Obligaciones de los operadores

In a way, in the process of developing a Colombian gastronomy, professional cooks, usually owners of upscale and fine dining restaurants, and other actors involved such as governmental officials, seem to be having not just to highlight but also to exoticizie local ingredients, preparations, traditional cooks and the whole setting – including themselves – to feel it right and they own it.

Making it right overcomes the deep-rooted colonial mentality that has valued the foreign, not because it is new, novel and implies widening the cultural spectrum, but because it is transmitted, imposed and absorbed as both better and right.62 The new gastronomy coincides with the beginning of the end of the armed conflict, a relatively stable economic growth in the last two decades, and a corresponding expansion of the culinary industry (see Chapter 1). In addition, the appearance and consolidation of food and political movements such as Slow Food and the Fair Trade approach have provided alternatives to trade principles based on an industrialization of the food chain and has bridged a gap between the producers and the consumers. Also, policy guidelines were oriented to protect cultural heritage and the protection of indigenous communities and other minority groups (e.g. Unesco convention for the safeguarding of cultural heritage and Law 13 about the right to freedom and equality of The Constitution of 1991 (Colombia)).

62 _{An inverse process of valuing traditions because they are such—let’s say just better and just right—is one of}

On the other hand, there is the discussion of whether something as ephemeral as

Colombian cuisine might exist to begin with. Although I will not address here the debate about the real possibility of defining national or regional cuisines, a Colombian one is seen by many of the cited Colombian cooks and some Colombian researches such as Julián Estrada, as the

product of fusing regional cuisines without diminishing their unique richness and complexity: “The concept of ‘regional cuisine’ must overcome the narrow circle of recipe collections (…) [in order to] take into account and represent the different sources that gave rise to such cuisine, that is, its indigenous, African, and Spanish traces; its peasant-like, provincial and cosmopolitan style; its traditional features, as well as its modern and innovative ones” (Estrada 2003: 215).

Colombian anthropologist Esther Sánchez also advocates for a similar understanding of proper identification of a local culinary identity: “The closer to their origin these products are, the more capacity they have to define their true characteristics or their distance from that which is considered original. These really are Chilean empanadas! a Chilean would say, trained from small age to savor them. The local expressions are, therefore, part of a shared cultural knowledge that reaches to geographical points that make it possible to define limits and territories in which the autochthonous is recognized while, obviously, judging variations of the traditional model that allow or prevent an identification” (Sánchez, n.d: 8). This perspective of authenticity implies that the authentic manifests itself in a product that intends to represent it but that does not pretend to replicate it (Sánchez, n.d.: 12). The possibility of replication in those terms constitutes the foundation of a theoretical referent to work gastronomically in local structures that can be not only well defined but universalized (Sánchez, n.d: 13).

Arjun Appadurai looks at the emergence of a national cuisine in contemporary India, a cuisine that he describes as designed by and for the urban middle class and reproduced in

contemporary cookbooks (2008: 298). By looking at the particular structure and rhetoric of these books, he analyzes the interplay between two main elements of the cuisine that they portray: on the one hand, a regional and ethnic specialization, and on the other, the development of a “crosscutting” pan-Indian cuisine (2008: 305). He notes that these social actors belong to a “multiethnic”, “multicaste” and “polyglot” class of consumers with Westernized tastes and an emerging culinary cosmopolitanism: “as in other modalities of identity and ideology in emergent nations, cosmopolitan and parochial expressions enrich and sharpen each other by dialectical interaction” (2008: 291-92, 304). A similar dialectical interaction between parochial practices and cosmopolitan expressions, and between regional or local and macro (or global) culinary practices—outside the country and inside Latin America but also beyond the continent—seems to be taking place and helping to construct Colombian gastronomy.

Referring to Perúvian cuisine, Ernesto Cabello, director of the documentary “De ollas y de sueños” (Cooking up Dreams), offers a provocative commentary in relation to the construction of a national cuisine:

It’s always intrigued me that with all the differences you can find in a country, there’s one place where the whole nation feels in total harmony. In my country, Perú, it’s not soccer, or music, let alone politics. That place is the kitchen. Throughout centuries of racial and ethnic mixing of encounters and lost connections, Perúvian cooking has become delectably integrating. In the kitchen, flavors, aromas and colors fight, negotiate and make peace with one another. Each one searches for its place and lives alongside the others. This documentary is an exploration to a place where all of one nation’s peoples are represented. Where poor and rich people share the same spirit. (Asociación Guarango 2009).

There is certainly a similar generalized call for integration in Colombia through cooking, as a way of relieving chronic violence and pervasive social anxiety. The historical juncture in today’s

Colombian political situation cannot be underestimated in regard to this call. Cook Eduardo Martínez defines cuisine as the difference between life and death, as a vessel for peace (see Chapter 3 p.29). Certainly, with a very challenging process of peace going on between the Colombian government and the oldest and most empowered guerrilla group of Latin America (The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia—People's Army (FARC–EP)), there is a desperate scream for peace in the country.

On October 11th, 2016, a group of cooks—some of the ones from whom I offer extracts of interviews in the previous chapter, and some more from Fogón Colombia63—organized a communal feeding activity in Plaza de Bolivar in front of the presidential house. Meals were offered to people from rural areas and different sectors of Colombian society, who went to the city capital to advocate for the urgent implementation of the peace agreement, in a public act called “Campamento por la paz”. Although this was a relatively small scale act in terms of the percentage of the public and the amount of food that was shared (around two hundred people were fed), it was not small in its symbolism because of the historic changes that Colombia is going through, supported by the cooperative efforts of cooks and other key agents. This was a consequence of a dramatic result in the national plebiscite that took place on October 2nd, 2016 in which 50.2 % of voters voted against a peace deal between the Government and FARC rebels. This deal had been signed by the two parties on September 26th, 2016, after 4 years of negotiation and 52 years of armed conflict, and after more than 200.000 people were killed, thousands others are desaparecidos and almost 7 million people were displaced because of violent acts. In political terms however, it needed public validation. Therefore, a new version of the agreement was signed on November 24th, 2016, and after being approved by The Congress of the Republic, it is now in

the first stage of implementation.