Quinoa: An Origin Story
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I don’t know about y’all, but the only thing I didn’t love about quinoa when I met it was the fact that everyone let me blunder on saying “queen-oh-a” instead of “keen-wah.” Once I knew that, there was nothing left to not love about it! Full of seedy goodness so yes we think it’s really a grain (it’s not), nutty-yet-sweet flavor, and a nutritional powerhouse, it’s hard to not love it! Even the little weird stringy bit on the end of each seed. Really, that’s my favorite part; probably because it’s weird. Anyway, only grasses can make grains, which is why the seeds we want to consume of non-grass plants are always called seeds even when they function like grains in most capacities.
What is, in my view, the very coolest thing about quinoa is that it’s part of the amaranth family. Some of you will know amaranth as pigweed, if you didn’t grow up learning that goosefoot or lamb’s quarters is pigweed. Even if you did grow up with that, same family. Ditto purslane, and ditto beets, spinach and chard. Actually, chard is really just beets selected for leaves and stems rather than roots, but nonetheless. If you like beets or chard, I can’t recommend highly enough that you use chopped and sautéed stems in your quiches. They’re magical in that format.
Anyway, I love amaranths. It’s a lot of food that you can gather wherever even if you don’t want to make space in the garden, and both seeds and leaves are food. This holds for quinoa, too! If you grow quinoa, you really can eat the leaves as a spinach-like vegetable. For the most part, seeds are harvested by hand rather than machine, due to differences in when seeds ripen. This is a somewhat annoying feature of a lot of plants that produce edible seeds or grains. If you wondered why quinoa is so pricey, now you know part of it. Hand harvesting always ensures higher costs. In some places, quinoa undergoes dry harvesting, which means the leaves have died and gone and you’ve got just the seeds left. You can totally do this, but you may also lose some or even a lot of seeds because quinoa does shatter like wild wheat.
One spectacular aspect of most amaranths is that they will generally grow in extremely poor soil, cracks in side walks, all manner of stuff. People put forth a great amount of effort eradicating volunteer amaranths. But this feature of quinoa makes it a crop that was listed by the United Nations as a super crop due to its potential impact on global hunger relief. Quinoa is a massively important crop, even though Americans tend to be pretty new to the quinoa game.
This is a particularly popular amaranth, called Love Lies Bleeding. People buy it as an ornamental specifically because of these gorgeous seed displays. I have seeds for this amaranth and others to plant in the school garden. No reason school gardens can’t have the edible pretties, too!
This is a Taiwanese quinoa. All you gardeners out there probably are very aware of just how much this looks like a number of purportedly ornamental (though still food) amaranths. This specific amaranth produces seeds smaller than the Andean ones we’re accustomed to finding in stores.
The unfun bit, if you suddenly had the urge to grow quinoa, is that the seeds do contain saponins, and in enough quantity that you might be sad if you neglected to remove these compounds first. This is a pretty straight-forward process if you use wet methods, but dry methods will require some industrial equipment most of us don’t have access to. The Canadians explain all this better than I would, so we’ll let them do the heavy lifting here. Nuts and bolts is to soak or rinse the quinoa until the saponins are gone. Saponins, so you know, are important for soap and detergent, because they are the surfactant. You should also rinse your quinoa before you cook with it.
So where does it come from?
Bolivia. Way up there in the Andes, which is also the home of the Quechua and Aymara peoples domesticated this little weed approximately 5,000 years ago to feed livestock. It took another thousand-ish years before people were nomming it down, too. The Quechua are what we call Inca, and the Aymara pre-date the Incas. Both of these indigenous peoples still live right there, and are also responsible for the domestication of potatoes and a lot of other foods. It is, however, in the Southern Altiplano (high plateau) that quinoa is cultivated for profit. Quinoa was a big deal back in the day, primarily because it actually grew in the upper Andes, but also because it was good for trade back when, too.
What is most interesting about quinoa is that it was very nearly lost. As part of his successful effort to squash the Incan empire, Pizarro burned down all the quinoa fields. It survived only in a few small, localized areas high up in the mountains, where it was still cultivated on a much smaller scale by indigenous peoples. Quinoa later is “rediscovered” by others in the 1970s and brought more into global view. In America, it’s in the early ‘80s that we start getting into the quinoa game.
Here is a traditional quinoa preparation from Peru, another Andean country that has counted quinoa amongst its indigenous foods for 3-4000 years. This is hitting my menu this week, for sure!
In the 1970s, people discover that there have been a number of indigenous groups still cultivating and eating quinoa, and it starts to take off, eventually spreading globally. As foods do. In this case, quinoa really takes off as a portion of the larger gluten-free movement (the other part of why it costs so much).
Due to this increased global interest, however, quinoa has become substantially more pricey than even its labor-intensive harvest process would mandate. As the price rises, so, it seems, does its popularity, and this does have a positive effect on a small percentage of producers, but in sum appears to be pricing indigenous peoples out of quinoa while creating wage slaves to work the fields. Mostly the ones who were dependent on it before the rest of us found out how cool it is. So that’s not a great thing.
This is a really short and highly personalized video on the quinoa crisis in Bolivia specifically. This is also going on in Peru, on which you’ll find much longer and more detailed videos in abundance.
From here, quinoa’s path is a little strange. Bolivia, in the 80s, began exporting a lot of its quinoa and replacing this critical food with US aid packages that were wheat dominant, so highly refined wheat is what you’re going to see a lot more of if you’re looking for food at a reasonable price. Now, Bolivia exports 80% of its crop, as the video mentions.
Other wealthier nations, however, have stepped up to help out. In 2005, the US and Denmark created breakthrough technologies to increase efficiency in quinoa processing, specifically as pertains to the saponin removal process. Quinoa is also now grown in a bunch of areas of the world. As these newer productions are able to expand, ideally that will leave more quinoa for Bolivians and Peruvians. There is, however, progress toward increased equity in quinoa profits being made! A number of indigenous communities no longer allow companies and other interested parties to come on along, willy nilly destroying their environments and scampering off with profits. These communities have learned and have now created collectives with regulations to ensure that producers are leaving some of the money (and quinoa) for the local communities.
This recipe doesn’t have much, that I could find, to do with indigenous communities, but it sure does look tasty. Shall be including it with the other video’s recipe in the meal plan!
When cooking quinoa, it really is generally a 2:1 ratio you’ll have between the water and grain. If you’re steaming it, whether in a rice cooker or with another method, you will need to cut the water so it doesn’t overcook. I generally go with somewhere in the 1.5-1.75:1 range and find that works well.
If you haven’t tried quinoa yet, I sincerely hope the history and recipes included here will inspire you to do so. It is a tasty, tasty, nutritionally-dense, complete protein, and highly versatile to boot! I find that it generally subs in beautifully when I want to use it in recipes that call for other whole grains.
