Quinoa Soup: What our consumption means for Bolivian growers

Quinoa Soup, an exploratory documentary, seeks to provide an American audience with stories from the field, providing a rare look into the daily lives of Cecilia and Leocadio, a quinoa-farming couple of the Quechua and Aymara nations.

On February 20th, 2013 the United Nations launched the International Year of Quinoa. A highly nutritious pseudocereal grown primarily in Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador, it is believed that this complete protein could help eradicate world hunger.

However, evidence has shown that an increase in quinoa’s trendiness in countries like the U.S. has left Andean growers unable to afford their traditional staple, resulting in a decrease in quinoa consumption among indigenous farmers and an increase in malnutrition.

In response to the so-called “quinoa quandary,” a plethora of articles have surfaced attempting to answer an oversimplified question: is eating quinoa good or bad?

This past February, Kindred Planet Productions, a team led by Kate Kirby, a recent graduate student in Global Policy at the University of Maine, traveled to Bolivia to investigate “what our consumption means for Bolivian growers.”