Eating Is Believing: Multivalent Andean Foods in Jesuit Writing from Peru, 1577–1653

Abstract The contradictory attitudes that Jesuit missionaries to viceregal Peru displayed toward various Andean staple foods with pre-contact ceremonial applications, most particularly cuy (guinea pig), suggest that they experienced a tension between colonial ambivalence and cultural accommodation. The Spanish colonial regime incentivized them to maintain the differences between their European selves and their Andean congregants in order to reinforce their own (and their institutions’) authority in the colonial context, while the Society of Jesus encouraged them to bridge those differences by forging linguistic and cosmological analogies and by adopting some local behaviors, including—as they did in other missionary contexts—foodways. By the seventeenth century, however, the Jesuits in Peru had abandoned their initial attempts to accommodate multivalent Andean foods and met them instead with colonial ambivalence.