On a similar note, there has been a concerted effort over the past few decadesto stop South Americans from chewing coca leaf and making tea from it, both of which are orders of magnitude less harmful than refined cocaine, and traditions that stretch back millennia.
Especially in more mountaineous regions coca leaves are available for breakfast instead of coffee. Some hot water over a few leaves makes for a quite refreshing tea, which I found less aggressive than coffee in its effect.
Leaves can be openly bought at kiosks in bags and contain the calcium stone required to chew them. Personally I found the taste a bit offputting (the effect is rather refreshing, though), but figured it needed to be tried once in Peru (same as guinea pigs, which, alas, I found too much of a bother).
Also, Chicha is still widely available in Peru. My sister in law (who is Peruvian) adores the stuff.
> there has been a concerted effort over the past few decadesto stop South Americans from chewing coca leaf
Are you sure? Certainly not in Bolivia. I also see if readily available in Andean markets as leaf. Also coca products in supermarkets in non-traditional chewing areas. Have not noticed any campaign to outlaw chewing, or get people to chew less
Reminds me of how for a while Peru was one of two countries where something owned by Coca-Cola wan't the most popular soft drink, instead it was Inca Kola; that ended with partial buyout of the local producer.
(The other was Scotland with Barr's Irn Bru, now a casualty in the War On Sugar)
Did you have chicha prepared the 'artisanal' / traditional way described in the article...
This part—the chewing—plays a key role in the fermentation process, since enzymes from saliva convert the starch to sugar, which, when combined with wild yeast or bacteria, eventually becomes alcohol. The preparers then spit the resulting juice into a clay pot, where it ferments for several hours. After that, voila: Chicha is born
Few concepts have been found to be independently discovered and adopted across the history of disparate human civilizations. Don't kill members of your own tribe. Incest is bad. Find a way, any way, to make booze. :-)
Most alcoholic drinks are an acquired taste. There's nothing Eurocentric about finding unfamiliar alcohol offputting. She doesn't rant about it, she's not even all that negative; she just didn't like it.
She had chicha in one single spot(in La Candelaria no less)and this entitles her to make such a tone-deaf blanket statement that all chicha must therefore taste like that? If she didn't like it or was grossed out from learning how it's made she could have worded things differently. Instead she chose to be a snob and look down on an indigenous beverage which has miraculously survived a European conquest and the subsequent years of cultural indoctrination.
She's most likely some upper middle class privileged white woman "journalist" (used very loose) who thinks she knows everything about a place because she spent a week there.
The entire article is praising chicha's cultural value and lamenting its passing. I'm struggling to understand why one sentence--"Frothy and milky in texture, the corn-based, alcoholic brew tastes a bit like the inside of a new shoe"--apparently turns it into vicious imperialism.
It's not even that negative! The inside of a new shoe isn't a smell I associate with deliciousness, but it's not really unpleasant. I feel like you're demanding that she lie and say it was the best thing she ever tasted.
Imperialism and eurocentrism are two entirely different things so please look up the definitions before you try to put words into my mouth. Second, I am not demanding that she lies, but to simply be a bit less condescending towards local traditions. I guess I expect a bit more from a publication such as Atlas Obscura than to have their writers sound like characters out of a Tom Clancy novel.
Lastly, she lifted most of her "research" from this popular blog entry from nearly six years ago and didn't bother to credit its author: https://www.historiacocina.com/es/cerveza-colombia
Why can't they be literal? Shoe leather isn't poison. People involved with tasting, familiarize themselves with all kinds of flavors that aren't food, so they can describe what their smelling/tasting. The wine industry is a good example. How do I know what dirt, grass, dog biscuits taste like? Because I've tried them. Chewing on a piece of leather isn't exactly some unheard of feat.
I know what dirt, grass, various weeds, and even dog poop taste like because I did a lot of weed cutting with powerful string trimmers in high school. The "Weed Eater" brand name is more literal than I like to think about.
Not things I'd choose to taste, or that I'd want to compare with something I willingly put into my mouth.
I don't think chicha is fermented directly after chewing — saliva contains too many other microorganisms to do that and have something at all tasty. Give it a nice boil though, and then ferment it, and I imagine that it'd be just fine.
You are correct, everything is boiled in a pot prior to fermentation pretty much the same way that malt is first turned into wort and then fermented in order to make beer.
