What was the common diet of an Incan peasant?

by BolivaWhite24

I understand that potatoes were and are a staple crop in Andean diets but it's hard for me to picture what meals looked like back then considering so many current recipes use Old World live stock. I would imagine that llamas, guinea pigs, and in the southern reaches of the empire, guancos, would be seen in some recipes. Thank you for your time.

Pachacamac

I don't know of any recipes that were recorded in the years immediately following the Spanish conquest, and that is the only opportunity we would have for learning how dishes were prepared prior to the massive upheaval brought about by inclusion in the global economy post-conquest. Another avenue to approach this would be to look at traditional meals ethnographically, especially in the more remote Quechua towns that even today are mostly native and not really well integrated into modern Andean societies, but that too is not overly reliable because any ethnographic study still would have taken place centuries after conquest. I don't study the Inka or modern ethnographies of the Andes so there may well be stuff that I don't know about.

But while the exact recipes may be hard to find, we know a lot about the ingredients that were eaten. We also know about maize (corn); maize was a hugely important food in the Andes (still is) and it was often made into two key foods: chicha, a corn beer, and sanco, a corn porridge. These were (and still are, at least for chicha) staples of any festival, and festivals happen at least annually in Andean towns. Besides during festivals, these foods are also served by the host during labour parties; basically, when you need some work done to your house, need to harvest your field, build a new canal, whatever, you would invite your neighbours to come help you do whatever you need done. Then, you feed them with chicha and maybe sanco (plus other foods, but chicha is the key), and when they need help with something, you are expected to go help out. This sort of reciprocity is thought to be common throughout the Andes for a very long time, but at the very least was practiced by the Inka and used by the empire to get stuff done as they rapidly expanded. Maize probably was a higher-status food but commoners would have access to it through festivals and building parties.

What about other ingredients? We know more about coastal Andean societies because the preservation there is insane so you can find very old fruits, seeds, and vegetables. We also have some clues through art. And we know that long-distance trade between the coast, highlands, and Amazon was always common, so something being grown/found in one place probably means it was used throughout the entire region (except for things like seafood, which would not keep well). There is also the concept of the "vertical archipelago," the core of which is that different things grow best at different altitudes, so a family may have land at several different altitudes and grow different things in different places, or people would grow one thing somewhere (e.g. potatoes grow best at high altitude, and above the potato line only grass grows, so that is where the llama/alpaca pastures are) and then trade.

Getting back to it, in the highlands, potato, quinoa, amaranth, llamas, guinea pigs, and probably freshwater fish and hunted birds are the staples, plus fruit and condiments (chilli peppers, primarily) that are grown at lower altitudes. In the jungle, manioc/cassava/yucca was commonly grown, along with coca, maize, fruits and condiments. On the coast, maize grew well along with a variety of fruits, beans, peanuts, and condiments. Plus massive amounts of seafood. I can find a more specific list of the fruits and other things that we have found at coastal sites, at least, because I can't think of too many now.

So that is a pretty long-winded way to address your question and basically say that you're right about potatoes, llama, and guinea pig in the highlands, but we don't know specific recipes, and I'll add corn as being very important.

Sources: Michael Moseley's The Inca and their Ancestors is always a good and readable go-to source for an overview of information on the Andes, and he talks a lot about food/agriculture, and about the Inka labour practices I discussed above. John Murra came up with the idea of the vertical archipelago. While his specific argument that a single family was basically spread across many different eco-zones at different altitudes is not really accepted anymore, the fact that different things grow at different altitudes and that this had a major impact on economic organization is. Murra discussed this in many places but this one is good: 1980. The Economic Organization of the Inka State. Research in Economic Anthropology, Supplement 1. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press.