[interview: Tainá Marajoara] neoliberal gastronomy and the attempt to annihilate food culture
“This contemporary cuisine is part of the ultra-liberalism apex. Source ingredients are only convenient for marketing reasons", points out the cook, cultural producer, and activist
this issue was translated by Luciane Maesp 📧 luciane.maesp@gmail.com
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Many cosmogonies understand the word as responsible for the world's creation. When uttered by one or more entities, its chant is the genesis of humanity and the universe – it happens in the Word of Catholic's Bible, and in a conversation between Tepeu and Qʼuqʼumatz on Popol Vuh (the Mayan Book of Counsel), to name some examples that are fresh on my memory after reading Martin Puchner's The Written World.
Among the divine words, there are expressions of desires, decrees, the ordering of the world, the setting of things by just naming them. The mouth as a creation portal is also in the Egyptian creation myth, in which Ra spats his son Shu, god of air, and regurgitates his daughter Tefnut, moisture goddess. For us mere mortals, the word is continuity – from the phatic function of communication to traditions maintenance and knowledge transmission in oral cultures, or even the expected standing of written records.
It is through the discourse (the articulation of all languages, alphabetical or not) that the greatest conflicts of the recent past are located. Just think about how powerful the official historical narratives are: they still hide and curb colonial crimes.
The mouth conceives, utters, and creates; also grinds, absorbs, and homogenizes.
Maybe I enjoy interviews that much because of the weight that written and spoken words have – they are the feedstock of interviews. It would be possible to write a report by silently observing something, checking and crossing information from research on databases, primary sources like historical records, and quoting excerpts of previous publications. Interviews would not. Interviews require a conversation in which one asks; questions; or brings a theme for the other to develop reasoning; answer a query; go through data and facts. The dynamic is to receive and give back, and that's why we journalists call ping-pong the type of interview I publish here: you can't play by yourself.
Once I interviewed Lourence Alves in August and heard her speaking of questioning eurocentric canons and dialogue with authors outside the white and colonial epistemology, I remembered Tainá Marajoara's speeches, whose work I've been following since 2015 after reading this interview on the sociologist Carlos Alberto Dória's late blog e-Boca Livre.
I've been in the Iacitatá Food Culture Spot at Belém do Pará in 2019, then I had the “uncolonial” coffee1: coffee, fresh juice, cocoa cake, beiju, Abaeté bread with Marajó cheese, jambu paste, cupuaçu jam, scrambled eggs, manioc porridge, and chestnuts. I took several pictures of this beautiful table set up and recorded a video interview with the cook, cultural producer, and activist, but I lost all these files when they were downloaded to the newsroom's computer.
That was the first and unforgettable time I talked with Tainá. When I asked her to help me describe the Marajó cheese, I thought about comparing its texture with a famous cream cheese Brazilian brand. She immediately denied my parallel proposal and made me realize that I used my words in an attempt to facilitate the reader's understanding, and ended up diminishing the history and the know-how held on the Marajó cheese production.
Our most spontaneous reactions show up our world vision and our deepest benchmarks: in my case, I'm a southern white city girl, a set of features understood as "neutral" in today's world. I can't be anything but this set of features, but I know the way I behave and occupy my place in the world can be different. I could have picked better words.
I apologized for the faux pas and nowadays I tell this anecdote in classes as an example of what-not-to-do. "I don't remember this specific situation, but we always hear people say this sort of comparison: "oh, this cheese seems like mozzarella", or that "canhapira is a feijoada," Tainá told me on January 6, 2022. "It's a food imperialism, a no-effort to expand the repertoire", she completed.
Iacitatá Institute was created in 2009 by Tainá Marajoara and Carlos Ruffeil, in Belém, mapping ingredients and preparations from the Amazon, and establishing a short chain between food producers and consumers. In 2014, Iacitatá Food Culture Spot opened to the public in an old mansion of the Cidade Velha neighborhood. There, it's possible to have breakfast, lunch, buy food, ingredients, and utensils made by the Amazonian communities and the MST (Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement) settlement. For over a decade, she has been building knowledge among hers, promoting debates, moving/putting forward concrete actions, and getting in the infight of institutional politics.
It's Tainá's credit that food culture was included on the 2013's National Conference of Culture, a pioneer institutional understanding that affirmed food culture as a cultural expression of Brazil. It's also her merit that the community, agroecological and native-based, and the traditional and popular culture spaces were covered by the Aldir Blanc Law, an emergency act of assistance for the Brazilian cultural sector enacted in 2020.
"Even though we dialogue with the Oral History Center of the University of São Paulo, we draw this concept from listening with the ancients of Cachoeira do Arari, at Marajó. I went there to hear what our old people had to say for us to make the academic crossover", she says. Tainá keeps the "moquém2 burning" for years, carrying on the resistance and fight efforts of various folks – despite the fact some people came across the issues of food sovereignty and food as a human right more recently, with the destructive turn of Bolsonaro's government.
Bolsonaro's government has a pretty clear intention of exterminating the multitude of ways of living and cultural expressions – not as if this intention didn't exist before. Unluckily these have been the worst years of the past decade to promote epistemicide, that is, the erasure of the ways of understanding and being in the world that is apart from the neoliberal western ideology. "It is more than an erasure, it is annihilation. It's meant to don't leave any trace of your way of living, nor of your knowledge", defines Tainá.
As the agribusiness agenda strengthens up in the congress, 2021 was the year that we saw on major newspapers and portals news about the indigenous leader Txai Suruí's presence on the COP26, and the indigenous people camp against the Marco temporal timeframe land rule. Every intensification increases the contrasts between the parts, and it seems that the subjecteds' voices can only be heard when the situation comes to the edge.
At the beginning of the Sars-Cov-2 pandemic, Ailton Krenak said "We're indigenous, we've been resisting for 500 years. I'm worried if whites will make it". I can imagine how tiring it is to make your culture stay alive for 500 years when the entire institutional structure created in the meantime works to eliminate every symbol and every inch of your land.
Tainá Marajoara talked to me on the phone for around an hour, when she probably repeated for the umpteenth time things that she and so many other activist groups diminished on the institutional politics have been saying for centuries. Below, is the transcription of the interview, edited and organized for better understanding:
Iacitatá Food Culture Spot is an example of short-chain articulation that promotes local food for local people. What changes have you noticed over the years?
The first meaningful advance is the awakening for the guarantee of rights and markets opening. There is a prejudice against food coming from family farming. It was worse before, but it still exists. There is racism in eating: "I won't eat black, poor, indigenous peoples' food". The kitchen has to be anti-racist to be truly transforming. This positioning directly affects the consumption practice. There are many pejorative thoughts in between, like assuming that it's dirty, that is no good, that it has worms. Transforming the consumer that came from this mindset – often because someone in the family got sick – has opened spaces for market and trading. We're opening up political spaces through this consciousness, and also structural politics so these populations have dignity. And so forth, we can walk towards a good living.
The debate on food sovereignty and food culture is directly linked to the land propriety issue, and Brazil has never had a strong public policy on indigenous land demarcation or other territorial ownership recognition, as for quilombolas. About food culture, there is a work of knowledge registering made by Iphan (the National Historic and Artistic Heritage Institute of Brazil), perhaps it is the most complete public policy aimed to maintain cultural traditions, which comprehends the notion of territory. Do you think it is possible to keep working with the public policies that were leftover from this government, or are we in a scorched earth situation?
There are both. The scorched earth situation with the destruction of the Ministry of Culture; of the Consea (National Council for Food and Nutrition Security); of the Ministry of Social Development; of the Ministry of Agrarian Development; and of the public policies to combat hunger. It is a scorched earth reality. Along with this government structure, many other politics are brought down – politics that could be faulty, but they had meanings anyways, as was the case of the national and international dialogues on cultural diversity. Brazil left discussion and groups directed for cultural and environmental safeguard. There are a few methods that promote the safeguard, but there also is the criminalization of processes that aren't recognized by Anvisa (Brazilian Health Regulatory Agency), which implies the impossibility of safeguarding them. The understanding of what is food culture and its role for the country and the world has to show up immediately. The colonialist subordinated mind should be left behind, for us to face the time of now, a world that is torn down by climate change and environmental collapse.
It rained hail in Belém at 2 PM. Pantanal caught fire. Pará is once again breaking records of deforestation and reaching very high temperatures. São Paulo got dark at 3 PM. And they talk about an agenda for the future... The future is an invention to postpone what has to be done today.
When indigenous people plant bacuri, they're planting it now for the next generations to eat. It isn't for 2030, it's for now. The need to survive is now, so it's possible to maintain life later.
With the destruction of food cultures, the peoples starve. And that is on purpose. The hunger generated in the countryside and the middle of the Amazon forest is a tactic to destroy the people of the Amazon. Amazon represents the higher rates of food insecurity in the country. How is it possible for a biome to have the highest biodiversity and the highest rate of food insecurity?
There are many layers of colonialism and discrimination to keep with domination practices, a deterritorialization of taste. The increasingly heavier insert of industrialization takes away from us the taste of food: people have to leave the lands, the countryside, to live in the city. It's a historical and cultural issue that makes the Amazonian peoples not seen as part of the history of humanity, as humanity's history was invariably out of the Amazon. It's always in Egypt, in Europe, in the American Revolution – but never in the Marajoara people and its complex living culture. It is more than an erasure, it is annihilation. It's meant to don't leave any trace of your way of living, nor your knowledge.
One of the first criticisms of yours I read was in 2015 on the sociologist Carlos Alberto Dórias's blog, about the ingredients appropriation that "great chefs" make by using an ingredient and ignoring its place of origin and its context of use. Is there any possible way for this gastronomy world to be a partner of preservation of food culture or is it a relationship that will always benefit the chef's side?
I say that the ingredient is seen as if there wasn't a population behind it, as if it popped up itself on the table. It is the output of culture, of knowledge.
The ingredient can be produced here at Furo do Palheta, in Marajó, and be even eaten by the Queen of England. The point is that spectacularization is done as if the ingredient existed without anyone's hands, as the industry produced that from scratch, synthesized it. Contemporary cuisine has a very strong focus on the product, on the ingredient, and this contemporary cuisine is part of the pinnacle of ultra-liberalism – it's an exponent with its white, colonialists and proprietor chefs, who see themselves as the people's saviors.
The cultural appropriation takes place in this other market: the chef wants to say that he is using an Amazonian ingredient talking about sustainability and that he's a friend of nature. That's the distorted part. If he only wants to use the goods, why does he use the ingredient and say he's protecting my culture?
For contemporary cuisine, the origin of the ingredients is only convenient as a marketing tool. If it wasn't market appealing, the source wouldn't be talked about. There's a whole cultural-based process rooted in bringing an ingredient: there are other affections and perceptions set on this food production. An Amazonian ingredient that you find in South or Southeast Brazil can be from a grabbed land, as an example. You never see chefs campaigning against pesticides. Books about manioc, Amazonian ingredients, Cerrado ingredients are published, but where is the discourse that pesticides are poisoning this food and that these foods are rarefying in its territories? And that, if the product is getting scarce is because whoever produces it is dying, getting contaminated. The native people understand that ingredient not as a cooking ingredient, but as an extension of their bodies, their affections, and their territory.
People may say that unifying gastronomy and food culture is utopic, that we are the ones that contrapose food culture and gastronomy... I do not only see the union of food culture and gastronomy happening, but also practice it on our Food Culture Spot. It happens as well at MST's Armazém do Campo warehouse, on the cuisines based on the land cycles, with the quilombolas3 who are occupying their spaces, in the indigenous cuisines themselves. We are happy about lighting this moquém and that this debate is taking place all over the country.
Is there a possible healthy intersection between this world of "high-end cuisine" and the valorization of food culture, though?
Starting from the "high-end cuisine" expression: for how long will we consider high-end an environment of poor working conditions, food waste, and use of land grabbing ingredients? There's no high-end when people have to die and be slaves so others can eat. This is gastronomic, colonial, and contemporary imperialism. It is within the universities, technical courses, in speeches that talk about the evolution of cuisines. It is not possible to call high-end what is made in a place that people get subjected to so others can eat. From 1500 until now we're talking about an expropriation process. The intersection between food culture and haute cuisine happens a few times, in some projects, but besides focusing on the high-end cuisine, it's a discourse built to subordinate these peoples.
In the heart of Amazon, there are no public policies to local food consumption, and basic food baskets are distributed full of processed ingredients. We have the greatest concentration of oilseeds, fruits, and vegetables, and at the same time, children getting sick and malnourished. It's needed to let these peoples take their protagonism, without whites' hands showing they're "saving the Amazon".
The sentence "eating is a political act" is showing up in more and more places, but I've been seeing it most times only used as a catchphrase, without a clear action or proposal. How do you see it?
I see both the trivialization [of the phrase] and the discovery that eating is a political act. On one hand, the trivialization and appropriation of the term, as the industry did with the "real food" concept, as it was almost done with the "food culture" concept. When you see these concepts in the mouth of the industry and of the chefs that are cover boys for agribusiness, it means that these concepts also make sense for marketing products.
On the other hand, we see many people willing to come together with indigenous peoples; strongly desiring to support the Landless Workers Movement; understand the climate issue and the collapse of the planet. We have reached the point of non-renewal of natural resources a long time ago. The intensification of this collapse is also due to our consumption choices. I highlight that it's extremely necessary to understand that it is the indigenous lands that guarantee air and moisture where they yet happen – without them, it all would be desert and drought.
We know that it isn't only the individual: the economic and trade strategies imposed by large corporations are the ones responsible for the collapse of the planet. Cities run out of water while large farm holdings consume most of the potable water. Just closing the tap doesn't save the Earth. There's a political and economic conjuncture that's making pressure through lobbying.
You are one of those people that are always one step ahead in debates and statements made when discussing food culture and gastronomy. I feel that many people are starting to talk today about what you've been pointing out for over a decade. Who are your interlocutors?
I exchange with people who build knowledge and discuss reality: the indigenous peoples, the genial Naine Terena, Eliane Potiguara, Daniel Munduruku, Ailton Krenak, Márcia Mura. I exchange with lawyers and prosecutors, with the human rights prosecutor. With the Landless Workers Movement, with other cooks, with Thiago Vinicius, of Solano Trindade Popular Agency, with Eliane Moreira, a socio-environmental prosecutor from Pará. With the professionals of the Brazilian Agroecology Association, with Antônio Nego Bispo.
We also have to decolonize our references. We need a radical transformation of power structures, of the way we build thought, and spaces that we can act. We can't talk about food culture and remain on this gastronomic track. If I'm talking about food culture, then culture is diversity. It's from the diversity that we reach concepts and formulations – and the forward transformation and public policies will be a reflection of it.
Enough of knowledges that came in the caravels. We need breaths, the forest repertoires.
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NT: Colonial coffee is a heritage of European immigrants that occupied the South Brazil regions at the turn of the 19th to 20th century. The colonial coffee table is set with a variety of pieces of bread, crackers, cheeses, sausages, cured meats, pickles, spreads, patés, cakes, tarts, jams, marmalades, fruits in syrup, wine, teas, coffee, and other sorts of foods, to resemble the meal the colonial European families had usually in Sundays afternoons after church. To treasure our deepest roots, an uncolonial coffee is a parody of a colonial coffee, made with Brazilian native ingredients and dishes.
NA: I chose to call it "uncolonial" coffee instead of "decolonial" coffee because the latter would sound like something that has no relation with the colonial habit. But what this service in Iacitatá Food Culture Spot means is the undoing of a colonial habit.
NT: Moquém is a Brazilian native people’s technology built to cook and preserve meat. Its structure keeps the low fire, then the ember unhurried burning under a wooden grid, allowing the food above to slowly cook and smoke, at the same time that it prevents flies and other insects from reaching and spoiling the meat.
NT: Quilombolas are the people that live in quilombos, hidden spots in the forests where the enslaved that could run went to live during the colonial period in Brazil. Nowadays, the quilombos house mixed ethnicity, but keep sharing African ancestry. They form a community that stands up against the urbanization process and for a simple life in contact with nature. Lourence Alves talks about it in this interview.