THE UNEXPECTED EMERGENCE OF COMMONALITY IN THE CITY THROUGH FOOD

Does food help unite people? Does eating make people have a sense of belonging? Is it possible to say that imagining a national cuisine can create a sense of democracy in societies where democratic institutions have historically been weak?

The city of Lima, Peru is a society of divisions and contrasts. Since it was founded in 16th century, Lima’s society has had a history of strong divisions of class and race. In the 20th century, as Lima grew from a city of roughly 300,000 inhabitants in the mid 1930s to about 10 million in 2019, the urban landscape of the city followed these social distinctions, with new neighborhoods being created and populated by people of similar socioeconomic status and class. The built environment of the city of Lima, its urban planning, and how people move through it reflect the history of decades of social, economic and political crises.

Since the mid-2000s, Peru (and Lima in particular) has gone through an important culinary boom. Today, Limeños across all socioeconomic levels on average spend about 1/3 of their monthly income towards eating out (INEI 2015). Food is so important in the everyday experiences of Limeños that it is at the center of everyday conversations among friends, relaxing with family members at the end of the day, an excellent icebreaker with strangers, and the formation of an imagined community of people who believe they eat “Peruvian food”. Food is also the focus of many television programs, books and magazines dedicated to food (which almost did not exist prior to the boom), as well as political populism (there are no less than 8 national celebration days related to food: from the national day of pollo a la brasa to the national day of pisco sour).

In a society where its democratic institutions are weak and where a normalized structural economic violence continues to be predominant, why does it sometime seems that food can somehow unite people, even when Limeños of different classes (and neighborhoods) almost never sit down together to eat on the same table? Food is at the very base of people’s everyday lives. Without it, human beings cannot survive. But far more than being simply a material of sustenance, food and eating also have links to bigger social, cultural, political and economic structures of societies. On the other hand, food is also deeply personal. People have memories of food, food one grew up with, one has tastes and preferences about how (and with whom) to eat. Food is, therefore, connects the deeply personal and the social, the experiences of people’s inner lives and the macro aspects of society.

How is it possible then that food (and particularly the invention of a Peruvian cuisine tradition) can apparently seem to eliminate these divisions and create an imagined community of Limeños where in other aspects of everyday life this seems impossible?

These are the questions that guide my doctoral dissertation, a long-term research project I worked on from 2014 to 2019. This gallery is an attempt to show through visual language what food represents to Limeños, but also it is an attempt to show what everyday life is like in the city of Lima, as well as that the urban context in which it takes place. Food in Peru has an important emotional dimension that can more be better conveyed through images than solely through text. Thus, read with the main document, this gallery’s goal is to show the texture of the everyday culture of a city like Lima.

(Some images have captions on them. Hover over the images to make the text appear)

Enjoy!