Miracle Foods: Quinoa, Curative Metaphors, and the Depoliticization of Global Hunger Politics

Abstract

Since the post–World War II “discovery” of global malnutrition and the concomitant rise of the development apparatus, various “miracle foods” have been proposed by international development organizations as solutions to chronic undernourishment in developing countries. This article draws on media analysis, development literature, and interviews to explore the “miracle food narrative” (MFN) in three cases: high-lysine corn, Golden Rice, and quinoa, which as the incumbent miracle food is the focus of the paper. The essay contends that miracle food narratives depoliticize hunger through a “curative metaphor.” This trope bolsters a paternal logic that blames malnutrition on the undernourished, and blurs problems of access and dispossession, locating “the solution” in Western philanthropy or economic development. The essay argues that quinoa’s interpellation as a global miracle food is directly related to the rise of “multicultural” and “sustainable” development paradigms, and corresponding changes in the roles of “culture/tradition” and “environment” in development discourse. While quinoa’s insertion in the MFN departs in some ways from the fable of the Western scientist designing the hunger antidote by representationally displacing authority in science with authority in “traditional ways,” this recasting of the actors leaves the broader narrative and underlying curative metaphor in place. As malnutrition alleviation programs integrate cultural difference, critical food scholars must pay close attention to the ways in which tradition and culture are invoked. To conclude, I draw attention to the fraught interaction of the politics of indigeneity and the politics of global malnutrition that arises with the shifting roles of science and tradition in quinoa’s adaptation of the miracle food narrative, as well as scale disjunctures between simple miracle food stories and complicated realities, a dynamic that underscores the need for agrifood and food policy scholars to pay close attention to complex interactions of scale.

Full text

Miracle Foods: Quinoa, Curative
Metaphors, and the Depoliticization
of Global Hunger Politics
Dramatic improvements in the world’s leading food grains—rice,
wheat and corn—may enable mankind one day to satisfy its
hunger. All over the world scientists are tinkering with the genetic
structures of grain to make them shorter, sturdier, and more
productive and increasingly nutritious.
—VICTORIA ADVOCATE NEWSPAPER (1968)
THE POST–WORLD WAR II construction of the development
apparatus brought hunger within the purview of scientific
knowledge. In the 1940s, media accounts and government re-
ports invoked neo-Malthusian fears of an exponentially expand-
ing global population that would soon surpass the global
carrying capacity. Millions would perish, went the logic, unless
“developed”nations intervened with their supreme capabilities
in science and technology to feed the hungry masses.
Scientific classifications of hunger (e.g., malnourishment)
were constructed and mapped onto nations and bodies through
detailed quantitative measurements. While these scientific clas-
sifications appear apolitical and objective, categorizations of
hungry bodies infer certain stories of blame, and justify very po-
litical, interventionist “solutions.”For instance, if “hunger”in
the sense of insufficient food supplies is the problem, then bulk
food aid is the solution. If “malnutrition”due to overreliance
on a single low-nutrition food is the problem, substituting that
food for one with a higher nutrient content is a rational solu-
tion. The framing of the problem implies a particular remedy.
This paper examines a particular subset of these proposed
remedies, which I call “miracle foods,”a strategy that
emerged in the 1960s and has been reincarnated multiple
times thereafter. I contend that the “miracle food narrative”
(MFN), the tale of the food with the power to cure global
hunger, emerged in the 1960s with high-lysine corn in the
context of the Green Revolution and was reconstructed with
Golden Rice in the context of the “micronutrient turn”
(cf. Kimura 2013) of the 1990s, and most recently, with the
Abstract: Since the post–World War II “discovery”of global malnu-
trition and the concomitant rise of the development apparatus,
various “miracle foods”have been proposed by international devel-
opment organizations as solutions to chronic undernourishment in
developing countries. This article draws on media analysis, develop-
ment literature, and interviews to explore the “miracle food narra-
tive”(MFN) in three cases: high-lysine corn, Golden Rice, and
quinoa, which as the incumbent miracle food is the focus of the pa-
per. The essay contends that miracle food narratives depoliticize
hunger through a “curative metaphor.”This trope bolsters a pater-
nal logic that blames malnutrition on the undernourished, and
blurs problems of access and dispossession, locating “the solution”
in Western philanthropy or economic development. The essay
argues that quinoa’s interpellation as a global miracle food is
directly related to the rise of “multicultural”and “sustainable”
development paradigms, and corresponding changes in the roles of
“culture/tradition”and “environment”in development discourse.
While quinoa’s insertion in the MFN departs in some ways from
the fable of the Western scientist designing the hunger antidote by
representationally displacing authority in science with authority in
“traditional ways,”this recasting of the actors leaves the broader nar-
rative and underlying curative metaphor in place. As malnutrition
alleviation programs integrate cultural difference, critical food schol-
ars must pay close attention to the ways in which tradition and cul-
ture are invoked. To conclude, I draw attention to the fraught
interaction of the politics of indigeneity and the politics of global
malnutrition that arises with the shifting roles of science and tradi-
tion in quinoa’s adaptation of the miracle food narrative, as well as
scale disjunctures between simple miracle food stories and compli-
cated realities, a dynamic that underscores the need for agrifood and
food policy scholars to pay close attention to complex interactions
of scale.
Keywords: miracle foods, development discourse, malnutrition,
quinoa, indigeneity, sustainability
RESEARCH ESSAY |Emma McDonell, Indiana University
GASTRONOMICA:THE JOURNAL OF CRITICAL FOOD STUDIES,VOL.15,NUMBER4, PP.70–85 , ISSN1529-3262, ELECT RONIC ISSN 1533-8622. © 2015 BY THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA.ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.PLEASE DIRECT ALL REQUESTS FOR
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proposal of quinoa as a miracle food and miracle crop, in the
context of recent changes in development discourse around
ideas of sustainability and culture. While panacea myths
have deep roots in Western Europe, the application of this
idea to global malnutrition was something new that arose
alongside the post–WWII development apparatus. As nutri-
tionists sought to delineate universal nutritional requirements
for the human body and agronomists bred “improved”crops,
development practitioners saw potential to create a single
food that would cure malnutrition. This MFN was attractive,
durable, and flexible, a combination of traits that have al-
lowed for miracle food cycles involving a period of excite-
ment and media attention along with the forging of webs of
powerful institutional actors endorsing the food’s potential,
followed by a slow retreat into the background as they fail to
meet expectations. A few years later a new food emerges and
follows the pattern. Time and again, these foods fail to meet
the lofty aspirations, and yet the “First World”public does not
question the broader logic of miracle foods, nor the implied
curative metaphor for hunger.
1
I deconstruct the foundational logic of miracle foods in
order to problematize the Western scientific understanding of
hunger. By honing in on proximate causes of hunger and lo-
cating blame in the hungry people themselves, ultimate
causes, such as global political economy and structural ad-
justment programs that implicate Westerners, are obscured.
I draw from Dianne Rocheleau’s (1995) work on “crisis narra-
tives”to illustrate problems with the analytical scale and link-
ages of cause and effect in miracle food stories. By framing
hunger as a biomedical issue with a biomedical solution,
MFNs define relevant actors and limit the terms and scale of
debate. James Ferguson’s (1990) ideas about development dis-
course suggest that stories of hunger panaceas, like the many
development projects that are unsuccessful in achieving their
public goals, are not innocuous in their ineffectiveness, but
are powerful in their reinforcement of a depoliticized framing
of hunger. I argue that miracle food fantasies reify concep-
tions of malnutrition as a biomedical pathology by invoking
a“curative”metaphor. This trope bolsters a paternal logic by
blaming malnutrition on the undernourished, blurring prob-
lems of access and dispossession, and locating the solution in
Western philanthropy or economic development.
This essay outlines the structure and defining characteris-
tics of an MFN by tracing the trajectories of three proposed
hunger panaceas: high-lysine corn, Golden Rice, and qui-
noa. I examine the former two briefly in order to sketch the
MFN and provide points of comparison for a more detailed
analysis of the incumbent miracle food, quinoa.
2
Ostensibly
an unlikely candidate for the MFN considering its origins far
outside the First World scientific laboratories (both in time
and space) that spawned previous miracle foods, quinoa pro-
vides a particularly revelatory case study to examine how the
MFN adapts to changing development discourse milieus.
3
I
elaborate upon quinoa’s recent interpellation as a miracle
food in order to underscore a decisive shift in the relative
roles of science and tradition in the MFN and demonstrate
how quinoa’s insertion into and modification of the MFN oc-
curs in direct relation to the rise of discourses of “multicul-
tural”and “sustainable”development. Quinoa is framed as
a miracle food and a miracle crop that while curing global
hunger, can also provide poverty alleviation, biodiversity con-
servation, and climate change adaptation. I argue that while
this acknowledgment of the interconnectedness of malnutri-
tion, poverty, and climate uncertainty offers a more complex
reading of “the problem,”such that malnutrition does not oc-
cur in a vacuum, the framing of the miracle food as “the so-
lution”serves to expand the depoliticizing power of MFN’s
curative metaphor with regard to these interdependent issues,
and in doing so obscures their incredibly political nature.
FIGURE 1: Quinoa panojas in Cuzco, Peru.
PHOTOGRAPH BY EMMA MCDONELL ©2015
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I employ and extend Aya Kimura’s (2013) analysis of “char-
ismatic nutrients”and their corresponding “nutritional fixes.”
Kimura examines the “micronutrient turn,”the rise of micro-
nutrient deficiencies in expert discourses about hunger in the
1990s and the parallel increasing dominance of fortification
and biofortification as the assumed solutions to “the prob-
lem.”
4
Kimura, drawing on Gyorgy Scrinis (2008), contends
that nutritionism, the increasingly dominant ideology that sees
food as primarily a “vehicle for delivering nutrients,”frames
the Third World food problem as an issue of “inferior”food,
and in doing so implies that the solution lies in finding the
missing “supernutrient”and providing it in the most efficient
way possible (Kimura 2013: 3–4). These technical attempts to
solve the Third World food problem by exclusively targeting its
nutritional aspect obscure structural inequalities and power
asymmetries by recasting the food problem as a primarily tech-
nical matter (ibid.: 5). Kimura utilizes Max Weber’s (1978)
discussion of “charismatic authority”as an unstable form of
authority harnessed by leaders who exude power beyond
normal expectations to examine what she calls charismatic
nutrients. For Weber, “charisma”is not divinely endowed, but
rather a social status upheld by sociopolitical webs and as such
is inherently unstable and ephemeral. Kimura uses this frame-
work to highlight successive eras of charismatic nutrients (e.g.,
protein in the mid-twentieth century) and their corresponding
“nutritional fixes,”which she argues become powerful not
because of their innate potency, but instead as a result of the
sociopolitical networks built around them (ibid.: 19).
Miracle foods and the curative metaphor for hunger allevia-
tion provide a conceptual foundation for charismatic micronu-
trients, supplying a narrative framework deeply embedded in
Western understandings of hunger. This project’sexaminations
of high-lysine corn and Golden Rice both follow the example
set forth by Kimura; however, my analysis of quinoa adapts and
expands this model to account for the changes in development
discourse, cultural-historical context, and geographical specific-
ity that have defined the emergence of quinoa as a miracle food.
Quinoa is inserted into the MFN that high-lysine corn and
Golden Rice also follow, though quinoa’s ascent does not entail
a charismatic nutrient. Much like Kimura argues that the 1990s
were characterized by the micronutrient turn, I contend that
quinoa signals the dawn of the subsequent era in which charis-
matic whole foods come to be seen as solutions, and the author-
ity of “traditional ways”comes to, rhetorically, replace the
authority of scientific expertise. I link this shift to emergent dis-
courses of “sustainable”and “multicultural”development.
First, I summarize the history of panaceas and hunger relief
programs to contextualize the rise of miracle foods. Next, I use
high-lysine corn and Golden Rice as case studies to illuminate
the patterned structure of the narrative and call attention to the
aforementioned critiques. I then highlight the ways in which
the MFN depoliticizes hunger and further interrogate quinoa,
the incumbent miracle food. At first glance, quinoa indicates
a paradigm shift in miracle food logic, but closer scrutiny reveals
a similar framework reworked to fit the sustainable, multicul-
tural development era. While quinoa’s insertion in the MFN
departs in some ways from the fable of the Western scientist
designing the hunger antidote by representationally displacing
authority in science with authority in “traditional ways,”I argue
that this recasting of the actors leaves the broader narrative and
underlying curative metaphor in place.
Miracle Foods and the Curative Metaphor for
Hunger
Tales of panaceas have a long history in Western European phi-
losophy. The term “panacea”derives from the name of the
Greek goddess of the universal cure, Panakeia. The daughter of
the god of medicine, Panakeia couldremedy any ailment with a
single potion (Kanellou 2004). While all healing systems draw
upon the curative powers of ingesting particular herbs or foods,
the notion that a single substance existed, or could be created,
that would cure all ailments was especially powerful in the
Western imagination.
As epidemics plagued a rapidly urbanizing Europe in the
nineteenth century, frightened consumers became especially
vulnerable to cure-all claims (Porter 2002). Entrepreneurs
flooded consumer markets with purported “magic bullet”
powders and ointments. Contemporaneously, an expanding
global food trade introduced exotic foods into consumer mar-
kets that were often advertised as having occult healing
powers. A number of now familiar foods such as chocolate,
sugar, and coffee were once peddled as panaceas (ibid.). The
“patent medicine”industry waned in the first decades of
the twentieth century as products were proven fraudulent,
yet the panacea myth endured. Impressive medical advances
(e.g., polio vaccine, penicillin) secured Western medicine’s
dominance and strengthened the idea that scientific progress
would unveil concoctions to remedy both bodily and societal
ills (ibid.).
Simultaneously, food was increasingly a focal point of
“civilizing projects”taking place throughout Europe’s colonial
possessions and in newly independent nation-states (Carpenter
1994). As Jeffrey Pilcher’s (1998) work on culinary nationalism
in Mexico highlights, the consumption of corn and other native
foods was seen by colonists as the root of Native Americans’
alleged inferiority. This belief fueled a surge in nutritional
education programs in rural areas to teach “Indians”proper
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European nutrition, and corn tortillas were largely replaced
with (wheat) flour ones. Pilcher argues that discourses about the
inferiority of native foods served as an artifice to divert attention
away from social inequalities—rural malnutrition resulted not
from the inferiority of tortillas but from poverty and the lack of
land. This framing of better nutrition as a curative for social ills
plaguing colonial subjects endures through contemporary
times in the form of the MFN.
The rise of nutrition science in the mid-twentieth century,
and the attendant “hegemony of reductionism and quantifi-
cation”in thinking about food and nutrition, has been linked
to the US Progressive Era’s obsession with the scientific man-
agement of all aspects of society (Biltekoff et al. 2014: 17). The
MFN came to be seen through this scientized, managerial
perspective in the mid-twentieth century, although the story-
line predates this particular rendition (emerging out of colo-
nial preoccupations with colonial subjects’diets) and is
currently undergoing a transformation due to quinoa’s inter-
pellation as a miracle food.
Obviously undernourishment is not new. The scientific cat-
egory of “malnutrition,”however, was constructed as part of the
development apparatus in the mid-twentieth century (Escobar
1995). Institutions such as the United Nations, World Bank, and
International Monetary Fund were created to coordinate inter-
national development. The UN took a central role in malnutri-
tion alleviation, coordinating the Food and Agriculture
Organization (FAO), International Fund for Agricultural De-
velopment (IFAD), and the World Food Programme (WFP),
tasked with addressing food production, distribution, and aid,
respectively. The international development project necessi-
tated reclassifying binaries of colonizers/colonized or civilized/
primitive into First World/Third World or developed/develop-
ing, dissociating interventionism from colonialism and render-
ing intervention as a matter of benevolence (Ferguson 1990).
The construct of “underdeveloped”was fabricated through
quantitative indices of illiteracy, poverty, and malnutrition, ra-
tionalizing outsider control of education, economy, and food
supply, respectively (Escobar 1995).
The encapsulation of hunger relief within the development
apparatus cannot be read as benign humanitarianism. Countless
interventions of “developed”nations in “underdeveloped”na-
tions were initially rationalized through food aid and the aid
packages always came with strings attached. Until the 1950s, the
“problem”was “hunger,”a designation that conjures an image
of a global, homogenous mass of empty stomachs in need of fill-
ing. Accordingly, the era was dominated by food aid in the form
of bulk wheat flour and other surpluses from the United States.
With the rise of nutrition science, “malnutrition”replaced
“hunger,”and with the reframing of the problem came strategies
that focused on particular macro- and micronutrients rather than
calorie deficiency (Kimura 2013; Escobar 1995). The FAO
(2013a) defines “malnutrition”as “an abnormal physiological
condition caused by inadequate, unbalanced or excessive
consumption of macronutrients and/or micronutrients.”
5
It is an
umbrella term that includes many manifestations such as rickets,
beriberi, and scurvy. The FAO’s categorization of malnutrition
has involved quantitative measurements of body mass, “stunt-
ing,”and dietary analyses, grouping the malnourished into cate-
gories of type and degree. While documenting bodily symptoms
of malnutrition seems straightforward, the ways in which these
categories are framed implies particular courses of action by de-
velopment institutions. Outside “experts”get to link causes and
effects, narrate malnutrition, recommend solutions, and then
dispense the “cures”—a system of Foucauldian biopolitics in its
rawest sense (Foucault 1990).
The food wing of the development apparatus employs a
throng of “experts”including nutritionists, demographers, and
economists to produce reports, and prescribe advice, often at
the national level (Escobar 1995).The surge in scientific knowl-
edge about malnutrition produced myriad hunger alleviation
strategies, as anthropologist Arturo Escobar articulates in his
analysis of development as discourse:
Whether the “nutrition problem”was thought to be due to insufficient
protein intake, lack of calories, lack of nutrition education, inadequate
food intake with poor sanitation and health, low incomes, or insufficient
agricultural practices . . . a battery of experts was always on call to design
strategies and programs on behalf of the hungry and malnourished
people in the Third World. (Escobar 1995: 103)
Malnutrition then, did not objectively describe a state, but de-
fined a particular perspective on a problem and outlined solu-
tions, all of which entailed First World action. By defining,
mapping, and proposing solutions to hunger, “First World”
political bodies exercised power over “Third World”bodies.
Like most development projects, “experts”frame the mir-
acle food solution as a “rational”plan of action, glazed in
technical development speak, portraying malnutrition as a
technical (biomedical) problem with a technical (biomedi-
cal) solution. The morally loaded techno-speak makes critics
of “modernist”agriculture seem regressive. How could one
oppose a cure for malnutrition? In the following case studies,
I hope to demonstrate why scholars should question the ratio-
nale of a biomedical cure for a socioeconomic problem, and
more importantly the curative metaphor for hunger. Even as
the developmentalist paradigm evolves to privilege “tradi-
tional”knowledge as a complement to scientific expertise, as
the final case study focusing on quinoa demonstrates, the
curative metaphor endures. Aside from questioning whether
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miracle foods will even work, we must ask what else these
stories do.
High-Lysine Corn
Domesticated 9,000 years ago in present-day Mexico, maize
was cultivated by American agricultural societies for millen-
nia. By itself, corn provides little in the way of nutrition, but
the symbiotic “Three Sisters”association of corn, beans, and
squash provides a rich nutrient base (Matsuoka et al. 2002).
European colonists reasoned that maize consumption was a
handicap inhibiting Americans’“development,”since it was
the wheat-consuming Europeans who ruled the world (Pilcher
1998). While they brought maize back to Europe and intro-
duced it to Africa in the sixteenth century, it only became a
major crop in the latter half of the twentieth century (Miracle
1965). The mid-twentieth-century efforts to improve corn’s“de-
ficiency”harken back to the colonial derision of native foods.
As the Green Revolution spread high-yield seeds and
“modern”agriculture practices throughout the world via
technology-transfer initiatives in the 1960s and 1970s, exten-
sive media coverage of famines in Biafra, Bangladesh, and
China brought hunger to the public’s attention (Escobar
1995). The FAO’s director called for an acceleration of “the
fight against hunger and malnutrition”in Time magazine
alongside photos of starving African children (Time 1959).
Famines and the Green Revolution were linked in complex
ways as “de-peasantization”and agricultural industrialization
destabilized the productive bases of food systems. However,
development institutions and media accounts framed the link
between hunger and agricultural modernization as a simple
problem/solution relationship.
In the 1950s, nutrition experts pegged protein deficiency as
the culprit in global hunger, leading development institu-
tions to seek a cost-effective protein source (Bressani 1984).
When researchers at Purdue University created the opaque-
2(o2) maize mutant in 1963, it seemed the cost-effective pro-
tein cure had been found. Protein in corn was considered
“low quality”due to its deficiency in lysine and tryptophan,
but o2 had almost double the content of these amino acids
(Frost and Robinson 1971: 408). By altering amino acid ratios,
maize was transformed into “high quality”protein, making it
in theory akin to an egg (ibid.).
The press deemed o2 corn a breakthrough in the “fight
against hunger”(ibid.). Headlines like “Grain May Defeat
Hunger”ran all across the country. The Rockefeller Founda-
tion, FAO, and UNICEF sponsored implementation trials
and nutritional studies. One of these studies found that protein
requirements of an adult male were satisfied with 300g of o2
corn/day compared to 600g regular corn/day (Clark 1966).
Another found o2 was equivalent to 90% of the protein of
skim milk (Bressani 1984).
O2 was amenable to the desires of multiple interest
groups: development practitioners, nutritionists, economists,
and the First World public. Green Revolution proponents
could add the “miracle”to PR campaigns to strengthen their
humanitarian image. If anyone doubted the righteousness of
systematically dismantling local food systems around the
world and replacing them with capitalist corn monocultures,
o2 evidenced a connection between corn production and
malnutrition alleviation, thereby justifying corn’s expansion
as it would provide an antidote to protein deficiency. For nu-
tritionists, o2 was an advance that acknowledged their assertion
that hunger programs should center on protein deficiency.
First World consumers, concerned with the children in the
Time magazine photos, could breathe easy as not only was the
end of malnutrition in sight, but Americans would have a
hand in its eradication.
Economists, the ultimate arbiters of o2’s feasibility, favored
this approach (Kimura 2013). Given that animal protein is not
cost-effective in terms of protein production per unit of land, a
cheap grain with good quality protein was the optimal solu-
tion. O2, and biofortified crops in general, fit quite nicely into
economic efficiency cost curves (ibid.: 3).
6
O2 seemed to be
just the protein-based, American-made, cost-effective miracle
the First World had been hoping for.
The interest group whose perspectives did not make it into
media accounts and development reports was the malnour-
ished people themselves. And when the Rockefeller Founda-
tion began trials of o2 corn in Colombia, farmers were not
impressed. Two critical problems inhibited o2 corn’s miracle
food potential: poor yield and different taste characteristics
(Frost and Robinson 1971). What was gained in protein was
lost in yield, a 6–10% reduction compared to regular corn
(Harpstead 1971). Farmers refused to cultivate a crop that pro-
vided inferior yields, a logic that was berated by crop scientists
as sheer ignorance: “Since he [the farmer] is of a superstitious
nature because of low educational level, it will be difficult to
convince him he should do something which might result in
loss of reduction of his crop, and he therefore may reject the
opportunity to make a significant improvement in his family’s
nutrition”(Frost and Robinson 1971). Moreover, the texture
and taste of o2 corn were decidedly different than regular corn,
and o2 could not mimic tortillas when processed. By the mid-
1970s, o2 corn had disappeared from the spotlight, finding a
less acclaimed use as swine fodder. O2 corn cut the cost of
raising swine by $1–2 a head and is used to this day on Ameri-
can pork feedlots (Prasanna et al. 2001; Johnson 1969).
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The story of o2 corn revealed, and reinforced, mid-century
First World conceptualizations of hunger. O2 corn is a god-
send in a framework that understands hunger as a homogenous,
biomedical problem that requires a single, technological an-
swer. The issue is a lack of nutrients, not a lack of nutritious
foods or a varied diet, but rather a single nutrient (e.g., protein).
Faith in a one-size-fits-all solution illustrates the assumption that
malnutrition is mostly the same around the globe, and with the
right antidote, can be cured. Malnutrition is pathologized,
regarded as an abnormal condition with the inflicted group, and
treated as a problem with them. This story obfuscates relation-
ships among technology, capitalism, social inequality, and mal-
nutrition. While the technification and capitalization of
agriculture systems via the Green Revolution was one of the
causes of increasing rates of malnutrition, miracle foods invert
this relationship, promoting more technology and capitalist
entrepreneurship as the solutions to malnutrition (Niazi
2004). According to the miracle food logic, the First World is
not at fault for food insecurity, it is the paternal curer.
7
Dianne Rocheleau’s (1995) concept of “crisis narratives”
helps us unpack the problems of scale in MFNs. Rocheleau
examines a series of “crisis narratives”told by “experts”about
the Ukambani region of Kenya, the home of the Akamba
agropastoralists. Over the course of the twentieth century,
outsiders told numerous “stories of crisis”afflicting the region
including overgrazing, soil erosion, and threatened wildlife.
Each implied a particular (interventionist) solution in their
appellation. These “uni-dimensional stories of blame”con-
structed a version of each “crisis”that located the source in
Akamba, even though, as Rocheleau (1995: 1038) asserts,
each crisis “can be viewed as successive internal impacts of
processes which have their origin—in large part—outside the
region.”The Akamba farmers recount a different story, one
which involves land alienation and limitations placed on the
mobility of their settlements and herds.
Like the “crisis narratives,”MFNs locate the cause of the
problem within the malnourished people themselves. Be it
their poor agriculture techniques, “superstition,”or high birth
rates, the problem is the local people, sometimes national
policies, but never global economic structures. The concep-
tions of scale and causation in this narrative illuminate main-
stream ideas that malnutrition is a biomedical problem with
global effects that are rooted in many local causes. Miracle
foods offer a morsel of progress and modernity, delivering the
nutrients that “traditional”diets do not provide, reifying the
idea of non-Western cultures as remnants of the past, and ob-
scuring the elephant in the room: structural inequality.
Though o2 corn faded into the background without produc-
ing substantive changes in human hunger, the endeavor was
not inconsequential (Prasanna et al. 2001). O2 set a precedent
that hunger was a technical problem requiring a technical solu-
tion, and what stood in the way was local culture that made
people unreceptive to “miracles.”Moreover, it defined the hun-
ger problemas a lack of sufficient food or nutrients instead of, as
Amartya Sen famously argued about famine, a lack of power to
demand food (Sen 1981).
Golden Rice: The MFN Takes a Micronutrient
Tur n
In the 1990s, vitamin A deficiency (VAD), a debilitating form
of malnutrition resulting from lack of fruit and vegetable in-
take that results in blindness, reduced immunity, and some-
times death, came to dominate discussions of malnutrition
(Debevec and Tivadar 2006). During that time, 100–300
million children, in rural communities primarily in Asia, and
to a lesser extent in Africa and Latin America, suffered from
VAD and 500,000 children were going blind each year
(Sommer 1995). In 1992, the WHO and UNICEF declared
eliminating VAD by 2000 a central goal (WHO/UNICEF
1992). VAD was blamed on an overreliance on rice, as conven-
tional rice lacks vitamin A (Nash 2000).
At the same time, the genetic engineering industry was fac-
ing intense public criticism. For years, industry lobbyists coun-
tered assertions that genetically modified organisms (GMOs)
only served the interests of agribusiness by making unsubstanti-
ated claims that genetic engineering (GE) could cure malnutri-
tion. In 1999 Dr. Ingo Potrykus’s Rockefeller Foundation–funded
research found that adding snippets of bacteria and daffodil DNA
to rice produced rice with beta-carotene, a red-orange pigment
found in fruits and vegetables that converts into vitamin A inside
the human gut. Almost immediately, “Golden Rice”(GR) was
hailed the next miracle food and the poster child for GE’s
humanitarian image (Sommer 2001).
Potrykus was featured on the cover of Time magazine
holding grains of GR, alongside the title: “This Rice Could
Save a Million Kids a Year.”A polarized debate erupted over
whether GR, or GMOs generally, were the ultimate “miracle
foods,”or “Frankenfoods”that threatened the future of the
planet (Nash 2000). In July 2000, Syngenta bought exclusive
rights to GR, promising to spread it across the world, and in
2005 researchers created Golden Rice 2 (GR2), a version with
twenty times the beta-carotene of the original (Golden Rice
Humanitarian Board 2013). Syngenta donated licensing for
GR2 to the Golden Rice Humanitarian Project, a public-pri-
vate partnership chaired by Dr. Potrykus that receives funding
from the World Bank, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation,
USAID, Rockerfeller Foundation, and Syngenta Foundation.
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The board is responsible for development, introduction, and
promotion of GR (PAN 2007). In 2006, the International
Rice Research Institute (IRRI) began field trials breeding the
“golden-ness”genes into local rice varieties (Coghlan 2005).
Just as o2 was proposed alongside a campaign for the Green
Revolution, GR was promoted alongside the expansion of
GMOs, which is sometimes referred to as the Second Green
Revolution (Christian Science Monitor 2008). Both of these
miracle foods served as evidence of the benevolent goals of
the agricultural technification and capitalization enterprise.
The GR MFN involved constructing VAD as a discrete
category through quantitative statistics. The vast number of
people suffering from VAD are presented in GR campaign
materials as emotion-grabbing, apolitical facts, much like the
“poverty porn”that helped spur the o2 craze. Framing malnu-
trition as a biomedical issue of the lack of a single vitamin is
incredibly political as it implies the solution is also biomedi-
cal, which in this case necessitates GMOs. If the problem is
VAD, then a rice containing beta-carotene is a logical solu-
tion. Yet VAD is caused by limited access to fruits and vege-
tables, and VAD is but one facet of a malnutrition complex
that is often connected to issues including protein, calorie,
and micronutrient deficiencies, not simply vitamin A. The
pro-GMO campaign’s message is twofold. First, it claims that
GR is a miracle for VAD; and second, it suggests that anti-
GMO activists are “anti-humanity.”This version of the GR
story’s media presence is extensive. Allowgoldenricenow.org
calls opposition to GR a “crime against humanity”and focuses
on discrediting anti-GMO groups. By singling out a micronutri-
ent and pathologizing VAD, the already-existing solutions that
do not involve GMOs, such as vitamin A capsules or a more
varied diet, are concealed (Kimura 2013). Two tablespoons of
carrots per day satisfies an adult’s vitamin A requirement (Hirsch
2013). When these contentions are brought up, pro-GR groups
argue that GR is more cost-effective than the alternatives, an
odd claim considering the billions of dollars that have been
poured into GR development without usable results (for people
suffering from VAD).
While the PR campaign has been conspicuous, GR is not
available for cultivation after over a decade of research. Re-
searchers blame activists for inhibiting GR development, but
critics argue that researchers have refused to answer essential
questions such as: what is the absorption quality of vitamin A
in Golden Rice? Environmental activist Vandana Shiva even
calls GR a “hoax,”a Trojan horse use to bolster public percep-
tions of GMOs, and never intended to solve VAD (Shiva n.d.).
Like o2, the GR story is alluring to “First World”consumers,
development practitioners, and agribusiness. The idea that a
First World technology will cure malnutrition in theThird casts
First World scientists as saviors, curing the problems of poor, suf-
fering, underdeveloped people. This storyline obfuscates con-
nections between soaring rates of VAD and the expansion of
modernist agricultural practices that made bulk commodity
foods like rice cheap and limited access to fruits and vegetables
a narrative in which First World consumers, development prac-
titioners, and scientists are villains, not heroes. The GR MFN
limits the scale of analysis, focusing on vitamin A rather than
structural inequality or agribusiness. This narrow perspective of
cause and effect envisions a global problem and a universal so-
lution. Yet, in its biomedical framework, the problem remains
separated from global political economy. As Shiva asserts, “the
Golden Rice is part of a package of globalized agriculture
which is creating malnutrition,”and the scientists advocating
Golden Rice perhaps “suffer a more severe form of blindness
than children in poor countries”(Shiva 2001).
Quinoa
FROM comida de indios TO MIRACLE FOOD
The miracle food du jour is quinoa, a grain-like crop domes-
ticated 5–7,000 years ago in the Andean highlands. Quinoa
served as a culinary staple and cultural cornerstone for nu-
merous Andean societies and, until recently, was produced
and consumed almost exclusively in the Andes. Within the
Inca Empire, quinoa was known as “the Mother Grain”(chis-
aya mama in Quechua), playing a dominant role in both rit-
ual activities and daily meals (Jacobsen 2003; NRC 1989;
Mujica et al. 2001). Upon observing its centrality in the social
fabric of the Inca Empire, the Spanish viceroy outlawed qui-
noa production and consumption, ordering its replacement
with European grains such as wheat and barley (Hernán Cor-
nejo 2007; Naranjo 2010). The Spaniards’efforts to eradicate
quinoa proved unsuccessful and agriculturalists continued to
grow and eat quinoa clandestinely, particularly in highland
regions where European imports failed. Nonetheless, the
coupled denigration of the crop and its cultivators instigated
a long-standing disparagement of quinoa as a “comida de in-
dios”(Indian food), a stigmatization that endures to this day
in many social circles and has contributed to the replace-
ment of quinoa with cheaper, imported foods in urban and
rural regions alike during the twentieth century (Repo-Carrasco
et al. 2003).
With up to 20% protein, all nine essential amino acids, no
gluten, and a host of vitamins and minerals, quinoa’s nutri-
tional profile is nothing short of extraordinary (Repo-Carrasco
et al. 2003; Cardozo 1959). Comparably impressive is quinoa’s
ability to thrive in the Andean highlands at altitudes over
14,000 feet, where nutrient-poor soils, frequent droughts, and
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occasional El Niño patterns make conditions inhospitable for
all but a handful of crops. Moreover, this “pseudo-cereal”in-
cludes over three thousand extant varieties; this extreme genetic
diversity means it can easily be bred to adapt to disparate envi-
ronments (PROINPA 2011).
8
The combination of exceptional nutritional content with
hardiness and adaptability have provoked declarations that
quinoa is both a “natural”miracle food and miracle crop.
While quinoa’s“biophysical”properties are important pre-
conditions for quinoa’s insertion into the MFN, in the follow-
ing section I highlight the extensive conceptual and material
work that goes into situating quinoa within the MFN, trans-
forming quinoa into a miracle food.
9
Given its origins with
ancient agriculturalists, contemporary association with indig-
enous subsistence farmers, and lack of a single charismatic
micronutrient, quinoa seems to be an unlikely candidate for
the MFN, which heretofore has exclusively included crops
explicitly created (or “improved”) by scientists, and which
center on one particular charismatic nutrient. Yet both qui-
noa’s non-Western roots and well-rounded nutrition are fore-
grounded in its insertion into and adaptation of the MFN. I
contend that quinoa’s identification as a miracle food signals
a marked shift in the relative authority of “science”and “tradi-
tion”in the MFN, linked to broader changes in development
discourse with the rise of “sustainable”and “multicultural”de-
velopment paradigms.
This adaptation of the MFN does not do away with its
pernicious effects. Following Escobar’s (1995) assertion that
sustainable development can be read as a discursive move to
bring “the environment”under the purview of development’s
managerial gaze and Charles Hale’s (2002) assertion that mul-
ticulturalism and neoliberalism are intimately bound, I argue
that quinoa’s inauguration as a miracle food represents a
broadening of the MFN’s propensity to depoliticize hunger.
The quinoa MFN extends the curative metaphor (along with
its prowess to depoliticize) to poverty, climate change adapta-
tion, and biodiversity loss. Echoing and extending Kimura’s
(2013) argument that different charismatic nutrients come to
be celebrated as keys to fighting the Third World food prob-
lem at different historical periods in relation to changing dis-
courses about malnutrition, I argue that quinoa’s framing as a
global hunger miracle food emerges in direct relation to the
rise of “sustainable”and “multicultural”development para-
digms and corresponding emphases on the “expediency”of cul-
ture (cf. Yudice 2004), environmental sustainability, food
security, and climate change. Quinoa’s interpellation into the
MFN reveals that the focus on charismatic micronutrients of the
1990s (which I contend are one instantiation of the MFN) is giv-
ing way to a new discursive formulation of problems/solutions
in which malnutrition is about a lack of multiple nutrients and
is seen as interconnected to other “development challenges.”
However,even as the reading of“the problem”is more complex
in this rendition of the MFN, the myth of the single global an-
tidote, the miracle food, re-emerges. While acknowledging link-
ages among malnutrition, poverty, climate change vulnerability,
and biodiversity loss would appear to be an opportunity to de-
sign solutions that confront the power-laden, scale-dependent
relationships among these issues, instead the durable, flexible
MFN reappears, obfuscating this complexity by framing the
solution as a simple matter of finding a superior miracle food.
before the mfn: discourses of “quinoa
development”
Quinoa’s recent designation as a global-scale miracle food is not
its first appointment as a “development crop.”While quinoa has
only recently been inserted into the (global-scale) MFN as I
have articulated it here, diverse development communities have
inserted quinoa into diverse development discourses over the
past four decades, each emphasizing different qualities (i.e., cli-
mate tolerance versus nutrition) and envisioning quinoa “devel-
opment”in disparate ways. Quinoa has been framed as a tool to
alleviate urban malnutrition in the Andes andincorporate peas-
ants into national economies, an “underutilized species”poised
for global cultivation, a “Non-Traditional Agro-Export,”and a
climate change adaptation crop. Quinoa’s adaptation to these
diverse discourses allowed for the forging of nascent sociopoliti-
cal webs, which would be necessary for quinoa’s induction into
the MFN, and as I argue later, the tensions between different
visions of quinoa’s future evident in these early narratives have
intensified with quinoa’s inauguration as a miracle food. Like
all foods that come to be seen through the MFN, quinoa is not
naturally a miracle food, but has been made to be seen as such
through the conceptual and material work of diverse actors.
After four centuries of disparagement and disregard by
those outside the highland communities where quinoa re-
mained a staple, quinoa began to catch the attention of re-
searchers and development practitioners in the late 1960s. A
handful of Peruvian and Bolivian agronomists initiated proj-
ects examining quinoa’s agronomic characteristics (Gandaril-
las 1968; Cárdenas 1969) and nutritional qualities (Cardozo
1959), and funding from OXFAM and FAO supported the
first quinoa-breeding programs that sought to develop commer-
cial quinoas (Bonifacio et al. 2014). By 1968 a small research
community had coalesced such that the first Chenopodium
Convention convened with over forty researchers from Bolivia
and Peru.
10
By the 1976 convention, the headcount had
almost tripled (Tapia 2014).
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Following this research surge, quinoa came to be seen as a
potential national development opportunity for Peru and
Bolivia during the 1970s. State agricultural development min-
istries supported studies assessing the feasibility of formalizing
domestic quinoa markets, framing quinoa commercialization
as an opportunity to alleviate increasing rates of urban malnu-
trition while integrating “economically unproductive”subsis-
tence farmers into capitalist markets (Egoávil et al. 1979).
11
As national-level development organizations began to see
the development of domestic quinoa markets as an opportu-
nity, another group of visionaries saw quinoa as a potentially
lucrative export crop. After North American traveler Steve
Gorad brought a 50lb bag of the “lost crop of the Inca”back
to the United States in 1978, he partnered with entrepreneur
Don McKinley and agronomist David Cusack to form the
Quinoa Corporation, which began exporting quinoa from Bo-
livia to the United States in 1983.
12
Quinoa came to occupy a
niche role in US health food stores, and by 1988 750 tons of
quinoa were sold in the United States (Carimentrand et al.
2013; National Research Council 1989). Quinoa’s fledgling ex-
port trade corresponded with the rise of the “Non-Traditional
Agro-Export”(NTAE) discourse in the 1980s, which touted the
export of high-value crops such as flowers and asparagus as
panaceas for developing countries that hitherto relied on ex-
port of cheap primary commodity crops (Imbruce 2006;
Thrupp 1994; PROINPA 2011). Quinoa export from Bolivia in-
creased incrementally throughout the 1990s, and it was not un-
til the early 2000s that demand outside the Andes surged,
leading Ecuador and Peru to rapidly develop export markets to
capitalize on what would become known as the “Quinoa
Boom.”
When international development organizations “discov-
ered”quinoa in the 1970s, quinoa was deemed an “underutil-
ized”species and recommended for global propagation. A
National Academy of Sciences volume on “Underexploited
Tropical Plants with Promising Economic Value”(1975) in-
cluded a chapter on quinoa that called for increased research,
trials in new locations, and intensive plant breeding to expand
the geographic range of quinoa cultivation. During the 1980s,
quinoa seeds were distributed to more than fifty countries, and
quinoa was prominently featured in National Research Coun-
cil’s“Lost Crops of the Inca”(1989), where it was again recom-
mended for worldwide cultivation and judged a “grain of the
future.”In 1996, the FAO declared quinoa one of “humanity’s
most promising crops”and soon thereafter organized the Amer-
ican and European Test of Quinoa to evaluate quinoa’s ability
to grow in North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia and “pro-
mote the regional interchange of the excellent genetic material
of quinoa among research institutes and universities”(Jacobsen
2003; Mujica et al. 1998).
The “Neglected and Under-utilized Species”(NUS)
framework gained acclaim in agricultural development
circles in the 1990s as a response to the failures of the Green
Revolution model that had focused on increasing production
and yields of staple crops such as wheat and corn. Quinoa’s
classification as an NUS led to partnerships between Biodi-
versity International, International Fund for Agricultural De-
velopment (IFAD), and local agricultural development
organizations in Peru and Bolivia in an ambitious multi-
pronged project that collected quinoa germplasm to make it
available for breeding, disseminate “improved”seeds, docu-
ment traditional knowledge about quinoa, and increase in-
come generation from quinoa production by developing
commodity chains (Rojas et al. 2009; Padulosi et al. 2014).
This project catalyzed alliances between development organ-
izations, national governments, private sector companies, and
research organizations, relationships that would serve as scaf-
folding for the sociopolitical webs enabling quinoa’s subse-
quent insertion into the MFN.
Finally, as the development community’s concern with
climate change, and specifically relationships between inten-
sifying climate uncertainty and global food production, esca-
lated in the early 2000s, quinoa came to be seen as a “climate
change adaptation crop”(Ruiz et al. 2014). Researchers con-
structed models of quinoa’s response to climate change (Leb-
onvallet and Brisson 2009) and, drawing on evidence that
quinoa could be bred to survive beyond the Andes, research-
ers and development institutions framed quinoa as a critical
tool for climate change adaptation (PROINPA 2011).
shifting paradigms: the rise of “multicultural”and
“sustainable”development
While quinoa’s adaptation to diverse development discourses
generated sociopolitical webs essential to quinoa’seventualin-
sertion into the MFN, major shifts in the roles of “culture”and
“the environment”in development discourse in the 1990s pro-
vided a critical impetus for quinoa’s positioning in the MFN. In
the modernization paradigm, which had served as the theoreti-
cal basis for development since WWII, culture and tradition
were residual categories and barriers to “progress”since “tradi-
tional”societies were thought to be in the process of becoming
“modern.”In the 1970s, development planners began to realize
that projects failed if they were not “culturally sensitive,”and by
the early 1990s multilateral development institutions such as
the World Bank were reorganizing objectives to encourage,
and sometimes mandate, “multicultural development,”ashift
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coinciding with the increasing profitability of culture and eth-
nicity (Escobar 1995: 499; Hale 2002). “Traditional ecological
knowledge,”known in the development community as TEK,
was also gaining attention as a (highly threatened) source of in-
sight into environmental problems. While scientific authority
was by no means replaced by tradition, “traditional knowledge”
was increasingly seen as an alternative source of authority on en-
vironmental issues. Culture, tradition, and traditional knowl-
edge were suddenly not considered hurdles to progress, but as
critical resources for development. However, as Hale (2002)
cautions, the emerging discourse of multiculturalism should
not be read as a benevolent celebration of long-denigrated cul-
tures. Instead the “neoliberal multiculturalism”that arose in the
1990s was a project that simultaneously celebrated benign, and
especially profitable, expressions of indigeneity while actively,
even violently, denouncing those that posed threats to the na-
tion-state’s authority.
13
As such, celebrations of (certain kinds of
and ways of expressing) indigeneity also prescribe what is an “ac-
ceptable”expression of indigeneity, and as Hale argues, limit
the political possibilities of indigenous peoples. Following
Hale’s insight, we must ask how the commending of quinoa as
a praiseworthy expression of indigeneity simultaneously con-
strains the claims the indigenous quinoa producers can make
about quinoa.
Around the same time, the idea of “sustainable develop-
ment”emerged as a response to concerns about the increas-
ingly visible environmental degradation wrought by what
come to be seen as myopic emphases on economic growth
and Green Revolution–style approaches to agricultural devel-
opment (Escobar 1995; Padulosi et al. 2008). “Sustainable de-
velopment,”famously defined by the World Commission on
Environment and Development (1987) as “development that
meets the needs of the present without compromising the
ability of future generations to meet their own needs,”
brought “the environment”under the purview of develop-
ment planners, and foregrounded issues of biodiversity loss
and climate change as “development problems”(Escobar
1995: 194–96). While the degree to which the sustainabledevel-
opment paradigm actually altered the practice of development
is debated (Redclift 2002), the discourse of development was
radically transformed such that almost all development projects
now contain rhetoric about sustainability, and biodiversity, cli-
mate change, and “the environment”in general are frequently
positioned at the forefront of the development agenda.
While previous miracle foods were scientifically improved
versions of primary commodity crops aiming to tackle particular
manifestations of malnutrition (e.g., VAD), quinoa’swell-
rounded nutrition could cure multiple kinds of malnutrition
while also attending to issues of culture loss, poverty, biodiversity,
and climate change adaptation. Quinoa’s association with in-
creasingly dominant development themes of indigenous culture,
traditional knowledge, agrobiodiversity, and climate change ad-
aptation were critical in positioning quinoa as a global miracle
food and miracle crop, a shift catalyzed by the International Year
of Quinoa.
the international year of quinoa: quinoa’s
debut as a global miracle food and miracle
crop
Quinoa’s designation as a global miracle food was consoli-
dated and formalized when, approving Bolivia’s proposal, the
UN General Assembly declared 2013 the International Year of
Quinoa (IYQ), launching a year-long series of events dedi-
cated to promoting quinoa as a miracle food and miracle
crop:
The IYQ constitutes the first step in an ongoing process to focus world
attention on the role that quinoa’s biodiversity and nutritional value play
in food security, nutrition, and poverty eradication, and support of the
achievement of the internationally agreed development goals including
the Millennium Development Goals . . . in a context of progressing
climate change. (FAO 2013b: 3)
The IYQ’s rhetoric explicitly frames quinoa as a “miracle
plant,”a curative not only for hunger, but a host of develop-
ment problems (FAO/Biodiversity International 2012). The IYQ
was carried out, in similar fashion to many UN-commemorated
“Yea rs,”through UN-sanctioned events and projects including
gourmet gastronomy fairs, product contests, seed competitions,
a Slow Food quinoa cookbook, a “World Congress on Quinoa”
to convene researchers, a symposium to convoke “diverse stake-
holders,”and a traveling exhibition detailing quinoa’s history,
use, and production that visited FAO offices across the globe
(FAO 2013b).
The IYQ, I argue, was designed as a self-conscious project to
foster and strengthen the sociopolitical webs necessary to con-
solidate quinoa’s place as the incumbent miracle food. The IYQ
entailed numerous venues explicitly intended to kindle partner-
ships between international NGOs such as Biodiversity Interna-
tional and Slow Food International, development institutions
including the World Bank, local development organizations
both within and beyond the Andes, national governments, pri-
vate companies along nascent global quinoa commodity chains,
and research institutions, an objective made explicit in the
IYQ’sgoalto“encourage partnerships between public, private
and nongovernmental organizations related to the cultivation of
quinoa”(FAO 2013e). While other miracle foods had assumed
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such a status through gradual processes of sociopolitical web-
making, the IYQ provided a major thrust for the consolidation
of the alliances necessary for quinoa’s insertion into the MFN.
These alliances were important not only for the sake of creating
a consensus about quinoa’s miracle food potential, but also for
developing and disseminating this narrative in media materials
and public events, and forging the scientific partnerships funda-
mental to developing quinoa varieties adapted to diverse lati-
tudes and climates and thus enabling quinoa’sglobal
propagation.
14
Convening groups with diverse, and sometimes incompat-
ible, interests, perspectives, and goals, the IYQ was a “collab-
orative”project in the sense Anna Tsing (2006) articulates
collaboration, as a dynamic in which the everpresent frictions
in relations between actors are not antithetical, but instead
animate connections across difference. Frictions are critical
to the development of “globally traveling knowledge,”or
knowledge about “the globe,”which in the case of the IYQ
was the creation and broadcasting of the narrative of quinoa
as a global-scale curative. While the discourse produced by
the IYQ-sponsored events (i.e., that quinoa’s global propaga-
tion will alleviate global food insecurity while simultaneously
ameliorating other development challenges) appears stream-
lined, conflicts abounded among IYQ participants about
what quinoa development should look like.
Nascent tensions and inconsistencies among different vi-
sions of “quinoa development”that were visible in quinoa de-
velopment discourses between the 1960s and early 2000s
intensified with the concurrent thrust toward the global expan-
sion of quinoa production and booming export markets, which
until recently were supplied exclusively by Andean nations.
Those aligned with or invested in the booming export markets
in the Andes feared that quinoa’s global propagation would flat-
ten skyrocketing prices and deteriorate the competitive advan-
tage from which Andean nations had benefited as the only
quinoa suppliers, a fear echoed in interviews with Peruvians
whose lives depend on quinoa, from producers to plant
breeders. As such, many affiliated with Andean production saw
global propagation as incompatible with poverty alleviation in
the Andean highlands. Others pointed out contradictions in the
goals of poverty reduction in the Andes through quinoa export
and malnutrition alleviation at the same scale. While high pri-
ces meant previously unavailable incomes for quinoa pro-
ducers, surging prices also made quinoa too expensive for the
urban poor in Andean cities, who were quickly replacing this
staple with imported rice and premade wheat noodles. Like-
wise, some began to question whether the export boom was pre-
cluding quinoa’s contribution to food security in the Andes. Yet
the incompatibilities in the IYQ’s lofty rhetoric and tensions
among interest groups are cloaked by the allure of the simple,
attractive Quinoa MFN, which frames quinoa as a potential
cure for hunger, biodiversity loss, and climate change, andis dis-
seminated with conviction through speeches, press releases,
and media materials.
the traditional miracle food: quinoa and the
changing roles of “culture”in the mfn
Scientists, the protagonists in previous miracle food tales, are
conspicuously absent from the IYQ rhetoric. Instead, it is
the “indigenous peoples of the Andes”we have to thank for
the incumbent miracle food, a conviction made clear in the
opening paragraph of the IYQ Master Plan: “The year 2013
has been declared ‘The International Year of Quinoa’(IYQ),
in recognition of the indigenous peoples of the Andes, who
have maintained, controlled, protected and preserved quinoa
as a food for present and future generations thanks to their
traditional knowledge and living practices which are in har-
mony with nature and Mother Earth”(FAO 2013c; emphasis
mine). The IYQ website and media materials are plastered
with photographs of women sporting “traditional”skirts and
long braids, evoking a common image of Andean indigeneity,
and even the slogan of the IYQ—“A Future Sown Thou-
sands of Years Ago”—references tradition and culture, not sci-
entific progress, as the source of quinoa’s curative power.
This shift in the role of culture in the MFN, from the barrier
to proper nutrition to the miracle food’s origin, emerges
alongside shifts in the role of culture in development dis-
course more generally. Not only did quinoa’s ascent to mira-
cle food stardom depend upon the rise of discourses of
“multicultural development”and TEK, but quinoa’s inser-
tion into the MFN affirms that tradition and culture yield
critical resources for development.
Although this rhetoric profusely acknowledges the role
“traditional peoples”played as “custodians,”it stops short of at-
tributing indigenous people agency in quinoa’s creation.
While scientists are quite explicitly the inventors of GR and
o2 corn, Andean agriculturalists are framed as passive “stew-
ards,”not authors or creators (FAO 2013b). In the IYQ rheto-
ric, quinoa is a “natural”product that indigenous people
preserved. Yet anyone with basic knowledge about agricultural
domestication knows that domesticated plants are not natu-
rally occurring or accidentally domesticated but result from
the hard work of seed selection and adaptation. In particular,
with its extraordinary intraspecific diversity, quinoa’s current
state is a result of conscious decisions made by cultivators who
have selected, exchanged, and experimented with varieties,
and continue to do so to this day.
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This claim that seeds are “natural”removes the social as-
pect of agrobiodiversity (Hayden 2003) and is strategic in
terms of the debates around intellectual property rights of
quinoa germplasm, a controversy in which the IYQ’s project
to globalize quinoa production is very much involved. After
researchers at Colorado State University patented a quinoa
variety in the 1990s in the hopes of spurring the development
of new varieties, the Bolivian government and largest pro-
ducer association, ANAPQUI, initiated a backlash and na-
tionalized their quinoa germplasm banks, a shift that was
eventually inscribed in Bolivia’s 2009 constitution (Dutfield
2000).
15
If the IYQ had thanked the Andean indigenous peo-
ples for inventing quinoa rather than merely preserving it “in
its natural state,”this framing would support the case, being
made by Bolivia, that Andean nations should have some sort
of ownership of quinoa germplasm. This ownership would in
theory guard quinoa from unauthorized use outside the An-
des and protect the farmers (and others in the Andes) benefit-
ing from the export boom against competition from other
countries, a threat quickly becoming a reality as quinoa pri-
ces drop due in large part to increased commercial produc-
tion outside the Andes.
While the IYQ outwardly celebrates quinoa’s“traditional
origins,”less conspicuous events are taking place in the
agronomy and technology communities that contradict any
pure un-technified “sharing of an indigenous miracle.”The
International Quinoa Research Symposium held at Washing-
ton State in August 2013 brought agronomists from around
the world to participate in breeding trials, express concern
over limited access to quinoa germplasm, and discuss intel-
lectual property rights for quinoa seeds. In the opening
speech, FAO Technical Coordinator Tania Santivañez stated
that “researchers need to be able to breed, plant, and test new
and existing varieties of quinoa to identify the best match be-
tween seed and environment,”alluding to the more complex
relationships between scientists and agribusiness and the pro-
motion of quinoa as a miracle food (Nickel-Kailing 2013). In
order for breeders to develop new quinoa adapted to regions
beyond the Andes, a key objective of the IYQ, quinoa’s germ-
plasm must be freely available, argued many at the sympo-
sium. The MFN frames quinoa as a potential cure for
global hunger (among other things), a potential that can only
be tapped through breeding. Thus stymying the innovation
of new quinoas, in a similar fashion to opposition to Golden
Rice, is framed as akin to supporting malnutrition.
While the rhetoric of gratitude to the Andes indigenous peo-
ple dominates quinoa’s framing as a miracle food, the actual re-
turns these people have received from this project to globalize
quinoa have been minimal. Few of the producers I interviewed
in Puno, the hub of quinoa production in Peru, had heard of
the IYQ and were disappointedto see little evidence of the proj-
ect in their own communities. The IYQ did organize “agrobio-
diversity fairs”in highland cities where farmers could enter their
quinoa into competitions to win ribbons and sometimes tro-
phies. Quinoa buyers also hoped to receive assistance from the
projectandyettheycametoseetheIYQasamere“especta-
culo,”a spectacle or show that lacked any real interest in helping
highland producers, and made jokes about the endless photo-
ops of Peru’s First Lady and the IYQ “special ambassador,”
Nadine Heredia, that characterized the IYQ events.
Thus, while the IYQ lavished praise upon the indigenous
“custodians,”this rhetoric of gratitude obscured that the geo-
graphical expansion of quinoa production, in the heroic pur-
suit of curing global hunger, was effectively undermining
Andean producers. Although the IYQ is over, the project to
globalize quinoa production that it jump-started continues.
As of the start of 2014, quinoa experimentation is taking place
FIGURE 2: Hundreds of quinoa accessions in Peru’s largest quinoa
germplasm bank.
PHOTOGRAPH BY EMMA MCDONELL ©2015
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in more than forty countries and commercial production in
thirteen, although most intensively in the United States,
Canada, France, Holland, Denmark, Italy, India, Kenya,
Morocco, and China, not all places suffering from dire hunger
(Bazile and Baudron 2013; FAO 2013d). As quinoa production
expands into areas with considerably higher agricultural pro-
ductivity than quinoa’s native highlands, where harsh environ-
mental conditions make yields relatively low compared to the
lower elevation, warmer regions where quinoa is increasingly
cultivated, highland farmers are struggling to compete. The
production glut has led farm-gate prices to plummet since
2014 and many highland smallholders are refusing to sell at the
low prices. This contradiction between the lauding of indige-
nous agriculturalists for “preserving”quinoa and the under-
cutting of this same group of people’s ability to economically
benefit from quinoa calls forth Hale’s (2002) warning about
projects celebrating indigenous culture. While Hale focuses on
relationships between indigenous groups and the state vis-à-vis
“multicultural citizenship,”cautioning that these projects serve
to delimit the kinds of claims indigenous people can make, this
dynamic also applies to the case of quinoa. The “stewarding”
of quinoa is celebrated as an exemplary form of indigenous
cultural expression that is both benign (does not produce an
affront to the state) and profitable; tradition is valuable because
it provides (economic) “value.”While applauding the indig-
enous traditions that protected quinoa, the language of steward-
ship enforces boundaries around thepolitical possibilities of the
quinoa stewards, who are expected not to make claims to own
or control quinoa’s genetic resources, claims that would protect
them from the globalization that threatens their ability to
benefit from quinoa.
Concluding Remarks: Traditional Miracles and
Universal Solutions
The stories of high-lysine corn, Golden Rice, and quinoa serve
as cautionary tales about the enduring power of the curative
metaphor to depoliticize global hunger, and in the case of qui-
noa, a number of other development “challenges.”To con-
clude, I draw attention to the complex, fraught interaction
between the politics of indigeneity and the politics of global
malnutrition that arises with the shifting roles of science and
tradition in quinoa’s adaptation of the MFN. I then point out
the way in which quinoa, as the only miracle food imple-
mented at more than an experimental scale, foregrounds scale
disjunctures between simple miracle food stories and compli-
cated realities, a dynamic that underscores the need for agrifood
and food policy scholars to pay close attention to complex inter-
actions of scale.
Critical nutrition scholars propose we rethink expertise in
nutrition policy, such that boundaries between experts who
have authority to give advice (through academic credentials)
and those who are targets of this expert advice should be broken
down (Kimura 2013: 4).
16
Nutritionism, it is argued, promul-
gates a techno-managerial gaze on hunger that is disembodied
from culture, and going forward, questions of cultural differ-
ence and tradition must be at the forefront in nutrition policy
(see Kimura 2013; Kimura et al. 2014; Escobar 1995). Quinoa’s
insertion into the MFN does indeed foreground tradition.
The heroes in the quinoa MFN are not scientific experts, but
the Andean indigenous people and their ancestors, who pro-
tected this miracle food “as a food source for present and future
generations”(FAO 2013c). This seems strikingly different from
the o2 and GR stories, in which First World scientists apply
the blessings of technology to the “inferior”native crops in
order to feed the hungry people who, as the story goes, cannot
feed themselves.
While culture and traditional knowledge have replaced
the scientist as the source of authority and procurer of the cu-
rative, the quinoa MFN, ironically, reproduces the dietary co-
lonialism that disregards cultural difference and tradition.
Even though the dogma of the scientific authority is sub-
verted in this narrative, the universalist project of replacing
the many other, “inferior”crops around the world with quinoa
systematically disregards local perspectives and culture, leaving
the normative orientation of nutritionism intact (Caldwell
2014). Moreover, the quinoa MFN implies a particular, limited
reading of the role of culture in malnutrition alleviation in
which “culture”and/or “tradition”are important insofar as
they supply resources for tackling malnutrition (i.e., quinoa).
While those responsible for the miracle food may be deserving
of praise, the quinoa MFN undermines claims to rights to con-
trol the use of these resources and the ability of these people to
profit from the crop’s success. The quinoa MFN shows us that
questioning scientific authority in nutritionism is not enough
for critical nutrition studies. While the quinoa story switches
out the actors, with “tradition”and “traditional peoples”taking
the place of science and scientists, the plot and underlying
logic remain intact. Even as malnutrition alleviation programs
integrate cultural difference, we must pay close attention to
the ways tradition and culture are invoked.
Finally, the negative impacts of the expansion of quinoa
production outside the Andes on quinoa producers in the
Andean highlands highlight the issue of scale in malnutrition
alleviation projects, and in particular the contradictions of
supposedly “global”solutions. Although expansion of quinoa
production beyond the Andes could in the future alleviate
malnutrition in some areas, it has come at the expense of the
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potential poverty alleviation in the Andean highlands that
export markets offered highland quinoa producers. While I
have demonstrated that miracle food tales are not innocuous
in their reproduction of fantasies of hunger as pathology, the
quinoa case shows that implementation of miracle foods is
also not harmless as the quest to expand production of mira-
cle foods has complex interactions at different scales. While
the universal cure is alluring in its ostensible simplicity, this
simplicity obscures complex interactions at different scales.
This article should serve as a cautionary tale about miracle
foods, and more broadly the curative metaphor, in discussions
about global hunger and other “development”challenges.
Tales of hunger panaceas are incredibly powerful and attractive
as they seem to offer an antidote to some of the most urgent and
pressing issues of our time. And yet the attractiveness of these
tales lies precisely in their ability to depoliticize the incredibly
political issues. As 30% of people in the “developing”world suf-
fer some sort of diet-related ailment, it is imperative that we stop
the futile search for a magical complex carbohydrate and begin
facing the ultimate causes of malnutrition: power, inequality,
and capital-intensive agriculture that dispossess (WHO 2000).
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank my meticulous editors, Bonnie McDo-
nell and Eddie Brudney, for sharing their time and grammat-
ical savvy, Richard Wilk for encouraging me to publish this
paper, the two anonymous reviewers who offered exception-
ally thoughtful and constructive criticism that has greatly im-
proved this paper, and the Gastronomica staff who have been
incredibly helpful throughout the publication process.
NOTES
1. While the term “miracle food”is my own, and used in a rather
specific way in this paper’s argument, the language of the miracle
food or “miracle plant”(see FAO/Biodiversity International 2012) is
prevalent in campaigns to promote all three of the miracle foods I
discuss.
2. For an excellent in-depth discussion of high-lysine corn, and in
particular, Golden Rice, see Kimura (2013).
3. I use “discursive milieu”to highlight the plurality of development
discourses, drawing on Grillo and Stirrat’s (1997) contention that
there exists not one monolithic “development discourse,”but a
plethora of discourses of development. Not only does the MFN
articulate with a number of emergent development discourses, but
the MFN itself is one of these discourses.
4. “Fortification”refers to the process of adding micronutrients to
foods during the manufacturing process, while “biofortification”
refers to altering a crop’s biological makeup to increase
micronutrient content (Kimura 2013: 2).
5. Macronutrients are nutrients required in large quantities in the
human diet (e.g., protein, carbohydrates), and micronutrients are
those needed in trace quantities (e.g., iodine, vitamin A).
6. While biofortification is now a common term in nutritional
literature, referring to the alteration of a plant’s biology to increase a
particular nutrient, it was only popularized in the 1980s, and thus
while the creation of o2 does fall into this category, it would not be
regarded as such at the time of o2’s“invention”(Kimura 2013: 42).
7. For more on the trope of the West as “global savior”of the poor
in colonial and postcolonial times, see Warren Belasco (2006) on the
link between imagined utopia and dietary colonialism.
8. Quinoa is a pseudocereal rather than a true cereal as it is not a
member of the grass family. As a chenopod, quinoa is related to
spinach and tumbleweeds.
9. I enclose “biophysical”in quotes to emphasize that quinoa’s
nutritional content and agronomic characteristics are at once
“social”and “natural”as they have been actively, and often
consciously, created and maintained by agriculturalists.
10. The Chenopodium genus includes quinoa and the closely
related kañiwa, which is also recognized for exceptional nutritional
content and hardiness.
11. Informal quinoa exchange networks were alive and well at the
time, and ferias were held all over the highlands where quinoa was
exchanged for other goods, often directly (Egoávil et al. 1979). The
“market development”was not the development of markets per se
but the formalization of capital-accruing markets. Farmers were
deemed “economically unproductive”because their production did
not contribute to national economic indicators.
12. For more on this aspect of quinoa’s history, see Joshua Berson (2014).
13. A clear example of these “radical”expressions of indigeneity in
Peru specifically are anti-mining protests that often draw upon
indigenous identity in resisting mining concessions, and are
commonly repressed through executive orders of “emergency zones”
where constitutional rights temporarily do not apply to citizens.
14. As quinoa’s physiological development hinges upon day length
and latitude, these factors initially inhibited quinoa’s production
outside the Andes (Jacobsen 2003).
15. For more on this particular conflict, see Lisa Hamilton’s (2014)
“The Quinoa Quarrel.”
16. See the special issue of Gastronomica 14(3) for more on critical
nutrition studies.
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