Listen now (60 min) | Chrysalis Kitchen | 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. For more, see the episode page at ChrysalisPodcast.org.
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8. Constanza Ocampo-Raeder — Tasting the…
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Listen now (60 min) | Chrysalis Kitchen | 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. For more, see the episode page at ChrysalisPodcast.org.