Every Seed has a Recipe...

What unfolds in this article is a written reflection on the gathered knowledges and lessons learned in and through Pachamanca (the Quechua Runa Simi word for «pot/meal underneath the earth»[1]). During four seasons of encounters, my dear master, friend and native quechua farmer from Huilloc, Isaac Riquelme Mamani, taught me the practice, technique, and values of this recipe, ritual, and seasonal gathering, which is rooted in Peruvian Andean food culture. Our situated dialogues guided nested rehearsals along three years of transnational fieldwork of the PhD project «Culinary Return», co-labouring[2] between Peruvian and Swiss communities and territories.

Bear with me, I’ll be weaving wor(l)ds… with plant kin, peasants, urban farmers, cooks, designers, artists, strangers, collaborators, friends, and chosen families—scattered among plural territories, and connected through recipe-rehearsals. As an interwoven body of collective and living knowledges, these people are co-authors of this text and are represented in the «collect.» While making sense of this tissue, I’ll bridge wisdoms shared in five different languages: animacy,[3] Quechua, Spanish, English, and German. Although, the text is presented in English, there are certain terms and practices that I chose to write in the language of transmission/origin. I leave layers of opacity with intent, which can’t be fully comprehended in their written format.

As such, this written piece is an entanglement of dialogues—between two gastronomy landscapes and solidarity agriculture territories, between different knowledges and worldviews,[4] between peer-peer reviews, between academic and transversal exchanges, between human and more-than-human, and between minds and stomachs.

So, come along to eat together... or Haykumi!

Llaqway[5]

(For the following lines please choose either of the two languages, and, if possible, find a calm space where you can read this out loud to yourself or to your kin.)

 
gabriela aquije zegarra and collect., Pachamanca, or «earth pot» in quechua runasimi, collective food gathering, and dry season ritual with Isaac Riquelme and Luisa Uspa Quispe, hosted at their home in Huilloc, Cusco, 2022, Culinary Return living archive.

(ESP)

«Mis conocimientos» son tan «míos» como «mis» semillas...
pero, las semillas son contendoras de vida en si mismas.
una vida planta que emerge en relación de cultivo con nosotres.
Entonces, las semillas nos enseñan nuevas relaciones con les conocimientos:
no en pertenencia, pero en interdependencia.
Cada semilla tiene una receta, cada receta cuenta un bocado de saberes ecológicos basados en relaciones vivas, mutables, pero también enraizadas, situadas, a través del tiempo.
Lo que se, y lo que no se también, lo comparto en Pachamanca:
la comida, el rito de agradecimiento, las labores con el territorio, las pedagogías de la anfitriona (chichera), las resistencias de una olla (en tierra) común.
Los procesos colectivos de sabores y saberes.
Saber saboreando, saber sintiendo, en cuerpa-territorio[6].
La pachamanca, entonces, se desenraiza y se vuelve a enraizar como formato para compartir relaciones vivas e itinerantes entre dos territorios.
¿cómo regenerar relaciones con la tierra, y reconocer los conocimientos ecológicos en las practicas colectivas de la comida? ¿cómo cocinar con los paisajes ?
No lo sé, pero puedo ensayarlo...

(ENG)

«My» knowledges are as much «mine» as «my»seeds... yet seeds are containers of life within themselves, a plant life that emerges in a cultivation relationship with us.
So, seeds teach us a new relationship with knowledges:
not in belonging, but in interdependence.
Each seed has a recipe, each recipe recounts a bite of ecological knowledges based on living relationships, mutable, but also rooted, situated, through time.
What I know, and also what I don’t know, I share it in Pachamanca: the food, the gratitude ritual, the work with the territory, the host’s pedagogies, the resistance of a common (earth) pot.
The collective processes of flavours and knowledges.
Knowing by tasting, knowing by sensing, in body-territory[6].
The pachamanca, then, is resituated as a format to present
a living, itinerant, and relational archive.
How to regenerate relationships with the land, and recognise ecological knowledge in collective food practices? How to cook with the landscapes?
I don’t know, but I can rehearse it…

gabriela aquije zegarra and collect., Uchucuta (spicy sauce in Quechua runasimi) recipe (rain and dry seasons) with Isaac Riquelme and Luisa Uspa Quispe, from Huilloc—Cusco (PE) and Rooftop garden with Solanaceae (capsicum) familiy. Klybeck, Basel, 2022–2023. Still image from the video piece «Cuidar(nos) la tierra» (2022).

Pachamanca

(For the rest of the text you’ll find an interweaving of reflective text and pieces of the most recent dialogue between Isaac and me
(aligned and in cursive to the left.[7])

In the presence of the lands…

In not knowing how to cook with the landscapes, I stayed in the presence of[8] the land. The ones from origin: Lima, more specifically the coast territories along to the Pacific Ocean and crossed by Rimac river, and Cusco, the central highlangs of the Cordillera de los Andes and crossed by Willkamayu (Urubamba) river. And the lands of arrival: Basel, more specifically the three territories (dreiland) that are water by the Rhein and Wiese rivers. 

To exercise not knowing as an analytical method for fieldwork, Peruvian anthropologist and scholar, Marisol de la Cadena highlights the importance of presence as a way of carefully situating us, focusing on the practice and not the result. «Co-labouring also means that you’re being co-laboured, learning with and perhaps in divergence.» Marisol explains, and adds that through co-labouring, fieldwork is «in the here and now of the presences it works with; the ‹field› is wherever those presences make you work (think and feel).»[9] Not knowing was—and still is—a practice that humbled me, contesting my academic knowledges and privileges. It permitted me to stay in the presence of the plural emerging relationships that I was experiencing, which came with complexities, so I was especially careful while mobilizing and re-rooting food knowledges between two territories—or better yet, between the ecologies of two kitchens.

«Gabriela: When I arrived at my first fieldwork in 2022, I didn’t know about the pachamanca, and I didn’t know about the uchucuta. And it was you [Isaac] who initiated this dialogue. I wanted to learn about the cooking methods and recipes, and you ended up teaching me the values ​​of these two recipes—which begin with seeds.»

As recipes begin with seeds, so I started not only to work/know with, but to think and feel with three mentor plant companions: the chili (which is called Aji or Uchu, in Runa Simi, and belongs to the colonial botanical family of Solanaceae; genus capsicum, plural species), maiz (called Sara or Corn, from the family Poaceae; genus Zea, various heirloom species in associative crop system of the Three Sisters or Drei Schwester or Milpa) and potato (called Santuruma[10]or Papa, from the family Solanaceae; genus Solanum, plural native Andean Peruvian species). To ground the different languages and animacy grammars that are expressed in this knowledge exchange, I engaged within remote yet synchronical labours of the agricultural calendar or almanac; between the dry and rainy seasons in Cusco; and the spring to autumn community gardening chores in Basel.

Through the seasons, as each seed became a crop, I began learning in situated food-ways: the harvest embodied lessons, the dynamics of their gatherings, and the community's stories around their recipes. The resulting food and drink included: uchucuta, stone-mortar spicy sauce made from the Aji; chicha, fermented drink made from sprouted maize and Sara; and chuño or freeze-dried potato made from the Papa. All were contained or connected in the gathering, dry-season ritual, and recipe of Pachamanca. In this process, cooking with the landscapes[11] emerged as a method for co-labouring with the lands that nurture us, where each recipe, its ingredients, and cooking process, translated wisdoms from the interdependent living presences (human and more-than-human) and its (political) ecologies. In short, I began rehearsing what the ecological knowledges of recipes could be and how these are being shared and transformed through the land—what scapes and what stays? 

By recipe-rehearsals I mean …

Each crop companion shared their fruit wisdoms through gardening seasonal labours, to become an ingredient inside different kitchen processes. All of these practices constituted the «ecological knowledges» of recipes, where «knowing» comes through rehearsing cultivation and cooking, where flavour begins with healthy soil, and where gastronomy pleasures (and its politics) are bonded with food sovereignty. Saber labrando, saber saboreando, saber haciendo. These are pieces of wisdoms in relation with an ecological entity, phenomenon, or cycle, which is passed-on through empirical or oral practice[12] and preserved through what Leanne Betasamosake defines as «grounded normativity» or «the ethical frameworks generated by these place-based practices and associated knowledges.»[13]

Rehearsing becomes crucial to implement these as everyday knowledges, and from an abolitionist perspective,[14] to refrain from an immediate commoditisation and consumptive take of food commons, that sits at the core of industrialised and extractives food systems.[15] Then could Pachamanca, as a rooted recipe and seasonal gathering, «hold the space»[16] for these rehearsals as an act of reciprocal care for nurturing the land and the people?

I don’t know, but I can rehearse it… In Peru, during two dry seasons and one rainy season (2022–2023), feeling like a foreigner in my own territory, separated by my academic privileges and yet bonded by Andean ancestry (and therefore accountable for it), I began to understand the knowledges and relations between the seeds and recipes of these three crops, through the practice of making Pachamanca with Isaac and Luisa Uspa Quispe (warmi or skillful quechua woman, mother of Rosmery, and partner of my mentor) members of the campesino indigenous Quechua community of Huilloc—Cusco (PE), who also taught me the Uchucuta recipe. While engaging with the Riquelme family, I recognised that Pachamanca is both a tourist activity and a commoditised Peruvian food staple, which is how I got to know it while growing up in the capital Lima. But also, I was re-introduced to this as an ancestral cooking process and ritual of the Andean dry season, according to the Inca’s agricultural calendar, preserved until today to feed a community that is in close relation with the land (or Pachamama), after the harvest season.

«Gabriela: I believe our friendship—even though remote—is based on trying to understand what is most reciprocal to the fact that you’ve opened up so much to me. So that’s why I make these clarifications about ‹collaborating on our differences,› but united by these. Because I understand that access to this type of formalisation of knowledge is my privilege, but I’m trying to understand what my responsibility is. What do you think?

 Isaac: I appreciate what we started and established from that day [we met] forward, even though you were foreigner, as you said. But I didn’t want to close myself to that [exchange], because when I leave [this realm] who will know? No one here [Peru] knows. So, I asked you to take my knowledge so that a little bit goes with you. But not just to stay with you; but when you share with others [in Switzerland], they’ll see that you’ve been sharing a little bit with me, you’ve been opening things up for us [Isaac and Huilloc community]. That’s what I love about sharing; it’s very unique. Sharing with my friends, my siblings, my daughter—we’re doing/moving something. There, we can also make mistakes. Every day we’re thinking, we can make mistakes. Sometimes we make small mistakes to grow more. We fail and fall to learn and get up better and stronger. And so, we get to know each other better through mistakes, and that’s important to me too.»

Back in Switzerland, the chilli was the first companion to mobilise Andean Peruvian situated practices, holding the space to re-root these in the Swiss landscapes. Kin travelled as seeds and initiated the cultivation practice of the Solanaceae family (between chilis, tomatoes, and potatoes) to understand the Uchucuta recipe. Through these land-rehearsals, the fellow chilies shared the labours and joys of its botanical family, by teaching what they require for fruitful growth, and how to engage with their Capsaicin spicy flavours. With each harvest the recipe iterated ingredients and measures, but always through the maran and tonabo (stone mortar) process and within collective formats (workshops, exhibitions, tasting happenings, etc). By rehearsing one of the embedded recipes in Pachamanca, from seed to stone, I began to understand how to sense its mediation capacities through taste. As chef and feminist author Rebeca May Jhonson shares «it’s tasting that inaugurates a different relationship to things, a new method of perceiving.»[17] So, I wondered what would mean to resituate «earth pot» within the Swiss landscapes, what would these ecological knowledges connect to?

gabriela aquije zegarra and collect. First: First Solanaceae rooftop garden harvest. Second: first Uchucuta recipe rehearsal, in a public workshop with the FFFFFermentation group, in Basel. Third: Luisa Uspa Quispe doing the Uchucuta in maran and tonabo, in Huilloc, Cusco, 2023. All pictures from PhD Culinary Return Archive; second by Erika Calderon; and all remaining images are by author.

«Gabriela: What I learn from plants—in this cultivation relationship, but also in ritual relationships, and cooking relationships—it’s how to relate to knowledges. Not just to know them, but to cultivate them in relationships. So, this complements the scientific ‹ecological› vision, which is an exercise—a rehearsal. Scientists and farmers [campesinos] both rehearse.

 Isaac: Sure. We test how it works or doesn’t work, that’s how we grow knowledges. I hold that, I move that… we ask how? And we do… does it work or not?... something like that, little by little, like walking. And that it’s an exercise every season.

 Gabriela: Yes! A seasonal exercise. And that’s also part of our knowledges with nature.

 Isaac: Let’s say. I plant a seed with organic fertiliser and a plant without. We observe, which is [growing] better? I see [the fruit, the soil] and I choose to grow them with organic fertiliser—it’s better. Without chemicals, like [we, campesinos, did] before... And that’s precisely why we learn through [indigenous] agriculture to respect the land»

 The pot underneath the earth holds the common table …

So, during the Swiss winter of 2022, to honour the Solanaceae garden harvest in Basel and wishing to situate uchucuta within Pachamanca, I co-produced the dinner «Warm Earth» as part of the collective design practice of Cocinas Alterinas and in collaboration with the ETH-SAE Greenhouse Lab in Zurich.[18] In these seasonal gathering, I contributed by sharing the (dry season ritual) ethics and exercising the labours of the Pachamanca recipe with my former collaborator Swiss Egyptian designer Mayar El Bakry, alongside chosen families, and an intimate circle of attendees. After a feedback dialogue with the head of the greenhouse, Marrocan agroecologist Kenza Benabderrazik, we discussed that this rehearsal served to situate and recognise the hot-stone cooking process as a sovereign technology[19] for feeding many during the winter season while also nurturing the soil, this time in a greenhouse in Zurich.

From then on, the rehearsals took different formats for registering, mediating, storytelling, sharing, and sensing with other bodies, from the lands of origin and of arrival. All rehearsals are inter-connected and -dependent but don’t claim to know or be the «original» recipe. Rather, these hold the space to experience the recipe and its manifold embodied (ecological) lessons. All the assembled things (objects/processes) from gardens to kitchens in Peruvian and Swiss territories, belong to a relation or are evidence of the process of not knowing how to cook with the landscapes. Therefore, Pachamanca is «not only» a food staple, a dry season ritual, or a performative gathering, «but also»[20] could be a mediation format to collectively share ecological wisdoms of the chili, potato, and corn.

gabriela aquije zegarra and collect. First: Gabriela as part of Cocinas Alterinas, rehearsing hot-stone cooking during the «Warm Earth» dinner in SAE Greenhouse in Zurich, 2022–2023. Second: Isaac during the layering of the food and hot stones, of the Pachamanca hosted at their home in Huilloc, Cusco. First picture from Cocinas Alterinas Archive, by Erika Calderon. Second picture from PhD Culinary Return Archive, by author;

In the last rehearsal during the western summer season, each of the embedded recipes guided a spatial display or arrangement of its related material worlds.[21] This gathering emerged as a format to present and engage with the living archive of the three crops and its recipes in the context of the Swiss Summer School for Architects in 2024. Through a two-hour exchange with spatial practitioners from different territories and creative backgrounds, we shared a fermented drink (kombucha SCOBY) while exchanging agroecological lessons and political entanglements of Pachamanca. Although the recipe/seasonal gathering/ritual in itself was foreign to them, they could relate through the chili, potato, and maize knowledges conveyed in different formats and plural voices displayed in texts, diagrams, technical drawings, multimedia pieces, vocal storytelling, etc. Pachamanca, rehearsed as a gathering format, opened the collective dialogue and situated the following questions: How do landscape architecture practices care about their relationship to land? What pedagogies could be shared between food-based research and landscape architecture practices? How could these two disciplines learn from and with recipes as ecological knowledge rehearsals?
... From Land-scape to Land-stay architect.

 Gabriela: For you, Isaac, what are the values ​​of Pachamanca?

 Isaac: The Pachamanca core value is to nurture the land. If it starts with an organic fertilszer, then human nurturance can happen. The [cooking] process [under the earth] is something surprising: suddenly, no one thinks it’s going to be cooked! Then you eat and share the wonder, the joy, and the flavour with others: with family, with neighbours, with foreigners. When they ask where does the taste come from? We [answer and] share collective imagination, and value the land for our human nurturance. Also, [for the one who cooks] imagination comes from a technique, and technique comes from those who know [by practicing].

 Gabriela: And who knows?

 Isaac: The masters or the kitchen [cocina—q’oncha], or maybe also time [labour in relation with the weather—seasons]

gabriela aquije zegarra and collect. First:Swiss Summer School presentation, Pachamanca recipe rehearsal of a spatial gathering format for knowledge-sharing, in Basel. Second: Partial view of the «Culinary Re-Turn» living archive. Third: Map for spatially navigating the ecological knowledges of the corn, the potato and the chili, 2024. All pictures from PhD Culinary Return Archive, by Anne Ulbricht (first) and all remaining images are by author.

So, to what extent could culinary pleasures uphold the lessons and values from rooted recipe rehearsals? Leanne Betasamosake Sympsom, Mississauga Nishnaabeg Canadian scholar, shares that «radical thinking and action» comes through the land and illustrates this in the preparation of the maple sugar. This indigenous nishnaabeg recipe intelligence takes care as much of the maple tree as it does of the syrup’s taste, because the lessons of this cooking process lies «in the reproduction of a loving web of nishnaabeg networks within which learning takes place.»[22] Yet, commoditisation and industrialisation of these foods are «deterritorializing»[23] their communal recipe values and embodied land wisdoms, while turning these into food concepts reserved to be only accessed or experience by an elite.

After three years of (many questions unanswered while) practicing «not-knowing» in the presence of Pachamanca, I’ve tested the how, now I’m contesting (again) the why. Why regenerate ecological knowledges through food matters? And more importantly with whom to share this process, and to whom will these knowledges and related economies serve? These are rather crucial questions in a food and knowledge system in which the win-win situations in the name of growth, efficiency, and innovation, hide deep modernist-colonial-extractivist denials.[24]

The geopolitical context of the second Pachamanca hosted by the Riquelme Familiy in Ollantaytambo, during the rainy season 2023, was the indigenous resistance to the outbreak of democracy during the coup d'état of President Pedro Castillo and the usurpation of power by Dina Boluarte. The Peruvian territory witnesses, once more, the rotten power of corrupted, oppressive, and racist hierarchical (economical) structures through the systematic oppression of native peoples and campesino (peasant) communities. Several members from the Huilloc and Patacancha communities that self-organise and travelled to the Peruvian capital Lima for the protest, experienced violence and repression perpetuated by the Peruvian State in complicity with media and industrial lobbyist elites and, by omission, all those (mostly from Lima) who denied/ignored a space for dialogue or recognition of the legitimacy of their struggles. All of this, while quechua Andean food cultures and their recipes, such as Pachamanca, were and are still cook, serve, and sold in many «campestre»[25] restaurants in the capital.

Therefore, in memory and resistance, I wish to dedicate this piece to the families and communities of the sixty-three people who were murdered alongside more than one thousand people who were severely injured during the protests against the current illegitimate government of Dina Boluarte, and the corruption state of the elected congress lived between December 2022 and March 2023,[26] which is still on-going as you read this article. The uprising was lead, in its majority, by self-organised groups of native peoples and campesinos of sixty-four provinces across the Peruvian territory, specially from Ayacucho, Puno, San Martin, and Cusco. May we stand together, by recognising and amplifying their ongoing protest and claim for justice, while recognising what Isaac told me: «If there are no comuneros, we don’t have agriculture, and so there is nothing—nobody eats.»[27]

While navigating this (uprooting) writing-dissertation-struggle, I’m re-rooting and making-sense of rehearsals in the presence of the collective imagination of political and feminist agroecologists. Like this one from Maywa Montenegro de Wit, quoting Helda Morales: «What can agroecologist learn from these ways of seeing the world? In my opinion, we need to envision an agroecology that celebrates plurality, diversity (not only of plants and animals, but of people), nonviolence and love. We need movements and academies that, as Lorena Cabnal puts it, ‹recover joy without losing indignation.›»[28]

Gabriela: What happens when these [pachamanca] knowledges are uprooted and re-rooted in a [capitalist] system? 

[29]Jose: It becomes a consumption product… and not only it commoditises the wisdom of those who thought you, but also their land. 

Rafa: Yes, that’s exactly what I loved about the word you used before: "deterritorialise”, right? Like forcing it. Of course, you take the knowledges to another environment, another place, where they don't belong. Globalize it, right? That’s what happened to the Pachamanca. 

Gabriela: That also leads me to ask what would be a reciprocal exchange, how to give back to the one who taught you? And that’s another level of consent that the gastronomy industry is just not caring for, yet. And, as I understood, it’s important that reciprocity is also with the land. But whom is the land? 

Rafa: The land is what I heard you talk about at one point, like «landscapes,»but as something composed of diversities. Not just the tangible, but also part of the spiritual.

 Isaac: That’s why we say that the land takes care of us—the Pachamama exists.

 Jose: Of course! As Severo says: «Pachamama qampatapi imaymana ruwana.»  If you translate it literally it would mean «mother earth, on top of you we can do anything.» But it’s not [a hierarchical] on «top of you,» rather understood as «with based on» or «thanks» to you. It’s to broader our relationships based on the land. If we didn’t have land, we couldn’t do anything.

gabriela aquije zegarra and collect. Dinner and collective review of the BNL article with Isaac Riquelme, in ALQA Museum of Popular Art in Ollantaytambo, Cusco, 2025.Culinary Return living archive.

Reference and Credit List

All the knowledges about Pachamanca and Uchucuta portrayed in the images and video captures come from, and the peoples (human and non-human) with whom I have exchanged: Isaac Riquelme and Luisa Uspa Quispe, from the community of Huilloc, Ollantaytambo, Cusco, Peru. As well the quoted dialogue with Isaac, took place in ALQA Museo de Arte Popular Andino, along with their members Jose Luis Espinoza Bejar (quechua men from Cusco – service team area), Kevin Rafael Warwa Rojas (quechua «hermose wawita,» walker and dancer from the mountains of Cusco – service team area), and Severo Huamán Phoqo (quechua comunero from the community of Patacancha, Ollantaytambo, Cusco – head gardener)

As well, the «Culinary Re-Turn» living archive (2021–ongoing), is composed by personal and collective work with various artists, designers, writers, collectives, local and peasant communities of Peru and Switzerland. Therefore, I use the abbreviation «and collect» to recognise the collective origin and governance of the knowledges I write about and within. Inspired by the expanded authorship and ways of critical publishing as practiced by Eva Weinmayr [30] and for collective design research advance by Nani and Friends [31], and many others. Direct contributors, authors, and collectives are acknowledged in the text or below in the bibliography.