Rainforest to Table

Forest Trends, Canopy Bridge and some of Latin America’s best-known and most influential chefs are looking to use the Amazon’s vast cornucopia of exotic healthy ingredients and traditional cuisines to bring the flavors and nutrition of the jungle to tables in indigenous villages and big city restaurants, in the process creating new markets and businesses for products that help protect the forest and nurture local communities.

The Amazon Pantry

The Amazon´s forests, lands and waters have for millennia provided a diverse cornucopia of food and ingredients that have transformed biodiversity into gastronomic pleasure - from a log fire in the jungle to some of the best restaurants in the world. Some products, such as cocoa beans and Brazil nuts, are well known worldwide Others are in the process of expanding more widely into the national and international markets, for example camu camu, açai, sacha inchi, and paiche amongst others. But there is an even greater, almost infinite, diversity of species, varieties, ingredients and uses yet to be discovered in the culturally and biologically rich world of the Amazon. With over 40,000 species of plants, at least 3,000 species of fish, and another, 3000 kinds of fruit, the Amazon larder is bursting with potential.

This diversity is threatened, with pressure from other sorts of food production – soybeans, beef cattle, cocoa plantations, oil palm – the main drivers of deforestation in the region.

But savoring the products of the rainforest can help save it.

An Amazon Food Movement

In Latin America, as in the US and Europe, a new food movement is taking shape, with interest in healthy and novel ingredients, and a commitment to origins and supporting producers.
A new crop of chefs and food enthusiasts is revitalizing national cultures and turning an enthusiastic and appreciative eye to local ingredients like never before. The boom in food culture has been nothing short of astounding with new restaurants, organic markets, and novel ingredients.

At the vanguard are chefs at standout Latin American restaurants, several ranked as amongst the best in the world, who are redefining national food culture, and increasingly incorporating Amazon ingredients into their offerings. Pedro Miguel Schiaffino, of Lima’s amaZ and Malabar, has been a pioneer in reinterpreting Amazon ingredients in his sophisticated cuisine. Across Latin America, other leading exponents include Paulo Machado, Mara Salles (Tordesilhas), and Thiago Castanho (Remanso do Bosque) in Brazil, Eduardo Martinez (Mini-Mal) in Colombia, Kamilla Seidler and Michelangelo Cestari of Gustu in La Paz, and Peru’s Mitsuharu Tsumura (Maido) and Virgilio Martínez (Central).

These chefs and restaurants are at the vanguard, educating their visitors dish by dish, making the Amazon’s biodiversity and extraordinary potential palpable.

An Agent of Change

Conservation in the Amazon requires society´s fully valuing its diverse ecosystems, both economically and culturally. Chefs and gastronomy can increase awareness and demand for delicious and healthy Amazon foods, creating a new way to value the rainforest and, through partnerships for sustainable sourcing, opening up new economic opportunities for local stewards of biodiversity and cultural traditions and creating new incentives for conservation.

Roadmap

In November 2015, we gathered a remarkable group of chefs, conservation scientists, activists, entrepreneurs, and food writers in the Peruvian Amazon to strategize about how to make gastronomy an agent for change, benefitting forests and local communities in the Amazon. You can see videos of the journey here.

Over the coming months we will continue to work together to unlock the potential of Amazon foods to generate new appreciation for the value of the rainforest, and to create new opportunities for local nutrition and sustainable enterprises through two main sets of endeavors:

Building a Community for Sustainable Amazon Gastronomy

There are many chefs, conservation scientists, ethnobotanist, anthropologists, local community representatives, activists, investors, businesses, consumer groups, NGOs, representatives of government programs and others who are already actively engaging with sustainable Amazon food systems from different perspectives. We are working on bringing this community together through events, platforms for sharing knowledge, films and publications. As a key part of the process we’ll be working to provide guidance and tools so that sustainability, transparency and fairness are basic principles guiding the relationships among businesses, consumers and local communities.

Delivering Conservation and Community Benefits on the Ground

By bringing the Amazon to new audiences, chefs and restaurants engender new appreciation for the value of the rainforest in its grand diversity. And this appreciation can be the starting point for powerful new opportunities for conservation and community well-being.

Leading chefs and restaurants in Latin America are bringing innovative products to their kitchens and tables, creating small-scale demand and budding opportunities for local community suppliers in the Amazon. We will work to foster and strengthen these chef-community relationships to promote an integral suite of benefits – better incomes, positive impacts for conservation and better nutrition locally, as well as seeking out opportunities to scale-up business enterprises that create these kinds of benefits at scale.

With support from: