colombia for more than six decades. In response, various initiatives have sprouted from civil society, international development aid, and the local and national government to: (1) rebuild and strengthen the social fabric and collective memory and (2) contribute to peacebuilding.[6] In Montes de María, a group of peasants have come together to sell foods with additional environmental value. These regional foods are environmentally regenerative and increasingly farmed because of their conservatory characteristics that help protect the rich ecosystems of the tropical dry forest (bosque seco tropical). The peasants also built important relationships with Miguel Durango, a seed custodian, who serves as a bridge between the community and gourmet restaurants such as Celele. Their relationship is based on mutual trust and respect for each other’s knowledge in order to improve the living conditions of the communities through sustainable use of both human and natural resources. The peasants told me how their labor is a constant learning process through discovery and recovery of seeds and traditional recipes which had almost been lost to forced displacement due to armed conflict. Today, they have managed to position Montes de María, in both the Caribbean region and the country more broadly, as a territory of peace and agroecological production.
Through his taste for food and cooking, Miguel identified that some local Colombian restaurants were already using these ingredients. He created a network of chefs in the area with whom he would later work, leading to mutually beneficial relationships between the local communities and the restaurants. The chefs sought to explore regional products of the local communities and the seed custodian wanted to promote them.
Money earned through this network has not only improved the economic conditions of local communities, but also strengthened the communal associations through the promotion of agroecological practices and products. One effective strategy promotes peasant markets by emphasizing the added environmental value of their products due to the use of agroecological techniques with native seeds and additional conservation work in the tropical dry forest ecosystem. The sale of these products to gourmet restaurants is thus based on the peasants’ harvests and not on the restaurants’ needs; it is a bottom-up social, economic, and cultural process.
Thinking back to my bites of Celele’s delicious mixture of Caribbean beans with eggplant, moringa leaves, fried costeño cheese or the pateburro snail from San Bernardo del Viento, I am pleasantly reminded of this experience in Montes de María that embodies a recent and innovative approach to social, agricultural production, and environmental challenges. This multiscalar process that I have briefly outlined demonstrates how food can reconstruct and reconnect communities with their territories, as a way to preserve cultural heritage, biodiversity, and rebuild social fabric and peasant culture in a post-conflict context.
In the midst of the gastronomic boom in Latin America, where chefs showcase “rediscovered” or “recovered” foods, the case of Montes de María is a successful example that could be replicated in other areas and with other peasant communities and associations. Anthropology can contribute to these reflections on the emerging use and presentation of native and traditional foods by the gourmet restaurant industry. This is even more relevant in the post-conflict context of Colombia where communities, such as those of Montes de María, are returning to their territories.
This return back to the land implies not only a reestablishment of the rights of those who have been dispossessed from their territories, but their arrival also contributes to the strengthening of the culture and peasant economies of these regions. Perhaps most important, returning back to these lands and making use of these agroecological and cultural practices contributes to the preservation of the delicate tropical dry forest ecosystems of these regions.
[1] Translated from: https://salchichitascocacola.wordpress.com/2013/02/04/comeback/
[2] See, https://www.semana.com/cultura/articulo/comida-en-colombia-mejores-platos-y-chefs/552410/
[3] Julia Londoño, “El año dorado de la gastronomía colombiana”, El Tiempo (Colombia) 2021, Dec. 25, 2021
[4] See https://www.eltiempo.com/cultura/gastronomia/fallecio-julian-estrada-un-gran-referente-de-la-gastronomia-colombiana-693409, https://www.redicot.org/index.php/revista/article/view/156/17, https://publicaciones.banrepcultural.org/index.php/boletin_cultural/article/view/20977
[5] https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/press-release/colombia-host-2020-world-environment-day-biodiversity
[6] See https://stories.undp.org/producto-de-la-paz, https://elpais.com/elpais/2018/05/07/planeta_futuro/1525697628_379881.html
Biography
Manuela Ramírez Pérez currently works for the UNITAR in Geneva. She holds a Bachelor in Anthropology, and Master’s Degrees in Rural and in Anthropology and Sociology from the Geneva Graduate Institute. She worked for the Mayor’s Office of Bogotá in a project supporting productive reconversion. She holds extensive field experience working on peacebuilding and human rights. She worked for the OAS Mission to Support the Peace Process in Colombia, and for the UN Verification Mission in Colombia.
gradfoodstudies.org 