Two dishes made with coca leaf.COCA CHALLENGE
A few days ago in Bogotá, a US diplomat was upset because he was served fermented coca leaves in the pairing of Leo, one of the most prestigious restaurants in Colombia.
The scene, narrated by Leonor Espinosa, who is among the 100 best chefs in the world, demonstrates the path that the country is taking to vindicate the coca leaf in gastronomy.
"Apparently [the diplomat] is unaware of the multiple traditional uses of coca in indigenous cultures, unrelated to cocaine," Espinosa wrote, ending with a phrase that brings together the commitment of chefs like her: coca is not cocaine.
Some twenty chefs from well-known restaurants in the country work together with communities of growers to shake the stigma of the coca leaf and resignify the plant as a food ingredient, just as five indigenous and peasant regions of the country have done historically.
Thanks to that, today it is beginning to be seen not only in fermented foods - like those that mark Leo's cuisine -, but also in coca mambe noodles from Salvo Patria, or mambe ice cream, in MiniMal, other renowned restaurants in Bogotá, or in the coca flour that serves as the base for almojábanas, empanadas and even coca leaf chocolates throughout the country.
“Chefs, as actors and representatives of the production chain, are agents of change.
Our commitment is to support the knowledge of this sacred plant, change paradigms, connect conflict territories and those with serious food security problems,” Espinosa said in a conversation with this newspaper.
In Bogotá Madrid Fusión 2019, Espinosa had already tried to show the culture of the coca leaf.
He recreated a mambeadero, as the indigenous people call the sacred place where they sit down to chew the macerated leaf and discuss the affairs of their community.
"It was very cute.
The representation of the mambeo made it possible to show how by chewing the leaf they generate thoughts and fill the basket of abundance.
It is to vindicate a ceremonious act and far from the world of cocaine”.
Cook Leonor Espinosa, cooking with indigenous people from the Amazon, during a Bogotá Madrid Fusión event. Bogotá Chamber of Commerce
For Dora Troyano, coordinator of the Coca Alliance for Peace, an initiative of Sena Cauca (one of the regions most affected by violence) and the Tierra de Paz Foundation, Leo's complaint is a sign of the awareness of the gastronomic sector in the revaluation of the leaf.
The Alliance that he directs is the first to obtain a permit from the National Narcotics Fund to buy, transport and store coca leaves and transform them into legal goods, "such as fertilizers and nutritional ingredients used in scientific research."
Troyano is the promoter of the Coca Challenge, which in 2019 invited chefs from all over the country to visit the community of Lerma, in southwestern Colombia, to explore recipes based on coca flour and from which 20 proposals came out that are now available. in the cookbook
The coca leaf in Colombian gastronomy
, with free download.
From that meeting, supported by the Open Society Foundation, a gastronomic manifesto came out that is also political: “We commit to contribute to the destigmatization of the cultivating communities and the legal use they make of the coca leaf, promoting research and education in this regard. and weaving support networks that promote the revaluation of the coca plant”.
It is also about supporting the "social and economic resistance" that these communities make in the face of a buoyant market such as drug trafficking.
“Of course we know that at the tip of cookies we are not going to consume the 180,000 hectares that are planted and that perhaps we are not going to be able to affect the 80,000 families associated with production, but we know that if we reach a goal of 150 families in each district we are going to be able to generate autonomous and sovereign income”, Troyano said in 2018. The latest figures from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) indicate that there were 143,000 cultivated hectares at the end of 2020.
Mónica Ríos is director of innovation and development at the Gato Dumas cooking school and one of the guests invited to Lerma in 2019. There she learned to see the coca leaf in a different way and to explore all its culinary potential.
"There is a huge map of products that can be scaled to multiple recipes," she says, excitedly listing everything from fried eggs with coca butter, sauces, vinaigrettes, green chocolate or 'kocambucha', the innovation of this laboratory, which is similar to green tea but with coca leaf.
At the end of 2021, the Ríos team won the Social Commitment Award within the Bocurse D'or, one of the most important world chef championships.
The project was called
Coca no Cocaine
and part of what they obtained was used to support the daughter of a mamo (indigenous leader) from the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in her studies.
For Ríos, with the coca leaf we must take as a reference the positioning achieved by Japanese Matcha tea that attracts so many consumers in the world.
“Visually they look alike, they are green, bitter and plant-like,” she says.
However, many difficulties still fall on this.
Although there are communities that produce it - the Coca Challenge presents a list of suppliers - and there are brands that sell it through Mercado Libre and other platforms, it is not regulated.
“There is a limbo.
It is similar to what happened with Viche, a fermented product from the Colombian Pacific.
As it was not regulated, the bars began to buy directly from the producers”, he explains.
Coca meringue cake, made by Mónica Ríos during the Coca ChallengeCoca Challenge
Fabiola Peñacué knows very well about the obstacles, one of the pioneers with coca leaf products and the community of Tierradentro (Cauca) where the Coca Nasa cooperative was created.
They started in 1999 selling "toasted coca leaf packed in a plastic jar, especially for making infusions" and now they sell rum, wine, beer and the famous Coca Sek soft drink.
“In the last 25 years my work has consisted of putting the coca leaf on the table of Colombians, it has cost me sweat and tears, but I am very satisfied with the results, including that many people and communities have decided to follow this path” , wrote about the controversy of the diplomat.
Espinosa prefers not to focus on the incident with the US official.
“It is not worth arguing with obtuse people.
It is painful that there are people who still believe that coca is cocaine.
Wine is not always made from grapes”, says the chef.
What we must do, she adds, is to continue using the fermented products and by-products based on the coca leaf to begin "telling other stories of Colombia" through gastronomy.
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