Food: a favored topic and occupation

Food has been a constant theme in the Sacred Valley. During the time of the Incas, much of the food that supported the people was grown here. Farmers are still using terraces to grow their food and the 5,000 year old irrigation systems that move the glacier water from the mountains to the fields during the dry months of the year. The hand hewn stone walls mark pathways through the mountains that we can use for our hikes. It never ceases to amaze me when I meet other people, and frequently a parked cow or donkey, on these rural highways.

On my very first full day here, I visited Moray. Moray is an Incan ruin that is believed to have been a sort of agricultural university where the Incas probably experimented with the use of circular terraces to create micro-climates in order to grow a wide diversity of food types. At Moray, I climbed down to the lowest (and hottest) terrace noting that they had varied the height, size, and even tilt of each wall to create the variances. At the bottom I tried to imagine each terrace covered in a different crop. Against the backdrop of the mountains, I felt humbled by the complexity of this great nation of people who had developed such a sustainable system for feeding a large populace.

Barbara and Avishai are both chefs and I count myself as a serious foodie, so conversations at the farm are frequently centered around food. I spilled the beans about Barbara's talents with a smokery. Avishai took us to a place high in the mountains where we could buy fresh trout from a fish farm. I've never seen so many beautiful, huge trouts in one place. A woman was frying up trout over an open fire and for a few dollars, she fried up two fish on the spot for us. Food never tasted so good as we huddled around sharing the fish and a few potatoes and a piece of corn.

That evening, Barbara brined the fish much the same way that she does the fish sold at Neopol. The next day, Fernando, the farm worker and occasional guide to us, built a makeshift smokery. I volunteered to tend the fire despite my total lack of experience with building a fire that is supposed to smolder for 2 plus hours. In the end it was a great group effort resulting in one our finest meals in Peru.