Afro Pacific Foodways Part 2
Artist Unknown
Tomorrow I team up with Chef Rey Guerrero a native of these specific coast of Colombia in area historically inhabited by Afro Colombians. We will be on the campus of Northwestern University to discuss Afro Pacific foodways using our respective expertise. Our current blog series books is a deep dive into Afro Colombian culinary history.
From the 1490s to 1700 the Iberian scramble to exploit the land and labor of the Americas led to cross cultural contacts between Amerindians, Europeans, and Africans. The subsequent intercultural interaction transformed the foodways of Columbia In general and the Pacific coasts specifically. While Colombia is often thought of in terms of Native American and Iberian origins, African often are left out of the equation. Depending on the region, Colombian popular cuisine has as much in common with African cuisine and its origins are far more complicated in a colonial world where a great deal of ethnic mixing happened. Colombian cuisine originated in the kitchens of Africans, Europeans, and Native American. It became the syncretism of these three culinary traditions in the Americas first developed in the kitchens of commoners out of necessity. There are cookbooks that illustrate this conclusion but few historical studies of Colombian foodways move beyond discussion of Iberian and Native American influences and origins.
