Modern society has removed many of us from an intimate connection to the land, the water, and the elements. Air conditioning in cars and artificial light in our homes allow us to carry on without paying much attention at all to the forces of nature around us.
These relationships to ecological surroundings are something entirely different for those who fish artisanally along the coasts of Peru.
Constanza Ocampo-Raeder is an anthropologist who writes beautifully and poetically about the people who catch camarones and the various types of fish used to make cebiche. She explores their intimate and visceral relationships to their environments—writing about a world of tasting the wind, talking to rocks, and listening to rainbows.
She finds that efforts to protect the traditional and artisanal fishing industries in Peru have provided the cultural and political power to protect the ecosystems that support these species.
I find her work particularly interesting in the context of the global seafood industry. The United Nations estimates that almost 90% of fisheries worldwide are either overfished or have already collapsed. To meet rising demand for seafood on a planet with nearly 8 billion people, seafood farming has expanded rapidly and now provides over half of the world’s seafood for human consumption. Fish farms pollute rivers, lakes, and coastal habitats, and escaped fish threaten wild populations with disease and other ecological impacts.
I think Constanza’s work points us toward what a healthy ecological relationship between people and marine life could look like, even as we fight to dismantle the commercial fishing industry and repair our collective relationship to the world’s oceans.
Constanza is from Mexico originally, and she’s married to a Peruvian. She’s now a professor of anthropology at Carleton College, in Northfield, Minnesota.
This episode of Chrysalis is part of the Chrysalis Kitchen series, which explores questions of the sustainability of our food.
You can listen on Substack, Apple Podcasts, and other podcast platforms.
Please rate, review, and share to help us spread the word!
Constanza Ocampo-Raeder
As an environmental anthropologist, Dr. Ocampo-Raeder’s work focuses on the political ecology of resource management systems in resource-based societies. Her current research projects explore the contradictions between sustainable development goals and policies that impact the livelihoods of small-scale producers, as expressed in initiatives such as food movements, protected areas and ecotourism. Dr. Ocampo-Raeder's current project focuses on the socio-ecological underpinnings of Mexico's diverse culinary traditions where she is exploring and contesting notions of fusion, mestizaje and gendered roles in the booming gastronomic economy. Her research combines ethnographic and ecological methodological frameworks to evaluate the human ecology of indigenous and rural societies in Latin America (Peru and Mexico). Dr. Ocampo-Raeder holds a bachelors’ degree in biology from Grinnell College and doctorate in anthropology from Stanford University. She has published amply in both Spanish and English, often with her undergraduate students, for environmental anthropology, food studies, and human geography journals. Dr. Ocampo-Raeder is currently an Associate Professor at Carleton College where she teaches anthropology, environmental studies and Latin American studies.
Cebiche/Ceviche Recipes from Constanza Ocampo-Raeder
Recommended Readings & Media
Transcript
Intro
John Fiege
Modern society has removed many of us from an intimate connection to the land, the water, and the elements. Air conditioning in cars and artificial light in our homes allow us to carry on without paying much attention at all to the forces of nature around us.
These relationships to ecological surroundings are something entirely different for those who fish artisanally along the coasts of Peru.
Constanza Ocampo-Raeder is an anthropologist who writes beautifully and poetically about the people who catch camarones and the various types of fish used to make cebiche. She explores their intimate and visceral relationships to their environments—writing about a world of tasting the wind, talking to rocks, and listening to rainbows.
She finds that efforts to protect the traditional and artisanal fishing industries in Peru have provided the cultural and political power to protect the ecosystems that support these species.
I find her work particularly interesting in the context of the global seafood industry. The United Nations estimates that almost 90% of fisheries worldwide are either overfished or have already collapsed. To meet rising demand for seafood on a planet with nearly 8 billion people, seafood farming has expanded rapidly and now provides over half of the world’s seafood for human consumption. Fish farms pollute rivers, lakes, and coastal habitats, and escaped fish threaten wild populations with disease and other ecological impacts.
I think Constanza’s work points us toward what a healthy ecological relationship between people and marine life could look like, even as we fight to dismantle the large-scale commercial fishing industry and repair our collective relationship to the world’s oceans.
I’m John Fiege, and this episode of Chrysalis is part of the Chrysalis Kitchen series.
Constanza is from Mexico originally, and she’s married to a Peruvian. She’s now a professor of anthropology at Carleton College, in Northfield, Minnesota.
You can find Constanza’s wide-ranging cebiche recipes and photographs from her fieldwork in Peru at ChrysalisPodcast.org.
Here is Constanza Ocampo-Raeder.
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Conversation
John Fiege
Well, can you tell me about the recipe brought and how you prepare it? Just take us take us through it a little bit?
Constanza Ocampo-Raeder
Yes, so I actually submitted several recipes because some of my work really delved into understanding the tradition of cooking fish with citruses, which is what we know colloquially as cebiche. And most of my work is carried out in Peru, and Peru is the capital of cebiche of the world, you know, they consider it one of the sort of primary dishes of the nation. So one of the things I wanted to do was, you know, depict different cebiche traditions around the world and sort of put them in conversation with some of the, you know, absolutely musts and must not that Peruvians tend to think about when they consider what the perfect speech entails. And I think, you know, one of the fundamental things that they always note is that their cebiche is really good, because of three fundamental issues. One, that they have access to incredibly fresh fish from a sea that actually has, you know, incredible amounts of, you know, biodiversity, both cold weather and tropical weather because it's right on the, you know, the Humboldt, or you know, Peruvian current, because they have a special kind of lime that they claim has a specific kind of acidity that cooks it to the right point, you know, when you when you actually mix it, and three, that it's simple, you know, and they have, you know, they really emphasize the simplicity of it, of not piling it up with too many condiments, which is actually what makes it different from, you know, other cebiche traditions around the world. So I really went out to try to learn how to make cebiche when I was living in Peru, and I learned it from a lot of different types of people from starting out with cookbooks, but just all the people that I knew, making cebiches at home paying attention to how it was done in restaurants, but then a lot of my fieldwork takes place with traditional fishing communities, artisanal fishermen. And we decided I really decided to pay attention to how they made cebiche because if it's, if you can claim it's the freshest cebiche, they were going to be the ones to make it. And it turns out that the best cebiche among the fishing communities tends to be made by teenage boys, because when they are starting—
John Fiege
Wow.
Constanza Ocampo-Raeder
Yeah, it's actually really kind of lovely and there's a lot of pride among these teenage boys about making the best cebiche and they just kind of come up onto the boat with like an old knife, their salt, they're, you know, they have this you know, little sometimes they often put in MSG into it, which is really interesting because it kind of tenderizes the fish. So they have these little secret packets, of you know, of their MSG that they bring in. And, and they just wait to see what's actually captured. And the reason why these young men are doing it is because when you start going into, being folded into the labor of a boat, generally the easiest one for somebody who doesn't have a lot of experience on a ship, is to cook, so they you know, so you can kind of climb up the ranks and get good positions if you're a good, you know, sort of cook, so. So that's how I learned how to make it.
John Fiege
MSG doesn't usually go with our idea of freshness.
Constanza Ocampo-Raeder
Exactly, which is really sort of unique, that they're actually bringing the Ajinomoto, it comes in these cute little packages that you can buy buy strips in the corner store. And they you know, that's their secret ingredient often they're like, you know, so even in these tours—
John Fiege
The not-so-secret ingredient.
Constanza Ocampo-Raeder
The not-so-secret ingredient, because even though they're bringing out the fish from the sea, you know, they think that it's a little bit tough when it's fresh fresh out of the beach, so they kind of put in a little secret tenderizer into it, you know, which makes a difference, I have to say like I've had cebiches in all these different kinds of ways. And, you know, they definitely, it definitely tenderizes it a little bit. So you know, so I learned how to do it with them. And it's generally pretty simple, you know, you have a pretty, you know, in the cities, there's a preference for certain kinds of fish like flounders and Chilean sea bass. But in fishing communities, you know, they'll make cebiche out of just about anything, just like in any coastal community. And it's basically freshly cut fish, you squeeze the lime with a little bit of olive oil, and some sort of hot pepper, either paste or you cut it up into tiny little bits. And you mix it up with maybe a splash of ginger, that's what you know, sort of changes a little bit from region to region, some garlic, if it's one style, which is the tiradito style, or you put onions in it, which is the traditional sort of Peruvian cebiche style, and you mix it all up and you serve it with something sweet like a sweet potato, which makes this like wonderful combination of like the sweet and sour, the acid and the sweetness. And you know, you mix it up and how long you actually let it mascerate is also changes from region to region. Now they do it really fast they do it what they call nisei or Japanese style. So they basically just mix it up right there and you're eating it as soon as you get it served. And I kind of like that, you know, sort of style—
John Fiege
It’s a lot of drama. A lot of—
Constanza Ocampo-Raeder
Yeah, it's a lot of drama. And you can go to these like cebiche bars, and they'll toss it right there for you.
John Fiege
Right, performance.
Constanza Ocampo-Raeder
Yes. And then something crunchy, you know, so it could be, you know, if you're in a place where they have fried plantains, they'll give you strips of fried plantains, or they'll give you, you know, sort of corn nuts, like Q’anchita, which have this sort of styrofoam quality to them, which are really interesting. Or, you know, in some places they might give you, you know, some some sort of like a bean, you know, like, frijoles zarandajas. So it just really depends on the region, but it generally has that sort of acid, the sweet and something crunchy. And that's about it. You know, it's really simple and Peruvians have excellent produce. They have great olive oil, like even cheap olive oil is just fantastic.
John Fiege
Oh, really? Oh, because they've got that huge agricultural region.
Constanza Ocampo-Raeder
Yes, exactly. Exactly. So so that's basically you know, and I talked about in the recipe a lot about this idea of using the eye, el ojimetro, the eye-o-meter, if you will, and you know, and it's really it is really interesting, because you have to kind of develop this embodied feel of how to cook it, when is, I can't tell you exactly how many limes you know, just kind of has to look like it can't be swimming in it, but it also can't be too dry, right and you want to have enough of the lime leftover so you can either pour it in a glass and drink it or scoop it up with spoons. You generally want to eat cebiche kind of communally, but everybody has a spoon so you can get the right amount of the juice and so forth. And they also use they tend to use purple onions, which are a little bit sweeter. And so they have, it's very sort of locally articulated with certain varieties that are very much Peruvian, even the limes, they're technically key limes and you can get them here, but you know when you get have access to real lime trees, like the quality of the lime is just spectacular.
John Fiege
Oh yeah, amazing.
Constanza Ocampo-Raeder
Yeah, yeah, Peruvians tend to claim that only their limes have a particular kind of acidity, and it comes from this one particular region. And there might be some truth to that. But to be honest, you know, I grew up in Mexico, and we had limes that were exactly the same and just as good, but, but it's that, that simplicity, and just the quickness of it that really, they have hands down the best cebiche out there. And just the variety of it, which is really sort of incredible.
John Fiege
Well, that idea of, you know, the limes have to be from here in this spot in Peru, like, that reminds me, in your article, you talk about this concept of oceanic terroir. And then you have this word that's really hard to say, searroir?
Constanza Ocampo-Raeder
Yes, which now I know, it doesn't quite work, I need to change it to merroir. Because I think there is, you know, the French have already started using it. So I tried to be I tried to coined a term, but it was already coined. So I need to change that. But yes, you know, there is this real, you know, discussion about, you know, one of the—you know, preparing the recipe takes this really interesting sort of communal process in which it's not just about the cook, who's actually preparing it. But to make it right, you also have to include the sort of knowledge of the commensal, the person who's actually eating it. And it's in that interplay of people tasting it and saying, yes, it tastes, it's the right texture, it's the right so-called freshness, it's the right sort of smell, it's the right look, you know, there's a particular patina, there's really beautiful patina, that forms on raw fish that's fresh, you know, it's like a little bit iridescent, but it can't be too much. Otherwise, it's old, you know. So there is this discussion amongst everybody who's preparing it, or giving the fish, the people eating it, about it having to have a particular taste, and that taste is very much connected to the different narratives are associated with what is a healthy ocean, right? What is a healthy seascape? And what is the relationship of all these different people to that particular environment?
John Fiege
Yeah, it's so interesting, because you know, the French talk so poetically about the soil, and the weather and humidity, when they're growing grapes for wine, and it was just, I found it really fascinating to hear some of your, your people you're talking about in your work, talking about the sea air and the winds, and like, what part of the sea that the fish is brought from? I was like, Yeah, of course, you know, like, that's, that's what food is, it's taking, it's, it's taking elements from its environment and, and turning it into something else. And why not? Why can't that be a merroir?
Constanza Ocampo-Raeder
Yes, exactly. And, you know, what I think is really interesting, which is going back to this, you know, when you're talking about taste, there is this assumption that because taste is being mediated through a very particular, you know, sort of bodily organ, like the nose and the mouth, right, that it’s objective. And I think what's really interesting about tracing the ways in which people, you know, talk about and construct narratives about the environment, and how it, you know, feeds into food, is that those narratives are actually pretty different. Like the objectivity. Once you start asking about people and comparing different narratives. You know, taste is not as objective, as you might actually, as psychiatrists, psychologists, actually, you know, make us out to think. Like all these studies of tastes and perception, you know, it's very much a sort of, pathway of, you know, different brain sort of processes, and you know, how your body picks up or can't pick up certain tastes. But what I have found in my work is that they're very culturally specific, right? They're socially constructed. And that in the case of the fisherman, for example, if you ask him, What is the best fish for ceviche, it is definitely not the fish that you pull out of the sea, right there and eat immediately. Hence, that's why they use the MSG, right? To them, the best fish is the one that you pull out of the sea, you clean and salt on the boat, you know, that's where, you know, you're using the wind of the deep sea, you're using the water from that particular ocean, you clean it up, you salt it, then you take it home, you store it on the top of your refrigerator, not refrigerated, you so you dry it, and then you reconstitute it, you know, about two to three weeks later. And that's the best ceviche and I have to say that that salting process, once you rehydrate and reconstitute it, it's absolutely delicious. So it's not an issue about freshness. It's about where and how it was prepared for future use.
John Fiege
Right. You know, strangely, this reminds me of some things I've been reading lately about cell phones and our, our, you know, addiction to social media. And there's been some studies by psychologists I believe, showing that people don't enjoy their food as much when their cell phone is sitting on the table.
Constanza Ocampo-Raeder
Oh, I can totally understand that. That's so interesting.
John Fiege
And it's like, yes, of course, taste has this massive psychological element. And it's about what is your interactions with the people at the table? You know, taste is not, you know, as you say, it's not this objective, scientifically measurable thing, it's about, it's about how it all happens in the process.
Constanza Ocampo-Raeder
Yes, yeah. And it's almost like you're chewing these past stories, right? Like you're chewing it, you're thinking it, your whole body opens up when you are exposed to food. And if you're connected into the sociality of it, and are open to hear about these different stories, I think that that's when taste can become this, like magical, cultural realm, where you're exhibiting different relationships with nature, different relationships with each other.
John Fiege
Yeah, totally. Yeah. And as you mentioned, you know, cebiche is, is really tied up in the Peruvian national identity in this sense of national pride. And it's really this a centerpiece of this gastronomical boom in Peru, that is attracting all this international attention to the food culture there. And it seems like a powerful sustainable food movement has emerged with this boom. But I was wondering if you could talk a bit about what some of the ecological impacts and consequences of this exploding interest in cebiche and other traditional dishes is there?
Constanza Ocampo-Raeder
Yes. I think that that is such a great question. Because, you know, the interesting thing about the food movement in Peru is that it constitutes itself a little bit later than most of the sort of contemporary kind of back to land, food movements that we have today. And they explicitly joined a narrative of biodiversity conservation, they were really kind of after the times of terrorism, you know, the country really kind of opened up, woke up to all these discourses that were taking place worldwide as sustainable development, of conservation. And they know and they noticed that Peru was kind of being ignored, because Peru had been closed off for a couple of decades from, you know, really being involved in direct sort of global conversations about things.
John Fiege
Fujimori, and that—
Constanza Ocampo-Raeder
Yeah, it was right after Fujimori was the first one to sort of open it up. And even though he was disastrous for the country in other reasons, he really sort of pushed a conservation agenda, reestablished, you know, sort of research taking place in the country. And that started really sort of catapulting not only economic opportunities, specifically through tourism, so suddenly, you know, they're like, Why aren't why are people going to Mexico and not, you know, lining up in droves to go to Peru? We have good food, we have great, you know, sights to go see, cultural multiculturalism and cultural richness. And so they started articulating sustainable development, around very similar sort of ethos has happened in the slow food movement in Italy. And in fact, a lot of the architects of the food movement are rural sociologists who are kind of, you know, followed the same pattern. And they really started focusing on how can we, you know, harness the sort of biological cultural richness of the country and use it as a weapons for sustainable development. So they even talk about like cocina como una arma social. So it's very much articulated as a sustainable development project. Now, the problem is that, you know, this meant that you would have to really explicitly start building networks to connect all the different producers. And this is an incredibly diverse set of producers, right? With thousands of varieties, if you just think about potatoes there’s thousands of varieties of potatoes, thousands of varieties of quinoas and any of the quinopods. So how do you start linking up small scale producers who are often, you know, inhabiting very different land tenure arrangements, they might be indigenous, communal? You know, how do you start, you know, managing and organizing that. So that's the first sort of problem that not everybody has access to the market or knowledge about how to market it in a sort of, you know, culinary or gastronomic setting. The other thing is that once things start getting popular, let's say that, you know, there's a couple of varieties of potatoes that suddenly became really popular for representing, you know, Peruvian identity. So Lay's, you know, the Frito Lays came up with like papas sandinas, you know, but the problem is that once you need to mass produce it, you need to move towards monocrop. So, those are some of the environmental impacts that suddenly these foods need to be industrialized, right? They need to be, the scaling up of it has a lot of problems. And there's authors like you know, Garcia who's talking about what the impact of that is in certain animals like cuys, and in llamas and other sort of traditionally, you know, raised in different ways animals, and the same thing is happening with a lot of agricultural products. And definitely, with fish, because fish is actually being harvested by traditional fishing operations, they tend to be smaller scale, and they have an actual legal category within Peru. But you know, the demand is up, right. And they're also competing with industrial fleets, which are often impacting the, you know, the type of species that they're harvesting as well.
John Fiege
Yeah, and I thought that was interesting how you talked about how these artisanal fishing folks have exclusive access to to fishing within five miles of the coastline. And so, you know, that's, that's really intensive protection of, you know, the traditional traditional kind of ways of fishing, and none of it’s industrial. But, you know, of course, there are poachers and illegal fishing operations that violate all of this. But it seems that despite all the protections, fish populations are still dwindling. Can you talk about kind of the myriad factors that are going into what what's happening there ecologically?
Constanza Ocampo-Raeder
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's really hard to pinpoint exactly who's responsible for it. Unfortunately, it's these small scale fishing operations that are easy to target by policy and management, but they're really not, I really do believe that they're not really at fault, just because of the scale of it. Even though if you add up all the different fishing villages, it is substantial. I mean, it is artisanal fishing communities provide about 80% of the fresh fish that's actually consumed in Peru. So it's not trivial. But the problem is that first, you know, that fishing folk population, it's incredibly diverse. So they're using different types of aparejos or fishing gear, they're fishing different sections of that five mile, you know, section. So some of them are doing perhaps, you know, lobsters, some of them doing oysters, some of them are doing smaller fish, some of them are, you know, just focusing on tuna fish, others on, you know, different types of things. So coordinating, you know, different techniques for fishing and different traditions of fishing is sort of tricky. But then, you know, there is the industrial fishing fleets that are now capturing entire schools of, let's say, tuna that used to make it in closer to inland but now, you know, they're just not seeing it. So, you know, I've had a couple of seasons where you see, you know, fishing boats go out, and all they come back with is giant Humboldt squids. And that's a disbalance that's happening at the ecosystem level. And we don't know if it's just a normal—apparently, squid, they have these boom and bust sort of ecological cycles. So we don't know if it's because something has happened because of overfishing, or is it a normal cycle of the biology of the Humboldt, but it's not normal for it to be coming in such you know, bursts, that frequently. And then of course, there's climate change. You know one of the reasons I chose to work with these communities is because half of the year, they fish for tropical species, warm water species, and half of the year, they do cold water species because they live right at the intersection between the tropical water currents that come down from the Ecuador and the cold water currents that are coming in from the Humboldt in the current, which is really cold water. So these are communities that are particularly vulnerable to the unpredictability that happens with climate change events.
John Fiege
So yeah, it feels like the oceans, in general, are this massive governance problem we have. And, and it always—
Constanza Ocampo-Raeder
Oh, absolutely. It's a tragedy of the commons. Yes.
John Fiege
Yeah, totally. And it always has been, and there has been some progress in terms of some kind of international agreements. But really, it only takes one rogue nation or fleet. And who's gonna enforce it? You know?
Constanza Ocampo-Raeder
Yeah, yeah. But here's where I'm, you know, a little bit optimistic, because one of the things that I was really sort of taken aback when I started working in these communities is that, you know, there are so many different social and cultural kind of processes that are helping mitigate who, what are the rules are, you know, these fishing communities, they have very well established rules that are often kind of enforced informally. They're built on like kinship and marriage relationships, and just neighborhood, you know, capital that kind of accumulates. And the other interesting thing is that they don't really act, you know, I think as Western thinkers, when we go even and research a place, you go and research one fishing village, right, and then you might go to the next one, but they are much more, to use sort of contemporary parlance that I use in my classes, they queer these boundaries in really interesting ways. So even though they might belong to Village X, they might have families in the next village, and there's quite a bit of negotiation and discussion between villages—there’s a lot of conflict too, but you know, they solve it through festivals and exchanges. And I think that that's why it's really important to sort of look at these issues at the local level. Because often, they've come up with solutions to kind of, you know, understand—they’re already dealing with these problems, and they have been for a very long time. So it's very insightful to see what are they socially and culturally doing in order to mitigate some of these problems? And it has and you're absolutely right, it comes back to really collective action and how collective action works. And you know, how common pool resources are actually being managed by populations.
John Fiege
Yeah, and it's hard enough to manage a national political conversation. But then you all of a sudden dealing with other nations with completely different interests and completely different political structures. It's just like, woof.
Constanza Ocampo-Raeder
Yeah, and even within the country, you know, like, depending on who's in government, you might have somebody who has this really extractivist sort of position, then you have somebody who doesn't, and then everybody likes to build new institutions. So there's so many overlapping institutional, I mean, it's chaotic. You never know who's, you know, you can see a fish and it's like, okay, who regulates this squid? You know, 13 different institutions?
John Fiege
How many different folks regulate it? Yeah. Well, in addition to cebiche, you research and write about camarones, which are similar to crawfish as we know them in the US. They're crustaceans like shrimp, shrimp just live in the oceans. But camarones they go for this long journey from the ocean. And, and they swim-walk upstream through the river until they reach the base of the mountains where I don’t know exactly what the cycle is, but it seems like they grow and spawn there, and then they head back to the ocean.
Constanza Ocampo-Raeder
Yeah.
John Fiege
And they're legally protected, and can't be caught until they reach a certain size. And the people who catch them are called camaroneros. And you describe these fascinating relationships they have with the ecology there and how they communicate through wind rocks, and in my personal favorite, rainbows, they’re talking to rainbows, which is awesome, in order to, as you say, think like crawfish. And can you talk about how the how these camaroneros think like crawfish?
Constanza Ocampo-Raeder
Yeah, it's you know, it's really allegorical because this is a very particular landscape. You know, it's an interandean river valley, it's from the southern, it's still in the department of Lima, so it's still near the capital. But it's these, you know, beautiful valleys, where most of the mountains, if you can kind of envision them, they're completely bare, you know, they, they they don't have any vegetation, except for the vegetation that's on the bottom, along these rivers where there's an amazing amount of wealth of agriculture. And that's where most of the agricultural production in Peru is happening, in these inner river valleys. And so these communities kind of are, you know, you live in that green space and on the river itself. And so it's you can't really escape the sort of, you know, you're always listening to the river flow, you're always paying attention to meteorological differences, because the Andes is a really intense place, you know, when it rains, it pours, the sky is just too blue sometimes, you know, it's a very, very sort of crisp, intense place. So these families are, you know, they, in order to understand the behavior of these crayfish, they really pay attention to what's happening around them, they go down and touch the river boulders to see if they're, you know, warm, or if they're cold to kind of predict what the type of movement of the crayfish might actually be. One of the most beautiful things I learned from them is that they're often tracing rainbows. So they're paying attention to where rainbows are appearing across the sort of mountainous landscape. And if there's a certain kind of shape of rainbow that's happening upstream towards the mountains, that's actually indicating that it's probably raining. And the type of rainbow will indicate if it's raining too hard, which means that it can muddy the waters. So you know, they dive in and hand pick the crayfish, so they actually have to get into the water now and get them because the baskets that they used to use are now, they're too efficient. So they're now prohibited. So they go into the water to handpick them. And if the waters are too muddy, you can't see the crayfish. So, so they're kind of using the signs to sort of understand what type of rain or what type of you know, climactic sort of movement is happening upstream, and they use that to really, you know, understand it. And it's and it's the way that they talk about the crayfish, it’s very personal, you know, they they use a lot of similarities between how the crayfish you know, behave. They, they use similarities like you know, when it's cold, like nobody wants to come out of your house, so why would you come out of your house, but if it's a nice day, you know, then you go out for a stroll, you know. So then that's the type of weather that they like to dive in. Because the shrimp are kind of strolling around their little cave or their little, you know, hole. So they use a lot of, you know, they they use their own life's pace, to sort of explain how the crayfish are working. And it's and its useful, it's very helpful to how they see it. So but they're very in tune. I mean, they're looking for rainbows. They're looking for earthquakes, there's a lot of these tremors that come down the mountains that are wind based, so they're not actual earthquakes. And they can tell, you know, oh, that like windows just suddenly rattle. And they're like, oh, something's going on upstream. So they're, they're kind of looking and adding up signs in order to decide if they're gonna go upstream to swim and capture the crayfish themselves.
John Fiege
It's so interesting. Would you would you mind reading the first two paragraphs of, of your camarones article?
Constanza Ocampo-Raeder
Yes, I would be delighted.
John Fiege
It's so beautifully written.
Constanza Ocampo-Raeder
Oh thank you. The title of the article is “When the Rainbows Bring the Crawfish.” “When the wind is not speaking, the people talk to rocks. They walk down to the river below their houses and place their hands on top of a stone’s smooth surface, just like when you touch the belly of a pregnant woman, gently, waiting for something uncertain. They're trying to determine the rock’s mood, because here rocks have temperaments. If they are in a fickle mood, they are tepid to the touch and there is no hope of deciphering what they want to say. If they are apathetic, they are cold and that tells people that the entire ecosystem is upset—it will not cooperate with humans that day. A very cold stone can even cancel an expedition planned for that night. A cold stone outdoes rumbling winds. When the river rocks are feeling sensual, however, when they feel hot in the frigid water, then the harvest begins. ‘A rock ‘in heat’ means the crawfish or camarones are out,’ Emiliano once told me. A hot rock is an excuse for a crawfish to take a moonlit stroll, but this time they do not swim-walk far from their miniature caves beneath the boulder. They softly shuffle about because the stone’s heat will only go so far in warming the water. On those nights, these Andean crustaceans circle the boulders that make up their lairs. Also on those nights, when the crayfish come out, he crawfish folk, camaroneros, are waiting to catch them.”
John Fiege
That's so awesome. I love that, it's so poetic.
Constanza Ocampo-Raeder
Thank you. That means a lot to me because English is my second language. And I took creative writing classes because one of the things I want to do is when I showcase some of these very, very different human natural systems and relationships, often the vocabulary we have is kind of limited by these Western ecological grammar that we tend to use. And I really want to write ethnography as this kind of magical realism. After all, I’m Latin American, so I love the idea of magical realism. And so it took me a really long time to write it. And it kind of goes against the grain for what typical academic articles are.
John Fiege
Yeah, and it's too bad there's not more academic writing like this. Yeah, you know, I love the moonlit stroll.
Constanza Ocampo-Raeder
Yeah, that’s how they said it, it's crazy. Yeah.
John Fiege
It's so cool. So, between this writing about camarones and your writing about cebiche, one of the things that really jumps out at me is this relationship of the person fishing in the environment, to where they're fishing, and, and how that's a key element of a certain idea of sustainability. In the US, we have this very quantitative idea of sustainability, this, this notion that sustainability can be measured and regulated to protect “natural resources,” as many people label animals, plants, minerals, ecosystems. But lost in all this is the human relationship to the rest of the natural world. It feels to me like you're hinting at this notion of sustainability that reconnects human communities to ecosystems. Can you can you talk a bit more about this human relationship to the environment and how it impacts your understanding of this amorphous word of sustainability?
Constanza Ocampo-Raeder
Yeah, yeah, I've thought a lot about that because I began as an ecologist. My undergrad degrees were in biology and tropical ecology. And you know, and I started working in different places around the world having contact with, you know, locals who were using those ecosystems directly. And one of the things that I found, you know, pretty, pretty curious early on, and then even to a certain degree frustrating, is that you know, if you're coming in from it from this sort of Western scientific perspective, there is this desire that nothing is valid until you can translate it into some sort of ecological justification in the case of sustainability, when you're talking about the use of, you know, wildlife, or plants, and so forth or forests. And, you know, I kept on thinking like, why do we always insist for something to be proven, either positive or negative, when you're in the ground? You know, these relationships are often entangled, and they're contradictory, and they're not necessarily, you know, harmonious. I think words like, you know, harmonious, which have plagued the sort of human ecology literature for a very long time, and that are still used, directly and indirectly, to talk about indigenous systems of traditional ecological knowledge, you know, are really, I think, often unhelpful. Because what would happen if you if I depict this, and you know, and we have all these wonderful connections with nature, but then the fact of the matter is that in this particular article, I talk about how the crayfish have been, you know, extinguished and have to have been repopulated into this river several times, because it, sometimes it's sustainable. And sometimes it's not, because you can't necessarily control everybody who's interacting with them. So you know, so there's this bar of purity that's often placed upon resource-based populations that they have to do it perfectly, when our post-industrial society, we are far from perfect, you know.
John Fiege
We don't do anything perfectly.
Constanza Ocampo-Raeder
We don't do anything perfectly. But when we're talking about others, we expect them to just be poetic about it, to be religious about it, to be, you know, nationalistic about it, have identities and sense of place. So I've thought about that a lot, and I think we need to open up to really think about human-nature relationships as often, you know, contradictory, unexpected. I think the Anthropocene sort of literature is really helping us look forward instead of backwards, you know, really take stock of what is here now, and then start reimagining the possibility of what sustainability can mean. And it's not going to be what you and I learned in our environmental studies, you know, when we were undergrads, like this is, I mean, at least I graduated from college over 20 years ago, and I am drastically in a very different place than I was when this sort of sustainable language and vocabulary started coming in. So I think we need to be open to messiness.
John Fiege
Yeah, and it, you know, to me it feels like this dilemma, in a sense that, on the one hand, you know, it's easy for people to sit in their air conditioned house under a fluorescent light and stare at their computer and see these perfect ecosystems and these beautiful photographs and, and have this sense of this unsullied, perfect nature out there somewhere. And, and that's also kind of easy to critique as well. But at the same time, if everybody tried to go have these personal relationships with ecosystems, and our, you know, 8 billion people on the planet, like that wouldn't go well, either. So it feels like we're in this, we're in this hard place where we have these really superficial removed relationships with plants and animals and, and places, ecosystems, the land, the water, but at the same time, you know, that's the only thing that protects it in some ways, you know, like, thank goodness, all those millions of people are in New York City, you know, and not spread all over the state. Because then there would be nothing left. You know.
Constanza Ocampo-Raeder
On the other hand, you know, I think that one of the reasons I chose to focus on the internal food movement of Peru is because it kind of makes you think about these, you know, sort of different scales and the nested sort of nature of social, you know, groupings and relationships, because, in this case, crawfish are being protected. They are, you know, there is a period of, of a veda, where you can't actually eat it for a certain amount of months, so that they can actually reproduce. And that was actually driven by the increased desire of, you know, restaurants to actually, you know, serve this particular dish inside Peru. They're not exporting, you know, camaroneros, and it's very regionalised. And it's connected to a pretty substantial urban area, which is Lima. And so you don't know where the drivers are going to be at. But what they did right in this case is that they went and spoke to the people who were actually, in this case, you know, harvesting the crayfish, and they worked with them to find different alternatives. And there's different guilds, every river valley has crayfish in Peru, so there's a lot of different guilds. Sometimes they fail, sometimes they don’t. But in this particular case, it also has a lot to do with the biology of a particular, you know, species. But in this case, they've been able to really manage it in what I think are pretty successful, you know, ways. So we need to play with issues of scale, I think, a little bit more.
John Fiege
Yeah, for sure. But I, you know, related to that I found one thing you mentioned super interesting, that in the offseason, camaroneros are hired to enforce the fishing ban, and they're actually paid by the local hydroelectric plant to do this. And from what I, from your article, it seems like the dams are, are getting a lot of criticism from environmentalists, in part because their operations impede the journey of the camarones up the river. And the power companies want to take a bit of the heat off themselves by making sure that the crawfish populations don't collapse.
Constanza Ocampo-Raeder
Yeah, I mean, it's like, you know, I came into this project, thinking that I was going to really write a piece, you know, showcasing the evils of the mining company, but everything again, was so entangled. I mean, they're, they're trying to, you know, resolve a particular image, but they're not only just polluting, you know, disrupting the waterways for the camaroneros but for the entire agricultural sector, which is pretty powerful,
John Fiege
And industrial.
Constanza Ocampo-Raeder
And industrial, you know, and yeah, it was a very surprising turn of events. And, you know, and it's also a very fragile sort of relationship, because you change mayors or, you know, something happens and those relationships can change. Conservation, I always tell my students is not an endpoint, it's always a process. You're just kind of buying time, throughout this entire thing. You're never gonna say like, oh yeah, here we are we, succeeded.
John Fiege
Now, conserved.
Constanza Ocampo-Raeder
Now it has been conserved. Yes, exactly.
John Fiege
Done, let’s move on.
Constanza Ocampo-Raeder
Yes. Yeah. Let's move on now. It'll never happen. So we, you know, I'll always have something to go explore. And we'll see what that work looks like. Right.
John Fiege
Right. Well, I just love how you've twisted around these traditional dynamics between industry and traditional fishing communities and urban environmentalists. And that’s, you know, that's, I think, what makes this work you're doing so strong is, is we, in the mainstream media, we fall so easily into these stereotypical simplistic visions of each of these, you know, folks who might be called stakeholders. Which in itself is a problematic term.
Constanza Ocampo-Raeder
Yeah, exactly.
John Fiege
You know, and it's, it's so complicated. And we, I think that, that complication, for me, it should give us a lot of humility. And to say,
Constanza Ocampo-Raeder
I, you know, that that is a wonderful word to use. I mean, I've been also thinking a lot about the idea of grace, right? Like, when you read about these things, when you read about, you know, let's say, different foods, you know, it's so easy for us in the position that we're in, to say, like, Oh, I just learned about X or Y tradition, I'm gonna go do it, or I'm gonna go travel and doing it. And I think that, that feeds into this consumer thing that everything's up for the experience of others. I don't know how to say this. But you know, I've made the switch to go back to my home country, which is Mexico, to really start exploring what my relationship with food is. And, you know, and I, and I live a really, you know, kind of crazy relationship with food, because in a given week, I'm cooking things from India, from Thailand, from Vietnam, from Mexico, from Peru, and that has incredible ecological consequences, right? Like, not everybody should be able to have access to Peruvian crawfish, you know, like, what does it mean to really move into a much more local, you know, process of eating. And somebody like me, its a really, it's a really hard thing for me to do because I'm Mexican. I’m not going to eat, you know, turnips in the middle of winter, it would just be hell for me, you know. I even have a hard time, you know, doing the CSA even though I love the idea. I love having fresh vegetables. There's a moment in which I look at all those, you know, famine foods, that I consider famine foods, like turnip, beets and all that. And I'm like, yuck, you know, like, I don't, it's not that I don't know how to cook them. I am a perfectly good, you know, cook. It's just that culturally, we're also becoming a much more, you know, multicultural pluriversal sort of globe, and how do you how do you travel? How do you make these other ecosystems and human-nature relationships travel with you? So I have no real answer, but I think your point is really important.
John Fiege
Yeah, and as somebody you know, with Northern European heritage, I’m really, I'm really glad I'm not tied to my own culinary history. You know? And that, that kind of Northern European, you know, focus on on animal husbandry and, you know, limited vegetables. You know, that's been disastrous, ecologically. So at the same time, being able to draw from other culinary traditions has allowed us to at least think about getting a food system into a more ecologically sustainable position.
Constanza Ocampo-Raeder
Yeah, because diversity is good, right. But then it also has its bad sides too. So, yeah, so I don’t, you know, just culturally speaking, you know, like, why do I insist on buying avocados in Northfield when, you know, 73% of them, because I'm, like, actually keeping track of it, are always a mess? You know, but I cannot live without avocados. So it's like those cultural underpinnings and connections we have, and the ones we build throughout our lifetime, are really important and they’re not trivial. Yeah.
John Fiege
Right, well, I lived in Texas for a long time, most of my adult life, and I always considered all the produce from Mexico to be local, essentially.
Constanza Ocampo-Raeder
Yeah. Mhm.
John Fiege
But then when I moved to New York, it doesn't work so well anymore. Oh, no longer local. Definitely no longer local. Well, you mentioned wanting to go and explore Mexico and kind of your relationship to food. And one thing I found really interesting that you wrote was how a Peruvian waiter once told you that cebiches in Mexico are disgusting.
Constanza Ocampo-Raeder
Oh, god. Yeah. And I mean, and, and I have even heard worse, like, you know, the Peruvian food movement hit a chord in the national sort of psyche, in a way that is really kind of powerful, and spectacular, but if you're foreign, it takes you by surprise, because you come into the country, and they will say things like that without, you know, considering any type of consequence or maybe decorum, you know. But yeah, no, it's, you know, the very famous Mexican cebiche is a Acapulco cebiche, which I, you know, my family happens to be from Guerrero. So I know it very well. And, you know, they use ketchup, and they even sometimes put Fanta onto it because it's an orange based one. And I know it sounds kind of atrocious, but it tastes so good. Oh my god. You know, it just kind of brings this brightness into it. And you know, and they're just horrified by it. Like my husband, you know, when he comes to Mexico, if I tell him it's a shrimp salad, he'll eat it and enjoy it. But if I remind him it's ceviche acapulqueño, he'll be like, Ugh, you know, that’s actually, you know. Ecuadorian cebiche, which is relatively similar to Peruvian cebiche, except that they use tomatoes, which is an Andean crop, like they could claim that one if they wanted to, and it's acidic, as well. They're like, Oh, my God, they use tomatoes. And they're, they're very sort of proprietary about what proper cebiche really is. So, so yeah, so it's, it's been interesting to sort of think about, you know, the, that that extreme sort of creation of a national identity around food. I have to say that in Mexico, it's very similar. People, we’re very, very proud of our food. But we articulate it differently, like Mexico really is built around this idea of mestizaje. So for us, our food exemplifies that social process very, very vividly, right? Like we're always talking about a mole, for example, it has like the best of the indigenous ingredients and techniques and the best of the Spanish, right, like a proper Mexican, you can't be too European and you can't be too indigenous, you have to be a mix, right? It's a caste system, like the mestizo is a caste system. And so we are articulate it differently. Peruvians don't emphasize the indigenous part of their, you know, ingredients as much as they do in Mexico. But there are some, you know, strange pathologies about like, you know, how Mexicans also articulate themselves as being central to the gastronomic world. But you know, but there's similarities to both places, because there was two pre-Columbian empires there. So you know, there was two colonial, you know, processes, one that took place with the Inca first, and then in Mexico, it was the Aztec and predated by the Maya. Then the Spanish came into this landscape that was incredibly diverse. I mean, these are diverse places ecologically, culturally, socially, historically. And they were just perfect places in order, you know, you had these networks of economic systems already built for the trade of goods, you know, so it's no wonder that the two places where you have these fabulous cuisines are Peru and Mexico. So there's a lot of difference—um, similarities.
John Fiege
And where do you fit into all this? Like, as you think about this new work you're doing? You know, what, what is your what's your relationship to food? How is your identity tied up? Or not tied up in these things?
Constanza Ocampo-Raeder
You know, I, that, I, you know, I don't know, I find myself at this, you know, I'm close to 50. So I'm really excited to sort of really think about who am I, and I have this particularly beautiful window in which I'm articulating that, which is to my kids, you know, there to, you know, little boys who are eight and ten and they were born in the United States, but they have a really, really proud Peruvian father and an incredibly proud mother. We travel they do fieldwork with me. And so a lot of the questions I'm posing about what does food do for you, why is it important to articulate and talk about food and really pay attention to how we're eating, is really coming from this insight of raising two children, you know, like, who do I want them to be? How are they negotiating their own identity in the United States? Like we have big rabid discussions about, you know, if a flour tortilla is a proper thing in my household. And you know, and I mean, of course, like flour tortillas are Mexican, right, and there's like, a lot of foods we eat with flour tortillas, but I've kind of become radicalized in the sense of like, I'm like, you shall not eat flour tortillas ever, unless they're handmade by somebody, you know. And so my kids are, you know, it's really, like, I really diversify insects, like Mexicans eat a lot of insects. So we, my kids regularly take up chapulines, or worms or stuff to their, to their lunches that I you know, I'm like, bringing stuff from home, to really emphasize that there's more out there than what they're being exposed. I mean, these, we go to a progressive school, and they have a relatively good lunch, you know, but the food, it's just dreadful. So, I am kind of, you know, really trying to showcase also that food is not just a vehicle to nutrition. I think that, you know, a lot of these notions of sustainability get translated into these strange notions of health, and a clean body and a trim body. And I'm not particularly thin, you know, like, I'm a pretty, you know, I'm a big, robust woman. And so this idea that only through cleaning am I supposed to achieve this very particular kind of Europeanized body? I don't, I'm not, you know, 100% with it either. And so veganism is something that I'm really sort of, you know, considering, like, okay, like, if I'm going to eat meat or animal protein, like in what context. So I'm actively this late in my life really thinking about it, but I think it came through my kids. And so right now my new project is next year, I'm spending a whole year in Oaxaca, in Mexico, and I'm going to write an ethnographic cookbook, but it's very much going to be about, you know, discovering, you know, the sort of ecological, the socioecological underpinnings of the foods we eat, and really kind of bringing out these stories, that a mole is not just a mole, but it really articulates a particular legacy, I really want to write against the idea of fusion, because I think fusion gives you this sort of false sense of like, multicultural reconciliation, when it's not necessarily, you know, it comes from a very particular legacy. And really articulate it into the future, like, what does, what does Mexican food food mean today when you know, Mexicans live throughout the continent, and in different places, right, like, what does it mean for my kids? So it's a big question, and I and I'm grappling with it in the unexpected realm. But one of the things I did choose was to go back to my country and start working in my own cultural space, if you will.
John Fiege
Yeah. Well, that's super interesting. Yeah, these are such, they’re such complex, but also like, deep philosophical questions.
Constanza Ocampo-Raeder
Yes. Yeah.
John Fiege
And so where are you landing with this? I mean, is even the idea of sustainability, is it like a central thing you think about? Or like, how do you even think about that?
Constanza Ocampo-Raeder
Oh, God, you know, I don't think about sustainability because every time I try to, you know, kind of operationalize it for a particular project or something, it gets too unwieldy, because I do think sustainability has been, you know, articulated around a particular kind of human-nature relationship, that's much more on the ecological sense of it. And I'm trying to open up the, I believe that you can get to those, you know, systems that, you know, have low, you know, pollution, low outcomes, runoff, erosion, all those good things that I think are merit, you know, meritful. But in order to get there, we still need to get through the sort of human histories that will encourage us to really invest in that system. Because I think it's become, the word sustainable has become too dry in my mind, it's about following the carbon footprint or about doing it. And I can't get on board with that message, because I just can't connect with it at the human level. So we're, I'm really coming down to it as building up these sources of human histories, in order to emphasize that we're connected with food in more ways than we think about. Because like, you know, going back to avocados. Yeah, I shouldn't be buying avocados. I shouldn't be buying limes. I'm pretty aware of what my carbon footprint is. But I'm still going to do it. And the only thing that changes is now I feel guilty about it. But but you know, what can I do?
John Fiege
Progress!
Constanza Ocampo-Raeder
Yes, exactly. Like at least now I feel—but what can I do to have a much more sort of, you know, joyful life in the sense of feeling true to my identity, true to the type of person I am, true to my kids’ heritage as well and still, you know, find a new ethos of eating and experiencing the world that is not, you know, problematic. And that's a big task. I don't know. I don't know if I'm being successful at it but I'm trying.
John Fiege
Well, the frame, the frame of thinking about your children is such a great one too. Because in your kids is, I mean, literally, your history. Like written in their DNA. And the way you spoke as they were growing up, you know, it's literally there, the history, but it's also so much about, what is the world they're going to inhabit one day?
Constanza Ocampo-Raeder
Yes.
John Fiege
And, and connecting the past to the future is just such an important thing. We can't live in the past. And we can't just be obsessed in with this, as you say, this kind of sterile, mechanistic idea of sustainability into the future, you know, they have to be connected to one another in some way.
Constanza Ocampo-Raeder
Yeah, and you know, and that's where I think delving into these, you know, sort of human histories is important, because if we think about all this, you know, discussion about the Anthropocene, like, what does it mean? Like, is it a Anthropocene of cyanide or the end of the world and all these, you know, kind of interesting, apocalyptic language that’s being used to describe the future. But if you look at at least, you know, like, the history of my country, we've already gone through an Anthropocene. I mean, the colonial onslaught was severe enough that it reduced the population to, you know. How is it that we have such an amazing diversity of food today, after the genocide, after the ecocide? You know, after these post industrial processes, I mean, Mexico has been neoliberalizing constantly, since, you know, the 19-, you know, I would say 50s, 60s, but then, you know, went crazy in the 80s. And why is it that it survives? There’s like, stories of survivors and resilience, that's where I want to be hopeful, you know, that this is not the first time we've we've faced these things.
John Fiege
Well, I'm super excited to read about your future work in Mexico.
Constanza Ocampo-Raeder
Thank you.
John Fiege
And, and I hope it feels like those first few paragraphs of your Gastronomica article.
Constanza Ocampo-Raeder
Yeah, I hope so. It's been already good. We've gone a couple of times. And it's been really, gotten me to think about, you know, these really interesting ideas of you know like, how here, we talk a lot about how we should go back to these decolonized diets, right. It's always, you know, in the US, it's always everything or nothing, like it’s binaries, you know. And when I ask—
John Fiege
This is the nation of black and white.
Constanza Ocampo-Raeder
Black and white, yeah, right. And when I asked these, you know, indigenous women that I'm, you know, collaborating with, you know, like, what did you use before the Spanish, like, you didn't have almonds, you know, they're not, you know, how would you decolonize this? And they're like, Why would we want to? They're like, They gave us the almonds, and we made them ours. And why would we deny all the work we put into making these almonds—and they have a word for it, they’re criollo. Right, like, so that is interesting. That's not happening with the decolonize food movement here. You know, so we’ll see what happens.
John Fiege
Well, it’s like, it’s like those, those cute little hats that folks in the Andes are so famous for, that are considered this traditional clothing, that they got from the Europeans.
Constanza Ocampo-Raeder
Yes, exactly. Exactly.
John Fiege
—long, long ago.
Constanza Ocampo-Raeder
And so what, are we gonna get rid of them? Yeah.
John Fiege
Is that decolonizing? Yeah, it's a really, it's complicated. But yeah, I very much appreciate this getting out of the simplistic binaries that American culture can, is just so good at pushing us into.
Constanza Ocampo-Raeder
Yeah, and I mean, and the thing is also to remember that it's not like in Mexico, we might have the solution because they take the opposite. It's all mestizaje. It's like, it's all just mixed together. And there are its own pathologies with that, right. But I do think that local stories can help us do that. So yeah.
John Fiege
Well, awesome. Constanza, thank you so much for joining me today. This has been really wonderful and fun.
Constanza Ocampo-Raeder
Thank you, John. I look forward to talking to you more in the future. You have to come to Oaxaca.
John Fiege
Oh, yeah.
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Outro
John Fiege
Thank you so much to Constanza Ocampo-Raeder. Go to our website at ChrysalisPodcast.org, where you find her recipes for cebiche, her photographs from her fieldwork in Peru, and our book and media recommendations.
This episode was researched and edited by Brodie Mutschler, with additional editing by Sofia Chang. Music is by Daniel Rodriguez Vivas. Mixing is by Juan Garcia.
If you enjoyed my conversation with Constanza, please rate and review us on your favorite podcast platform. Contact me anytime at ChrysalisPodcast.org, where you can also support the project, subscribe to our newsletter, and join the conversation.
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