Decolonize Your Diet

On the intersection of decolonization and veganism.

Mar 01, 2025

When Joe Yonan asked me to contribute recipes to his cookbook Mastering the Art of Plant-Based Cooking, he also asked if I wanted to write an essay. Immediately, I knew what I wanted to explore: the intersection of decolonization and veganism, and how the past is connected to a plant-based future. Below is the full essay from the cookbook, which features three chefs that show that cooking with plant-based ingredients can be a practice in decolonization.

Decolonize Your Diet

Starting in the fifteenth century, colonization impacted all aspects of Indigenous culture in the Americas. European colonists uprooted Indigenous peoples from their homes, enslaved them, indoctrinated language and religion, and exploited natural resources for economic gain. Colonial practices destroyed Indigenous food systems and introduced foreign plants and animals, transforming many Indigenous recipes, disappearing others, and creating new dishes.

Peru's Indigenous peoples, for instance, prepared ceviche in precolonial times. But its contemporary and most traditional preparation—fish cured in lime juice with salt, red onions, and native hot peppers—is a product of colonization because Spain's colonial foodways introduced two of its ingredients: limes and red onions. Colonization also created Mexico's emblematic carnitas taco of pulled pork atop native corn tortillas after the Spanish introduced pigs to the Americas. And in the United States, dairy foods— milkshakes, ice cream, cheese, and more—became a product of colonization when Europeans brought cows to the Americas.

Before colonization, though, Indigenous cooking in the Americas was largely plant-based.

In Peru, Indigenous peoples thrived on a diet of native ingredients such as quinoa, potatoes, corn, hot peppers, and wild herbs and plants. They also used food storage methods, such as freeze-drying potatoes into chuño, which has a ten-year shelf life, in case of scarcity or drought. Quinoa, dubbed "The Mother Grain," was an important source of protein for the Inca. The Inca also cooked animal protein such as fish and llama, and they cultivated most of their foods according to seasonality and at challenging high elevations in the Andes.

In Mexico, Indigenous peoples cooked with native ingredients such as squash, beans, corn, and xitomatl—tomato, in the Indigenous language Náhuatl. They also developed nixtamalization, the process of treating corn with lime (calcium hydroxide) water to remove toxins produced by fungi, making the corn more workable, and increasing its nutritional value. This is the basis for making corn tortillas, tamales, tostadas, sopes, and all the other dishes that start out as masa. Some animal protein, such as birds or fish, was also part of their diet, which complemented their agricultural system, yielding diverse, nutritious foods.

In North America, Indigenous peoples developed community-based regional food systems rooted in permaculture. Here, the Three Sisters—squash, beans, and corn—complement one another nutritionally and form the foundation of Indigenous culinary traditions. They also carry spiritual significance and, when grown together, work synergistically to create fertile soil. Across North America, some animal protein, such as deer or other native game, was also part of their diet.

Today, chefs and home cooks in Peru, Mexico, the United States, and elsewhere are seeking to reconnect with their ancestral food cultures by decolonizing contemporary recipes, and in the process are unearthing the deep roots of plant-based cooking in the Americas. But what does it mean to decolonize a dish? Is it simply to cook only with precolonial Indigenous ingredients? Is it possible to undo the evolution of traditional dishes that were transformed by colonization? The answer is not that simple.

Let's take a closer look at Peru's ceviche. Precolonization, some five hundred years ago, the Inca cooked ceviche by curing fish for hours in the juice of tumbo, a jungle citrus similar to a sour orange, mixed with salt and native hot peppers. After the Spanish colonists introduced limes and red onions to Peru's cuisine, ceviche's ingredients changed. But postcolonization, Japanese indentured workers who settled in Lima transformed ceviche even further. They shortened the curing time and quickly tossed the catch of the day with salt, fresh lime juice, onions, and hot peppers. Colonization transformed the dish's ingredients and its preparation.

To strictly decolonize ceviche would mean to cook it like the Inca, without limes and without onions. It would also mean erasing the culinary contributions of Japanese culture. Should that be the goal of decolonization?

Three chefs are confronting the challenges of decolonizing recipes in different ways.

From Peru's Pacific Coast, over the Andes Mountains, and into the Amazon jungle, chef Virgilio Martinez forages for native ingredients at different elevations to create a tasting menu at his Lima restaurant, Central. He also works with farmers and producers, especially in the Andes, to feature their ingredients on his menus. And he cooks using Indigenous techniques such as pachamanca, an underground earthen oven that slow-cooks buried ingredients with hot rocks. By using native ingredients in situ, instead of re-creating traditional postcolonial dishes, Martinez is effectively cooking through a decolonization lens.

All food evolves over time. Just as immigrants adapt their cuisines to fit the ingredients of their new homeland, these chefs are showing that decolonization can be an exercise in looking to the past as a way to imagine the future.

Based in Los Angeles, Jocelyn Ramirez is a chef and author of La Vida Verde, a cookbook with plant-based recipes inspired by her Mexican roots. One of her recipes for tacos eschews pulled pork for shredded jackfruit, and another combines tofu, tempeh, and mushrooms to resemble chorizo. Cooking with plant-based ingredients instead of pork is one way Ramirez is decolonizing the taco. But she also builds community through her food business, Todo Verde. From cooking classes to farmers markets and other events, she is trying to bring food equity to LA neighborhoods and promote a healthy plant-based lifestyle that celebrates a shared ancestral culture.

In the United States, Oglala Lakota chef Sean Sherman, aka the Sioux Chef, is revitalizing the nutritional plant-diverse Indigenous cuisine of his ancestors. While his cooking includes some native animal proteins, it eliminates ingredients that didn't exist before colonization—such as dairy, wheat, flour, cane sugar, beef, pork, and chicken. But he also embraces a modern Indigenous perspective and cooks with nonnative plants. With a focus on education, Sherman opened the Indigenous Food Lab, a cooking school and restaurant that showcases decolonized dishes, foods, and techniques of North America's Indigenous peoples.

As a chef and former omnivore who turned vegan several years ago, I was afraid I would lose my cultural identity if I stopped eating the traditional animal-protein dishes I grew up with in Peru. But chefs such as these have shown me—and others—that cooking with plant-based ingredients can be a practice in decolonization. After experimenting with veganizing several dishes, I had a realization:

The culinary essence of my country's traditional recipes is not the animal protein, but rather the combination of flavors, hot peppers, spices, textures, and stories that have shaped a dish over centuries.

Learning to cook Peru's traditional dishes with plant-based ingredients has done the opposite of what I feared it might. I haven't merely preserved my cultural identity while going vegan; I've forged an even deeper connection to my ancestral roots.

La Yapa

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