Recovering Our Ancestral Foodways: Indigenous Traditions as a Recipe for Living Well

My book manuscript, entitled, Recovering Our Ancestral Foodways: Indigenous Traditions as a Recipe for Living Well will be published in Summer 2024. This manuscript is the first relational ethnography of Māori and Quechua peoples’ philosophies of well-being, traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) and contributions to sustainable food systems. Based on over ten years of fieldwork in Aotearoa New Zealand and Peru, the book explores how Quechua and Māori peoples describe, define, and enact well-being through the lens of foodways and how they operationalise their understanding through the broader goals of promoting physical and spiritual well-being and community wellness. Recovering Our Ancestral Foodways relies on the Indigenous-based research framework of investigation, that I designed, what I call the Khipu Model, based on an Andean knowledge-keeping system and rooted in the ways of knowing of Māori and Quechua peoples, values, and belief systems.