Before I left Bs As to film in the Puna, my dear friend Claudia suggested that I contact a woman named Maria Eugenia, who has been studying what Claudia called "aboriginal food and cooking." Maria ran a small school that taught classes in aboriginal cooking, and Claudia thought it would be a perfect fit for Pan American Dreams. I finally got a meeting set up for today.
Tammy and I met Maria Eugenia at a cozy little restaurant in Palermo called La Pharmacie, with its interior done up in a kind of faux pharmacy motif and an eclectic menu with everything from omelettes to empanadas to salads and pizzas, pasta, grilled chicken and steaks.Maria Eugenia was amazing! Her focus is the study and teaching of aboriginal food and philosophy (la comida aborigen) and its possible application in modern gastronomy. With her business partner Rodrigo, she runs a small aboriginal cooking school on the outskirts of Bs As.
A little perspective. In Argentina, flu is called "el gripe" and colds are called "el resfrio". Everyone I know here in Bs As has had one or both in the last month, including me.
|
Now imagine a world in which "el gripe" and "los resfrios" are unknown! In which cancer is almost non-existent!! In which it is not unusual for elders to live to 100 years and beyond in spite of a complete absence of modern medicine and vaccinnations.
Go back with me in time at least a thousand years before Christ to pre-Columbian Andean culture. Look at their simple diet of corn and beans and quinoa, which was a sacred grain, along with mate, which was a sacred beverage. There is no food "processing," no refrigerated shipments halfway round the world. No chemicals, preservatives, hormones, residual antibiotics, color additives, nor plastic packaging. Everything you eat is cooked in the earth, in earthen pits using only implements constructed from completely natural materials. All of your food is grown close to your village.
Familiarize yourself with the long forgotten languages and cultures of Akuntsu and Arhuaco, Ayoreo, Enawene Nawe, Enxet, Guarani, Makuxi, Nukak and Yanomami. There is reverence in their rituals to pachamama (mother earth) and the food that she provides.
We have so much to learn. It turns out there is almost no real research on this subject. There are a few academic tracts and a lot of articles about U.S. indian tribes and their food, but very little substantive information on the food and the almost religious philosophy of food from American antiquity.
With Maria Eugenia, we are dealing with someone completely unique. Trained in traditional Western culinary schools, she has become a self made expert on ancient American food and cooking, driven in her eight year quest by the gaps in both the knowledge that was passed on by her mother and grandmother as well as what she learned in modern cooking classes. She has to read and research every day to find new information, to fill in blanks, to find sources for long forgotten plants and herbs and methods of preparation. Most of her learning comes from talking to people, visiting remote places, rummaging through dusty library shelves. She is intensely intelligent and passionate.
I did a half day's worth of internet research to see if she was right about the absence of detailed information on ancient American foods and ancient methods of cooking. There is almost nothing besides the usual palaver about maiz and a few articles about quinoa. I think Maria Eugenia is on to something very powerful if properly presented.
Maria Eugenia wants to share the ancient American methods and ingredients and knowledge that she has discovered over the past eight years so that people can slowly begin to reconnect to their food in ways we no longer think about. Her curriculum is very detailed, running to 30 plus pages. But it is still the "lite" version of ancient American food and cooking because we know so little about it.
I proposed on the spot that we film a food and cooking show named exactly after Maria Eugenia's curriculum - La Comida Aborigen. She was thrilled with the idea, and we agreed to meet again, but this time at her cooking school with Nico and Lucas present.
As a kind of side note, whenever we ate with Katia or ate at her home in Salta, she always insisted that everyone at the table hold their plate up to their face and slowly take in the smell of their food before eating a single bite. lt is a small but powerful gesture from the old ways that I love, since we have become so disconnected from our food now. We think of our food as a buyable market commodity, not something that derives from a vital personal connection to the earth.
It is exciting to have connected with someone as committed to the investigation and teaching of these old ways and as unique as Maria Eugenia. Tammy shared my enthusiasm and helped bridge the gaps when my Spanish broke down during our meeting.
