The Quinoa Bust: The Making and Unmaking of an Andean Miracle Crop
Emma McDonell
Feb 2025 · California Studies in Food and Culture Book 84 · Univ of California Press
Ebook
292
Pages
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Eligible
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infoThis book will become available on February 18, 2025. You will not be charged until it is released.
About this ebook
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.
About the author
Emma McDonell is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and coauthor of Critical Approaches to Superfoods.
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