A new book published by Rimisp, the Latin American Centre for Rural Development, documents the food systems of ten indigenous peoples stretching from Canada to the Amazon and the Andes. Titled “Cultura Alimentaria Indígena,” or “Indigenous Food Culture,” the book was launched on 2 December 2025 at an event in Cusco, Peru, and is distributed free of charge.
The ten peoples covered are the Asháninka, Aymara, Kayambi, Cree, Inuit, Náhuatl, Maya Q’eqchi’, Métis, Misak and Wolastoquey. That geographic range, spanning Canadian Arctic communities to Amazonian and Andean groups, makes the book one of the broader recent attempts to document indigenous food systems across the Americas in a single volume.
Funding came from Canada’s International Development Research Centre. The book runs to six chapters, combining essays, interviews and traditional recipes across themes including food sovereignty, the impact of climate change, the effects of industrialisation on traditional diets, and the preservation of ancestral food practices. It appears in Spanish, English and French, reflecting the range of communities and institutions involved in producing it.
Documenting food systems under pressure
Editor Rodrigo Yáñez Rojas described the project’s origins in direct terms. The book, he said, “began as a conversation on the transformation of indigenous food systems, which was enriched by stories, interviews and collective reflections.” That framing positions the book less as a static record and more as an accumulated set of testimonies gathered over time from the communities themselves.
The subject matter is not abstract. Indigenous food systems across the Americas face converging pressures from climate change, land loss and the spread of industrialised food production. Documenting ancestral practices while they are still actively maintained, rather than after they have faded, is part of what gives the project its urgency. The book’s structure, built around interviews and recipes alongside critical essays, keeps the communities’ own voices central to that record.
Food systems under strain for cultural or ritual reasons are not unique to the Americas. In Kerala, the Sabarimala temple has faced a shortage of ingredients for aravana payasam, the ritual prasadam offering, ahead of its pilgrimage season, a reminder that traditional food systems come under pressure for very different reasons in very different parts of the world, and that documenting and sustaining them is a recurring concern well beyond any one region.
A five-country rollout before publication
Before the Cusco launch, the project ran a pre-launch tour across five countries between October and November 2025: Colombia, Mexico, Guatemala, Bolivia and Ecuador. That tour connected the editorial team directly with the indigenous communities whose food systems the book documents, rather than treating them solely as subjects studied from outside.
The approach carried through to the launch itself. The Cusco event featured indigenous co-authors representing communities in Guatemala, Ecuador and Bolivia, placing contributors from the documented communities alongside the book’s editors at its public debut. Combined with the five-country tour, that choice reflects a project built around participation rather than extraction, a distinction that matters for indigenous communities who have often seen their food knowledge documented by outsiders without their involvement in how it was told.
Ten months after its Cusco launch, “Indigenous Food Culture” remains a live resource rather than a dated release. Its free distribution and multilingual format were designed to put it directly into classrooms, community organisations and policy discussions concerned with food sovereignty across the Americas, a relevance unlikely to fade as climate pressures on indigenous food systems continue to build.
