Decolonizing Cookbooks.

It can only happen if we write our own stories

This is the year I declared that I was going to start the process to write a cookbook. The subject of my cookbook would be Latin American cooking. I’ve been doing some intense research by buying stacks of cookbooks, watching documentaries + videos, + reading any pertinent articles I could get my hands on. Why was I doing all of this? Because anytime I hear or read anything that is deemed “Latin Cooking” it mainly features Mexican cooking.

Mexican cooking is beautiful, vibrant, indigenous, + delicious. Unfortunately, it’s narrative has been whitewashed for decades down to the singular taco. As wonderful as Mexican cooking can be it’s not the whole story of Latin American cooking. 

I’ve found in my research a certain “whitening” of the food that I want to explore + write about. Where are the stories of Afro-Latinos + Indigenous people? Where are the stories + recipes of the marginalized + enslaved? Most of the books I purchased were from eBay because again, most cookbooks center around Mexican cookery.  

The arrival of my research cookbooks was like Christmas in September. I was so excited to read unfamiliar recipes and learn about foreign ingredients until I actually opened one. As I perused a copy of a book called Latin Cooking I fell upon a stomach-churning sentence that bothered me for weeks. The passage went like this: 

The irresistible, health-conscious, adventurous cuisine found throughout Latin and Central America, Mexico, Cuba, and Spain includes a natural abundance of exotic, fiery, and savory flavors. It has been exploited by African, French, British, Indian and Indonesian visitors.

WHOA. Hold up. So you’re going to tell me that Africans exploited “Latin” cooking AND were visitors? So they were just on vacation the whole time and decided to stay in the countries they “visited”? This egregious way of glossing over centuries of slavery is something that happens so often that it’s normalized AND printed in a book. Latin America’s colonizers captured + enslaved more people than in the United States fourfold so how does this not get talked about more often in the way we cook? How have its effects on our cuisine not been discussed + studied outside of an academic setting? 

This is why we need to own our own stories. Tell them the way they deserve to be told. Beyond the whiteness of buzzy food trends that tend to Columbus our own culture and sell it right back to us. Decolonizing our food is essentially our job as people of color. Food is at the core of our culture + if we don’t retain that then we are aiding in the erasure of who we are as systematically oppressed people. I hope that with my writing + research I can change that.