“From school they bring many things, even the bad habits . . .”: Changing food preferences of youth

Today, children's food tastes differ significantly from their parents', and seem to be one of the most important reasons for the observed transitions in food systems. According to elders and adults, this trend is primarily associated with the formal schooling system and the National School Food Program (Programa de Alimentación Escolar, PAE) initiated in 1964, which has not been culturally sensitive (Clark 2011; Altman 2013). Food attitudes are shaped early in childhood and are reinforced by a combination of familial, social, and cultural influences, which makes food habits one of the most malleable of all habits (Rozin 1990; Schnettler et al 2013).

Mapuche children in Menetue spend most of the day at school in Chilean curricula, which impacts their construction of identity and attitudes toward their own ethnicity and traditional foods ( Appendix 1 (mred-39-01-06_12..23_Barreau Supplemental material Appendix 1.pdf), Supplemental material,  http://dx.doi.org/10.1659/MRDJOURNAL-D-18-00015.S1). The PAE was designed by the National Board of Student Aid and Scholarships (Junta Nacional de Auxilio Escolar y Becas, JUNAEB) under the Ministry of Education of Chile and applied to the entire country as a national solution, without consideration of regional and cultural differences (Contreras 2003; Aburto and Taibo 2010; Clark 2011; Ortega 2015). PAE provides free breakfast, lunch, and a midafternoon meal to students. Sometimes dinner is given at boarding schools or to those in “vulnerable” situations as a means of preventing dropout. Ironically, children in rural areas receive more processed foods than students in urban areas due to the sourcing system established for PAE providers. Although the program tries to ensure that children have the minimum nutritional requirements during the school day, it has generated changes in children's food preferences, thus accelerating a transition toward a diet based on nonlocal, processed foods (Clark 2011; Altman 2013; Barreau 2014).

According to participants' assessments, the change of tastes and acculturation occurs most aggressively for youth who move to boarding schools in urban centers after sixth grade. The ongoing processes of “gustatory subversion” (Lewis 1988) leading younger generations to prefer market foods as status markers has been widely reported (Cruz-García 2006) and results in lower quality diets and economic dependence. One community member articulated this process: “In the countryside, the change in the diet is felt as well; because now children leave at a very early age then they take those customs of that place and lose the ones of this place. And it is because of school, it is something mandatory, not something voluntary . . . and from there they bring many things, even the bad habits” (P.A. ♀ 41–50).

Most mothers reported that their children became accustomed to nonlocal, processed foods that differed from what was offered at home and started refusing traditional preparations made of local, healthier, and fresher ingredients. As mothers tried to please their children, they tended to prepare fewer traditional foods, leaving younger siblings with no chance to try traditional foods. This clearly demonstrates children's agency in influencing family food practices (Joassart-Marcellini and Bosco 2017). The fact that children today do not like many Mapuche preparations has accelerated the loss of traditional cuisine as mothers are not cooking these meals anymore. Additionally, since the Mapuche pedagogy is oral and in situ, the formal school regime and the lesser time spent in the community have been reported as interrupting the transmission of environmental knowledge and skills, as new generations are not learning what the elders once learned (Barreau et al 2016).

“They have forgotten how to make Mapuche meals . . .”: Changing cooking spaces and habits

The lack of traditional culinary utensils emerged as an important reason for changes in the food system. Handmade Mapuche cooking utensils are hard to find nowadays as there are few artisans who make them, and those that can be found are unaffordable for most families (Figure 2). The presence of a fogón or kütralwe, the traditional cooking space, and some key cooking utensils, tells much about how attached a family is to traditional Mapuche cuisine. According to some elders, the fogón was not only where food was cooked and stored in the past, but it was also where social life occurred within a family (Caro 1990). Many remembered that the family would gather around every meal to chat, tell stories, eat, and drink mate (Ilex paraguariensis infusion). Everyone would sleep inside on animal skins surrounding an alwaysburning fire that cooked and smoked food and also kept everyone warm, especially during cold winters. The role of the fogón has changed somewhat for subsequent generations, becoming primarily a cooking space. Adults described growing up in a house separated from the fogón where, depending on the economic situation, many would also have had a small kitchen with a cast iron firewood stove for everyday cooking. Today few families have a fogón due to space restrictions or have converted it into a storage area. Women who married a winka (non-Mapuche) man often no longer had a fogón (Figure 3).

FIGURE 2

Traditional Mapuche cooking artifacts or utensils. (A) Women winnowing wheat using a llepü; (B) a chaigüe full with recently cooked mote in an iron challa sitting beside; (C) a round wooden batea; (D) kudi and ñumkudi for preparing wheat catutos. (Photos by Antonia Barreau)

FIGURE 3

Mapuche woman preparing mote (wheat peeled with ashes) in her fogón. (Photo by Antonia Barreau)

These problems are exacerbated by the fact that the cooking habits of Mapuche women are changing, contributing to something of a feedback loop: traditional cooking utensils and spaces are no longer needed if traditional foods are no longer prepared. Mapuche women are becoming increasingly reticent to prepare traditional meals, which are seen to be more energy- and time-intensive than their modern counterparts. Women in our study described how their mothers used to begin preparing lunch very early in the morning, and, immediately after lunch, they kept cooking to prepare supper. Every meal was prepared from scratch with homemade ingredients. According to most women participants, it seems that today, they are not willing to make such an effort everyday as there are market foods available that require less time and effort to prepare. Fry (2000) reported that the perceptions that traditional foods are inconvenient and time-consuming are the main reasons for a shift in diets in Mapuche families in Makewe in southern Chile. Lack of time was also reported by people from different indigenous communities of the Puget Sound in the Pacific Northwest as a barrier to accessing traditional foods (Krohn and Segrest 2010). Today, in Mapuche communities, traditional preparations are often reserved for special events such as the arrival of guests, holidays, heritage fairs, or ceremonies such as the Nguillatun.

Migration was also mentioned as a determining factor in the decline of the preparation of traditional meals: “What happened is that many women in my community went to Santiago to work at a very young age, and when they returned they had forgotten how to make many Mapuche meals” (P.A. ♀ 41–50).

After primary school, most women in our study migrated to a city to work as housekeepers. While working, they had to learn to cook what the winka family wanted. For those who spent several years away from home, it was hard to go back to traditional ways of cooking and preparations, as their preferences and food habits had changed. Similarly, when a Mapuche woman married a winka man, she changed her cooking habits to suit her husband's preferences.

“People sowed a lot of wheat . . .”: Shifts in production of grains and vegetables

Wheat was and is a staple food, present in most Mapuche dishes, from the basic flour for homemade bread to more elaborate preparations. This cereal was brought by the Spanish and can be considered one of the first signs of cultural exchange; it was rapidly assimilated and has been an important constituent of Mapuche people's daily diets for centuries (Guevara 1908; Bengoa 2000; Torrejón and Cisternas 2002; Toledo Llancaqueo 2006; Montalba and Stephens 2014). After Spanish arrival, wheat quickly replaced maize in most places as a Mapuche staple. Other traditional crops and wild grains that were cultivated before the Spanish arrived, such as quinwa (Chenopodium quinoa), mangu (Bromus mango), teka (Bromus berterianus), madi (Madia sativa), potatoes, pumpkins, peppers, and green beans, began to disappear as they were replaced by exotic species like barley, wheat, and oats (Gumucio 1999; Torrejón and Cisternas 2002; Pardo and Pizarro 2005; Coña and de Moesbach 2010; Eyssartier et al 2011).

Most adults recalled that as children, they helped their parents sow large quantities of wheat, maize, oats, rye, flaxseed, and barley interspaced with long rows of peas, beans, various potatoes, beans, and broad beans. Most grains started slowly disappearing from the landscape as farms shrank, but wheat remained longest. Legumes, maize (mostly one variety, called mapunwa, has mostly disappeared), and potatoes have today been relegated to a few rows in chacras. As one Lonko remembered: “Before, there was a lot of Mapuche maize, the one with different colors. It had blue, red, and yellow kernels all mixed in the same cob. Now those are hard to see, almost no one grows them” (G.A. ♂ >81).

Women frequently complained that purchased wheat was lower in quality compared to home grown wheat. However, locally grown wheat is simply no longer available. According to participants this is due largely to lower soil productivity, restricted spaces for agriculture that prevents rotations between crops and pastures for livestock, a lack of threshing machines, a higher presence of agricultural pests, and the absence of fallows and excessive use of agrochemicals. Indeed, agrochemical use and other intensive agriculture practices have been widely incorporated by Mapuche communities as a result of governmental indigenous policies, subsidies, and external agents' interventions (regional programs and initiatives) designed to convert indigenous peasant producers into capitalist farmers (Clark 2011). This has not only washed out soils, but, more profoundly, has disrupted local livelihood strategies and food systems and eroded traditional ecological knowledge (Clark 2011; Eyssartier et al 2011). In Menetue, pesticides and artificial fertilizers were introduced by national and municipal programs to “support” small farmers. Rather than supporting local agricultural methods such as field rotation, animal manuring, and local seed-saving, these programs have pushed families to incorporate concepts and techniques designed for intensive agriculture (Clark 2011).

Shifts in the production of grains and vegetables are occurring alongside shifts in agricultural practice itself. Agricultural work like sowing or harvesting was historically collaborative in nature, based on reciprocity rather than remuneration. Families used to turn to their kin, neighbors, and friends for help in what is called a mingako, a festive space for collective work which allowed the family seeking help to share large amounts of food and drink to compensate their guests for their labor (Caro 1990). As stated by some participants, Mapuche people now seem to be more individualistic as agricultural activities have become more of a personal and less a collective concern.

“Sausages . . . I do not eat that stuff”: From traditional to modern foods

Food diaries from each of seven households recorded 170 meals, a sample of a summer diet. In this season, home gardens, orchards, and chacras provide abundant vegetables, fruit, eggs and milk products, and animals can be butchered. Wild fruits, like berries, ripen, and orchard fruits are ready for preparing chicha de manzana (apple cider). According to the Mapuche worldview, the walüng is the summer or sun's time, which brings the harvest, abundance, and benefits of work carried out.

According to the food diaries, locally produced ingredients comprised 55% of total family intake, compared to 45% market-based foods. Wheat and wheatbased preparations such as bread, though locally prepared, were classified as market-based as the flour was bought, not sown. We would expect that the proportion of market-based foods during seasonal scarcity (usually winter and spring, seasons that were not considered in our food diaries) would be greater than 45%. Indeed, during fall, families buy most of the food they will need for winter when the routes to buy groceries become impassable and local production of food slows down. For some of the women interviewed, fall is their most expensive season. Dried legumes, potatoes, and maize were stored for winter consumption but current agricultural yields could not sustain families for an entire year.

When sorted by food groups, vegetables made up 38% and grains 25% of summer diets (Figure 4). Grains were consumed in the form of homemade bread and sopaipillas (fry bread), both made with white flour and rice, comprising 73% of all grains consumed. White flour and white rice are refined, processed carbohydrates that have replaced traditional grains like quinwa, lokro, whole wheat, and rye flour. Homemade bread was recorded in 46% of all the meals, which, compared to our observations of its ubiquity, seemed low. Ibarra et al (2011) similarly found that homemade tortillas were not salient in foodstuff freelists but were present in 99% of meals in the Sierra Chinanteca, Mexico. In Menetue, both bread and mate (drunk after and between meals) were likely taken for granted as they are omnipresent, like a plate or a glass of water.

FIGURE 4

Relative frequency of occurrence of food groups in meals recorded in food diaries during the “abundance period” (n = 170 meals).

Fats, oils, and sweets represented 16% of all food items, mainly as butter, instant coffee, jams, and honey. Sweets included processed drinks with high sugar content, such as sodas, powdered juices, instant coffee, and tea, to which refined sugar is added. Butter and margarine, both purchased nowadays, were the most frequent food items in this category, ever-present for cooking and eating bread. The low dairy consumption (5%), mostly cheese, is probably due to few milking cows owned per family and to expensive market dairy products. The great variety of orchard fruits are generally used to prepare jams, conserves, and chicha to store for the rest of the year, rather than for fresh consumption. Thus, fruits represented only 2% of all foodstuffs recorded. Many participants reported that consumption of vegetables and fruits diminished even further during the winter, as did dairy consumption.

Foods such as tomato sauce, mortadella, sausages, margarine, and children's processed breakfast cereals were considered “new foods” by participants, incorporated into family diets in recent years. Rice and noodles, although long known, were called “recently incorporated foods,” as they were too expensive for many families to buy in the past and, thus, rarely consumed. Over time, they have replaced traditional foods like locro, soplillo, and quinwa as they have become less expensive and easier to prepare. According to Schnettler et al (2013: 251), “the multiplication of means of transport and road construction during the 1980s and 1990s allowed foodstuffs and related products (mate, sugar, oil, pasta, rice, etc) to be brought from the cities and introduced into the communities, and these have now become essential in every family's diet.” Caro (1990) described how introduced foods like rice and noodles gave some Mapuche individuals a sense of prestige, as winka food is associated with modernity. Fry (2000) recorded the perception of traditional foods as “old fashioned” in the Mapuche community of Makewe, a factor hastening their replacement by industrialized foods. Instant coffee (coffee and barley-based), tea, powdered juices, long-life milk, and carbonated beverages were also mentioned as newly incorporated foods. Nowadays, carbonated drinks are purchased for special occasions like celebrations or when receiving visitors. These “new foods” were rarely consumed or even known by most adults during their childhood, and most of them are rejected by elders, who request traditional preparations. For them, the new foods are not even considered to be food. As the local chief told us: “my grandchildren eat those things called sausages . . . I do not eat that stuff. For me, [real] food is prepared” (G.A. ♂ >81). The rejection of “new foods” by elders is a common pattern among indigenous groups around the world (Kuhnlein and Receveur 1996; Fry 2000; Kuhnlein et al 2004; Krohn and Segrest 2010; McCune and Kuhnlein 2011).

“Now, everything is artificial and so people die early . . .”: Increasing prevalence of chronic diseases with changing diets

Shifts in local foodways are inevitably linked to improvement or deterioration of people's health. When study participants talked about these changes, discussion of the prevalence of chronic disease in the family commonly emerged. Diet-related chronic disease among indigenous groups has been widely studied (Kuhnlein 1995; Uauy et al 2001; Kuhnlein et al 2004; Myers et al 2004; Damman et al 2008; Powell et al 2011). For example, type 2 diabetes is considered to have reached epidemic proportions among Inuit (Myers et al 2004), Australian aboriginals (Burns and Thomson 2006), Mapuche (Pérez-Bravo et al 2001), and Northwest Coast Indians (Krohn and Segrest 2010), among others (Diamond 1992; McCune and Kuhnlein 2011).

In our community survey, adults were asked whether they suffered from chronic diseases or conditions such as overweight, obesity, diabetes (mostly type 2), hypertension, hypercholesterolemia, or any cardiovascular disease, and whether they had been prescribed medication. Almost half of the 38 people surveyed reported having been diagnosed as overweight or obese. These were predominantly women, which coincides with the findings of Uauy (2001) and Pérez-Bravo et al (2001) for other Mapuche communities. Just over 10% were diagnosed with type 2 diabetes with a prevalence in men, contrasting with the findings of Pérez-Bravo et al (2001), who reported a higher prevalence of this disease in women of 5 rural Mapuche communities elsewhere. In our study, based on current diagnoses by rural health professionals, almost 16% were hypertensive (over half women) and 13% had been diagnosed with high cholesterol (Table 1). Although the numbers for some conditions may not be alarming, the high prevalence of overweight and obesity is concerning because of correlation with a variety of adverse health outcomes (Uauy et al 2001; Burns and Thomson 2006). Most of these chronic conditions are related, because they have similar modifiable risk factors, including sedentary lifestyles and diets high in saturated fats, cholesterol, salt, and alcohol, and low in fiber, fruits, and vegetables.

TABLE 1

Percentage of community members reporting a chronic health condition diagnosed by the Municipal Rural Health Team that visited the community every 2 weeks.

Perception of how things were in the past can say a lot about which foodways have been lost. Participants perceived people as generally healthier in the past because they used to die of old age rather than of disease. In Menetue, everyone had a story about relatives who lived over 100 years without ever visiting a doctor or hospital. “Before, everything people ate was natural that is why the ancient lived for a century. Now, everything is artificial and so people die soon” (J.H. ♂ >81). This perception was also reported by Jelves and N˜ anco (2002) and Fry (2000) for Mapuche people in Makewe. This notion is also consistent with descriptions by chroniclers such as de Bibar (1558), Nuñez de Pineda and Bascuñán (1673), González de Nájera (1614), among others, who characterize Mapuche people as very healthy, with long life expectancies compared to Europeans, and with rich and diverse food traditions. Chronic diseases and conditions such as people report today were uncommon or nonexistent in the past, according to everyone interviewed. There was a common perception that the high prevalence of these diseases in the community were associated with a processed food diet with too much sugar, fat, and “chemicals” at the expense of natural foods and, relatedly, the loss of natural remedies to treat mild health conditions.

The disappearance of traditional plant-based remedies and their replacement with drugs and pills were also mentioned as important influences on health. In the past, food and medicinal plants were the basis of good health, and people had a wealth of knowledge about their uses. Wild foods were considered to be medicinal, and that was the reason Chau Dios (God) left them for people to use. The fogón or kütralwe was also believed to have an impact on health: its use as a common social space was curative, as it would keep the whole body dry and warm and the bones strong through winter. It is also believed that tortillas al rescoldo (bread baked in embers) made on the fogón are healthy, providing important mineral ash elements. Cooking in a challa iron pot is known to contribute to overall iron intake (Urrutia 1998).

In Menetue, there are links between land dispossession, the loss of food sovereignty, and the prevalence of nutrition-related chronic diseases (Barreau et al 2016). This can be related to historical political disadvantaging, causing indigenous people to access market-based foodstuffs at the cheapest, and least nutritive, levels. Clark (2011: 169) remarks that “a key outcome of the past thirty years with respect to the food system has been the near-complete loss of food sovereignty and the expanded intervention of markets in the rural Mapuche food system.” In addition, although government health programs provide recommendations for healthier lifestyles, the “mainstream nutrition” tenets upon which the recommendations rely have been promoted globally and largely ignore diversity and context (Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy 2017). This leads to nutritional recommendations and school food programs that are standardized, decontextualized, and reliant on outsider experts, as opposed to local experts who hold place-based knowledge about how food-bodyhealth relations unfold in people's daily lives (Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy 2017).