Few books have been more influential in the history of the Americas than Sweetness and Power. Thirty years ago, Sidney Mintz laid the foundation for generations of scholars interested in the political economy of agriculture and the role of crops as pivotal commodities in global capitalism. Since then, researchers across the hemisphere—and throughout the Global South—have sought to identify other commodities whose multidimensional trajectories mirror that of sugar, linking themes such as imperialism, colonialism, enslavement, land dispossession, and the cyclical booms and busts of commodity-based economies. The Quinoa Bust, anthropologist Emma McDonell’s debut work, stands out as one of the most compelling examples of “Mintzian” scholarship, offering a much-needed revitalization of crop-centered studies in the Andes and Latin America.
The Quinoa Bust takes readers to a frequently overlooked corner of the world: Puno and the Andean Altiplano, a high plateau sustained by the Lake Titicaca basin at over 12,000 feet above sea level. Globally renowned as the home of the world’s highest navigable lake, the Altiplano has long served as a stage for what historian Nils Jacobsen (1993) has called “mirages of transition”—projected and contested visions of romanticized pasts and idealized futures that affirm the region’s material potential while simultaneously resenting and denying its Indigenous human geography. Throughout Peru’s national history, the Altiplano has been the site of several events central not only to the country, but also to the broader region. Among the most significant was the expansion of a wool industry rooted in local, community-based shepherding economies but reaching both domestic and international markets. This economic network, which connected Lima and Liverpool, briefly positioned the region as a hub of economic development. However, in recent decades—and particularly in the aftermath of the Internal Armed Conflict (1980–2000)—Puno, similar to much of the Peruvian Andes, came to be viewed through lenses of poverty, marginalization, and cultural backwardness. It is within this context that quinoa emerged.
McDonell’s book is organized into three equally compelling sections. Following a comprehensive introduction that explores both the distant and recent histories of quinoa, the author positions quinoa as a focal point for analyzing contemporary boom–bust trajectories, local–global dynamics and terms of exchange, and the value of crops in illuminating “relationships between race/racism, coloniality, commercial processes, international development paradigms, and the encompassing agrifood system” (p. 23). Each chapter follows its own timeline within a broader historical arc. Beginning with its “discovery” and the promise it held for both producers and consumers, quinoa underwent a process of rearticulation and rhetorical transformation to become globally consumable. Much like the early modern narrative surrounding the potato, quinoa’s sudden availability in international markets challenged entrenched racialized discourses—discourses that were only disrupted by the culinary and hyper-nationalist boom in Peru during the twenty-first century.
The book’s second section focuses on the boom and its hidden narratives. As quinoa became a miracle food widely consumed by the upper-middle class in Lima and New York, quinoa-producing families and communities confronted at least two major power dynamics that rearranged their everyday lives. With peaking demand, quinoa faced the quintessential agricultural dilemma: the limitedness of land and the crop’s frontier. Unlike similar situations, however, the expansion of quinoa production required a “reimagining and remaking of the region’s agroecologies and commercial relationships” (p. 120). Unlike similar scenarios, rearticulating the politics of production for quinoa did not entail a top-down approach. Instead, this recalibration relied upon the technocratization of agrarian knowledge and seemingly neoliberal técnicos who envisioned the Altiplano’s mercantile future. Interventions on the landscape, as both a physical and social space, only preceded interventions on quinoa itself. Part two of the book also examines the making of “quality quinoa” and the quest for crop standardization, perhaps one of the most widespread and enduring legacies of the Green Revolution.
The final substantial section of McDonell’s book addresses the bust. This phase is marked by a familiar and devastating combination: shifting geographies of production, declining prices, waning incentives among Altiplano producers, and the loss of political capital among técnicos. These factors contributed to the partial collapse of a decade-long local economic boom. Paradoxically, during this same period, quinoa prices reached record highs globally, and growing international demand—particularly from the United States—continued to drive the decentralization of production. Amid this shifting landscape, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) detected traces of agricultural chemicals in Peruvian quinoa, intensifying the crisis. In this context, the politics of power and production hinge heavily on “trust,” understood as a continually negotiated form of capital. The Quinoa Bust vividly illustrates how the end of the first cycle of the quinoa boom not only undermined the material foundations necessary for quinoa cultivation, but also disrupted the sociocultural relationships that sustain trust as a stabilizing force in inherently unequal exchanges. In response, Altiplano producers have embarked on what appears to be a final attempt to reclaim their place in national and international markets by turning to the now-ubiquitous strategy of branding. Despite earnest efforts to coordinate the diverse interests within the production structure, McDonell presents the enduring issue of unequal access to redistribution—a persistent challenge for agrarian cooperatives and collective endeavors in the Andes—as an insurmountable obstacle.
The Quinoa Bust is more than a tour de force through the altiplano or an analysis of the politics and policies surrounding quinoa production. It is a compelling call to reconsider the role of crops in the context of late capitalism. In its primarily financial form, contemporary capitalism continues to reinforce the enduring material and cultural legacies of colonialism and imperialism, particularly in its patterns of consumption. The Quinoa Bust exposes and dissects these structures, revealing their ongoing influence in sustaining hidden inequalities and perpetuating an unattainable neoliberal promise of progress. McDonell achieves this through outstanding ethnographic work that is skillfully integrated with archival research. Her book is a model for future studies on crops and capitalism in the Andes and beyond.
