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Frozen Puerto Rican foods are often framed as convenience and for many families, they are.
This is not about shaming anyone for buying pasteles, alcapurrias, sorullitos, or empanadillas frozen. People are tired, and time is limited. Sometimes the frozen version is what keeps the taste close. I get it, but the other side to this is that traditional food knowledge is not only the recipe. It is the representation of our culture. The practice of keeping it alive. If that gets removed, the food may still exist, but the tradition is replaced.
An increasingly industrialized food system does not just feed us differently. It reshapes how culture gets passed on from generation to generation.
When our food becomes products built for scale and profit versus for the people and their heritage, we have to ask who benefits and why. It’s the hardest realization to see it happen before our eyes.
Sources / further reading:
Traditional Food Knowledge: Renewing Culture and Restoring Health, Jennifer C. Kwik
Time Spent on Home Food Preparation and Indicators of Healthy Eating, Monsivais et al.
Puerto Rican Women’s Perspectives on Food, Identity, and U.S. Colonialism, María E. Rodríguez
Behind the scenes of one of the recipes from my cookbook proposal.
These are my mom’s empanadillas, and making them still reminds me why this book means so much to me. Here’s to one day seeing them between the pages of my own cookbook. ❤️
Some dishes arrive long before we have the language to describe them.
Growing up this was a staple in our household. It was always there when something mattered. Holidays, birthdays, people arriving, people leaving. A celebration for the everyday moments.
Only later did I understand that a dish can be familiar and still be deeply historical. Rice, gandules, sofrito, sazón, pork or no pork, a caldero, every family’s own way of making it. None of it is accidental. It is the result of movement, colonization, African and Spanish influence, island ingredients, and Puerto Ricans making something completely their own.
As for me, I care about looking past the surface of our food. Not to make it feel heavier, but to give it the fullness it has always deserved.
Sometimes the dish everyone recognizes can also be the one we haven’t been taught to fully understand.
#arrozcongandules #puertoricanfood
As a food content creator and as someone who is trying to publish my first cookbook on the recipes I lost when I lost my mom, this matters to me.
Puerto Rico imports about 85% of its food. This number gets repeated often, but not always with the history that made it a fact.
Puerto Rico does not lack fertile land, a tropical growing climate, or the know-how of the farmers themselves, my grandfather included. It happened because the island’s food system was shaped, over generations, to depend on what arrived from the U.S.
So, when I talk about Puerto Rican food, I don’t want only want to talk about recipes. I want to continuously learn and share about the land, policy, and systems that shaped the recipes I inherited.
Food sovereignty in Puerto Rico is not a buzzword. For the curious like me, it is the larger issue beneath all of this.
The question now lingers: can an island known for its food feed itself again?
Sources referenced for this carousel include USDA, the Puerto Rico Census of Agriculture, The Guardian, and reporting on Puerto Rico’s food sovereignty movement.
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