Comments on: Quinoa Nonsense, or Why the World Still Needs Agricultural Economists

By: The More You Read | Punyu

The More You Read | Punyu — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 12:32:31 +0000

[...] campaign against the minimum unit pricing of alcohol (for the record, I support MUP); and the the quinoa debate (one perspective); and global discussions around non-communicable disease and sustainable [...]

By: The Bad News About Quinoa | FRAGGIN' CIVIE

The Bad News About Quinoa | FRAGGIN' CIVIE — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 07:23:28 +0000

[...] stories and blogs that sparked this recent quinoa controversy in the first place (and that largely shut it down before she ever even got to [...]

By: Round Up Ready – Food Controversy Edition | On a Quasi-Related Note

Round Up Ready – Food Controversy Edition | On a Quasi-Related Note — Sun, 27 Jan 2013 20:41:16 +0000

[...] more people began to look into the story, debunking the myths, sorting through the nonsense and the fads and fallacies, and ultimately reporting that is was in fact OK to eat quinoa. (Which [...]

By: Dawn Corso

Dawn Corso — Sun, 27 Jan 2013 15:35:00 +0000

Thank you all for such an informative discussion. So many variables exist in this issue, that its hard to sort out for the average (yet concerned) consumer. I’ll keep reading…

By: The International Year of Quinoa – Every silver lining has a cloud. « Dochasnetwork's Blog

Sat, 26 Jan 2013 21:20:03 +0000

[...] Quinoa Nonsense, or why the world still needs agricultural economists, by Marc Bellemare [...]

By: What we learned this week | Make Wealth History

What we learned this week | Make Wealth History — Sat, 26 Jan 2013 17:15:07 +0000

[...] Quinoa has emerged as a desirable new food in the West, with the consequence that its value has shot up and people in the Andes can no longer afford to eat it – but is this a good or a bad thing? [...]

By: Jeremy

Jeremy — Sat, 26 Jan 2013 12:02:11 +0000

@Joe: interesting observations, supported by a commenter to our blog. He said:

One noteworthy argument used by Saunders is that quinoa “had all but died out as a staple in Bolivia” by the 1980s. In a book chapter about to be published (http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9781849714570/), I argue that quinoa has indeed been a secondary food item in living memory in the Andean highlands (except perhaps for small pockets in the Altiplano), and that its decline probably has its roots in the emergence and growing competition of highland-adapted maize prior European contact (admittedly, the evidence for the latter is scant… although there is some).

I would thus seem that the current outrage about the significance of quinoa becoming unaffordable is based on a fallacious premise, namely that the poor have consumed massive amounts of quinoa prior to the current price surge, and are now deprived of a food that was nutritionally significant to them. In that regard please see the short communication of Winkel et al (J. Agronomy & Crop Science, 2012): “Although quinoa is promoted in the markets of the northern countries as the ‘rice of the Incas’, Andean populations have never consumed it as a staple cereal, like rice in Asia or wheat in the Middle East and Europe. In fact, native Andean people regard quinoa as a ‘heavy’ foodstuff and, as a dietary rule, consider it harmful to eat it for dinner (Johnsson 1986: 107). Traditionally, quinoa is mostly used to thicken soups or drinks (lahua, pesqe) or in the form of small cookies (kispinia, mukuna), and less frequently as main dish (phisara) (National Research Council 1989, Tapia et al. 2000). […..] We agree with Jacobsen (2011: 396) that quinoa has tended to be replaced by pasta and rice, which, contrary to the quinoa grain commonly available in the villages and the urban markets of Bolivia, do not require tedious cleaning and washing before consumption. But this change occurred long before quinoa entered the export market (see Johnsson 1986: 167, referring to the early 1980s)”.

By: Norm

Norm — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 19:23:36 +0000

“Surprisingly the delivery method with the smallest carbon footprint per pound of food was shipping in bulk by diesel-powered ship – even from across the expanse of the Pacific.”

Evidence that doing something that feels good and doing something that does good requires some homework and math.

By: How many Bolivians are dying because foodies love quinoa? | Point4CounterPoint

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 19:03:14 +0000

[...] Marc F. Bellemare, an assistant professor at Duke University, points out in his blog, the tragic take on the quinoa boom assumes that Bolivian households are mostly quinoa consumers [...]

By: Joe

Joe — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 18:23:00 +0000

Thanks to Sergio for his informed response. My experience (strictly anecdotal) from traveling in Bolivia and Peru 10 years ago was that meat and potatoes dominated local cuisine. The only time I saw quinoa on the menu was when I stopped in the tourist haven of Cuzco. My host at the time indicated that quinoa didn’t hold much cache locally because it was stigmatized as “peasant food.”
One reader mentions the problems attendant with shipping quinoa from South America rather than “eating locally.” In their book “The Ethics of What We Eat,” Peter Singer and Jim Mason measure the carbon footprints left by various types of importation as compared to visiting a farm 30 miles away to purchase food. Surprisingly the delivery method with the smallest carbon footprint per pound of food was shipping in bulk by diesel-powered ship – even from across the expanse of the Pacific. The reason is that those traveling to nearby farms to buy locally are typically doing so in individual car trips. The method of delivery then, for an equal volume of food becomes hundreds of individual car trips to equal what can be shipped by sea in bulk surprisingly cheaply.