Dear food: Yuca’s relational role in sustaining precarious populations in Ecuador

Abstract

In this article, we argue that communities’ relationship to food helps to shape their experiences of crises. The French term la vie chère – dear life – simultaneously invokes affective relations, collective valuations, and high prices, pointing to the importance of all these dimensions in understanding experiences and responses to rising costs of living. In this sense, the ways through which people apprehend and experience the cultivation and consumption of food influence their possibilities for material sustenance. The study compares the role of yuca, a regional word for cassava, in a coastal and in an Amazonian province of Ecuador, in order to shed light on trajectories of social reproduction in contexts of scarcity. Key to the divergent experiences of cassava in these two sites are histories of colonization and exploitation of land and people that shape social and human–nature relations, as well as expert studies that define and reinforce the tuber’s relational role in diverse ecologies.