This is Part IV of New Worlder’s first series: Food & The Amazon Rainforest, which explores the relationships and possibilities surrounding food in one of the most diverse and vulnerable ecosystems on Earth.
The Mercado de Belén in Iquitos changes every day. Every hour really. Being the only large settlement in the Peruvian Amazon, a vast array of flora and fauna, some of it rare and endangered, is being noisily driven in by peke-peke’s (motorized canoes) and on overloaded riverboats that start the journey downriver as far as a week away and pick up a little something at every village they pass. Some foraged fruits may only appear for weeks or even days at a time. Parts of the market can flood as the tide rolls in too, depending on the time of the year. Houses in the adjoining neighborhood of Belén are built on balsa wood so when the water from the Itaya River is high, and for much of the year it is, the village floats.
Iquitos is an island surrounded by the Amazon, Itaya, and Nanay rivers with no roads connecting it to the rest of the world. Low cost airlines reach the city daily from Lima, but it still feels closed off and otherworldly. A series of booms and busts – rubber, oil, drugs – have shaped the city in a strange way, leaving restaurants filled with azulejo tiles and a giant hotel tower near the main plaza abandoned for decades. There’s ironwork throughout the city designed by the firm of Gustav Eiffel. There’s strange psychedelic music like chicha, a form of Amazonian cumbia that developed in the 1960s. Ecolodges, river cruises, and ayahuasca are bringing more tourists to Iquitos every day, however, food has begun to bring in visitors as well. Nearly every Peruvian chef with any interest in Amazonian ingredients began their understanding of rainforest biodiversity by coming to the Mercado de Belén.
As you enter the market area you are hit with heady smells that come and go with the wind. There are brief moments of the sweet smells of passionfruit and oranges, then there will a waft of animal flesh decaying in the sun. Death and decomposition follow your every step. The sight of butchered armadillos and rare creatures like Dusky Titi monkeys and Keel Billed toucans in small, filthy cages cause you to question humanity. Women donning aprons are snapping the necks of chickens and intestines are being pulled out of pigs. Everyone is shouting, trying to sell something: jungle tobacco rolled up in pieces of newspaper; turtle eggs; pink Hannah Montana backpacks. It’s intense. An overload of the senses.