Pod Insights Gastropod The Rise and Fall of Quinoa: From Incan "Superfood" to Buddha Bowl Basic About this episode Quinoa is everywhere these days, the base for a million salads and grain bowls. But, until recently, barely anyone outside the nutritious seed's ancient's homeland—the Peruvian and Bolivian Andes—had ever heard of it. This week, we're telling the story of how a gorgeous spinach-like plant traditionally grown in a remote, high-altitude region of South America was transformed into one of the hottest foods on the shelves at Whole Foods. This is a tale that began with Coloradan hippies, the deliberate invention of a new Peruvian gastronomy, and beer, but truly took off when the United Nations declared that this so-called "superfood" was the secret to solving global hunger, adapting to climate change, and rescuing Andean farmers from poverty. So, did quinoa deliver? Listen in now for the story behind your next Buddha bowl.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:03 Speaker 00 Way back in the dim and distant past, I'm talking 2011 here, a parody song went viral. It was set in the Whole Foods parking lot, specifically Whole Foods on the west side of LA.
0:26 Speaker 00 I missed this at the time, but apparently it was huge. Ryan Seacrest tweeted it, the news covered it. Whole Foods wanted to like use it officially. It had some really iconic lines about some pretty iconic upper-middle-class trends at the time, like kale salad and kombucha and driving a Prius.
0:42 Speaker 01 This buster's on his iPhone talking to his friends, picking up some cayenne pepper for his nasty cleanse. You're the most annoying dude I've ever seen, bra. Could you please move your right in front of the quinoa?
0:53 Nicola Twilley? Oh, man, don't block the quinoa. How's a bra gonna have a kale salad and some kombucha without quinoa?
0:59 Speaker 00 And yes, quinoa is the focus of this episode of Gastropod. That's right, you're listening to Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history. I'm Cynthia Graber.
1:07 Nicola Twilley? And I'm Nicola Twilley. And this episode, we're telling the story of how quinoa rose from its obscure Andean origins to Whole Foods parody rap glory.
1:17 Speaker 00 Once quinoa did burst onto the global scene, what impact did this popularity have on farmers in the Andes, the descendants of the people who domesticated it, who up until really pretty recently were basically the only ones who were eating it?
1:30 Nicola Twilley? You will never look at your grain bowl the same way again. This episode is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for the Public Understanding of Science, Technology, and Economics. Gastropod is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network in partnership with Eater.
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3:08 Speaker 04 So quinoa is a crop that's native to the Andean Highlands. It's cultivated in this area with really high altitudes. So we're talking 12,000 feet of altitude and even higher.
3:21 Speaker 00 Emma McDonald is an anthropologist at the University of Tennessee Chattanooga and the author of a new book called The Quinoa Bust: The Making and Unmaking of an Andean Miracle Crop.
3:30 Nicola Twilley? She spent several seasons doing field research in quinoa-growing and processing communities in Peru, embedding herself with farmers, with the agricultural technicians who work for wholesalers, and with the wholesalers themselves.
3:43 Speaker 00 Emma says that even though you find quinoa in a grain bowl in America, it's not the same as most of the rest of our grains.
3:49 Speaker 04 Many grain crops that we eat, so rice, wheat, corn, are grass species. Quinoa is not a grass species, and it's not a relative of any of those plants.
4:03 Nicola Twilley? Botanically, it's in the amaranth family.
4:05 Speaker 04 Quinoa is actually related to lamb's quarters, and spinach, and beets. So it's really kind of an interesting crop in thinking about that it is a grain, and yet it is not related even remotely to many of the common grains that we think of.
4:21 Speaker 00 And it looks really different on a farm than, say, a field of wheat, where it's like an expanse of these stalks that are around three feet tall, waving like grass in the wind.
4:29 Speaker 04 Quinoa actually has a pretty woody stalk. It can grow up to six feet tall. Different varieties, but generally they're between about four and six feet tall when mature. There are many different colors of quinoa, so it's also a really beautiful crop when it's mature and you're looking at fields of, you know, red or, or yellow, sometimes purple quinones.
4:52 Speaker 00 Like Emma said, quinoa originally comes from this very particular region in South America, a super harsh environment, high in the Andes, mostly in what is today Peru and Bolivia. It's called the altiplano, which means high plateau.
5:05 Speaker 04 So this is an area where really very few crops survive. And so quinoa is part of a pretty unique agricultural system in the Andean Highlands because crops that many listeners are familiar with, you know, tomatoes, corn, things like that, they can't survive at, you know, 13,000 feet of altitude.
5:25 Speaker 00 This high plateau, this altiplano in South America, it's huge. It's a little bit bigger than the entire state of New York, and it's so high up in the mountains that very few trees can even grow there.
5:35 Speaker 04 Really very few kind of plant species grow. It's a really kind of rugged environment, so there's really high, what we call diurnal temperature fluctuations. So the high temperatures during the day versus the lows at night have a really dramatic difference.
5:52 Speaker 00 It's really flat and sparse, but Emma says it's really beautiful. It's ringed by Andean mountains capped with white glaciers stretching up even higher into the sky. For the indigenous people living in this gorgeous but challenging landscape, quinoa was a big deal.
6:06 Speaker 04 Yeah, so quinoa has been both a cultural and dietary cornerstone in the Andes. So along with potatoes, which is another kind of central staple, quinoa is one of the main kind of starches available in this area. So we have archaeological evidence that shows us that for centuries, quinoa has been a really important part of diets throughout the Andean region.
6:30 Speaker 00 But it wasn't something that traditional farmers planted as a single crop, the way we do today with wheat on an industrial scale. It was part of a whole agricultural system.
6:38 Speaker 04 So quinoa is usually part of a crop rotation with potatoes. There are various other Important tuber species that are also often cultivated in this crop rotation.
6:50 Speaker 00 Some of those tubers like Oka and Oyuko, they're weirdly gorgeous. They come in like bright orange and pink and purple. I've seen them in the Andes and they look almost like jewels.
6:59 Speaker 04 This crop rotation also often involves tarwi, which is a local lupin species. So lupin as a legume fixes nitrogen. And so this crop plays a really important role in maintaining the soil fertility.
7:14 Speaker 00 Tarwi is kind of a crunchy bean, which although I am a huge bean lover, I am not actually a tarwi fan. But in the Andes, it was an important part of the whole deal. In its homeland, quinoa is a staple and it's eaten all kinds of ways.
7:27 Speaker 04 Quinoa is often eaten in soups. It's prepared in various different kinds of soups with chicken, with vegetables. There's many different quinoa soups. A favorite of mine is called pesque. This is like a sort of savory porridge. It's basically quinoa cooked in milk and also with some butter in it. Some people will add some garlic and it's this really kind of rich, delicious porridge. Another kind of interesting way that quinoa is prepared is what's called kispina. It's quinoa flour that is cooked in hot water and then sort of mixed usually with sugar and molded into a kind of unbaked cookie. It's a very sort of nutrient dense.
8:12 Speaker 04 Like you could think of it as a sort of energy bar of sorts.
8:15 Speaker 00 Might not have eaten an unbaked quinoa cookie, but I'm guessing that most of you listeners out there have tasted quinoa before. Maybe you make it regularly at home. I certainly do. But if you've never tried it, it tastes a little different from rice or wheat.
8:28 Speaker 04 Yeah, so quinoa has a subtle, what I would call a nutty flavor to it. Like most of the grains we eat, it really soaks up the flavors that it's cooked in. So if you cook it in chicken broth, it's gonna, you know, taste a bit like chicken broth. But I think that there's always kind of a bit of a nutty flavor to quinoa. And it does depend on the varieties.
8:48 Speaker 00 As is often the case with the staple, I tend to think of quinoa as just quinoa. The way I think of corn is corn. Corn and wheat is wheat, but of course, like wheat and corn, there are actually quinoa's plural, a whole world of them out there.
9:02 Speaker 04 So we don't actually know exactly how many quinoa varieties have been grown, but there are a lot of them. They vary based on size of the grain. They vary in color, so there are purple quinoa's, there are red quinoa's, there are yellow quinoa's, there are black quinoa's. They vary in terms of their kind of cooking and taste characteristics. So some quinoa's have a kind of stronger flavor than others. Some, when cooked, sort of create a kind of milkiness within the liquid that they are being cooked in. So they have different kind of culinary characteristics as well.
9:36 Speaker 00 And all these different quinoa sizes and colors and tastes, they also have really different advantages on the farm.
9:41 Speaker 04 Some quinoa's do really well in out of season frost. Other quinoa's are much more vulnerable. Some quinoa's have much thicker saponin layers than other quinoa's.
9:51 Speaker 00 This saponin layer is like a thin coating around the quinoa seed, and it tastes bitter.
9:56 Speaker 04 It serves some really important purposes. So this bitter flavor also prevents birds from gorging themselves on quinoa fields. It also prevents other kinds of pests from eating quinoa. And it's also a mild toxin for humans and other mammals. And so if you eat quinoa that that hasn't been sort of properly cleaned and the saponin layer is still there, you might get a mild stomach ache.
10:23 Speaker 00 Today, the kind you get in the supermarket either is a variety that doesn't have a lot of saponin, or the saponin has already been washed off before the quinoa was packaged. I remember reading things about rinsing quinoa before cooking it when I started buying it a very, very long time ago, but I don't remember ever doing that.
10:39 Nicola Twilley? I remember being sort of slapdash about the rinse step with some bulk bin quinoa way back before it was really popular, and then regretting my laziness when my pot of boiling quinoa got all bubbly like it was in the washing machine, which it kind of was.
10:55 Speaker 04 Saponin also, interestingly, has other uses, so it can be used as a soap and historically in this region has been used as a sort of laundry soap.
11:03 Speaker 00 Sounds delicious. Now, you've probably heard of the Incan Empire. It was the largest empire in all of South America in its day. From about the 1200s to the 1500s, the Incans ruled a huge swath of the Andes Mountains and the west coast of South America. Their realm included parts of what's now Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Argentina, Chile.
11:22 Nicola Twilley? By this point, quinoa was being grown and eaten throughout the Andes, not just in the Alta Plano, where it was first domesticated. It's really adaptable to different soils and altitudes and water levels, and it became a staple crop throughout the Incan Empire.
11:36 Speaker 00 Their ruler lived in Cusco, in what's now Peru, lower down in the Andes. And the story is that the Inca supreme leader is the one who ceremonially sowed the year's first quinoa to mark the new agricultural cycle.
11:47 Nicola Twilley? Once the Spanish conquistadors arrived, they obviously took notice of all the silver mines in the region. And, at least according to one of the main chroniclers, this guy who was the son of an Incan noblewoman and a Spanish conquistador, the Spanish were pretty into quinoa, too.
12:03 Speaker 04 He noted that many of the Spaniards were actually eating quinoa at this time, specifically quinoa leaves in soups is something that he mentions. And that's another kind of interesting aspect of quinoa is that not only are the grains edible, but the leaves themselves are very nutritious and delicious.
12:22 Speaker 00 So at first, the Spanish were into quinoa, but then they started to kind of disdain it.
12:26 Speaker 04 With time, quinoa came to be perceived as a quote unquote "Indian food," a food that was sort of associated with indigeneity in the Andes and also associated with poverty. This is something that quinoa is not alone in kind of having this connotation. So a number of foods, such as alpaca meat, cui, which is guinea pig, also take on similar sorts of connotations over the course of Spanish colonialism.
12:55 Nicola Twilley? This sort of biased perception of the people living in the Andes and their food as being kind of backward, it emerged over the centuries post-conquest, and it really hardened into a class system that still shapes society in Peru today.
13:08 Speaker 04 The coast is often considered to be sort of whiter, wealthier. It's often Perceived as being more sort of modern. Whereas the Andes has larger indigenous populations and is sort of perceived as representing kind of indigenous elements of Peru. So this translates into pretty dramatic social class disparities where most of the wealth in Peru is concentrated in coastal areas, whereas the rural areas of the Andes tend to have very high poverty rates. These are areas where kind of going to work in a mine is one of the main kind of income opportunities.
13:50 Speaker 00 And to be honest, even among the indigenous communities in the Andes, the region where quinoa is mostly farmed, so high up on the altiplano, even more remote than most of the rest of the Andean communities, that region is considered by rich Peruvians as really the most, quote, backwards.
14:05 Nicola Twilley? And so, eating quinoa, which people all over the Peruvian Andes carried right on doing throughout the centuries, that was seen as backward, too. Restaurants in coastal Lima did not serve quinoa.
14:17 Speaker 05 Oh, no, no, no, no.
14:18 Speaker 00 Jose Luis Travis is the chef and founder of Mission Ceviche in New York City. He grew up in Venezuela, but his father is Peruvian, and he moved to Lima to go to culinary school. Quinoa was not part of the curriculum.
14:29 Speaker 05 It was seen as enough fancy, maybe. It was consumed by the communities and the mountains where they come from.
14:38 Nicola Twilley? Another Peruvian on the Mission Ceviche team, David, told us that his grandparents were from the Andes, so he did grow up eating quinoa.
14:45 Speaker 06 So they are from Jacucho, so we have been eating especially like potatoes, quinoa, since we were kids.
14:52 Speaker 00 But his experience wasn't common because of prejudice.
14:54 Speaker 06 I mean, a long time ago, people didn't, they thought it was just for poor people.
14:59 Nicola Twilley? So when David was a kid, quinoa had fallen to about as far as you can get from desirable superfood status. How did it rise up again and take over the shopping carts at Whole Foods? That story after this break.
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16:57 Speaker 00 In the early 1900s, quinoa started to get some attention outside of the millions of people in the Andes who were farming it and eating it. A Bolivian researcher in 1910 studied its nutritional profile and found quinoa to be incredibly nutritious. It's high in protein and fiber and minerals like folate.
17:13 Nicola Twilley? Not long after, in 1918, an American named Edward Albee wrote an article marveling at these results and extolling the many virtues of this, quote, "exceedingly hardy crop." He thought it would make an excellent substitute for wheat to try to help deal with food shortages after the First World War.
17:31 Speaker 00 And the studies kept coming. People kept looking into quinoa and seeing how incredibly awesome it was.
17:35 Speaker 04 And so we see the development of this small cohort of sort of quinoa boosters or quinoa promoters in the early 20th century. These are folks who are flabbergasted that this crop that is...
17:51 Speaker 04 Super cheap, eaten by people that are sort of at the bottom of the social hierarchy, that this crop is incredibly nutritious, right? People start comparing it to milk and finding like, oh, my gosh, you know, it's sort of the quality of the protein is equal to or even better than milk. So they do studies feeding quinoa to rats and then feeding milk to rats and then feeding, you know, milk and quinoa to rats. And, you know, it turns out the rats that were fed quinoa grew the largest and the fastest.
18:24 Nicola Twilley? But despite these repeated demonstrations of how fabulous quinoa is, it kept not really catching on outside the Andes. It was just too big of a leap for Westerners at the time to think outside the dietary canon of Wonder Bread and milk, nature's perfect foods. You have to remember, this was a time of better living through chemistry and of course, fortified wheat and dairy are what most Westerners saw as the foundation of a healthy diet.
18:51 Speaker 00 But in the 1960s and 70s, there was a revolt against the Wonder Bread orthodoxy. We've talked about this on the show before. This was kind of a back to the land time, back to whole grains, and even looking out of the Western world to find other foods entirely. And one of those alternative-y type guys ended up in South America.
19:08 Speaker 04 Yeah, so in the late 1970s, a group of three Americans, one of them was a kind of spiritual seeker who had gone to Bolivia to study under a sort of spiritual guru and through that had encountered quinoa and grown sort of obsessed with quinoa. He meets and talks up quinoa to a couple other folks. So these three Americans basically launched the first sort of quinoa import-export venture, exporting Bolivian quinoa to the United States in the early 1980s. This is called Quinoa Corporation, which later becomes the brand Ancient Harvest, which
19:50 Speaker 04 some listeners may recognize from the grocery store aisles. It's still one of the large kind of quinoa retailers in the US.
19:59 Nicola Twilley? This first appearance of quinoa in American health food stores got going in the 1980s. These guys were in the Denver Boulder area and we are talking hardcore hippie crunchy types. By the mid 1980s, you could buy quinoa at health food stores around the US, but Emma told us there were only something like 20,000 to 40,000 quinoa eaters in the entire United States. Up from zero just a few years before, but still, that's really not a huge amount.
20:26 Speaker 00 I probably wasn't in that very first 20,000 to 40,000 quinoa eaters, but I did soon join the band. I became a vegetarian in 1990 and honestly, I can't remember when I first ate quinoa, but I did a lot of shopping at the health food store on campus and I feel like I've been eating quinoa forever, so it was definitely since then.
20:42 Nicola Twilley? My husband Jeff was also an early quinoa adopter. I had never tried it or any of the hippie classics like tofu or satan until he cooked them for me when we were in grad school in the early 2000s. Listeners, of course, I married him.
20:57 Speaker 00 And Jeff and I and our fellow crunchy vegetarians weren't the only ones paying attention. There was a New York Times article about the tiny ivory colored seed that was being, quote, rediscovered.
21:07 Nicola Twilley? This narrative of rediscovering something that had been lost, Emma says this was part of a larger movement in agricultural development circles that also gave quinoa a boost around this time.
21:19 Speaker 04 So in 1989, the National Research Council in the US published The Lost Crops of the Incas. This was a report featuring quinoa, but also some other interesting Andean crops and making the case that these crops have important roles to play beyond the Andes.
21:39 Speaker 00 This paper marked a pretty big change. Before the 1980s, for decades, something called the Green Revolution was the dominant ideology in agriculture in developed countries and was seen as the way to solve hunger in all countries. It kicked off after World War II and the focus was on breeding and improving crops so they could be grown in huge monocultures with plenty of fertilizers and pesticides. And this new approach to agriculture promised to feed the world.
22:02 Nicola Twilley? Something like quinoa was definitely not part of the Green Revolution. Instead, the West was exporting new and improved varieties of things like wheat, corn, and soy. But by the late 70s, early 80s, the whole green revolution model was coming in for some serious criticism. People increasingly thought that maybe there was some wisdom in indigenous practices and traditional varieties, and they started to focus their efforts on promoting these so-called lost or neglected crops like quinoa.
22:32 Speaker 00 Of course, it wasn't actually lost or neglected in the Andes, where millions of people still ate it, but never mind. The same change was beginning to take place within Peru, too. For a long time, a legacy of Spanish colonialism was that, as we said, quinoa was looked down on, and the crops that were grown and considered desirable were global staples like rice and wheat. This was true in the restaurants, too. You'd find Italian food or French food at fancy restaurants.
22:55 Speaker 04 It was an oxymoron to say that you're going to a kind of fancy Peruvian restaurant.
23:00 Nicola Twilley? But starting in the 1990s, Peruvian chefs in Lima began to pick up on this idea of taking pride in traditional foods and showcasing their own native culinary traditions and crops.
23:12 Speaker 04 They wanted to come up with a sort of haute cuisine that was based in Andean ingredients and sort of tap the richness of Andean biodiversity to create a unique and specifically high-end cuisine.
23:26 Nicola Twilley? Emma told us that a number of Peruvians told her that back in the 1990s, there was this feeling that Brazil was known for footballers and Argentina for tango, but Peru had nothing.
23:38 Speaker 00 So a bunch of Peruvians, mostly chefs. They decided that what Peru was going to offer was food. It was going to become the gastronomic capital of South America.
23:46 Nicola Twilley? And one of the ways it was going to make itself stand out was by using these unique alteplano crops. Now, full disclosure, a lot of the alteplano is actually in Bolivia, but a lot of these crops were grown in Peru throughout the Andes, and they were special.
24:01 Speaker 00 One of the earliest and most famous of these chefs using Peruvian crops in Peru's capital and gastronomic center in Lima is Gastón Acurio. He now has a whole fleet of restaurants around the world, but his first fancy restaurant was called Astrid Gastón, and he quickly turned to focus on serving alpaca and guinea pig and Amazonian fruits and all sorts of varieties of Andean potatoes and tubers and quinoa. He became kind of the face of this new gastronomic revolution in Peru, but he certainly wasn't the only one.
24:30 Speaker 04 Kind of gives permission to specifically elites in Peru to eat quinoa. So these restaurants start featuring Andean ingredients and plating them using kind of French plating techniques and French cooking techniques and sort of repackaging them for a different audience.
24:50 Speaker 00 Basically, once quinoa was on the menu in a white tablecloth restaurant, being prepared in a fancy European-inflected way, it was not backwards anymore. In fact, it was extremely trendy.
25:01 Speaker 05 Become something that you can, you can hold this, bring it to the war, and at the same time, you know, makes Peru as a name outside, right?
25:12 Speaker 00 Nikki and I were in New York recently, so we were able to meet with Jose Luis in person. He told us that he didn't cook with quinoa in culinary school, but he started to see it on menus in Lima as, say, the base of a tabouleh, which is certainly not originally Peruvian.
25:25 Speaker 05 This is the beauty of quinoa. Actually, quinoa is very versatile. You can do so many things. Right now, in the menu, we have it as a furikake, which is like a mix of seasoning from Japan. You know, have the seaweed, have seasoning. We use the red quinoa. It's kind of more crispy. So we cook it in the oven. When it's ready, we dehydrate it one more time for hours, and then we just deep fry, and they pop.
25:54 Speaker 00 Jose Luis brought us a dish with this puffed quinoa furikake. It was scattered very beautifully on top of a ceviche made with tuna and scallops and tomatillo.
26:04 Speaker 05 Okay, so this is one of my favorite dishes. We call it ceviche en équation.
26:08 Speaker 04 I kind of want to start with just the quinoa, just because that's what we're here for. So I'm going to tie a little crispy quinoa.
26:13 Speaker 00 I've definitely never had quinoa like this.
26:17 Speaker 00 Oh, it's like crunchy. Mmm.
26:20 Speaker 04 It's delish. I mean, he's, is exactly what he says. It's like that Japanese furikake, but with a crispy, crunchy quinoa that gives it also a little tiny bit of a, like, just this little more graininess to it.
26:34 Speaker 00 It's like puffed rice, but almost like a little bit nuttier. And then, of course, we ate a bite of everything all together.
26:41 Speaker 00 Incredible. Wow, that's delicious.
26:43 Nicola Twilley? I really like the crunch.
26:44 Speaker 00 Jose Luis does all kinds of non-traditional fun things with quinoa. He makes a quinoa salad with hearts of palm and tomatoes. He makes quinoa granola.
26:53 Speaker 05 You can bring it to the, to the sweet side. I don't know, you can make melocotones, any kind of fruit. You can do like a cake with quinoa.
27:04 Speaker 00 And they also make a version of a risotto with quinoa that we got to taste. David brought it over to us.
27:08 Speaker 06 This is called quinoto. We're gonna use one of the best quinwas from Peru. It's gonna be the red quinoa and some Parmesan cheese to give like a risotto way. And we're gonna use five type of seafood, especially like mahi mahi, also scallops.
27:23 Speaker 04 I know, sometimes our jobs are hard, but we dove in.
27:27 Speaker 00 It is very rich. And the quinoa in this just gives it a little bit of body.
27:30 Nicola Twilley? Mmm. It's funny, I'm trying to compare it to risotto. I feel like the quinoa, it still stays a little more separate.
27:36 Speaker 00 It definitely does.
27:37 Nicola Twilley? You get textured that way, which I kind of like. Like it isn't just all smooth. There's some nubbiness.
27:43 Speaker 00 The chefs who originally made this kind of new Peruvian food popular in Lima were selling fancy meals to Peruvians and to tourists. But they were also selling the idea of Peruvian food to the world. But it was still a hard sell to get middle and upper class Peruvians to embrace eating quinoa at home.
27:58 Speaker 04 An important turning point with the kind of repackaging of quinoa for new audiences within Peru was when a company called Inca Sur started developing packaged quinoa. So historically, quinoa was bought and sold in bulk in sort of large bags in local and regional markets where you would, you know, say, I need one kilo or two kilos. And someone would scoop the amount out of, out of this large bag. Inca Sur's innovation was to start selling quinoa in individual boxes. And that allowed them to create specific packaging and branding around quinoa. So what they did was frame quinoa not as a quote unquote Indian food, but as an Inca food.
28:42 Speaker 00 In coastal wealthy Peru, attitudes are a little bit contradictory this way. The actual descendants of the Incans are often
28:50 Nicola Twilley? Like we said, as Indian and backward, but the idea of the Incans is revered.
28:56 Speaker 04 Within Peru, the Inca is imagined as the sort of regal, majestic Inca empire. And that's contrasted with the sort of perceptions of actually living indigenous peoples. And so this sort of moment of taking this food, quinoa, that is perceived as a quote unquote "Indian food" associated with poverty and other sorts of racialized connotations, and reimagining it as a quote unquote "Inca food", also kind of gave permission to Peru's middle and upper classes to incorporate quinoa into their diet and into their lives.
29:34 Nicola Twilley? And then in 2013, one of Peru's most popular beer brands, Cuscania, they introduced a quinoa-based beer. They made it seem both Incan and also kind of white.
29:43 Speaker 04 So the tagline on the billboards was "Our flavor", meaning Peruvians, "Our flavor made into beer". So the Cuscania television spot features this sequence of slow motion clips with traditional Andean panpipe music in the background.
30:10 Speaker 04 There's a pair of light, complexioned hands grasping handfuls of quinoa from a large sack. A hand is peeling a potato. There's quinoa grains dropping sort of dramatically into water, making splashes.
30:24 Nicola Twilley? All very exciting. At this point, quinoa was really picking up steam. It was authentic, Incan, nearly lost, but now rediscovered. And it fit in with lots of emerging food trends, too. It was gluten-free, high in protein, and you could make it into anything from snacks to a side for your meat and veg. And this led up to quinoa's true moment in the spotlight, 2013, the International Year of Quinoa. That celebration and what happened next, coming up after the break.
30:53 Speaker 07 When everything feels nonstop, movement becomes the pause. So give Lululemon this holiday season. Smooth, seamless running gear builds momentum through every mile.
31:05 Speaker 07 Targeted support adds steadiness to every pulse and hold.
31:11 Speaker 07 And dynamic stretch expands presence through every pose.
31:17 Speaker 07 Give the feeling. Shop in store and on lululemon.com.
31:23 Speaker 00 We're just days away from the midterm elections, which means I only really have one question.
31:30 Speaker 03 Hi, it's Jessica.
31:32 Speaker 05 Yeah, and I'm Al. We're from the Culinary Union.
31:34 Speaker 00 How are the issues that we've been tracking all year actually playing out on the ground?
31:40 Speaker 03 The reason why we're out here is because we're actually out here canvassing for Aaron Ford and Mr. Horford. I'm not sure if you've heard of them.
31:46 Speaker 05 Oh, yeah. I'm about to go to him. Amen.
31:49 Speaker 00 A few weeks ago, I headed west to Nevada, where the entire midterms can basically be summed up in just three words: the Trump slump.
31:59 Speaker 03 Even with our great union jobs that we had, we struggled. That never happened before. It is because of these politicians what they're doing to us. The Trump slump.
32:12 Speaker 00 This week on America Actually, midterms canvassing with the Las Vegas Culinary Union.
32:17 Speaker 03 How many more days until Election Day?
32:20 Speaker 00 Catch us every Saturday on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.
32:26 Speaker 03 I'm Bridget Reed. And I'm James Walsh. The Alexander Brothers moved in a world of multimillion-dollar homes, exclusive parties, and powerful people. Behind that glamorous lifestyle were years of rumors and allegations that they were committing sexual assault. In our reporting for New York Magazine, we investigated what people knew and heard from women who came forward to tell their stories. Now, that reporting is the basis for a new three-part docu-series, The Wolves of Real Estate: The Alexander Brothers. You'll see exactly how privilege protected them and how they were finally stopped. Stream all three episodes now, only on Peacock.
33:10 Speaker 00 In Bolivia, at 4,000 meters above sea level, these farmers are growing what many are hailing as a miracle food, a food that experts say has the power to help fight global hunger. Quinoa's potential to thrive and help feed communities worldwide is just one of the reasons why the United
33:31 Nicola Twilley? Is proclaiming 2013 the International Year of Quinoa. 2013 was quite a year. The words twerk and selfie were added to the dictionary. Breaking Bad ended and the song of the summer was Get Lucky. Oh, and it was a big year for quinoa.
33:49 Speaker 04 So the United Nations declares 2013 the International Year of Quinoa, which sets in motion a whole host of events all across the world with the goal of promoting quinoa production and consumption.
34:05 Speaker 00 There were events to introduce Moroccan farmers to quinoa. There were cooking competitions in all sorts of countries. In Rome, there was a ceremonial quinoa harvest in the center of the city, led by the First Lady of Peru and government officials from Bolivia.
34:18 Nicola Twilley? The United Nations Secretary General at the time, Ban Ki-moon, had high hopes for quinoa. It was going to solve a whole lot of different problems. I hope this International Year of Quinoa will be a catalyst for learning about the potential of quinoa for food and nutrition security, for reducing poverty, especially among the world's small farmers, and for environmentally sustainable agriculture. Let us work together to make sure the benefits of this extraordinary grain can be felt by those who need it most.
34:55 Speaker 00 These goals all sound great, but they're not really all the same thing. And it turns out that all the different organizers of the International Year of Quinoa saw a variety of ways quinoa could solve the world's food problems.
35:06 Speaker 04 The different promoters of quinoa and the International Year of Quinoa had different sort of visions for quinoa's future. For some of these folks, quinoa's kind of main purpose was to help solve poverty in the Andes.
35:21 Nicola Twilley? But another goal for the quinoa boosters was to solve malnutrition globally.
35:26 Speaker 04 And so for some of these people, the main goal of the International Year of Quinoa was to introduce quinoa production. Into other regions across the globe with the idea that it could help solve nutrient deficiencies in other regions.
35:39 Speaker 00 And then also, there was this idea that quinoa could help create more resilient farming systems.
35:44 Speaker 04 Quinoa's adaptability to quite challenging climate conditions make it a potential crop to help agricultural systems adapt to the kind of new reality of climate change.
35:56 Nicola Twilley? These are all outcomes we can get behind, but Emma pointed out that they're also not necessarily compatible.
36:03 Speaker 04 So for instance, if quinoa is going to solve poverty in the rural Andes, the price needs to be high, right? So that these farmers can get high incomes. If quinoa is going to help solve malnutrition, the price needs to be low so that the urban poor can buy quinoa and integrate it into their diets.
36:25 Speaker 00 And in the same vein, if you're encouraging farmers around the world to grow quinoa to help make their farms more resilient to climate change, well, then the farmers in the Andes won't be so special anymore, and they might not be able to compete on price.
36:36 Nicola Twilley? Minor issues like conflicting goals aside, all the attention and investment in quinoa triggered by the 2013 International Year of Quinoa just made quinoa explode.
36:48 Speaker 00 After a century of people outside the Andes promoting it, and after decades of a small subgroup of Americans getting into it, quinoa was suddenly everywhere, I mean everywhere.
36:58 Speaker 01 This beautiful whole grain increases the strength and stamina of all Inca warriors, and it can do the same for you. It's quinoa, spelled quinoa.
37:43 Speaker 01 Quinoa.
37:44 Speaker 00 We kid you not, Americans, including cowboys, increasingly loved quinoa. But we were not alone. Quinoa was being incorporated into meals and snacks all around the world.
37:55 Speaker 01 Everything is about to change.
38:00 Speaker 01 And lunch will never be the same. Now that you can add some healthy to your hurry with delicious new John West tuna, brown rice and quinoa. John West, be your best.
38:12 Nicola Twilley? Quinoa-wa-la choco spread. Nai neutralite choco spread meh protein-yuk superfood quinoa or crunch-tastic chocolatey taste. Neutralite.
38:22 Speaker 00 And since apparently everyone on the planet was now discovering quinoa, unsurprisingly, the price of quinoa skyrocketed. Between 2013 and 2014, it literally doubled.
38:31 Nicola Twilley? And lots of poor Andean farmers wanted to cash in on this boom.
38:35 Speaker 04 When quinoa's price was climbing dramatically, you can imagine that lots of farmers, many of whom had been growing quinoa their entire lives, thought, OK, this is great. This is perfect. How am I going to make sure that I take advantage of this moment?
38:51 Speaker 00 But they ran into a few problems. Here's the biggest issue. We told you that farmers planted all sorts of varieties of quinoa. Some of them had more of that saponin layer. Some had less. Some were better at dealing with drought or with pests. They were different colors and different sizes.
39:04 Speaker 04 And the agricultural system in the Andean Highlands was really based on cultivating and promoting that diversity. So in some sense, you can think of it as a risk management strategy that if you're a farmer growing one variety of quinoa that has high yields but is maybe susceptible to frost, would pair well with another quinoa that maybe doesn't have quite the yield potential but is really hardy in the face of out-of-season frost.
39:34 Nicola Twilley? But when Mr. or Ms. American quinoa eater goes to the supermarket to buy quinoa and then makes quinoa for dinner, they want something that looks the same and behaves the same, not a mix of grains that take different times to cook.
39:48 Speaker 04 And this was really a problem for turning quinoa into a global commodity because... In order to sort of flow into global markets, it needed to be uniform.
39:59 Speaker 00 This was also an issue for quinoa processors in Peru. They needed to buy machinery that would work on quinoa that was the same size and had the same thickness of that saponin layer.
40:08 Speaker 04 Producing quinoa that meets the parameters that the buyers and processors wanted it to meet is really challenging and is not how many of the farmers were used to farming their quinoa. So various farmers that I met during that time had their quinoa rejected. And so this was sort of heartbreaking to watch when going to a quinoa buy where there was so much kind of hope and so much kind of enthusiasm about quinoa because, you know, if you can imagine, you know, getting six times what quinoa was worth just a few years ago, right? Like, that's life changing for these farmers. It's the difference between, you know, sending your kid to college and not.
40:52 Nicola Twilley? Basically, the way quinoa was grown traditionally, it could not be a standardized commodity. The two things were incompatible. But it's hard to make a lot of money in exports if you aren't producing a standardized commodity.
41:05 Speaker 00 In contrast, along the coast of Peru, that area was already set up for commodity farming. They have like 12 hours of sunlight per day nearly all year with a pretty steady temperature. It's really easy to grow crops there if you irrigate. And so they were already exporting things like asparagus and grapes.
41:20 Speaker 04 So many of these farmers started replacing crops like bell peppers with quinoa, in part because the climate here is so temperate, they are able to have two harvests per year. So we saw dramatic differences in the yields in these coastal quinoa operations versus the Andes.
41:39 Nicola Twilley? Coastal farms were harvesting as much as seven times what an Andean farm could. Plus, it was easier for them in their climate and with their big irrigated mechanized farms to produce not only more quinoa, but also more standardized quinoa.
41:54 Speaker 00 One way the Andean farmers thought they could compete was with organic certification. On the coast, there are a lot more pests because it's hot and humid, and so they have to use a bunch of Chemicals to deal with those pests, whereas in the mountains, organic farming was pretty much the norm.
42:07 Speaker 04 But it takes three years to become certified organic. And so there's this multi-year process of you keeping track of all of the kind of inputs that you apply to your fields, keeping track of all of these different farm activities in notebooks. Certifiers come verify this. There was this frustration of the kind of bureaucracy of organic certification and the requirements of this multi-year waiting period, all of the paperwork. Because for many of these farmers, right, they're like, I've been doing this my whole life. Why can't you just trust that my quinoa doesn't have chemicals on it?
42:46 Nicola Twilley? A lot of these traditional Andean farmers were not necessarily literate or fluent in Spanish. They never had to keep records like this before, and it took a lot of extra time and effort. So it was a struggle.
42:58 Speaker 00 This was all happening super fast in Peru. Like we said, it was from one year to the next. And these issues around standardization and organic certification, this all kind of came out of nowhere. And then the bad news hit.
43:09 Speaker 04 Yeah, so quinoa's price peaked in 2014, and between 2014 and 2015, fell 40%. The following year, it fell another 20%. So you can imagine the sense of kind of hope that quinoa was going to bring sustainable wealth to the region. It was going to bring income opportunities that would, you know, keep youth from migrating to cities and having to work in mines. That it sort of began to evaporate very quickly as quinoa's price fell.
43:43 Nicola Twilley? The demand for quinoa hadn't changed. Quinoa was still really hot, and the price was still higher than it had been before the international year of quinoa, but it was no longer a ticket to riches.
43:55 Speaker 04 The boom created this sense of kind of hope with, you know, increased incomes. The bust was a kind of rapid disintegration of that dream.
44:06 Speaker 04 I mean, many farmers are still producing quinoa. It's no longer having the kind of life-changing economic impact. Many farmers also decided that it was, it's no longer worth their time and energy to put in the effort that it takes to produce commercial quinoa.
44:23 Speaker 00 Despite the price drop and despite the fact that some Alte Plano farmers gave up trying to export, Peru is still exporting a lot of quinoa. In fact, it's the number one quinoa exporter in the world. A lot of it is from the Alte Plano. Some of the quinoa comes from the coast, as we said. Emma told us that some of it is actually from across the border in Bolivia, but it's marketed as Peruvian.
44:42 Nicola Twilley? Under its own name, Bolivia is already the second-largest exporter of quinoa after Peru. And for some farmers in the Bolivian part of the Alte Plano, exporting quinoa has boosted their income. Emma says some farmers on the Peruvian side feel the same, particularly the ones that were already maybe a little bigger or better off.
45:01 Speaker 04 Farmers that are part of sort of well-organized cooperatives have been able to kind of better secure those relationships with exporters. I think that a lot of it, in terms of the degree to which you're able to take advantage of this, depends on your position and which farmer association that you're part of.
45:22 Nicola Twilley? So the quinoa boom didn't necessarily help the poorest Peruvian farmers the way people had hoped. But did it achieve any of those other lofty goals that the United Nations and others all talked up back in 2013?
45:36 Speaker 00 Another goal quinoa boosters had, they thought people around the world would grow quinoa as a way to help solve global malnutrition. But Emma says that hasn't really happened. Quinoa has just turned into another crop.
45:46 Speaker 04 It's become a business opportunity in different areas as opposed to something that's having sort of clear impacts on local nutrition in the area that it's being grown.
45:57 Speaker 00 People had also thought that quinoa could help farmers adapt to climate change. That doesn't seem like it's really happened yet. People who work in international development are still suggesting quinoa is a great adaptable crop, so it's here if people need it.
46:09 Nicola Twilley? Ultimately, Emma says, the story of quinoa's boom and the big, often conflicting dreams every Everyone had for it, there's something really important that we can and should learn from this for the next big food trend.
46:22 Speaker 04 Yeah, I would say that the kind of complex ramifications of food trends and the ways that are kind of the whims of of eaters taste can have dramatic impacts on people's lives across the globe and in ways that we can't always anticipate.
46:41 Speaker 00 To us, one of the interesting things about Emma's research, it's that we eaters might have great intentions. When we find out about a crop that's important somewhere and is farmed traditionally, we want to try it. We hope that by eating it, we can help support those farmers. And if they'd like to keep farming in a traditional way, we hope that we're helping them do that.
46:57 Nicola Twilley? But as the story of quinoa shows, the food system we have isn't set up to work with the kind of variability and small scale of traditional farmers. One of the things the quinoa boom revealed is that there are a lot of otherwise invisible hurdles that go into getting something onto supermarket shelves. And they get in the way of all those good intentions.
47:19 Speaker 00 There are grains that are eaten traditionally in other parts of the world that are just starting to become better known in America today, like teff from East Africa and fonio from West Africa. They're both being touted as super grains. Obviously, there's nothing scientific about this term. But Emma says we should be careful and pay attention to what impact these food trends have.
47:37 Nicola Twilley? The major takeaway from the quinoa story is that you can't just rely on a rising tide to lift all boats. That would be nice, but it isn't always the case.
47:46 Speaker 04 You know, like from a utilitarian perspective, it's like, yeah, maybe quinoa should be produced all across the globe because maybe it, you know, could really have positive impacts on people's nutritional well being. But that's going to undermine farmers in the Andes. You know, it's not going to help them continue to use quinoa as something to kind of better their own lives.
48:09 Speaker 00 And so while you can buy quinoa at the store today without knowing where it comes from, and it could come from the Netherlands, or Spain, or Colorado, Emma says she deliberately looks for quinoa from Peru or Bolivia.
48:19 Speaker 04 I also understand that, like, there is a logic. You know, when I was in Switzerland a few years ago, I met some Swiss Commercial quinoa farmers and their whole kind of logic was we need to have locally produced quinoa because of, you know, the kind of climate change impacts and whatnot of our global food supply system, that it's much more sustainable to buy local quinoa. And so some of it depends on your ethics, but for me, I would recommend buying quinoa that is produced by farmers in the Andes because, you know, as quinoa becomes more and more of a global crop and they face more and more competition, I think that Andean farmers deserve to still be getting some kind of slice of the pie.
49:02 Nicola Twilley? Thanks this episode to Emma McDonald, the author of The Quinoa Bust, there's a link on our website, and to listener Edward Brudney, who suggested we speak to her.
49:11 Speaker 00 Thanks to Jose Luis Chavez and David and the rest of the team at Mission Ceviche, and also, of course, to our superstar producer Claudia Guybe.
49:18 Nicola Twilley? And thanks to my husband Jeff for remembering the immortal Whole Foods parking lot rap. We'll be back in a couple of weeks with a brand new episode. Till then.
49:29 Speaker 07 When everything feels nonstop, movement becomes the pause. So give Lululemon this holiday season. Smooth, seamless running gear builds momentum through every mile. Targeted support adds steadiness to every pulse and hold.
49:47 Speaker 07 And dynamic stretch expands presence through every pose.
49:53 Speaker 07 Give the feeling. Shop in store and on lululemon.com.
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