The Desk Dispatch: Seeking Gustu in La Paz
Hilary Landa writes about the potential and pitfalls of getting to know Bolivia through food.
I’m a sucker for a story like this, one that has romantic-comedy potential but also some real lessons about what it means to travel, to use food as a stand-in for language, and how a desire to be on-the-pulse of cool restaurants can obscure realities when we go to new places. There’s more I want to say, but I won’t spoil the piece.
Writer Hilary Landa has a background in cultural anthropology and public service advertising. She is currently a Gastronomy master’s student at Boston University interested in food writing and examining representations in food media versus realities. She writes about her first trip to Bolivia and how she tried to greet it stomach-first, with gusto.
Seeking Gustu in La Paz
By Hilary Landa
A fateful dating-app swipe introduced me to my partner of seven years, Rodrigo, and his native country, Bolivia. Before we met, I am embarrassed to admit I was not able to confidently pinpoint it on a map. I had never been to a Bolivian restaurant before and could not tell you what Bolivian food was. But soon enough, I was enjoying it every Sunday at his mother’s house. She cooked sopa de maní—a rich, comforting soup with a creamy broth that contains no cream at all, but rather, blended peanuts. She made salteñas—the Bolivian version of an empanada—made up of a thin, slightly sweet dough strong enough to hold a hearty, flavorful stew. She prepared llajwa—a Bolivian salsa featuring the herb quillquiña that she grows in her home garden. When we finally planned a trip to Cochabamba and La Paz last fall, I was ready to see and taste it for myself.
Nestled between the Andes Mountains and the Amazon Rainforest, Bolivia is landlocked in the heart of South America. Part of the Inca Empire before Spanish colonization, the country’s 12 million people reflect its history—many of mixed European and indigenous heritage who primarily speak Spanish, and 36 distinct indigenous groups that make up almost half of the population. As one of the most biodiverse countries in the world, Bolivia is home to many natural wonders, including the world’s largest salt flat named Salar de Uyuni, the flamingo-filled Laguna Colorada, and La Paz—the world’s highest capital city at an elevation of almost 12 thousand feet.
Though tourism makes up less than 2 percent of the Bolivian economy, international tourism in Bolivia has been slowly but steadily increasing since the early 2000s, from just over 400 thousand visitors in 2003 to over 1.2 million in 2019. In the West, Bolivian food is often conflated with food from other Latin American countries. For example, if you Google search “Bolivian food near me,” Peruvian, Argentinian, and catch-all Latin American restaurants will most likely appear. In recent years though, popular travel publications like Condé Nast Traveler and BBC Travel have published headlines like “Why Bolivia Should Be Your Next South American Trip” and “Why Bolivia is the Next Food Hotspot,” positioning it as an unknown land ripe for discovery and convincing readers they are being let in on South America’s best kept secret.
In preparation for our trip to La Paz, I searched for restaurants to try. The one that kept reappearing in glossy travel articles and food blogs—as it had been named one of the “50 Best Restaurants in Latin America”—was Gustu, which purported to strictly use local ingredients. (The restaurant takes its name from the Quechua word for flavor.) Rodrigo and his family had never heard of it nor been there. This should have served as a warning that Gustu is not a restaurant for locals. After all, it is too expensive for most Bolivians to try in the first place. When Gustu first opened in 2013, the average monthly salary in Bolivia was $517, while the average cost for dinner at Gustu was $50 to 60 per person. In my haste, I made a reservation for us to see what all the fuss was about.
Unbeknownst to me at the time, Gustu was established by Claus Meyer, Danish co-founder of Noma, and his Melting Pot Foundation that works to create “social change through culinary entrepreneurship” via the same values of local, seasonal, and sustainable eating promoted in his New Nordic Cuisine manifesto. In a 2016 New Yorker piece titled “The Tasting-Menu Initiative,” Meyer said he chose Bolivia as the place to set up a Noma replica because it has “a great undiscovered larder of fantastic products that people could be seduced by.”
To “discover” the foods they feature in the restaurant, Gustu sources their ingredients and informs their culinary techniques partly through expeditions they call “Sabores Silvestres” in partnership with the Wildlife Conservation Society, taking excursions to rural areas of Bolivia to “identify and revalue promising products coming from protected areas and indigenous territories” and recover “native ingredients and culinary traditions.”
Through these research trips, Gustu seeks to gain access to significant cultural knowledge, predominantly possessed by indigenous women, that is critical to their business model. In Bolivia, indigenous women dominate the domestic culinary sphere and informal marketplaces, with many learning how to cook traditional dishes at a young age and selling food and goods in markets. They are expected to do the unpaid work of passing down traditions and feeding their families and communities, but according to the World Food Program USA, 40 percent of women in Bolivia live in poverty. If they give their ingredients, recipes, and techniques away to cultural outsiders eager to capitalize on them, then what else does Gustu need them for?
Assuming that Bolivia is not well known to most Westerners, Meyer appears to have seen an opportunity to get credit for discovering a “new” destination, dictate the narrative around and definition of Bolivian food, and reap the subsequent recognition for Bolivians’ work and identity. This is a story that Bolivians have heard many times before, and there are unfortunately many examples of wealthy, Western entities extracting natural resources—including the cinchona tree, coca, and quinoa—for their own profit throughout the country’s history.
Given this history of colonization and exploitation, Bolivia is a difficult place to get to know as an outsider. Spending time with my partner’s extended family over the years, I had sensed an underlying, understandable skepticism of me and broader American culture (McDonald’s is unofficially banned in Bolivia), so I always felt the need to defy stereotypes and prove that I am not like the others. Since I do not speak Spanish fluently, I would eat instead of talk to try to belong.
During my first few days in Bolivia, we visited the homes of Rodrigo’s aunts and uncles, each house greeting us with food and drinks. A travel clinic had given me an extensive list of dietary guidelines, to which I did not adhere: “No ice. No iced coffee/tea. Only canned or bottled beverages. Don't drink the water. Bottled water only (even for brushing teeth). Use straws if available. No street food. Eat only cooked food that is still hot. Eggs must be hard-boiled. Only pasteurized milk products. Only cooked veggies. No seafood. No salad/condiments/salsa.”
How could I reject their food welcoming me to Bolivia? And so, my stomach betrayed me. I could only eat crackers and drink bottled water for the latter half of the trip. My otherness had been revealed, stealing the primary way I was able to connect with his family. I canceled our Gustu reservation. But in retrospect, that I had made a reservation to begin with disclosed long before that I was a foreigner seeking a foreigner’s experience, falling into a “tourist trap.”
“Everyone gets sick the first time they go,” one of Rodrigo’s family friends told me when we got back home. Bolivia is likely not a place that you will be able to visit just once and truly experience gastronomically, and it is certainly not a place preoccupied with catering to foreigners or making itself palatable to us. However, when I asked Rodrigo’s mother, Lidia, what she thinks about people visiting Bolivia for tourism, she said, “I like to see tourists in Bolivia because I want them to see that there are a lot of beautiful things there. I especially like to see tourists who eat with us in the streets and markets. They are actually getting to know Bolivia. A tourist who only eats at expensive restaurants does not know Bolivia.”
Many countries whose economies rely on tourism are pressured to serve up fabricated, nonthreatening versions of their identities to be easily consumed; to really get to know others requires time, work, and occasional food poisoning.
Paid Subscriber Notes
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News
I have nothing new, but I would share my own 2020 essay on travel and food poisoning, “Of Cognac and Vomit,” which was published at Pellicle. Perhaps this sheds light on my soft spot for narratives of travel illness—more, please!
Reading
I’d like to tell you I’m reading something exciting, but I’m a little bit of a mess right now trying to get some ancestral narratives straight for my book by fact-checking an interview I did with my 91-year-old grandpa. (Did Trump’s father build the house he lived in? What was the rice dish his grandmother cooked?) Honestly rude of everyone in my family line not to have taken copious notes and organized the archives in anticipation of a future writer. Luckily, my aunts have good memories.
In another tab, I have Roland Barthes’ Mythologies open.
A Lifestyle Note
It’s nothing new coming from me, yet it is always a happy day when I get a new issue of one of the magazines I subscribe to: A little reminder to take a breather. Subscribe to print magazines!!! Especially independent ones. I want to hear any print magazine recommendations in the comments.
I'm clueless if there is indeed some, but I think there needs to be more about that classic disconnect between what health professionals recommend for eating far from home and the reality of eating somewhere far from home.
As a Bolivian who has eaten at Gustu, I read this essay ravenously. Next time she goes she should visit Ali Pacha (vegan) and Popular, who I think are doing the local and national better.
In other things… Mythologies. *swoon*