Size, color, and freshness: Standards and heritage of native potatoes in Peru

Abstract

Peru is the center of origin and diversity of more than 3,000 varieties of native potatoes although only a few varieties are typically consumed beyond the Andean region. Drawing on 14 months of ethnographic research, I explore the role of standards of size, quality, and colors as well as documents like invoices in formalizing and mobilizing the potatoes in the market. I argue that these standards and documents together with economic sociability serve as an important strategy to add value to native potatoes from their production in Ayacucho to their distribution in Lima. By keeping the ethnographic eye on the construction and negotiation of those standards, I show the fragility, the risks, the opportunities, and the power relationships that emerge along the native potato chain.

Keywords:

• Economic sociability
• food heritage
• native potato
• Peru
• standards
• supply chain

Introduction: The Peruvian gastronomic boom

Peru is the center of origin and diversity of more than 3,000 varieties of native potatoes, although only a few varieties are typically consumed beyond the Andean region. Since colonial times these tubers have been devalued as they were considered food of the indigenous people and intimately bound to the Andean identity (De la Cadena 1995; Orlove 1998). However, since the Peruvian “Gastronomic Boom” took off in the mid-2000s, some well-known chefs became interested in exploring the geography of the country and “discovering” native ingredients (McDonell 2019) including the native potatoes and other Andean tubers like oca, olluco, and mashua.¹ As a result, chefs, farmers, and consumers started to re-value these tubers for their historical origins in the Andean culture and territory, as well as for their physical qualities like color, texture, and taste. As my informants revealed during my fieldwork between 2015 and 2016, tubers, especially native potatoes, started to be commercialized and consumed in the capital of Lima more than ever before. This process is slowly creating new routes of circulation, but the produce must be standardized, sometimes through documentation and sometimes through “economic sociability” (Cavanaugh 2016), that is, verbal interactions that are not registered on paper. In this article I will discuss the conundrum that lies behind the growing demand for native potatoes as food heritage and the implications it poses to the traditional methods of production. I argue that standardization serves as a crucial strategy to add value and allows native potatoes to reach a new culinary market, but it also restricts how potatoes can be sold and it conditions those farmers who can benefit from selling their produce.

In recent years, the ‘Peruvian Gastronomic Boom’ has elevated Peruvian food worldwide and nationally. Lima is now recognized as a gastronomic center in South America, bringing pride to Peruvian national identity. The government has raised Peruvian gastronomy to the rank of National Heritage, and national days are being created to celebrate local dishes and ingredients (Matta 2013; 2012). In addition, in 2010 the government requested UNESCO to include the country’s gastronomy in the list of Intangible Cultural Heritage (Matta 2011, 2016b).² Raul Matta (2012) explains the Gastronomic Boom as resulting from a combination of factors such as the end of the Peruvian civil war in 2000, rapid economic growth, and the success of a few Peruvian chefs in world-gastronomic capitals like New York or Paris. In this light, the Boom is making food part of a political and economic project aiming at reconstructing the social fabric of the country and relies on food heritagization as a “processes of appropriation, conservation, and appreciation of foodstuffs and culinary practices” (Matta 2011, 196, my translation). The Gastronomic Boom now appears as a culinary and social movement that promises “inclusion, prosperity, and peace for a country fragmented by colonialism, racism and war” (García 2013, 506),³ however the Gastronomic Boom is also the result of an elite social class that combines the traditional and rich Peruvian gastronomy with chefs’ knowledge.

One of the most famous Peruvian chefs and a leading figure in the development of the Gastronomic Boom, Gastón Acurio, has vocally been advocating to include indigenous farmers to extend the benefits of the Boom to producers. He also played a central role in the development of the Novo-Andean Cuisine (Cocina Novoandina), which is based on “the ‘beautiful fusion’ of indigenous Peruvian products” (García 2013, 510) and is influenced by the style and the esthetics of the French Haute Cuisine and Nouvelle Cuisine combined with Andean traditions⁴. Gastón believes that the Novo-Andean Cuisine and the Gastronomic Boom are a means to acknowledge the work of producers of traditional crops, and to protect the country’s biodiversity. However, critics of the Gastronomic Boom argue that indigenous people are still marginalized in Peruvian society (Matta 2012, 2013; García 2013). They also point out that the “celebratory glow” around the Boom obscures the “marginalization and violence against indigenous and nonhuman bodies in Peru” (García 2013, 507), whereby animals like guinea pigs and alpaca are introduced to new markets and are slaughtered in new industrial ways that sometimes disrupt local routines of animal husbandry.

Adding complexities to mainstream discourses on the Gastronomic Boom as a vehicle to protect and valorize traditional food as heritage, in this article I foreground a farmer named Edilberto’s experience and engagement with producing native potatoes for the emerging Peruvian culinary market. Based in the Andean region of Ayacucho, Edilberto is a farmer and a businessman who has embraced the opportunities and hopes of integration created by the Gastronomic Boom by offering and selling to chefs and restaurants some varieties of native potatoes. Interestingly enough, Edilberto and Gastón Acurio are acquaintances. They met at a food fair in Lima, where Edilberto displayed his native potatoes. Soon after meeting, Gastón started buying Edilberto’s produce for his most exclusive restaurant, Astrid&Gastón, including them as part of his signature tasting menu (menú de degustación).⁵

The process of getting the potatoes to Gastón’s restaurant was an important step for Edilberto’s produce to enter this niche market. It entailed creating a new supply chain for native potatoes, achieving the standards demanded by the restaurant, matching its esthetic expectations for the tasting menu, and arranging logistics of delivery. After Edilberto made a deal with Gastón, other restaurants started to contact him as the request for native potatoes slowly started increasing. The restaurant’s esthetic choices, I argue, are influenced by the creative principles of the Novo-Andean Cuisine in that there is an interest in diverse ingredients and small portions. As I will show later, some of Gastón’s requirements were different from those shaping the way Edilberto used to sell his produce in the wholesale market; yet Gaston’s requirements became the standards for selling the tubers to other restaurants. For instance, differently to the wholesale market, a preference for small-sized and fresh potatoes without sprouts packed in a range of colorful varieties have started to become the standard for restaurants.

The increasing popularity of local or indigenous ingredients such as potatoes in high-end restaurants is not an isolated case in Peru or Latin America. Chefs in Peru are also using, for instance, guinea pigs (cuy) for their symbolic relation to the Andes (Matta 2016a). Similarly, in the construction of the discourse of Mexican cuisine, Ayora-Diaz argues that cookbooks seek “to legitimize their claims of authenticity by locating their roots in indigenous cultures” (Ayora-Díaz 2012, 62). During my research, more often than not, the chefs in the restaurants where I conducted fieldwork in Lima, used the potato and the tubers oca, ollucos and mashua in a way that conveyed the people who have long grown and consumed them in the Andean mountains.

For instance, chefs in high-end restaurants like Astrid&Gastón, IK, or Central use native potatoes on their tasting menu to evoke the Andean territory and history while they serve other ingredients like fish and algae to represent the sea and the coastal regions. When I attended the tasting menu in IK, I observed and heard the staff giving a short description of every dish they were serving. When they brought potatoes to the table, they said: “this is a journey across Peru through the dishes. Here we have the Andean tubers …and we have the potato - more than 3,500 edible varieties. In this case we have a red potato. What we do is to cover it on salt, and cook it in an artisanal clay oven.”

Las Canastas is not high-end restaurant, it does not include a tasting menu, and it has in fact more accessible prices. Specialized in roasted chicken (pollo a la brasa),⁶ Las Canastas promotes their new menu that now includes native potatoes by remarking their colorful varieties and offering them as a healthy alternative to French fries. The restaurant manager explained me that they introduced native potatoes after seeing Gaston’s tasting menu - they got in in touch with Edilberto soon after.

Native potatoes and the heritagization of food

Native potatoes are distinct from varieties that have been “improved” by scientific breeding methods to resist pests and to increase and standardize yields as part of diverse state development programs (Ploeg 1993; Haan et al. 2010). Native varieties are associated with the ancestral and traditional ways of cultivation as well as with the territory since they need the minerals available in the Andean mountains’ soil up to 3,000 meters above sea level. Their breeding and genetic mutations are the result of indigenous ways of managing the cultivars that privilege a system of mixed seed planting. This enhances the gene flow, genetic variation, and mutation among the species planted (Haan et al. 2010; Brush et al. 1995). In contrast, "improved potato” varieties (papas mejoradas) superimpose a scientific agricultural logic that undermines the local way of farming in the Andes (Ploeg 1993). During the eighties Enrique Mayer and Manuel Galve noted that the introduction of “improved varieties” created genetic erosion of the native varieties. They reported that even though native varieties were not profitable, farmers were still cultivating them on a small scale (Mayer and Glave 1999, 345). Crucially, the native potatoes that Mayer and Glave⁷ described are now making their way to some of the best restaurants in Lima and have become part of the food heritage.

Making food an object of heritage or the “heritagization of food” (Klein 2018; Grasseni 2014; West 2016), involves a process where diverse actors engage in claiming the “historical legacy” (Weiss 2016, 244) of a specific local foodstuff. The way people in Peru name the potato as “native” refers to the connection between the origins of the tuber, the Andean territory, and the people who domesticated it from a wild variety around 8,000 years ago⁸ (Reader 2009). Based on these connections and history, Edilberto explains that native potatoes should get their own designation of origin to protect their genetic diversity from biopiracy. In his view, this would prevent any possibility of expanding the area of production of native potatoes and keep it bounded to the Andean territory. However, the heritagization of food is “not only due to ecological and environmental reasons, but also as a consequence of other political and cultural factors” (Mak 2014, 343). These often translate as strategies of rural development, niche market creation (Klein 2018), restructuring agricultural production systems, and the creation of development policies (Matta 2013), which are now taking place in Peru in the context of the Gastronomic Boom. Claims about the Andean origins of the potato and its “nativeness” are constantly made in the restaurants: as shown above, both the chefs and restaurant staff relate the tubers to the Peruvian history, territory, indigenous farmers, and healthiness (Abbots 2014). Furthermore, potatoes are subject of state-driven policies to promote their origin and identity as traditionally Andean products. Considering such factors, the case of native potatoes configures a unique example of food heritage in Latin America.

Indeed, scholars discuss food heritage in relation to political, economic, or ideological goals (Brulotte and Di Giovine 2014), examining, for example, the capacity of food heritage practices to benefit or not small-scale and local producers (Klein 2018; West 2016; Bowen 2010; Matta 2013), or the significant role they play in the construction of identity (Lu and Fine 1995; Anderson 2006; Brulotte and Di Giovine 2014; Wilk 1999), traditions (Paxson 2014), and place (Weiss 2011). Klein (2018) suggests that the question of who benefits from projects of food heritagization is disputed, showing that the government plays a key role in influencing whether industrial corporations, farmers, ethnic minorities, or rural localities are their chief beneficiaries. Along these lines, Bowen (2010) shows that the process of Geographic Indication of Origin of Mexican Tequila failed to benefit small-scale producers because the role that the state played in designing and enforcing legislation has mostly benefited large industries. In contrast, small-scale cheesemakers in France (West 2014) and the Italian Alps (Grasseni 2014) have been able to benefit by “actively participating in food heritagization” (Klein 2018, 80). In Peru, the government has been playing an active role in marketing and promoting Peruvian Gastronomy, highlighting the importance of agriculture and the revitalization of the indigenous way of producing (Matta and García 2019; Matta 2012). However, as Matta argues, the question of “who benefits from heritage?” (2013) is still unanswered in the Peruvian context and this article aims at shedding light on it.

Food heritagization involves standardization “to ensure consistency” (Matta 2013) and marketing strategies that are tied to processes of packing, branding, and certifying foodstuffs with the aim of commercialization and profit (Weiss 2011; Besky 2014; Grasseni 2003; Paxson 2014; Klein 2018; Brulotte and Di Giovine 2014). Brad Weiss, for instance, argues that local pork is “an amalgam of animal husbandry, marketing strategies, and social networking” (Weiss 2011, 452). Similar cases occur with tea in India (Besky 2014) and cheese in Italy (Grasseni 2003), where cultural histories of how food is produced are part of the marketing strategies and “new skills” (Grasseni 2003) that producers have to learn to sell their produce and benefit from the heritagization of food.

My work on native potatoes in Peru relates to these debates and in this article, I pay particular attention to the strategies of standardization that my informants used to move the tubers from the Andean mountains to specific markets in Lima. I will argue that those who benefit from the heritagization of native potato are those who are best able to navigate this new market, through adapting to certain standards and forms of documentation. By looking at the process of standardizing the produce, I aim to highlight the fragility, the risks, the opportunities, and the power relationships that emerged along the native potato chain after Edilberto and Gaston met.

Method: Fieldwork and the field site

This article is based on 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2015 and 2016, during which I followed the activities of Edilberto. His farm is in the Andean town of Condorccocha, where he was born and where his mother lives. Edilberto resides in Huamanga, the main city of the region of Ayacucho, one hour away from his farm and eight hours away by car from the capital of Lima, where he sells most of his native potato produce.

During my fieldwork, I moved among these places to follow the routes of the potatoes and the different activities Edilberto carried out. While I spent most of my time on the farm and in Huamanga, going to Lima allowed me to visit some of the restaurants where Edilberto sells his produce. While there, I interviewed members of the restaurants’ staff and observed how they use native potatoes in the kitchens and on the plates. Fieldwork in the restaurants was focused primarily on IK and Las Canastas, two of the restaurants that currently have deals with Edilberto. These two restaurants were first inspired by Gastón’s use of native potatoes. The case of Edilberto is representative of the ways in which the Gastronomic Boom becomes entangled in local and native production and distribution processes and of how it has created hopes and sometimes the possibilities for farmers to find new niche markets for selling their produce.

Edilberto does not work alone. In the farm in Condorccocha Edilberto hires farmers for daily wages. He has also hired Colfir, an agronomist who helps him make sure the production cycle in the fields meets the restaurant’s requirements. Colfir also helps in finding other native potato farmers in the region that can supply the restaurants in Lima when Edilberto’s produce is not enough. As Colfir spends most of his time in the farm in Condorccocha, Edilberto can do administrative, logistic, and networking activities in Huamanga and Lima with the hope of finding more clients and expanding the chain. By expanding the chain, Edilberto hopes to get other farmers on board to benefit from selling their native potatoes. As I will show in what follows, in expanding the chain, the use of standards must expand too.

Standards: The first invoice and economic sociability

“Jose, look, this is the first invoice I did for Gaston Acurio; the first time I sold him native potatoes”, Edilberto exclaimed as he showed me a piece of paper from 2011 that he kept in a box with other old documents. He then explained to me that in addition to carefully selecting the potatoes to comply with the restaurant’s requirements, Gastón decided to buy native potatoes from him because he was able to provide an invoice, something that not all native potato farmers are able to do. In Peru, few producers are formally registered as taxpayers and can comply with the tax documentation and revenue procedures involved in generating an invoice.⁹ Edilberto’s first invoice showed the need for documentation to ensure the tubers would reach new restaurant sites along the chain. In contrast, for selling the produce in the wholesale market, like many other farmers do, there is no need of providing receipts.

In what follows, I will reflect on the role of documents and standards of quality, size, and color and their implementation by producers like Edilberto as a strategy to add value to the tubers in new places of distribution. Without complying with all these, the restaurants would not buy native potatoes from farmers like Edilberto. I will show that standards and documents are good ethnographic realms to explore how food heritagization gets entangled in relations of power, the opportunities it brings, and the fragility that it creates. Meeting standards, sometimes through documentation, is a condition for the native potatoes to leave the farm to reach new markets. But what are these standards? Who defines them and following what logic? And how can Edilberto make sure the potatoes meet those standards?

Understanding standards as "whether in the form of physical objects, reference materials, written codes or laws, or widespread practices [that] are the means by which we judge persons, process, and things to be superior, acceptable or unacceptable" (Busch 2011b, 3248), I will focus here on the processes of potato selection. I will concentrate on the construction of the standards through a process of “economic sociability” (Cavanaugh 2016), that is, on verbal interactions that occur in the acts of sorting (Tsing 2013) and add value to the potatoes, making them suitable for consumption in the restaurants. I will also argue that meeting the standards constructed through economical sociability and documents constitutes a condition to access the new gastronomic markets to commercialize native potatoes and other tubers like ocas, ollucos, and mashuas.

The standardization of selecting tubers for restaurants is becoming a relatively “widespread practice" (Busch 2011b, 3248) within Edilberto’s supply chain but it is important to note that it is not based on any document. It is instead the outcome of verbal interactions between chefs and Edilberto. Chefs like Gastón participate in food festivals; they talk, see the tubers, and request specific size and color of potatoes, suitable for their tasting menu in his case. Edilberto is always ready to tell how he produces the tubers, the history of their origin in the Andes, their qualities of texture, color, and taste: “we grow the best potatoes in the world”, he would often say. Chefs and restaurant owners often visit Edilberto’s farm in Condorccocha to establish a social connection with him and with the Andean territory. Through these verbal interactions at either food festivals or in the farm, they agree on their requirements of size, color, and freshness of potatoes, but what I want to stress here is the skilled labor Edilberto performs when talking to potential customers.

Jillian Cavanaugh (2016) defines the verbal interactions that “produce value in global capitalism” (Cavanaugh and Shankar 2014, 51) as “economic sociability” emphasizing how they go beyond what is registered in documents: “talk is often necessary part of the production process” (Cavanaugh 2016, 699). In Cavanaugh’s ethnographic case studies verbal interactions are understood as skills that help producers to go about their business while auditors fill in paper forms – the verbal interactions taking place are not documented on paper but make auditing more flexible. The shape economic sociability takes in my ethnographic study is in the creation of standards that are not based on paper but that are essential for the production and circulation of native potatoes.

In this regard, through his skilled talking, Edilberto adds value to the tubers by providing information such as the origins of native potatoes in the Andes and ecological details about the importance of long rested soil and the minerals available in the Andean land to grow good native potatoes. He also assures customers that they will receive what they want by meeting standards they have verbally agreed upon regarding size, colors, and freshness. By reaching specific spoken agreements about quantities, time, and place of delivery, the potatoes can reach new sites of consumption. Economic sociability here acts as a substitute to paper-based standards, laying down the rules regarding the size, color, and freshness of the potatoes. However, even though the standards are not written down, not meeting them could lead to the loss of a customer.

A problem with sizes

I was calmly writing fieldnotes in my room in Huamanga when Edilberto phoned me. He was busy doing paperwork at the bank and asked me to immediately go to the shipment agency to help Almaquio, a farmer who was delivering native potatoes to Edilberto for the first time to sell at a restaurant in Lima. Almaquio had just arrived from Vinchos, a town 3 hours away from Huamanga. To make the most of his trip, Almaquio also brought ollucos and additional native potatoes to sell in the wholesale market, as he usually does. This relationship between Edilberto and other farmers like Almaquio extended the potato chain and its benefits. As Edilberto finds more customers, his produce becomes insufficient, and he needs to make alliances with other farmers. Extending the supply chain also means extending the ways of producing native potatoes to make them ready according to the restaurant’s requirements. In other words, to expand the chain also means to expand the standards by which these potatoes must be sown, fertilized, harvested, and selected. This process does not happen automatically; rather it involves labor, training, discussions, and the making of mistakes that can make the chain fragile.

I went to the shipment agency as fast as I could to try to help Almaquio. Edilberto phoned me again to ask me how the sacks were arranged and if there was a specific bag ready to send to the restaurant only with blue potatoes (papas azules). I didn’t know how Almaquio had filled the bags, so I passed him the phone and they discussed this. In about half an hour, Edilberto arrived and started to verify the bags noticing that the bag of blue potatoes was not as it should be. While the color of the potatoes was right, the size was wrong and not what the restaurant had requested. In the middle of the courier agency, we emptied the bags onto the floor and started to sort the potatoes according to the appropriate size. Edilberto was explaining to Almaquio how important it was to keep the "high quality standards" (altos estándares de calidad) of the restaurants, so they got exactly what they wanted and would be satisfied. Otherwise, Edilberto continued, they might just stop buying native potatoes, jeopardizing their commercial relation, which would affect all the farmers involved with Edilberto along the chain.

The main problem was the selection of the size – the selected potatoes were too big for what the restaurant wanted. Almaquio included many first-sized (primeras) potatoes in the bag which are the biggest and are the size that farmers and their families normally eat. Restaurants are requesting a smaller size, known as second-sized potatoes (segundas),¹⁰ which according to the logic of farmers would be stored mainly as seeds. One of the differences between selling for the wholesale market and for restaurants is that in the wholesale market it is not necessary to carefully select the potatoes according to size. In other words, the standard relating to size here is different. Conversely, the size requirements of the restaurants are new, and it takes time and effort to make an appropriate selection.

What happened that day elucidates a tension created by the standards restaurants have for potatoes and what farmers’ see as edible potatoes due to their historical, traditional requirements and understandings. It illuminates different ways in which the chain operates, its rhythms, its fragilities, and how the tubers accrue value by the act of being sorted out in the right way to meet the standards agreed with the restauranteurs. Lawrence Busch (2011a) noted that standards are so ubiquitous in our modern daily life that they are “ordinarily invisible” (Bowker and Star 1999, 2). Busch also asserts that standards are taken for granted until they fail to work (2011a, 2). In fact, recalling that day I can remember Almaquio acting in accordance with another set of standards that ensured things were done correctly and worked smoothly. For instance, he used specific plastic bags to transport the potatoes. These were carefully weighed to hold 50 kilograms of tubers each and were closed with a plastic thread with a special technique that guarantees that the bags do not accidentally open, scattering the potatoes.

The problem with the apparent inappropriate size of potatoes was that Almaquio did not know how to select them according to the required standard because that standard had only just recently been agreed upon and constructed through the verbal exchanges between Edilberto, the chefs, and the restaurant managers. In other words, it was not the potato size as an agreed standard that was failing to work, but the standard was not being implemented because it was new to the farmers like Almaquio.

Standards become interesting if we consider that “as standards are used, people and things are tested, and we determine what shall count” (Busch 2011a, 12). Thinking of what counts and therefore of what does not count, becomes quite provocative because another question arises: what counts for whom? In this regard, standards “are associated with power” (Busch 2011a, 1) and also “inform social and moral order” (Bowker and Star 1999, 5), which in my ethnographic case was determined by chefs and restaurants who decided the potato size that best fitted their needs. Standardization "incorporates two processes: consensual agreement (…) and the expression of power of an authority over its subjects" (Lengwiler 2009, 202). At the same time, as Busch argues, “in some instances (…) [the standards] must be followed in order to participate in a given market” (Busch 2011a, 26; see also Paxson 2016). Many of Edilberto’s efforts were focused on what he called "finding markets" (encontrar mercados). By trying to find markets he agrees to adapt the production and selection to certain requirements of chefs and restaurants who have buying power. These requirements, that started with the first sale to Gaston Acurio, are slowly becoming standards in the new native potato chain.

In an interview with the owner of a high-end restaurant in Lima, I asked what the criteria they set when asking Edilberto to provide them with native potatoes. He replied:

First, we look for the size, next for the texture: there are some varieties that are thicker (más espesa) and some others are moister (más húmeda). We do consider these things a lot and now we are also playing with colors. So, what defines our needs are size, texture, and color. But we also adjust regarding what varieties Edilberto grows every year because you will always find wonders wherever you look …

This shows that the restaurant owner values potato size as part of an esthetic choice on how the potatoes will look on the plate. It also clarifies that restaurateurs are open to the varieties that Edilberto offers to them. The potato size the interviewee refers to are small potatoes – the second size described above – which are the ones he buys from Edilberto and offers in his restaurant. His food esthetics valorizes small portions for the tasting menu, echoing the influence of Novo-Andean cuisine. During my fieldwork I observed that a demand for the seconds was also a requirement of other restaurants that bought native potatoes from Edilberto, getting inspiration for the way other chefs are using small native potatoes. Edilberto is aware that the chefs’ influence is helping to make the native potatoes more visible in the city. Indeed, as the case of Las Canastas shows, some restaurants that contact Edilberto to buy native potatoes are crucially influenced by seeing Gastón Acurio’s use of native potatoes. This suggests that it is the chefs’ leadership and choices that gets other restaurants interested in native potatoes, including the standards of size by which they first reach the gastronomic market in the city.

Concerning the invoice of the first transaction with Gaston Acurio, it was necessary for the restaurant to get a receipt to prove and formally document the transaction to register the expenditure on its tax declaration. Once Edilberto managed to adjust to that standard by supplying the requested document, he also began finding other customers. To come back to the scene in the shipping agency, I want to note that the standardization of the potato size is not mediated by any document. It is instead the outcome of “economic sociability” (Cavanaugh 2016), a decisive spoken agreement between Edilberto and the people from the restaurants that adds value to Edilberto’s produce. That spoken agreement is enacted and fulfilled during the selection process, monitored by Edilberto and Colfir. In this regard, shaping the production to meet the requirements both with documents for taxation purposes and by selecting the potatoes considering size, color, and varieties are some of the ways in which the potatoes accrue value to move from the Andes to the restaurants. But these are not all, and in the in the next section I will show that the condition of freshness of the potatoes is another agreed standard that farmers are careful to comply with through the selection process.

“Healthy potatoes” and the selection process

In her project following the matsukake mushroom, Anna Tsing (2013, 2015) argues that the repetitive act of sorting out mushrooms is a measure of commensuration that is part of what enables the mushrooms to enter a capitalist chain. Similarly, by fitting to certain standards, some of them during the selection process, native potatoes can enter the new gastronomic chain. As I described above with the size, the selection must be carefully done to maintain the connection between the client and Edilberto, but the selection involves complying with other verbal agreement in addition to size: the condition of freshness and quality. The potatoes that go to restaurants are only those that people in the Andes call “healthy” (sanas). Healthy potatoes do not have any worms, fungus, or cracks caused by the pickax (lampa) during the harvest.

Thinking through standards also has an ethical dimension. A standard can be “dangerous” in the sense that it “valorizes some point of view and silences another” (Bowker and Star 1999, 5). This is problematic because at the same time, it could make certain things easier given that “standardization is considered to be a necessary technique designed to facilitate other tasks” (Lampland and Star 2009, 10). In my ethnographic study this is the case of making the second-sized potato the standard for restaurants - at the same time the preference for seconds its opening new routes of commercialization, it modifies the management from production to harvest. I will describe this in what follows.

The selection process standardizes the produce according to the requirements of restaurants – it is one of the moments during which native potatoes are made “good” for the purpose of this new supply chain. By finding their way into restaurants, native potatoes are also entering a new class space: restaurants categorized as high cuisine, a space of consumption they did not occupy until recently. What makes a “good” potato is a relative idea and a cultural value – it is here that standards make power relations visible. In a provocative study about tomatoes, Frank Heuts and Annemarie Mol (2013) argue that a good tomato is defined as good only in relation to the context and in relation to specific groups of reference. That is to say that valuing a tomato differently prioritizes different ideals of taste, price, sensual appeal, or naturalness. The judgment of what is good differs and varies between experts (Heuts and Mol 2013, 140). What is a good potato for the restaurants is what Edilberto is trying to stabilize as a standard with the restaurants and materialize throughout the selection process.

The selection process does not happen at only one point during the life of the potato on the farm; it is instead repeated at many stages between planting, harvest, and packing. Let me begin with the harvest to exemplify this. A farmer (most of the time a man) walks all the way along the furrow, digging in the soil with his pickax (lampa) to take the potatoes out of the ground. Another farmer (sometimes a woman) follows him and begins to sort the potatoes according to size: the firsts (primeras), the seconds (segundas), and the thirds (terceras). The farmer walking behind the farmer with the pickax would normally put potatoes of one size, say the seconds, inside a bag he or she is carrying and leave aside the others, now separated according to size. Another farmer would come next with two more bags, one to put in the firsts, and another to put in the thirds, constantly double-checking that the sizes correspond to their correct standards of size. For me, it was difficult to differentiate between sizes because I could easily confuse a small first with a second or a small second with a third.

The potatoes are also classified according to their variety. Edilberto and Colfir organize the fields by single varieties and avoid mixing varieties which makes classification easier at the harvest time. Potato sacks are transported to the potato warehouse in a lorry or in a pickup truck and they are stored according to size, variety, and purpose. “Selecting potatoes” (seleccionar papas) is a very common activity at the farm in Condorccocha. Every time an order comes in from a client, the potatoes must be sorted and selected again. The selection criteria tend to be the same regardless of the restaurant, that is, the standardizing process is working for Edilberto, stabilizing his offer to clients.

As the months go by, the potatoes stored in the warehouse dehydrate, looking wrinkled and feeling soft to the touch. These potatoes must be taken out during the selection process for clients. However, according to Edilberto, this is because people are “ignorant” (ignorante) and do not know that those potatoes are tastier and that in fact they recover the water they have lost when they are boiled. He explained to me that the taste changes because the starch (almidón) and the sugars develop and make the potato sweeter. Another thing that happens to potatoes as time passes is that the sprouts emerge, and these must be taken out to make them look fresh and appealing to the restaurants in Lima. This is another case of economic sociability, a verbal requirement from the restaurants that is becoming a standard - they have told Edilberto they do not want potatoes with sprouts. In Edilberto’s view, however, this is another sign of ignorance because potatoes taste better when the sprouts are taken off just before cooking them. These are some of the reasons why, he believes, "there is a need to educate the consumers". “Educating the consumer” is a way in which Edilberto rhetorically contests the authority of the gastronomy-led market standards for potatoes, which decide what does and does not count as a “good” potato.

The potatoes that are not “healthy” enough for the gastronomic market are “silenced” (Bowker and Star 1999) or erased for the world outside the Andes in the sense that they are not valued within the new supply chain. Those potatoes – not considered good enough for the gastronomic market– are good enough to be eaten by humans and we were eating them on the farm. As with the tomatoes studied by Heuts and Mol (2013), what is “good” is relational - here, it pushes the selection process to make invisible or let disappear what is not valued according to market standards. The worst thing that can happen to a potato is to be rotten, a condition that is seen, smelled, and sensed by touch at the stage of selection. Rotten potatoes are not eaten by humans but are instead put into another pile and feed to the pigs and the cows on the farm.

In this regard, the selection process consists of prioritizing what is good according to the gastronomic market and disregarding what is not. Thus, the work of the selection process adds value that allows the tubers to enter the capitalist chain (Tsing 2013) so long as they are able to fit the standards that the clients are asking for and that have been agreed upon through “economic sociability” (Cavanaugh 2016). Selecting potatoes requires effort, labor, and knowledge in scrutinizing every single potato before sending it to any client. The possibility of failing in this process makes the continuity of the chain fragile. Making mistakes could put the commercial relationship Edilberto has with his client into jeopardy, something that could have happened that day in the courier agency with the potatoes that Almaquio had brought. Edilberto prevented this from happening on that day, but a few months later he was not so fortunate when trying to make a new deal with another restaurant.

The requirements that the restaurants have regarding potato size and quality are creating standards that sometimes make it easier for new arrangements to be agreed upon. However, standardization is modifying traditional production logics at the farm level. Restaurants prefer the seconds, and only healthy potatoes. As I have discussed, seconds are now becoming the common size that all restaurants are asking for. But seconds is the size of potatoes that are traditionally selected as seeds, a process that runs parallel to the selection process of potatoes for the market. In other words, potatoes become seed by selection, and they are stored in a separate place. Once the bulk of seconds is selected during the harvest, the tubers that are going to be used as seeds are put inside a specific type of plastic bag suitable for “breathing” (respirar). These sacks are stored in open-air conditions in what Edilberto calls the “nursery” (semillero).

The seeds need air to breathe and water from the rain to stay hydrated and to be able to reproduce their cells and sugar content that will be transformed into energy for producing new potatoes. As time passes, the taste of the seeds gets bitter and the sprouts do not thrive from the "potato’s eyes" (los ojos de la papa), conserving their energy to grow for when they are sowed. Once sown, the potato-seed releases all its energy to create new potatoes; as it vanishes in the earth, it transforms into a jelly-like substance to bring to life new-born potatoes. The firsts, thirds and the leftovers of the seconds would normally be potatoes for consumption and are stored in a dark warehouse (almacén). Here, they lose energy for being seeds as sprouts thrive from the "potato’s eyes" (los ojos de la papa). Or, as Edilberto evocatively explained to me: “when potatoes are stored in the dark, they think they are underground, that is why the sprouts start to thrive”.

Traditionally, through the seed logic, the seconds would become food only when they are not good enough to be used as seeds or if there is an excess of seeds. Now, however, the seconds are becoming the most important size not only for their use as seeds but for selling to restaurants. Because this size is a requirement for native potatoes to enter this new market, it is prioritized for commodity exchange rather than for reproduction, diminishing the seed stock available. The reason why the seconds are traditionally used as seeds is because their efficiency as seeds is the same as that of the larger firsts but being smaller, the seconds are easier to store and carry. In one bag of potatoes, for example, there would be more seconds than firsts simply because the seconds are smaller. Using the firsts as seed involves more labor because it requires filling more sacks to get the number of seeds needed to sow. On the other hand, it is more convenient to eat the firsts because they are bigger, and they make more portions. Using the thirds as seeds is possible but they require to be treated more carefully and therefore more labor and an increase of the risks during the production cycle.

Conclusions

In this article I have suggested that pursuing new markets for the native potato in Peru requires a mediation through standards, which are set with documentation and via economic sociability. These, I have shown, are strategies that add value to the produce. Following such standardization procedures, Edilberto adjusts the production of his potatoes to his clients’ request. An ethnographic analysis of this process makes it possible to unpack relations of power and highlight the fragility of the new chain, which now depends on whether or not the new requirements are met. To access the potential benefits offered by food heritagization, farmers try to implement new standards, and become accustomed to new paperwork. In doing so, they engage in relations with different forms of authority; these highlight the continuation of power dynamics at play. Indeed, their system of potato production tends to be both a) displaced in the selection of size and criteria of freshness and, at the same time, is b) revalued in the act of buying their produce. As shown, standardization of native potatoes is led by chefs and their own perspectives and values, which are driven by the fervor of the Gastronomic Boom and the European-based esthetics of Novo-Andean Cuisine.

As the ethnography in this article shows, those farmers able to benefit from the heritagization of food in the context of the Peruvian Gastronomic Boom are those who have the skills to adapt their produce to new standards, and more importantly to negotiate the creation of those standards. Paying attention to how the standards come about and how they work at different stages in the chain has revealed that traditional practices and knowledge are negotiated within power structures. Rather than being challenged, such power dynamics are more likely to be reproduced despite the good intentions that restauranteurs have when including ingredients in their menu to benefit the farmers that produce, in this case, native potatoes.

Acknowledgements

This article is based on my PhD research at The University of Manchester and on a presentation at the SOAS Food Seminar. A version of it was also presented at the AAA Annual Meeting in 2021. I am very thankful to Edilberto, Professor Penelope Harvey, Professor Andrew Irving, Dra. Angela Torresan, Dr. Jakob Klein, Dra. Elizabeth Hull, Dra. Judith Tsouvalis, Dra. Letizia Bonanno, Professor Carole Counihan, and the three anonymous reviewers for their comments at different stages. The PhD research was funded by CONACyT-Mexico.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Ocas, ollucos, and mashuas are other Andean tubers that farmers grow - they are part of the rotational system to grow native potatoes. Slowly, chefs are also getting interested in those too.

2 Although the submission to UNESCO was rejected (Matta 2016b), it shows the government’s active efforts to make food an object of heritage.

3 The rhetoric of inclusion in Peru has given rise to different political projects of national and international integration through education (García 2004), roadbuilding (Orlove 1993; Harvey and Knox 2015), and, recently, gastronomy (Lauer 2012; García 2013).

4 French Haute Cuisine includes “elaborate presentations, exotic spices, and rare ingredients” (Sammells 2014, 145). As a driver of the Gastronomic Boom, the Novo-Andean Cuisine has an “inclusionary rhetoric” (García 2013, 515) that translates into including ingredients and the people who produce them.

5 The tasting menu is inspired by the Nouvelle Cuisine and it is crafted by increasing the number of dishes in a small and very carefully presented portions (Moral 2020).

6 In 2010, the Ministry of Agriculture of Peru declared “El día del pollo a la brasa” (The Day of the Roasted Chicken) to be celebrated every third Sunday of July. (“Resolución Ministerial No.0441-2010-AG” 2010). Roasted chicken is a popular and affordable meal available in many different places.

7 Mayer and Glave (1999) did not mention specific varieties.

8 A book published by the Peruvian government mentions the potato was originated about 7,000 years ago (Brack-Egg 2015). The book itself is entangled in the context of the government’s efforts to re-value Peruvian heritage production.

9 In Peru 60% of production was informal in 2008 (Loayza 2008).

10 Although Edilberto told me the potato sizes are different among varieties, the size of the firsts (primeras) is between 7 to 9 centimeters in length. The size of the seconds (segundas) is between 5 to 7 centimeters (Egúsica-Bayona 2014, 191).