 Okay, we're gonna get started. Please take your seats. Up next we're gonna have Pilar Egues Guevara. I didn't pronounce her right. And she's gonna be talking about coconut gentrification in the coast of Ecuador. Is that where you're from? All right. Thank you everyone for being here. My name is Pilar Egues Guevara and I am from Ecuador but I've been living here for about 10 years. I want to start by saying that I also come from a different field than many people and the topics dealing most of which have been dealt in this conference. I have a PhD in Anthropology so my presentation topic is along the lines of the previous presentation about not what food does to our body but rather where it comes from and what happens at the place of origin of these trendy health foods. I will present the findings of a study I've been conducting over the past years or the past year in Ecuador using the methods we use in Anthropology which are ethnographic fieldwork in this interviews, focus groups and participant observation with older people and medical doctors as well as literature review and commodity statistics of coconut over a period of over 50 years. So where I conducted my fieldwork is in the province of Esmeraldas which is highlighted in red. It's a northern province in the west in the coast near the border with Colombia. They have a population of about half a million people which is predominantly of African descent and this is a photo of the some of the women that I work with there. So coconut is an essential ingredient in their traditional dishes of this region. It's characteristic of this region. It gives a name to the iconic dish from Esmeraldas called en cocado which literally means coconut. En cocado is a seafood or meat stew cooked in a coconut sauce and local herbs. So that's a crab en cocado. To the tourists visiting Esmeraldas beaches en cocado is an exotic dish and an attraction of Ecuador's black province as is their traditional music and dance. However for black esmeraldeños or esmeraldas, the people from there, en cocado represents more than just food. It's just a potent symbol of their identity and essential part of their bioecologic and cultural heritage and of their collective history as an ethnic and regionally distinctive people in Ecuador. In spite of this cultural significance to the people of Esmeraldas, en cocado, this dish has become an exceptional as opposed to what it used to be an everyday meal and a basic staple in the diet. In my interviews, olden men and women remembered having eaten coconut in almost every single year of their day during their childhood and young adult years, about 40 or 50 years ago. At that time many of them still live in the country. In those years, coconut was just was used to make drinks such as they used to make hot chocolate with fresh pressed coconut milk. Smoothies made with ripe plantain, cinnamon and coconut milk and this is known as masato. This upper photo there is what they used to drink. It's not so common anymore. If it's done today, they used regular milk, not coconut milk. Children and adults used to eat pieces of coconut with rock and sugar or panela as a snack. Many desserts were made with coconuts such as the steel popular cocadas made with grated coconut and rock and sugar. That's a photo of the cocadas that are made with white sugar but the traditional, more traditional cocadas are brown with rock and sugar. Older women from Esmeraldas told me about their countless recipes which called for coconut milk adding a distinctive color and consistency. The cocadas mentioned earlier were stews made of varieties of seafood or wild mountain animals hunted locally and cooked in a thick flavorful coconut sauce. Even to this day the coconut milk and cream used for cooking is fresh, hand-grated and pressed minutes before adding it to the pot. Coconut oil was scantily used for frying and mostly had cosmetic and therapeutic uses taking internally to combat intestinal parasites and externally as a skin and hair conditioner. We do not have data for this time period 40 or 50 years ago but it is likely that at that time the fat intake of Esmeraldas mostly came from oil rich ripe coconuts used in everyday cooking as well as from wild cut fish and other seafood. Older people also testified to using lard in small amounts for seasoning. Also their diet and conditionally included plantains and ore rice to company meat or fish stews as well as small amounts of mostly cooked vegetables and for those of you who don't know plantains are a kind of banana that is not eaten raw you have to cook it and that's a green plantain when it becomes ripe it it's a yellow and it's sweet and that's the one that is used to make the smoothie that I showed before. However Esmeraldas diets today look quite different compared to previous decades the rice portions have increased significantly to make up for or replace the reduced consumption of plantains and fish we have become which have become more expensive and relatively inaccessible to the majority and especially those living in urban areas and I went to do my fieldwork with a friend and that's the typical dish that you you're served today in Esmeraldas that's the kind of it's a yeah it's a fairly decent amount of rice with a little bit of beans and and some fish on the side that's actually a restaurant but generally the portions for meat or fish or seafood are smaller because it's expensive and people eat a lot of rice. So in addition fat from traditional sources like lard fish and coconuts has been replaced for disproportionately larger amounts of commercial vegetable oils and margarine made with hydrogenated vegetable oils. As a reference the Food and Agricultural Organization reported that in 2010 4% of the dietary intake in Ecuador came from animal fat well over four times as much 17% came from vegetable oils. These are the data from the Food and Agricultural Organization and they show a fourfold increase in vegetable about a fourfold increase in vegetable oils over four decades and relatively stable and low levels of animal fat but the most of the vegetable oil increase comes from palm and soybean oil. So Esmeraldans today are not eating as much nearly as much as coconut as they used to and certainly not every day. In fact going against the traditions and of their cultural preferences most people in Esmeraldas are purposely avoiding coconut. Some of my interviews told me that nowadays on average they eat a coconut based meal once a week or maybe twice a month. Some people particularly medical doctors in Esmeraldas reported eating coconut exceptionally as a treat once or twice a year purposely repressing in purpose their desires to indulge in tempting and cocaos. So based on my interviews I found that there were too many reasons for this drastic change. The first is that people especially adults and those suffering from chronic diseases particularly overweight and diabetes are being medically advised to avoid eating coconut. The ongoing preventing campaign against obesity in Esmeraldas led by public health authorities prescribes not to eat fat from animal and coconut sources and I got a flyer from a local hospital and the point highlighted there is a avoid saturated fats of animals and of coconut. So doctors in Esmeraldas and in the rest of Ecuador based his dietary prescriptions on the American Health Association's current recommendations regarding saturated fat consumption and its supposed relationship with cardiovascular disease. As most of our are familiar with these recommendations are best based on bad science in quote made in the 1950 United States particularly Ansel Key's seven country studies. Nutrition books in Ecuador as late as 1960 still admitted oil from coconuts as good sources of vitamin D. However already in the 70s major vegetable oil industries were founded and processed commercial oils particularly from palm and soybean were advertised wisely as healthy and cheap alternatives to traditional fats. By the 1980 influential nutritionists in Ecuador condemned the use of lard from pigs and coconuts as unhealthy sources of fat which were harmful for the heart. The prejudice against saturated fats prevails and through today both in the medical community as well as in popular belief. In fact in the imagination of many Ecuadorians including many people in my family and many people I interview and I work with, margarine is a healthy food as is sunflower oil and they are preferred over lard or coconut which often steer feelings of guilt amongst those who choose to indulge. Therefore it is fair to assert that thanks to the prevailing global economic and cultural hegemony vegetable oils arrived at the tables of Ecuadorians and Esmeralda around the 1970s effectively displacing traditional fats from local sources via the importation of technology and bad science from the United States. The picture get even more ugly. Racial prejudice against black people in Esmeralda's informs the generalized discourse among medical doctors blaming black people and their cultural traditions for their health conditions. Consider this quote from the head nutritionist at a local hospital in the city of Esmeralda. He said to me for generations the customs are not focused on the care of their own health but rather the habits of the black race are not to better their health but rather to live day by day. He said unfortunately for the black culture the food here in this area is hypercaloric because their main source of food is coconut. Everything is incocal. There are similar expressions of food shaming with regards to plantains which are thought to be an inferior food of black people or of slaves. Thus in the medical imagination cultural preferences for plantains and coconut only worsen black people supposed propensity to be fat or obese or to have hypertension which is relatively high among black people in Ecuador. Overall identified a tendency among medical doctors in Esmeralda to understand chronic diseases among black people as genetically or culturally determined that is individuals presumably are guilty of their bad health based on their bad habits and preferences their culture and their inferior genetics in quotes. What is interesting about this medical understanding is that they are shocked odds with their everyday reality in Esmeralda's according to my interviews people in Esmeralda's particularly those under medical oversight and treatment avoid eating coconut under the assumption that it worsens their health conditions rather they follow their medical prescription to eat vegetable oil and margarine as healthy fats. So we see how racial ideologies become entangled with obsolete medical understandings of disease further amplifying the negative impacts of this epistemic gap or the gap in the knowledge about health and food for black people in Esmeralda's. So the major factor which I observed drives people in Esmeralda's away from coconut is an economic factor like the two other main staples which are fish and plantains coconuts have become scarce and expensive over time in Esmeralda's according to my interview is well in the early 2000s one coconut cost as little as 10 to 25 cents today they are sold for as much as 150 or 250 dollars US dollars in times scarcity but how were coconuts made scarce in the local markets of one of the major coconut producing lands of Ecuador. There are several reasons over the past decades there were plagues that the decimated coconut palm tree plantations and also my coconut plantations have been replaced by other more profitable commodities specifically African palm trees which are used by the vegetable and soap industry. So the remaining coconuts grown in Esmeralda's are now being shipped to major cities like Quito, Guayaquilancuenca to meet the growing demand for the pastry and restaurant industries that have flourished there. Another portion of the demand for coconuts from Esmeralda's come from granola factories in the city of Santo Domingo which used to dry grated coconut as an ingredient. More recently government programs included granola with grated coconut from Esmeralda's as part of cool breakfast in public schools throughout the country. So it's interesting to see how as coconuts travel from Esmeralda's to major Ecuadorian cities they are rebranded as healthy foods and they're predominantly consumed by white and mestizo urban middle classes there. So I have little time so basically the demand there's been such great demand for coconuts in these urban based industries that we have to start importing coconut from Peru, Mexico, Colombia and the Philippines and also we've started exporting coconut in the early 1990s sending most of it to Spain, the United States, Colombia and Argentina. So we all know that coconut has become so trendy here in the United States and there's so much interest for it. So recall my previous comment about the US dominated economic and cultural hegemony that frames this field of power and within this field of power there are specific pathways or circuits through which health food science circulates going from major global centers of research to global peripheries like Ecuador. Ecuadorian health authorities today are still making policy based on American Heart Association recommendations to limit consumption of saturated fats. However there's this new mainstream science about the goodness of saturated fats that is gaining ground here. These new science as we all know simply validates or rediscovers long discredited and in the case I've presented shamed dietary traditions of many populations in the tropics who have had coconut as a staple in their diet. Now this new science is finding its way back to Ecuador and I brought an example for you to see. So this is Kale Food Conscious Young American an entrepreneur that brought a coconut oil enterprise to the coast of Ecuador and the people from the you know the Esmetsonian magazine that feature him say Ecuadorian kitchens and street food stole sometimes rick of stale burn oil but one American man is striving to invent a new culinary tradition and he is saying it would be hard to instill coconut oil into centuries of tradition here as if we had vegetable oil as a traditional and people are literally prelim themselves here by using tons of these rancid vegetable oil. So it's the same logic of blaming that we saw earlier. Just to wrap up this issue of gentrification is real. There's many other foods that are undergoing this process and you might have read about quinoa but basically it's when you know these foods become trendy among especially middle-class educated people and they're sold at hard prices. They pull the prices up and then become inaccessible where the places where they're grown. Some implications of this specific case are to note how these foods are framing new identities, modern identities of health conscious and educated US Americans who are taking in all these foods into their daily lives but at the same time other people are losing their resources upon which they have built their own identities for many many years. And okay I'll just keep are there solutions and going back to the previous presentations what can we do about it and I'm not a big fan of or not that I'm not a big fan but I don't believe too much in boycott. I think that there's a limited potential for change through consumer choices. I think that people need to get involved and I invite you to get involved with my project. I'm directing a project, an educational project in Ecuador. I work with an unprofit organization called La Polarosa Media Project which is a film education organization and we bring education about food to Ecuador. So if you're at all interested I have a sign-up sheet here and you can write your email and be really happy to send you more information about how to get involved. Thanks. Thanks Pilar. We can do one question. Do we have any questions? Okay let's thank Pilar again and we're gonna try to get back on schedule so the next talk we'll try to start around 10 o'clock still.