Quinoa rose to global stardom pitched as an unparalleled sustainable development opportunity that heralded a bright future for rural communities devastated by decades of rural-urban migration, civil war, and state neglect.
The Quinoa Bust is based in a longitudinal ethnography centered around Puno, Peru, the main quinoa production area in the world’s chief quinoa exporting country. This book traces the social, ecological, technological, and political work that went into transforming a humble Andean grain into a development miracle crop and also highlights that project’s unintended consequences.
The Quinoa Bust shows how even efforts based in the best of intentions—counteracting the homogenization of global food supply, empowering small-scale farmers, revaluing local food cultures, and adapting agricultural systems to climate change—can generate new kinds of oppression. At a time when so-called forgotten foods are increasingly positioned as sustainable development tools,
The Quinoa Bust offers a cautionary tale of fleeting benefits and ambivalent results.
Tabella dei contenuti
Contents
Note on Names and Places
Quinoa Timeline
Introduction: Quinoa’s Promise
Part one
Miracle Crop
1 • Reimagining the Future of a Neglected Crop
2 • Whitening a Comida de Indios: Culinary Bioprospecting and the Inca Superfood
Part two
Boom
3 • The Quinoa Frontier: Making a Productive and Orderly Landscape
4 • Producing Good Quinoa: The Moral Politics of Quality Standards
Part three
Bust
5 • Disarticulations: Uneven Risks and Fragile Relations in the Quinoa Bust
6 • Fragmented Knowledge and Intractable Residues in the Quinoa Supply Chain
7 • (Re)building Reputation: Origin-Based Labels and the Elusive Promise of Differentiation
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Appendix: Quinoa Production, Export, and Price Charts
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Circa l’autore
Emma Mc Donell is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and coauthor of Critical Approaches to Superfoods.
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