Creando la frontera culinaria: un examen crítico de las narrativas de los chefs peruanos sobre alimentos perdidos/descubiertos

Abstract

This article examines the narratives of lost and discovered foods prominent Peruvian chefs employ to frame their work as chefs and to promote Peruvian food more generally. It argues that many foods framed as recently lost/discovered were not lost but instead unknown, unvalued, or neglected by elite consumers. Tales of lost foods obscure the work of the many people who have produced and consumed these foods, while tales of discovery exalt white, male, elite chefs as protagonists with the vision and expertise to see value in “undervalued” ingredients and dishes. Linking contemporary Peruvian chef’s narratives about their work and Peru as a culinary frontier to heroic tales of Enlightenment thinkers and eighteenth-century travelers, the article shows how the same metaphors of vision, travel, and masculinity that wove their way through early heroic stories of discovery also define contemporary tales of Peruvian chefs seeking out novel ingredients. It argues that even as Peru’s emerging class of celebrity chefs work to subvert colonial culinary hierarchies that hold up European cuisines as exemplars of gastronomic excellence, they ultimately reproduce colonial relationships of power through their narratives of discovery that frame chefs as the arbiters of “good food” and erase the labor of the actors who actively produced and consumed the foods prior to their discovery.