Exploring traditional Colombian foods and customs: a contemporary perspective on ancestral products

Abstract

The OIR, Regional Intersystemic Observatory, of the Colombian Universidad Nacional Abierta y a Distancia (UNAD), as one of the organizational devices that comprehensively and collectively manages community outreach strategies, energizes service learning through interaction and participatory action with the territories in one of its lines of work.  From this perspective, a work with an exploratory and descriptive methodological approach was developed in four representative regions of Colombia: Andean, Caribbean, Orinoquia and Pacific in order to identify uses, customs and perspectives of new generations in relation to their own ancestral foods of each territory. Through 559 surveys applied in each area, the use, acquisition, conservation, transmission and symbolic value of these were addressed in the face of the problem of food security and their articulation with peasant-based social organizations, being peasant activity or also called small-scale family agriculture who contribute significantly to the micro-territories. Among the main results are: the linking of ancestral foods as a differential factor in the development of communities, as well as the relevance of geographical location compared to habits, uses and transmission of traditions to future generations.