Food for thought

Traditional indigenous knowledge is key to beating food insecurity. Review: Recovering Our Ancestral Foodways, Mariaelena Huambachano, by Gavin O'Toole

Recovering Our Ancestral Foodways: Indigenous Traditions as a Recipe for Living Well, Mariaelena Huambachano, 2024, University of California Press

In the diverse ecosystems and micro-climates of the Americas, indigenous people solved the problems of survival long before Europeans messed things up.

Across the hemisphere, complex native societies had developed abundant food sources and supply chains that nurtured large, and in some cases, urban populations—an estimated 200,000 people in both Aztec Tenochtitlán and Incan Cuzco alone.

Subsistence—food security—was a primary consideration for the pre-Columbian population, probably numbering in total somewhere in the middle of a range of estimates between eight to 110 million in the hemisphere as a whole.

The peoples of Mesoamerica and highland Andes also developed sophisticated supply chains based upon highly productive forms of agriculture that included innovative farming techniques such as, in what is now Mexico City, the fabled floating chinampas, and in the Andean highlands, the extensive use of terraces.

Indeed, in Aztec and Incan societies ensuring food security was the most important area of imperial policymaking—it might even be said that agriculture was as much a vector of empire as warfare.

Farming played the most important role in the Incas’ remarkable expansion, with a state-controlled production system employing labour-intensive practices on a massive scale representing far more than just sustenance, but a fundamental tool of social control.

Effective storage solutions also developed within complex transportation infrastructures over time as a key goal of all crop cultivation, the aim being to produce a surplus that would enable communities to eat during the winter and in times of crop failure.

Indigenous people understood fully the principles of cold storage, for example, to keep grain and especially seeds for future planting, and cultivators in North America from Tenochtitlán to Ohio constructed sophisticated silos both above- and underground to hold maize corn.

The knowledge base, experience and collective memories that enabled these technological and social developments were the very bedrock of human culture in the western hemisphere, yet almost all of this expertise accumulated over generations was never written down.

In consequence, there is little doubt that most of it was lost during the demographic collapse of indigenous society as a result of the violent depredations of colonialism and disease in the 16^th and 17th centuries.

A slow, uneven and ultimately limited recovery of indigenous society only unfolded as western forms of land-use and then capitalism displaced indigenous cultivation across the continent, meaning that this knowledge base never recovered.

This historical background throws into relief a contemporary tragedy, even if it does not fully explain it—today, marginalised and impoverished indigenous populations confront disproportionately high levels of food insecurity, a dramatic irony given the contribution they have made to global food security.

In North America, indigenous people are far more likely to experience food insecurity than white, black or even Hispanic Americans, with estimates suggesting that about one in four Native Americans experience food insecurity compared to one in nine Americans overall. 

In the Caribbean, Mesoamerica, and South America the prevalence of food insecurity is higher than the world average—a UN report in 2022 suggested 22.5 per cent of people in the region are food insecure in some way—affecting in particular older adults in indigenous and rural communities where food insecurity intersects with poverty, gender, and ethnicity.

In Cusco, Peru, for example, some 18 per cent of indigenous children are chronically undernourished with daily diets containing insufficient calories, nutrients, and proteins for healthy growth—a rate almost twice that of privileged groups.

Given such stark realities, scholarship of this issue urges a critical need to promote food security initiatives that consider local indigenous traditions, agricultural practices, and to promote food sovereignty and farming methods that improve long-term sustainability.

Mariaelena Huambachano’s Recovering Our Ancestral Foodways makes an important contribution to this endeavour, based on the comparative study of indigenous peoples in both modern Peru and Aotearoa (the Māori-language name for New Zealand).

Both of these representative indigenous populations face high levels of food insecurity, which reflect their history of colonisation, the impact of which persists in the dominant capitalist food system of today.

This keeps the costs of producing food, such as labour, to a minimum, thereby making it cheap and accessible at the expense of human and environmental health.

Huambachano writes: “The loss of Indigenous lands, disruption of their foodways, racial discrimination, and policies increasing the presence of processed foods into their diets are some of the key drivers of Indigenous food security and nutrition inequities. Thus, efforts by both Māori and Quechua people to preserve their traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) and cultural heritage—and with them their cultures, languages, lands, and foodways—to beat back food insecurity and undernourishment are vital.”

The author explores a fascinating and understudied dimension of this issue by applying her own knowledge and experience of both peoples to asks how the philosophies of the Quechua and Māori can help foster more inclusive, equitable, and healthy food systems.

Both indigenous cosmovisions or worldviews are based on a kinship-centric system founded upon the belief in the duties and responsibilities of human and non-human entities (deities, rivers, mountains) to respect Nature and care for each other.

Their “foodways”—the food systems grounded in holistic philosophies of life, science, and traditions within particular eco-cultural landscapes—share a similar indigenous cosmovision about preserving soil health, agrobiodiversity, and traditional knowledge.

The author explores how a Eurocentric understanding of food systems has historically extended through settler colonialism to become the dominant paradigm, turning indigenous foodways on their head.

She examines the foundations of an indigenous philosophy of well-being among the Quechua and Māori peoples, identifying key principles of spirituality, self-determination, and intergenerational equity.

Huambachano argues that the application of these principles have profound implications for the development of food security and sovereignty policies aimed at strengthening sustainable food systems and to drive an agenda of change in the modern era.

In the process, she develops an indigenous-based research methodology called the “Khipu Model” grounded in the ways of knowing, values, and principles of the Quechua and Māori that incorporates a community-based research approach and engages directly with TEK.

Recovering Our Ancestral Foodways offers nourishing insights into how traditional knowledge can be refried to defeat food insecurity within indigenous communities, while introducing the colonisers to a taste of sustainability. It is, quite simply, food for thought.