Researchers are studying the cooking traditions of the FARC | Hacker News Reader

Researchers are studying the cooking traditions of the FARC

atlasobscura.com

93 pointssamizdis15 comments

It's particularly interesting to me how their meals shifted when changing war circumstances forced them into more conservative cooking setups. But I really enjoyed this article for the look into sustenance cooking while trying to remain low profile.

I am quite curious if the flour they acquired was hand-ground in querns out of rice and corn or if it was one of the "luxuries" they had to trade for.

Related: "Wartime & Military Cooking & Food", from Virginia Tech, has a lot of resources and looks really interesting too.

link: https://guides.lib.vt.edu/c.php?g=10336&p=5063099

I have been wild camping a lot recently and I'm more curious about how they get enough drinkable water for everyone.

if you have a day or two in one spot, it's easy enough to purify surface water with a 50-gallon food-grade drum for settling and a few capfuls of bleach. they operate in pretty remote wilderness and may even be upstream of the cocaine labs where there won't be too much contamination.

the process can be accelerated with a simple gravel and sand filter, and if you're thirsty enough nobody really minds crunchy water

>if you're thirsty enough nobody really minds crunchy water

Nature can fuck up the water by itself. Such as dead and rotting animals in the waterways, which is very common. So I would say a persons' preferences is not too relevant here.

The article mentions Choco, the wettest place in the world. Daily rainfall and a banana leaf should do you right.

> But after the government built houses for each former FARC member and their families, everyone started cooking at home, where kitchen duties have fallen on the shoulders of women, unlike their time in the guerrilla, when men and women cooked as equals.

What a terrible shame. Without passing any judgement, going from an equal society created from desperation, since being given what they need to survive, returning to one of traditional roles.

It was never an "equal society" +90% of the guerillas were men, as it always have been through time in all societies. Men are the ones who must fight.

A quick Google has about 40% of FARC as being women; do you have a better source?

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/09/fa...

It’s a common theme across cultures that when farming is invented then division of labor falls along predictable lines. In this case, I’m guessing it’s implied that men were working in the fields?

In Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell mentions this happened as well.

Almost as if it's a natural human behavior or something.

Of course it is.

The men use physical strength in the fields for gathering or hunting, while the women take care of children whom reaction for them and want their support.

Except that hunter/gatherer societies specifically tend to see much less gender-specific work, contrary to such "common sense" assumptions.

Never really understood how they fed them on Hoth either.

FARC is not the rebel alliance.

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