It’s five o’clock on a Monday afternoon, and Avenue La Paz is teeming with activity. This city is a dizzying pinball machine of movement any time of day: car horns jeering, staccato laughter rolling down sidewalks, impassioned phone conversations punctuating life fortissimo. Pedestrians zip and zag through each other; cars clip corners as they head for home; coffee shops pulsate with end-of-work gossip.
But Lima is far more than the sum of her thoroughfares. If you pause for just a moment, you’ll hear the sound of children giggling in the fray, consumed with cones of strawberry ice cream. And you’ll see elderly couples plodding through the chaos, impervious to the rush of life around them.
Sometimes, near the busiest intersections, musicians pick at instrument strings, tap handmade drums, or sing Peruvian melodies of yesteryear. They don’t look at you, and they don’t expect anything. This is a foreign thing for most Americans—an empty exercise without the profit of donations. But Peruvians—from what I have seen—don’t really ask for money, or perform for money. As my tour guide, Alberto, put it, “They play, they sing because it is what they do when times are hard. It lifts us up.”
Peru once suffered from a turbulent economic past. For many years, things were so bad, some communities pooled their rice for communal meals. “We suffered a lot of economic difficulty in the ’80s,” Alberto says, “but when we found stability again, when we found peace, we knew we wanted to rebuild our country around the parts of our culture that we love. Two of these things were music and food.”
Of course, food—prized in many countries, but in Peru, it’s the lifeblood of the people. Peruvian cuisine is informed by a geography that covers almost every known clime and land type; the country boasts jungles, desserts, coasts, mountains, and plains. Thanks to this diversity, local and regional ingredients are boundless—never better showcased than at Lima’s mercado, or city market.
In truth, Lima has several lust-worthy markets, but I toured the one near my hotel in Miraflores, an upscale district enjoying endless rounds of gentrification. With the influx of restaurants in the area, chefs needed a place nearby to get the makings for their daily menus. Thus was born the mercado of Miraflores.
Imagine this: A stadium for food, constructed in Art Deco style, and brimming with more than 300 food stalls arranged in concentric circles. On the outside are tiered displays of produce; star fruit, banana, avocado, melon, pineapple—the list goes on and on—cascade down 10-foot-high displays. Alongside them are tucked bags of nuts and dried fruit, intermingled with cacao leaves and vitality powders. There’s even a stand for holistic, shaman-esque medicine—just tell the owner what your sickness is, and he’ll concoct a mix of natural ingredients sure to cure what ails you.
There’s more, of course—lots more. Meat stands are almost entirely obscured by shanks of beef, fabricated duck, strings of sausage. Kitchenware stands are stocked with clay pots and utensils made from Peruvian wood. Juice bars tout energy-imparting combinations of tropical fruit via neon-bright displays. And among all these stands are nestled tiled cebicherias where shoppers and shopkeepers alike dock for midday fixes of fresh fish and lime. Watching over the entire scene are icons of the Virgin Mary—a common talisman of good luck.
I ask Alberto what the cost of renting a stall is. “They’re not rented, they’re owned,” he says. Families lay claim to a spot in the market and stay there—one generation teaching the next how to butcher, chop, package, cut, and sell. It’s just another example of how seriously Peruvians take their food.
As we leave the mercado, I notice a half-dozen aged men quietly process in front of the entrance. On their shoulders rests a casket, and as they pass us by, the crowd utters, “Presente.” Present. This is one of the more touching parts of life here; after death, everyone gets one last chance to be present, t0 say goodbye to friends and loved ones. It hammers home the point: Central though food is to Peruvian culture, it would be nothing without family. Alberto says it best: “Love and family come first. Food second. Money—eh, it will come sometime.”
This is one article in a series on Peruvian culture and dining. Look for more at diningout.com.
By Jeffrey Steen, Managing Editor