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food / travel

Big City Chefs Rediscovering Local Ingredients, Colombia-Style

Top chefs in Bogotá and other big cities in Colombia are rediscovering and updating the country's traditional fare to celebrate local ingredients.

Photo of cooks in a kitchen

Cooks gathered around a kitchen in Colombia

Julián López de Mesa Samudio

BOGOTÁ — Travelers to Paris, Tokyo or Madrid aren't expecting to eat hot dogs when they visit those cities. Food is an essential part of any travel experience, and more so if you are eating for fun, so your menu really must be a typical, intrinsic part of the local landscape.

When people visit Colombia they are not looking for high-end salmon or French-style foie gras, because these are not the local fare. If you find them here, they were imported, and even if someone is producing them, you can't find the same quality, or those essential, cultural and environmental ties between any traditional food and its place of origin.


Concerns like these have led to the rise in recent decades of movements like Slow Food and other local food initiatives, which seek healthier and more nutritious foods with a strong connection to a particular landscape, culture and community. And this is particularly true in Colombia.

Photo of a cook preparing meat in Columbia

Cook preparing meat in Colombia for a restaurant

Mestizo Cocina de Origen/Facebook

Chefs leaving big cities

In the past decade, some of the gastronomy world's biggest prizes and awards have gone to restaurants and chefs who offer local and traditional foods, reuse ingredients, cut waste or use strictly traceable ingredients. The idea is to make the farm-to-table chain as short and local as possible, ideally with no more than one or two links between producer and consumer.

Travelers are divorced from their host destination and its customs.

Perhaps one of the greatest attractions of a travel destination is the opportunity to enjoy slow-cooked, home-style meals, typically mixing traditional know-how with some modern techniques. These might be the fare to serve a group of diners, in a setting that recalls a home, a family meal or get-together with friends.

It's a style that makes the restaurant a crucial feature of local tourism and linked in many ways to local prosperity, social life and culture. It also goes in the face of a type of unchecked tourism seen in many places, where travelers are divorced from their host destination and its customs.

This has led many Colombian chefs, after the pandemic, to leave the big cities where they rose to prominence and head for smaller towns, where they are consciously promoting and developing local cuisine.

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Society

Big Brother For The People: India's CCTV Strategy For Cracking Down On Police Abuse

"There is nothing fashionable about installing so many cameras in and outside one’s house," says a lawyer from a Muslim community. And yet, doing this has helped members of the community prove unfair police action against them.

A woman is walking in the distance while a person holds a military-style gun close up

Survellance and tight security at the Lal Chowk area in Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir, India on October 4, 2022

Sukanya Shantha

MUMBAI — When sleuths of the National Investigating Agency suddenly descended on human rights defender and school teacher Abdul Wahid Shaikh’s house on October 11, he knew exactly what he needed to do next.

He had been monitoring the three CCTVs that are installed on the front and the rear of his house — a chawl in Vikhroli, a densely populated area in suburban Mumbai. The cameras told him that a group of men and women — some dressed in Mumbai police’s uniform and a few in civil clothes — had converged outside his house. Some of them were armed and few others with batons were aggressively banging at the door asking him to immediately let them in.

This was not the first time that the police had landed at his place at 5 am.

When the policemen discovered the CCTV cameras outside his house, they began hitting it with their batons, destroying one of them mounted right over the door. This action was captured by the adjacent CCTV camera. Shaikh, holed up in his house with his wife and two children, kept pleading with the police to stop destroying his property and simply show them an official notice.

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