Years ago I had the privilege of being invited on an expedition to the Amazon to discover, hand in hand with experts and local peasants, the immense food reservoir that it houses. Although I didn’t know it previously, incidentally I starred in a documentary about how the modest scholar from a distant culture lived that epiphanic discovery.
Although they represented only a small part of the immeasurable Amazon pantry, there were so many fruits of the river and the jungle, so many delicious fruits of a thousand colors, aromas, shapes and sizes that we savored, that the very professors of gastronomy and nutrition in Sao Paulo who accompanied me recognized in many cases that they did not know them.
The fabulous natural setting of the journey reminded me of Fitzcarraldo, that megalomaniac and music-loving madness of Werner Herzog with Klaus Kinski and, picking up the thread of mental connections, transported me upriver to the historic expeditions in search of El Dorado.
The explorers who went into the jungle looking for that mythical city died of starvation when they exhausted their provisions, unless they could access the food knowledge of the natives and overcome, driven by hunger, the supremacist prejudices that prevented them from eating like the ” wild”. Because those supposed savages were actually the civilized ones in the Amazon jungle.
Let’s explain it once more, the human food strategy differs in the combination of the cognitive filters that we share with other animals (smell, taste and the rest of the senses) with an essential cultural scaffolding built and transmitted by the community. We are cultural and social animals also when it comes to eating and, without the culture that each society manages, without the appropriate education, we do not know how to do it. I have thought about all this again as a result of the news about the epic with a dramatic beginning and a happy ending of the children lost for forty days in the Colombian jungle:
“The fact that the brothers are from an indigenous community and that they know the jungle environment has given them a certain advantage within the miracle that we have witnessed; Some urban minors would have had practically no options”, comments Dr. Valentín Río, an emergency doctor with international experience in catastrophes and conflict situations.
Among those skills, “which seem to be engraved in their DNA,” says Dr. Río, was knowing how to select edible wild plants and fruits and discard poisonous ones. Damaris Mucutuy, the children’s aunt, confirmed that her niece Lesly had this knowledge and was confident at the time of affirming that she has been the one who has brought her siblings forward. “She knew what they could eat and what they couldn’t.”
What this epic episode teaches us once again is that we need the knowledge of each community to eat well in each setting. And that not because traditional and local are less important. On the contrary.
Let us remember it especially those of us who live surrounded by a supposed abundance of food within our reach, but that we must also know how to manage so as not to lose our health. Everyone, but especially children, so that they are not at the mercy of dangerous self-interested messages that lead them to lose themselves in a toxic diet.
“She knew what they could eat and what they couldn’t.” That’s what it’s all about. And that means an education based on local wisdom, scientific knowledge and the ethical principles that must govern society so that each community, now and in the future, is healthy and the food system, that of each place and that of the whole of the planet, sustainable.
To educate a child you need a tribe. To educate the world you need all of them.
