This is a transcript of the Gastropod episode, The Rise and Fall of Quinoa: From Incan “Superfood” to Buddha Bowl Basic, first released on March 11, 2025. It is provided as a courtesy and may contain errors.

NICOLA TWILLEY: Way back in the dim and distant past—I’m talking 2011 here—a parody song went viral. It was set in the Whole Foods parking lot, specifically Whole Foods on the westside of LA.

SINGER: It’s getting real in the Whole Foods parking lot! I got my steel and you know it gets sparked a lot. I’m on my grind homie, it’s on my mind homie—these fools with clipboards are looking at me like they know me. It’s getting real in the Whole Foods parking lot!

CYNTHIA GRABER: I missed this at the time, but apparently it was huge, Ryan Seacrest tweeted it, the news covered it, Whole Foods wanted to, like, use it officially. It had some really iconic lines about some pretty iconic upper middle class trends at the time, like kale salad and kombucha and driving a Prius—

SINGER: This buster’s on his iPhone, talking to his friends; pickin’ up some cayenne pepper for his master cleanse. You’re the most annoying dude I’ve ever seen, brah! Could you please move? You’re right in front of the quinoa…

TWILLEY: Oh man, don’t block the quinoa. How’s a brah going to have a kale salad and some kombucha without quinoa?

GRABER: And yes, quinoa is the focus of this episode of Gastropod. That’s right, you’re listening to Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history, I’m Cynthia Graber—

TWILLEY: And I’m Nicola Twilley, and this episode, we’re telling the story of how quinoa rose from its obscure Andean origins to Whole Foods parody rap glory.

GRABER: Once quinoa did burst onto the global scene, what impact did this popularity have on farmers in the Andes, the descents of people who domesticated it? Who up until really pretty recently were basically the only ones who were eating it.

TWILLEY: You will never look at your grain bowl the same way again. This episode is supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for the Public Understanding of Science, Technology, and Economics. Gastropod is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network in partnership with Eater.

[MUSIC]

EMMA MCDONELL: So quinoa is a crop that’s native to the Andean highlands. It’s cultivated in this area with really high altitudes. So we’re talking 12,000 feet of altitude and even higher.

GRABER: Emma McDonell is an anthropologist at the University of Tennessee Chattanooga and the author of a new book called The Quinoa Bust: The Making and Unmaking of an Andean Miracle Crop.

TWILLEY: She spent several seasons doing field research in quinoa growing and processing communities in Peru, embedding herself with farmers, with the agricultural technicians who work for wholesalers, and with the wholesalers themselves.

GRABER: Emma says that even though you find quinoa in a grain bowl in America, it’s not the same as most of the rest of our grains.

MCDONELL: Many grain crops that we eat—so rice, wheat, corn—are grass species. Quinoa is not a grass species and it’s not a relative of any of those plants.

TWILLEY: Botanically, it’s in the amaranth family.

MCDONELL: Quinoa is actually related to lamb’s quarters, and spinach and beets. So it’s really kind of an interesting crop, in thinking about, that it is a grain and yet it is not related even remotely to many of the common grains that we think of.

GRABER: And it looks really different on a farm than say a field of wheat, where it’s like an expanse of these stalks that are around three feet tall waving like grass in the wind.

MCDONELL: Quinoa actually has a pretty woody stalk. It can grow up to six feet tall. There are different varieties, but generally they’re between about four and six feet tall when mature. There are many different colors of quinoa, so it’s also a really beautiful crop when it’s mature and you’re looking at fields of, you know, red, or yellow, sometimes purple quinoas.

TWILLEY: Like Emma said, quinoa originally comes from this very particular region in South America: a super harsh environment, high in the Andes, mostly in what today is Peru and Bolivia. It’s called the Altiplano, which means high plateau.

MCDONELL: So this is an area where really very few crops survive. And so quinoa is part of a pretty unique agricultural system in the Andean highlands because—crops that many listeners are familiar with, you know, tomatoes, corn, things like that. They can’t survive at, you know, 13,000 feet of altitude.

GRABER: This high plateau, this altiplano in South America, it’s huge. It’s a little bit bigger than the entire state of New York And it’s so high up in the mountains that very few trees can even grow there.

MCDONELL: Really, very few kind of plant species grow. It’s a really kind of rugged environment, so there’s really high, what we call diurnal temperature fluctuations. So the high temperatures during the day versus the lows at night, have a really dramatic difference.

GRABER: It’s really flat and sparse but Emma says it’s really beautiful. It’s ringed by Andean mountains capped with white glaciers stretching up even higher into the sky.

TWILLEY: For the Indigenous people living in this gorgeous but challenging landscape, quinoa was a big deal.

MCDONELL: Yeah, so quinoa has been both a cultural and dietary cornerstone in the Andes. So along with potatoes, which is another kind of central staple, quinoa is one of the main kind of starches available in this area. So we have archaeological evidence that shows us that for centuries quinoa has been a really important part of diets throughout the Andean region.

GRABER: But it wasn’t something that traditional farmers planted as a single crop, the way we do today with wheat on an industrial scale. It was part of a whole agricultural system.

MCDONELL: So quinoa is usually part of a crop rotation with potatoes. There are various other important tuber species that are also, often cultivated in this crop rotation.

GRABER: Some of those tubers, like oca and olluco, they’re weirdly gorgeous, they come in like bright orange and pink and purple, I’ve seen them in the Andes and they almost look like jewels.

MCDONELL: This crop rotation also often involves tarwi, which is a local lupine species. So lupine as a, as a legume, fixes nitrogen. And so this crop plays a really important role in maintaining the soil fertility.

TWILLEY: Tarwi is a kind of crunchy bean, which, although I am a huge bean lover, I am not actually a tarwi fan. But in the Andes, it was an important part of the whole deal.

GRABER: In its homeland, quinoa is a staple and it’s eaten all kinds of ways.

MCDONELL: Quinoa is often eaten in soups. It’s prepared in various different kinds of soups with chicken, with vegetables. There’s many different quinoa soups. A favorite of mine is called pesque. This is like a sort of savory porridge. It’s basically quinoa cooked in milk and also with some butter in it. Some people will add some garlic. And it’s this really kind of rich, delicious porridge. Another kind of interesting way that quinoa is prepared is what’s called quespinia. It’s quinoa flour that is cooked in hot water and then sort of, mixed usually with sugar, and molded into a kind of unbaked cookie. It’s a very… sort of nutrient dense, like you could think of it as a sort of energy bar of sorts.

GRABER: You might not have eaten an unbaked quinoa cookie, but I am guessing that most of you listeners out there have tasted quinoa before. Maybe you make it regularly at home, I certainly do. But if you’ve never tried it, it tastes a little different from rice or wheat.

MCDONELL: Yeah, so quinoa has a subtle, what I would call a nutty flavor to it, Like most of the grains we eat, it really soaks up the flavors that it’s cooked in, so if you cook it in chicken broth, it’s going to, you know, taste a bit like chicken broth, but I think that there’s always kind of a bit of a nutty flavor to quinoa. And it does depend on the variety.

TWILLEY: As is often the case with a staple, I tend to think of quinoa as just quinoa, the way I think of corn as corn and wheat as wheat. But of course like wheat and corn, there are actually quinoas plural, a whole world of them out there.

MCDONELL: So we don’t actually know exactly how many quinoa varieties have been grown, but there are a lot of them. They vary based on size of the grain. They vary in color. So there are purple quinoas, there are red quinoas, there are yellow quinoas, there are black quinoas. They vary in terms of their kind of cooking and taste characteristics. So some quinoas have a kind of stronger flavor than others. Some, when cooked, sort of create a kind of milkiness within the liquid that they are being cooked in. So they have different kind of culinary characteristics as well.

GRABER: And all these different quinoa sizes and colors and tastes, they also have really different advantages on the farm.

MCDONELL: Some quinoas do really well in out of season frost. Other quinoas are much more vulnerable. Some quinoas have much thicker saponin layers than other quinoas.

TWILLEY: This saponin layer is like a thin coating around the quinoa seed, and it tastes bitter.

MCDONELL: It serves some really important purposes. So this bitter flavor also prevents birds from gorging themselves on quinoa fields. It also prevents other kinds of pests from eating quinoa. And it’s also a mild toxin for humans and other mammals. And so if you eat quinoa that, that hasn’t been sort of properly cleaned, and the saponin layer is still there, you might get a mild stomach ache.

GRABER: Today the kind you get in the supermarket either is a variety that doesn’t have a lot of saponin, or the saponin has already been washed off before the quinoa was packaged. I remember reading things about rinsing quinoa before cooking it when I started buying it a very, very long time ago, but I don’t remember ever doing that.

TWILLEY: I remember being sort of slapdash about the rinse step with some bulk bin quinoa way back, before it was really popular, and then regretting my laziness it when my pot of boiling quinoa got all bubbly like it was in the washing machine—which, it kind of was.

MCDONELL: Saponin also interestingly, has other uses, so it can be used as a soap, and historically in this region has been used as a sort of laundry soap.

GRABER: Sounds delicious. Now, you’ve probably heard of the Incan Empire. It was the largest empire in all of South America in its day. From about the 1200s to the 1500s, the Incans ruled a huge swath of the Andes Mountains and the west coast of South America. Their realm included parts of what is now Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Argentina, Chile.

TWILLEY: By this point, quinoa was being grown and eaten throughout the Andes, not just in the Altiplano where it was first domesticated. It’s really adaptable to different soils and altitudes and water levels, and it became a staple crop throughout the Incan empire.

GRABER: Their ruler lived in Cusco, in what’s now Peru, lower down in the Andes, and the story is that the Inca supreme leader is the one who ceremonially sowed the year’s first quinoa to mark the new agricultural cycle.

TWILLEY: Once the Spanish conquistadors arrived, they obviously took notice of all the silver mines in the region. And, at least according to one of the main chroniclers, this guy who was the son of an Incan noblewoman and a Spanish conquistador, the Spanish were pretty into quinoa too.

MCDONELL: He noted that many of the Spaniards were actually eating quinoa at this time, specifically quinoa leaves, in soups is something that he mentions, and. That’s another kind of interesting aspect of quinoa is that, not only are the grains edible, but the leaves themselves are very nutritious, and sort of delicious.

GRABER: So at first the Spaniards were into quinoa, but then they started to kind of disdain it.

MCDONELL: With time, quinoa came to be perceived as, a quote unquote Indian food, a food that was sort of associated with indigeneity in the Andes, and also associated with poverty. This is something that quinoa is not alone in kind of having this connotation. So a number of foods, such as alpaca meat, cuy, which is guinea pig, also take on similar sorts of connotations over the course of Spanish colonialism.

TWILLEY: This sort of biased perception of the people living in the Andes, and their food, as being kind of backward—it emerged over the centuries post-Conquest, and it really hardened into a class system that still shapes society in Peru today.

MCDONELL: The coast is often considered to be sort of whiter, wealthier. It’s often perceived as being more sort of modern. Whereas the Andes has larger indigenous populations, and is sort of perceived as representing the kind of indigenous elements of Peru. So this translates into pretty dramatic social class disparities, where most of the wealth in Peru is, sort of concentrated in coastal areas. Whereas, the rural areas of the Andes tend to have very high poverty rates. These are areas where, kind of going to work in a mine is one of the main, kind of, income opportunities.

GRABER: And to be honest, even among the Indigenous communities in the Andes, the region where quinoa is mostly farmed, so high up on the Altiplano even more remote than most of the rest of the Andean communities, that region is considered by rich Peruvians as really the *most* quote “backwards.”

TWILLEY: And so eating quinoa, which people all over the Peruvian Andes carried right on doing throughout the centuries—that was seen as backward too. Restaurants in coastal Lima did not serve quinoa.

JOSE LUIS CHAVEZ: Oh, no. No, no, no.

GRABER: Jose Luis Chavez is the chef and founder of Mission Ceviche in New York City. He grew up in Venezuela, but his father is Peruvian and he moved to Lima to go to culinary school. Quinoa was not part of the curriculum.

CHAVEZ: It was seen as—as, not fancy, maybe. It was consumed by the communities in the mountains where they come from.

TWILLEY: Another Peruvian on the Mission Ceviche team, David, told us that his grandparents were from the Andes, so he did grow up eating quinoa.

DAVID: So, they are from Ayacucho. So, we have been eating, especially, like, potatoes, quinoa, since we were kids.

GRABER: But his experience wasn’t common because of prejudice.

DAVID: I mean—a long time ago, people, they thought it was just for poor people.

TWILLEY: So when David was a kid, quinoa had fallen to about as far as you can get from desirable superfood status. How did it rise up again, and take over the shopping carts at Whole Foods? That story, after this break.

[BREAK]

GRABER: In the early 1900s, quinoa started to get some attention outside of the millions of people in the Andes who were farming it and eating it. A Bolivian researcher in 1910 studied its nutritional profile and found quinoa to be incredibly nutritious. It’s high in protein, and fiber, and minerals like folate.

TWILLEY: Not long after, in 1918, an American named Edward Albes wrote an article marveling at these results and extolling the many virtues of this quote, “exceedingly hardy crop.” He thought it would make an excellent substitute for wheat to help deal with food shortages after the first world war.

GRABER: And the studies kept coming, people kept looking into quinoa and seeing how incredibly awesome it was.

MCDONELL: And so we see the development of this small cohort of, sort of quinoa boosters or quinoa promoters in the early 20th century. These are folks who, you know, are flabbergasted that this crop that is super cheap, eaten by, you know, people that are sort of at the bottom of the social hierarchy. That this crop is incredibly nutritious, right? People start comparing it to milk and finding like, oh my gosh, you know, it’s sort of the quality of the protein is, equal to or even better than milk. So they do studies feeding quinoa to rats, and then feeding milk to rats, and then feeding, you know, milk and quinoa to rats and, you know, it turns out that the rats that were fed quinoa grew the largest and the fastest.

TWILLEY: But despite these repeated demonstrations of how fabulous quinoa is, it kept not really catching on outside the Andes. It was just too big of a leap for Westerners at the time to think outside the dietary canon of Wonder bread and milk: nature’s perfect foods. You have to remember, this was a time of better living through chemistry, and of course fortified wheat and dairy are what most Westerners saw as the foundation of a healthy diet.

GRABER: But in the 1960s and 70s, there was a revolt against the wonder bread orthodoxy. We’ve talked about this on the show before, this was a kind of back to the land time, back to whole grains, and even looking out of the Western world to find other foods entirely. And one of those alternative-y type guys ended up in South America.

MCDONELL: Yeah, so in the late 1970s, a group of three Americans—one of them was a kind of spiritual seeker who had gone to Bolivia to study under a sort of spiritual guru, and through that had encountered quinoa, and grown sort of obsessed with quinoa. He meets, and talks up quinoa to, a couple other folks. So these three Americans basically launch the first sort of quinoa import export venture, exporting Bolivian quinoa to the United States in the early 1980s. This is called Quinoa Corporation, which later becomes the brand Ancient Harvest, which some listeners may recognize from the grocery store aisles. It’s still one of the large, kind of quinoa retailers in the US.

TWILLEY: This first appearance of quinoa in American health food stores got going in the 1980s. These guys were in the Denver-Boulder area, and we are talking hardcore hippie crunchy types. By the mid 1980s, you could buy quinoa at health food stores around the US, but Emma told us that there were only something like 20,000 to 40,000 quinoa eaters in the entire United States. Up from zero just a few years before, but still that’s really not a huge amount.

GRABER: I probably wasn’t in that very first 20 to 40,000 quinoa eaters, but I did soon join the band. I became a vegetarian in 1990, and honestly I can’t remember when I first ate quinoa. But I did a lot of shopping at the health food store on campus, and I feel like I’ve been eating quinoa forever, so it was definitely since then.

TWILLEY: My husband Geoff was also an early quinoa adopter. I had never tried it, or any of the hippie classics like tofu or seitan, until he cooked them for me when we were in grad school in the early 2000s. Listeners, of course I married him.

GRABER: And Geoff and I and our fellow crunchy vegetarians weren’t the only ones paying attention. There was a New York Times article about the tiny ivory colored seed that was being quote, “rediscovered.”

TWILLEY: This narrative, of rediscovering something that had been lost—Emma says that was part of a larger movement in agricultural development circles that also gave quinoa a boost around this time.

MCDONELL: So in 1989, the National Research Council in the US published “The Lost Crops of the Incas.” This was a report featuring quinoa, but also some other interesting Andean crops. And making the case that these crops have important roles to play, beyond the Andes.

GRABER: This paper marked a pretty big change. Before the 1980s, for decades, something called the Green Revolution was the dominant ideology in agriculture in developed countries and was seen as the way to solve hunger in all countries. It kicked off after World War II, and the focus was on breeding and improving crops so they could be grown in huge monocultures with plenty of fertilizers and pesticides. And this new approach to agriculture promised to feed the world.

TWILLEY: Something like quinoa was definitely not part of the Green Revolution. Instead, the West was exporting new and improved varieties of things like wheat, corn, and soy. But by the late ‘70s, early ‘80s, the whole green revolution model was coming in for some serious criticism. People increasingly thought that maybe there was some wisdom in Indigenous practices and traditional varieties, and they started to focus their efforts on promoting these so-called lost or neglected crops. Like quinoa.

GRABER: Of course it actually wasn’t lost or neglected in the Andes, where millions of people still ate it, but never mind. This same change was beginning to take place within Peru, too. For a long time, a legacy of Spanish colonialism was that, as we said, quinoa was looked down on. And the crops that were grown and considered desirable were global staples like rice and wheat. This was true in the restaurants, too: you’d find Italian food, or French food at fancy restaurants.

MCDONELL: It was an oxymoron to say that you’re going to a kind of fancy Peruvian restaurant.

TWILLEY: But, starting in the 1990s, Peruvian chefs in Lima began to pick up on this idea of taking pride in traditional foods and showcasing their own native culinary traditions and crops.

MCDONELL: They wanted to come up with a sort of haute cuisine that was based in Andean ingredients and, and sort of tap the richness of Andean biodiversity to create a unique and specifically high end cuisine.

TWILLEY: Emma told us that a number of Peruvians told her that back in the 1990s, there was this feeling that Brazil was known for footballers and Argentina for tango, but Peru had nothing.

GRABER: So a bunch of Peruvians, mostly chefs, they decided that what Peru was going to offer was food. It was going to become the gastronomic capital of South America.

TWILLEY: And one of the ways it was going to make itself stand out was by using these unique Altiplano crops. Now, full disclosure: a lot of the Altiplano is actually in Bolivia, but a lot of these crops were grown in Peru throughout the Andes, and they were special.

GRABER: One of the earliest and most famous of these chefs using Peruvian crops in Peru’s capital and gastronomic center, in Lima, is Gaston Acurio. He now has a whole fleet of restaurants around the world, but his first fancy restaurant was called Astrid y Gaston. And he quickly turned to focus on serving alpaca and guinea pig and Amazonian fruits and all sorts of varieties of Andean potatoes and tubers—and quinoa. He became kind of the face of this new gastronomic revolution in Peru, but he certainly wasn’t the only one.

MCDONELL: This kind of gives permission to specifically elites in Peru to eat quinoa. So these restaurants start featuring Andean ingredients, and plating them using, kind of, French plating techniques and French cooking techniques and sort of, repackaging them for a different audience.

TWILLEY: Basically, once quinoa was on the menu in a white tablecloth restaurant, being prepared in a fancy European-inflected way, it was not backwards anymore. It was, in fact, extremely trendy.

CHAVEZ: Become something that you can, you can hold this, bring it to the world. And at the same time, you know, makes Peru as a name on the outside, right.

GRABER: Nicky and I were in New York recently, so we were able to meet with Jose Luis in person. He told us that he didn’t cook with quinoa in culinary school, but he started to see it on menus in Lima as, say, the base of a tabbouleh, which is certainly not originally Peruvian.

CHAVEZ: This is the beauty of quinoa, actually. Quinoa is very versatile. You can do so many things. Right now on the menu, we have it as a furikake, which is, like a mix of seasoning from Japan. You know, we have the seaweed, have sesame. We use a red quinoa, it is kind of more crispy. So we cook it in the oven. When it’s ready, we dehydrate it one more time, for hours. And then we just deep fry, and they pop.

TWILLEY: Jose Luis brought us a dish with this puffed quinoa furikake—it was scattered very beautifully on top of a ceviche made with tuna and scallops and tomatillo

CHAVEZ: Okay, so this is one of my favorite dishes. We call it ceviche nikkei.

TWILLEY: I kind of want to start with just the quinoa just because that’s what we’re here for. So I’m going to try a little crispy quinoa.

GRABER: I’ve definitely never had quinoa like this. [CHEWING] Oh! It’s like crunchy, crunchy.

TWILLEY: It’s delish. I mean, he’s, it’s exactly what he says. It’s like, like that Japanese furikake, but with a crispy, crunchy quinoa that gives it also a little tiny bit of a… like, there’s just a little more graininess to it.

GRABER: It’s like puffed rice, but almost like a little bit nuttier.

GRABER: And then of course we ate a bite of everything all together.

[CHEWING]

GRABER: Mmm.

TWILLEY: Incredible.

GRABER: Wow, that’s delicious.

TWILLEY: I really like the crunch.

TWILLEY: Jose Luis does all kinds of non-traditional fun things with quinoa. He makes a quinoa salad with heart of palm and tomatoes, he makes quinoa granola.

CHAVEZ: You can, you can bring it to the, to the sweet side. I don’t know, you can make melocotones, any kind of fruit, you can do like a cake with quinoa.

GRABER: And they also make a version of a risotto with quinoa that we got to taste. David brought it over to us.

DAVID: This is called quinotto. We’re going to use one of the best quinoas from Peru. It’s going to be the red quinoa. And some Parmesan cheese to give like, a risotto way. And we’re going to use five type of seafood, especially like mahi mahi, also scallops.

TWILLEY: I know, sometimes our jobs are hard. But we dove in.

GRABER: It is very rich. The quinoa in this just gives it a little bit of body.

TWILLEY: Mmm. Yeah, it’s funny, I’m trying to compare it to risotto, I feel like the quinoa, it still stays a little more separate?

GRABER: It definitely does.

TWILLEY: You get texture that way, which I kind of like. Like, it isn’t just all smooth. there’s some nubbliness.

GRABER: The chefs who originally made this kind of new Peruvian food popular in Lima were selling fancy meals to Peruvians and to tourists, but they were also selling the idea of Peruvian food to the world. But it was still a hard sell to get middle and upper class Peruvians to embrace eating quinoa at home.

MCDONELL: An important turning point with the kind of repackaging of quinoa for new audiences within Peru, was when a company called IncaSur started developing packaged quinoa. So historically, quinoa was bought and sold in bulk. In sort of large bags in local and regional markets where you would, you know, say, I need one kilo or two kilos, and someone would scoop the amount out of—out of this large bag. IncaSur’s innovation was to start selling quinoa in individual boxes. And that allowed them to create specific packaging and branding around quinoa. And so what they did was frame quinoa not as a quote unquote “Indian food,” but as an Inca food.

TWILLEY: In coastal wealthy Peru, attitudes are a little bit contradictory this way. The actual descendents of the Incans are often dismissed, like we said, as Indian and backward, but the idea of the Incans is revered.

MCDONELL: Within Peru, the Inca is imagined as, the sort of regal, majestic Inca empire. And that’s contrasted with the sort of perceptions of actually living Indigenous peoples. So, this sort of moment of taking this food, quinoa, that is, perceived as a quote unquote Indian food associated with poverty, and other sorts of sort of racialized connotations. And reimagining it as a quote unquote “Inca food” also kind of gave permission to Peru’s middle and upper classes to, incorporate quinoa into their diet and into their lives.

GRABER: And then in 2013 one of Peru’s most popular beer brands, Cusqueña, they introduced a quinoa-based beer. They made it seem both Incan and also kind of white.

MCDONELL: So the tagline, on the billboards was “our flavor,” meaning Peruvians, “our flavor made into beer.” So the Cusqueña television spot features this sequence of slow motion clips with traditional Andean pipe music and pan pipe music in the background.

[PAN PIPES, UPBEAT MUSIC]

MAN: Vuelve la edición especial, Cusqueña Quinua. Una gran cerveza, hecha de lo mejor con nuestra comida.

MCDONELL: There’s a pair of light complexioned hands grasping handfuls of quinoa from a large sack. A hand is peeling a potato. There’s quinoa grains dropping sort of dramatically into water, making splashes.

TWILLEY: All very exciting. At this point, quinoa was really picking up steam. It was authentic, Incan, nearly lost but now rediscovered—and it fit in with lots of emerging food trends too. It was gluten free, high in protein, and you could make it into anything from snacks to a side for your meat and veg.

GRABER: And this led up to quinoa’s true moment in the spotlight, 2013, the International Year of Quinoa. That celebration and what happened next, coming up after the break.

[BREAK]

BROADCASTER: In Bolivia, at 4,000 meters above sea level, these farmers are growing what many are hailing as a miracle food. A food that experts say has the power to help fight global hunger. Quinoa’s potential to thrive and help feed communities worldwide is just one of the reasons why the United Nations is proclaiming 2013 the International Year of Quinoa.

TWILLEY: 2013 was quite a year. The words twerk and selfie were added to the dictionary, Breaking Bad ended, and the song of the summer was Get Lucky. Oh, and it was a big year for quinoa.

MCDONELL: So the United Nations declares 2013 the International Year of Quinoa. Which sets in motion a whole host of events all across the world with the goal of promoting quinoa production and consumption.

GRABER: There were events to introduce Moroccan farmers to quinoa, there were cooking competitions in all sorts of countries, in Rome there was a ceremonial quinoa harvest in the center of the city, led by the first lady of Peru and government officials from Bolivia.

TWILLEY: The United Nations Secretary General at the time, Ban Ki Moon, had high hopes for quinoa. It was going to solve a whole lot of different problems.

BAN KI MOON: I hope this International Year of Quinoa will be a catalyst for learning about the potential of quinoa for food and nutrition security, for reducing poverty, especially among the world’s small farmers, and for environmentally sustainable agriculture. Let us work together to make sure the benefits of this extraordinary grain can be felt by those who need it most.

GRABER: These goals all sound great but they’re not really all the same thing. And it turns out that all the different organizers of the International Year of Quinoa saw a variety of ways quinoa could solve the world’s food problems.

MCDONELL: The different promoters of quinoa in the International Year of Quinoa had different sort of visions for quinoa’s future. For some of these folks, quinoa’s kind of main purpose was to help solve poverty in the Andes.

TWILLEY: But another goal for the quinoa boosters was to solve malnutrition globally.

MCDONELL: And so for some of these people, the main goal of the International Year of Quinoa was to introduce quinoa production into other regions across the globe. With the idea that it could help solve nutrient deficiencies in other regions.

GRABER: And then also, there was this idea that quinoa could help create more resilient farming systems.

MCDONELL: Quinoa’s adaptability to quite challenging climate conditions make it a potential crop to help agricultural systems adapt to the kind of new reality of climate change.

TWILLEY: These are all outcomes we can get behind. But Emma pointed out that they’re also not necessarily compatible.

MCDONELL: So for instance: if quinoa is going to solve poverty in the rural Andes, the price needs to be high. Right? So that these farmers can get high incomes. If quinoa is going to help solve malnutrition, the price needs to be low so that the urban poor can buy quinoa and integrate it into their diets.

GRABER: And in the same vein, if you’re encouraging farmers around the world to grow quinoa to help make their farms more resilient to climate change, well then the farmers in the Andes won’t be so special anymore, and they might not be able to compete on price.

TWILLEY: Minor issues like conflicting goals aside, all the attention and investment in quinoa triggered by the 2013 International Year of Quinoa just made quinoa explode.

GRABER: After a century of people outside the Andes promoting it, and after decades of a small subgroup of Americans getting into it, quinoa was suddenly everywhere. I mean everywhere.

MAN: This beautiful whole grain increased the strength and stamina of all Inca warriors. And it can do the same for you! It’s quinoa! Spelled QUINOA.

[TO THE TUNE OF ‘SUMMER LOVIN’]

RICE: Healthy cooking, happened so fast;

QUINOA: Healthy cooking, together at last;

CHORUS: Oh well oh well oh well oh huh! Tell me more, tell more more, like how fast is quinoa?

CHORUS: Tell me more, tell me more, just two minutes? You star!

[WESTERN WHISTLING]

VOICEOVER: The cowboy is a metaphor for America. Tough, strong, and free. But cowboys aren’t just naturally tough. They’ve got a secret weapon:

COWBOY: Quinoa.

TWILLEY: We kid you not. Americans, including cowboys, increasingly loved quinoa, but we were not alone. Quinoa was being incorporated into meals and snacks all around the world.

AUSTRALIAN VOICEOVER: Everything is about to change. And lunch will never… be the same. Now that you can add some healthy to your hurry! With delicious new John West tuna, brown rice and quinoa. John West. Be your best.

INDIAN WOMAN: Quinoa vala chocolate spread. New nutralite choco spread mehe protein superfood quinoa, a crunchtastic chocolatey taste. Nutralite!

GRABER: And since apparently everyone on the planet was now discovering quinoa, unsurprisingly the price of quinoa skyrocketed. Between 2013 and 2014, it literally doubled.

TWILLEY: And lots of poor Andean farmers wanted to cash in on this boom.

MCDONELL: When quinoa’s price was climbing dramatically, you can imagine that lots of farmers—many of whom had, you know, been growing quinoa their entire lives—thought, okay, this is great. This is perfect. How am I going to make sure that I take advantage of this moment.

GRABER: But they ran into a few problems. Here’s the biggest issue: we told you that farmers planted all sorts of varieties of quinoa, some of them had more of that saponin layer, some had less. Some were better at dealing with drought, or with pests. They were different colors and different sizes.

MCDONELL: And the agricultural system in the Andean Highlands was really based on sort of, cultivating and promoting that diversity. So, you know, in some sense, you can think of it as a risk management strategy, that if you’re a farmer growing, one variety of quinoa that has high yields, but is maybe susceptible to frost, would pair well with another quinoa that maybe doesn’t have quite the, sort of yield potential, but is really hardy in the face of out of season frost.

TWILLEY: But when Mr. or Ms. American Quinoa Eater goes to the supermarket to buy quinoa and then makes quinoa for dinner, they want something that looks the same and behaves the same, not a mix of grains that take different times to cook.

MCDONELL: And this was really a problem for turning quinoa into a global commodity because in order to… sort of, flow into global markets, it needed to be uniform.

GRABER: This was also an issue for quinoa processors in Peru. They needed to buy machinery that would work on quinoa that was the same size and had the same thickness of that saponin layer.

MCDONELL: Producing quinoa that meets the parameters that the buyers and processors wanted it to meet is really challenging, and is not how many of the farmers were used to farming their quinoa. So, various farmers that, that, I met during that time had their quinoa rejected. And so, this was sort of heartbreaking to watch when going to a quinoa buy, where there was so much kind of hope and, so much kind of… enthusiasm about quinoa. Because, you know, if you can imagine, you know, getting six times what quinoa was worth just a few years ago, right? Like, that’s life changing for these farmers. It’s the difference between, you know, sending your kid to college and not.

TWILLEY: Basically, the way quinoa was grown traditionally, it could not be a standardized commodity. The two things were incompatible. But it’s hard to make a lot of money in exports if you aren’t producing a standardized commodity.

GRABER: In contrast, along the coast of Peru, that area was already set up for commodity farming. They have like 12 hours of sunlight per day nearly all yea, with a pretty steady temperature. It’s really easy to grow crops there if you irrigate, and so they were already exporting things like asparagus and grapes.

MCDONELL: So many of these farmers started replacing crops like bell peppers with quinoa. In part because the climate here is so temperate, they are able to have two harvests per year. So we saw dramatic differences in the yields in these coastal quinoa operations versus the Andes.

TWILLEY: Coastal farms were harvesting as much as seven times what a Andean farm could. Plus it was easier for them in their climate and with their big irrigated, mechanized farms to produce not only more quinoa, but also more standardized quinoa.

GRABER: One way the Andean farmers thought they could compete was with organic certification. On the coast there are a lot more pests because it’s hot and humid, and so they have to use a bunch of chemicals to deal with those pests. Whereas in the mountains, organic farming was pretty much the norm.

MCDONELL: But it takes three years to become certified organic. And so there’s this multi-year process of, you keeping track of all of the, kind of inputs that you apply to your fields. Keeping track of all of these different farm activities in, in notebooks. Certifiers come verify this.There is this frustration of the kind of bureaucracy of organic certification. And the requirements of this multi year waiting period, all of the paperwork. Because for many of these farmers, right, they’re like, I’ve been doing this my whole life. Why can’t you just trust that my quinoa doesn’t have chemicals on it?

TWILLEY: A lot of these traditional Andean farmers were not necessarily literate or fluent in Spanish. They’d never had to keep records like this before and it took a lot of extra time and effort. So it was a struggle.

GRABER: This all was happening super fast in Peru, like we said it was from one year to the next, and these issues around standardization and organic certification, this all kind of came out of nowhere. And then, the bad news hit.

MCDONELL: Yeah, so quinoa’s price peaked in 2014. And between 2014 and 2015, fell 40 percent. The following year it fell another 20 percent. So you can imagine the sense of, kind of, hope that quinoa was going to bring, sustainable wealth to the region, it was going to bring income opportunities that would, you know, keep youth from migrating to cities and having to work in mines. That it, it sort of began to evaporate very quickly as quinoa’s price fell.

TWILLEY: The demand for quinoa hadn’t changed, quinoa was still really hot. And the price was still higher than it had been before the International Year of Quinoa. But it was no longer a ticket to riches.

MCDONELL: The boom created this sense of, kind of, hope with, you know, increased incomes. The bust was a kind of… rapid disintegration of that dream. I mean, many farmers are still producing quinoa, it’s no longer having the kind of life changing economic impact. Many farmers also decided that it was, it’s no longer worth their time and energy to put in the effort that it takes to produce commercial quinoa.

GRABER: Despite the price drop, and despite the fact that some Altiplano farmers gave up trying to export, Peru is still exporting a lot of quinoa. In fact it’s the number one quinoa exporter in the world. A lot of it is from the Altiplano. Some of the quinoa comes from the coast, as we said. Emma told us that some of it is actually from across the border in Bolivia, but it’s marketed as Peruvian.

TWILLEY: Under its own name, Bolivia is already the second largest exporter of quinoa after Peru. And for some farmers in the Bolivian part of the Altiplano, exporting quinoa has boosted their income. Emma says some farmers on the Peruvian side feel the same—particularly the ones that were already maybe a little bigger or better off.

MCDONELL: Farmers that are part of, sort of, well organized cooperatives have been able to, kind of better secure those relationships with exporters. I think that a lot of it in terms of the degree to which you’re able to take advantage of this depends on your position and which farmer association that you’re part of.

TWILLEY: So the quinoa boom didn’t necessarily help the poorest Peruvian farmers the way people had hoped. But did it achieve any of those other lofty goals that the United Nations and others all talked up back in 2013?

GRABER: Another goal quinoa boosters had: they thought people around the world would grow quinoa as a way to help solve global malnutrition. But Emma says that hasn’t really happened. Quinoa has just turned into another crop.

MCDONELL: It’s become a business opportunity in different areas, as opposed to something that’s having sort of, clear impacts on local nutrition in the area that it’s being grown.

GRABER: People had also thought that quinoa could help farmers adapt to climate change. That doesn’t seem like it’s really happened yet, people who work in international development are still suggesting quinoa as a great, adaptable crop. So it’s here if people need it.

TWILLEY: Ultimately, Emma says, the story of quinoa’s boom and the big, often conflicting dreams everyone had for it—there’s something really important that we can and should learn from this, for the next big food trend.

MCDONELL: Yeah, I would say that, the kind of complex, ramifications of, food trends and the ways that are kind of the whims of, of, eaters’ tastes can have dramatic impacts on people’s lives across the globe, and in ways that we can’t always anticipate.

GRABER: To us, one of the interesting things about Emma’s research—it’s that we eaters might have great intentions when we find out about a crop that’s important somewhere, and is farmed traditionally. We want to try it, we hope that by eating it we can help support those farmers, and if they’d like to keep farming in a traditional way, we hope that we’re helping them do that.

TWILLEY: But as the story of quinoa shows, the food system we have isn’t set up to work with the kind of variability and small scale of traditional farmers. One of the things the quinoa boom revealed is that there are a lot of otherwise invisible hurdles that go into getting something onto supermarket shelves. And they get in the way of all those good intentions.

GRABER: There are grains that are eaten traditionally in other parts of the world that are just starting to become better known in America today—like teff from east africa, and fonio from West Africa, they’re both being touted as supergrains. Obviously there’s nothing scientific about this term. But Emma says we should be careful and pay attention to what impact these food trends have.

TWILLEY: The major takeaway from the quinoa story is that you can’t just rely on a rising tide to lift all boats. That would be nice, but it isn’t always the case.

MCDONELL: You know, like from a utilitarian perspective, it’s like yeah, maybe quinoa should be produced all across the globe. Because maybe it you know could really have… positive impacts on people’s, you know, nutritional well being. But, that’s going to undermine farmers in the Andes. You know, it’s not going to help them continue to, to, to use quinoa as something to kind of better their own lives.

GRABER: And so while you can buy quinoa at the store today without knowing where it comes from—and it could come from the Netherlands or Spain or Colorado—Emma says she deliberately looks for quinoa from Peru or Bolivia.

MCDONELL: I also understand that—like, there is a logic, you know, when I was in Switzerland a few years ago, I met some Swiss commercial quinoa farmers. And their whole kind of logic was, we need to have locally produced quinoa because of, you know, the kind of climate change impacts and whatnot of our global food supply system, that it’s much more sustainable to buy local quinoa. And so some of it depends on your ethics. But, for me, I would recommend buying quinoa that is produced by farmers in the Andes. Because, you know, as quinoa becomes more and more of a global crop and they face more and more competition, I think that, Andean farmers deserve to still be getting some kind of slice of the pie.

[MUSIC]

TWILLEY: Thanks this episode to Emma McDonell, the author of The Quinoa Bust, there’s a link on our website, and to listener Edward Brudney, who suggested we speak to her.

GRABER: Thanks to Jose Luis Chavez and David and the rest of the team at Mission Ceviche, and also of course to our superstar producer Claudia Geib.

TWILLEY: And thanks to my husband Geoff for remembering the immortal Whole Foods parking lot rap. We’ll be back in a couple of weeks with a brand new episode, till then.