Seeding Empathy Through Food
A conversation on memory, justice, and reconciliation
To truly empathise is not to place yourself in the shoes of another, but to walk along their path. To see yourself in their story and to see them in their wholeness. To feel not only their pain, their grief, and their rage, but also their love, joy, hopes, and dreams. Empathy is more than just the comprehension of one's suffering; it's about resonating with their humanity in its entirety. It’s an invitation to hold space and listen. And when you listen deeply, you're not just hearing their words, you're attuned to the unspoken stories of their soul. Stories that are unimaginably diverse, and yet profoundly tie our liberation together by our shared connection to the lands that sustain us, the seeds that nourish us, and the memories of those whose shoulders we stand on. Empathy is where healing begins, where bridges are built, where solidarity is forged. It is the first step towards liberation.
In many ways, the current state of division in Colombia attests to a crisis of empathy. Spanning over half a century, the armed conflict involving state violence, paramilitary and guerrilla groups, alongside the parallel damage of narcotraffic and organised crime, has inflicted immense harm on countless people.
At the root of this violence sits the vicious control of land, and the consequent unequal access to it. Between the 1930s and the 1950s, Colombia went through a civil war between the Conservative and Liberal parties. Both parties shared the goal of expanding and settling their respective land-owning and political power over as many regions as possible. Hundreds of thousands of peasant farmers were intimidated and forcibly displaced by an othering system, where those who identified with one party’s vision were hunted by the other.
Trapped against the wall since time immemorial, Colombian peasant communities have led uprisings dating back as early as the 1920s. These uprisings were, consequentially, met by government repression. In 1955, an insidious government attack launched by ex-president Gustavo Rojas Pinilla, (known as the War of Villarica) led to the creation of the guerrilla group FARC-EP (now formally disbanded). Since then, the group became the state’s main target of military offensives, among other guerrillas that organised throughout the years.
What started as a peasant-resistance army, did not live up to its values for long. Through kidnapping, forced recruitment of minors, killings and other forms of violence, on top of seeking funds from narcotraffic, FARC-EP shaped into a group that by the 1990s had little to no perceived coherence or moral legitimacy.
Throughout the early 2000s, vulnerable communities in the rural country witnessed a spike in forced disappearances. Thousands of young individuals were being abducted, and at first, many families attributed this phenomenon to armed groups like FARC-EP. At the same time, the Colombian government was pushing a national narrative of “victory” against the guerrillas, flooding the media with “successful” combat reports almost every week. What many didn’t know, and was later unveiled by a courageous group of women, was that the disappearances were the result of military-led extrajudicial killings (known in Colombia as ‘false-positives’), to falsely report a high-toll of combat deaths of FARC-EP combatants. Several army officers and former state employees have publicly admitted to this atrocity.
This war tactic, institutionalised under the government’s “Democratic Security” policy, not only pressured soldiers to kill and hide thousands of bodies in common graves but also incentivised them with monetary rewards or days off, creating a profound mistrust between the state and the people. This erosion of trust has fueled the cycle of violence and deepened divisions within the nation.
After several unsuccessful attempts, the government and FARC-EP finally signed a peace deal in 2016, a tremendous opportunity and multi-layered process that remains stagnant due to the lack of political will that followed the agreement. As uncertainty casts a bigger shadow over Colombia, one thing rings true every passing day: over fifty years of violence* have left communities alienated from their territories, cultures, and each other's struggles.
*The previous context was distilled to lay out a landscape for the conversation we want to share with you today. We are aware of the many nuances and milestones within the Colombian armed conflict missing here that can easily, and have, taken entire books to mention in full.
We believe in the power of stories. They can either contribute to consolidating the power of a few, or to amplify those who have been left at the margins. Everywhere around the globe, we are confronted with narratives that seek to dominate not only our collective understanding of the world, but also the way we navigate it. Desperation, fear, and powerlessness can leave us feeling numb to what we see around us. But when we cut through the noise, listen to each other, and reclaim our own stories, our voices can be the catalyst for a shared, powerful sense of belonging.
Like many Colombians, A Growing Culture staff member Alejandra grew up within the heaviness of the country’s unyielding contradictions — the warmth of its people juxtaposed with the chilling daily stories of violence, the joy and vibrance of its cultures held in tension with collective grief and outrage, the undying hope that the communities most affected by war held on to vote ‘Yes’ to the peace deal, and the noxious apathy of those who only envision resolution through brutal revenge. Ale’s passion for food and deep interest in storytelling and memory work have been driving forces in her life, and have also profoundly shaped our work at AGC. Over the last few years, Ale has been working independently on a project and a resulting book, Para el Alma. Soon to be released, the book explores the stories of women hailing from diverse regions and cultures of Colombia whose children, brothers, or spouses fell victim to extrajudicial violence perpetrated by the Colombian state. However, their connection goes beyond the shared stories of loss. Ale uses food as a common thread that weaves together their histories, their cultures, and their connections to land, with memories of joy and hope.
You are currently working on a book, Para el Alma, using food as a lens to connect the experiences of the mothers and sisters of state-led extrajudicial killings in Colombia. Can you explain the background and context of these cases, and how you came to learn about them?
I've heard of the struggle against state-led violence since I was in high school. ‘False Positives’ cases were something that everyone knew about from the radio, or TV. Those affected were mostly young men and people who had very little access to resources or education — people who were systematically on the sidelines of Colombia. And they were being targeted because of that vulnerability. Perhaps because the perpetrators of these crimes thought that no one would care or ask for justice. But it was the total opposite.
The stories highlighted in this book come from women who are part of the Madres de Falsos Positivos (MAFAPO) and Movice organisations in Colombia that have been fighting against state-sponsored violence for over a decade now. What's so fundamental about MAFAPO is that when their stories started to gain attention in mainstream media, it became clear that war was not only present in remote territories, but that it was right around the corner from Bogotá, the country's capital — a city that, in many ways, was a bubble isolated from the atrocities that many rural communities had to endure every passing day.
MAFAPO's loud cry for truth and justice uncovered that what happened to their children, spouses, and brothers, was something that was happening to other families across Colombia. Their resistance inspired more mothers that had gone through the same thing, to denounce the violence. And so the national movement in reclamation of forced disappearances and extrajudicial killings gained force.
Where did this project come from? What was its root?
The idea of this project came to mind in 2021, when I was doing a course on business models with social impact. I didn't have a clear vision at the time of what exactly I wanted to do, but I knew that it had to be related to food, because it's always been a huge passion of mine — a passion that comes from my grandmother and all of the delicious things that she would cook for the whole family.
So at the time, around April 2021, Colombia was going through an uprising because of a set of reforms that the government wanted to pass. We were on the streets pretty much every day, riots every day, protests every day. And what happened was that we started to hear about a lot of cases of forced disappearance, torture, and killings within the context of these protests. And you would see groups of mothers, like ‘Mamás Primera Línea’, going out to protect their children that were out on the streets. They would also put up fires and huge pots, and cook hundreds of meals so the protestors would be fed and nourished. They would stay on for whole days alongside their children, resisting the police. Mothers dressed themselves with things like shields, protection goggles, hats, and gloves, and they would be the first line of defence. That moved me, how tremendous it was that women were right there on the frontlines of the uprising. To me, it was just impossible to separate the project that I wanted to make for this course from the social reality that I was living through at that time.
So when all of these cases of police brutality and state violence were flooding social media, you'd also see members of MAFAPO and other women-led organisations protesting too, claiming that what was happening to the young men and women in these protests was very similar to what their own children, brothers, and partners went through many, many years ago – that these state crimes were so out there in the spotlight, and no one was doing anything. And so they were there to say, “History is repeating itself, again. The state is disappearing men, they’re killing them, they're torturing them. This cannot happen.” That's when I knew that I wanted to work with this group of women. And my research began.
I started to learn more about them and their history because I knew about their struggle, but not all the details. I came across an interview where one of the women shared that still to this day, over a decade after the disappearance and killing of her son, people dare to justify this tragedy by saying that “He must have been doing something wrong”, or that “There had to be a good reason behind his killing.” That, “What else could she expect of her son’s future if they were so poor, with no resources for him to have a career, or to ‘succeed’ in life?” That, sooner or later, this would be his fate. To this, she reflected on how heartbreaking it is that there are people out there who believe that because they are vulnerable, it makes them some kind of second-class citizens who “deserve” such a tragedy happen to them. “They don’t see me as their equal”, she said. That’s when I thought, what could be something that would allow people to see themselves in the story of one of these women? Since I wanted to do something with food, that's where things connected, because we all have to eat. It's something we all have in common.
Could you share how you connect memory, food, and women in your book?
In the context of conflict, memory is a fundamental element, because you have to tell the story of what happened, in the hope that history doesn't repeat itself. Non-repetition is one of the pillars of justice and peace because you want to make sure that everyone understands the conditions that led to violence, and take steps to move forward in a different direction. But memory work is usually centred around tragedy, loss, and pain. What I think the element of food brings to this project, and to any space really, is the fact that memories around food are usually centred around love and care. When you think about a special meal you’ve had, you think not only about the food on that plate, but also about the people you shared it with, the place that you were at in your life, the conversations you had at the time. It's not only about ingredients and flavours, but the whole story of what was happening at the moment you had it.
So I think food gives us an opportunity for the women to tell us who they are, and who their loved ones were through the meals that they love. It’s an opportunity to hear about their dreams, hopes, and memories of joy. It's huge for transformation because it allows us to learn about them, not just from the fact that there was a tragedy that happened in their lives, but from the beautiful memories they shared with their loved ones — say, a birthday feast or a family trip — things you don't often hear when you talk about these cases, and I think that's humanising. And in those stories, you can also see yourself because you've also probably had a memorable birthday treat or a lovely shared meal with family and friends. And that's where I think we all can connect.
A lot of the mainstream media coverage tends to reduce the victims of violence to numbers. But your approach goes into unpacking so much more than just how many victims were affected. Could you tell us why this is so important in the Colombian context?
Colombia has been going through an armed conflict for more than half a century. You can see the magnitude of it through numbers, but if you're going to try and tell each individual story, I think we would need a hundred lifetimes to share because we've been through so much.
Fortunately, I feel like we're at a stage where more of us realise how fundamental it is that the story of the Colombian armed conflict is told from the people who lived it, in their flesh and bones. The radical work of the latest Truth Commission has made this perfectly clear, and it inspires me every day. The time is right to start telling our stories.
And we can't just focus on how scandalous the figures are, because, sadly, these numbers just keep going up. We have a very popular figure, which is 6,402 (for the number of estimated victims of state-sponsored violence between 2002-2008), but that's a number that we've most likely passed. I think it's important to say their names and see their faces, because I'm sure that in their stories you will see a lot more of yourself there than you would expect. So it's also about recognising that we, as Colombians, are all brothers and sisters from the same land and territory. And I think that only happens through stories, and through listening to each other instead of looking at numbers.
It’s so fascinating that you chose food as the thread that weaves all these different stories together. Could you share more about your personal connection to food, and how it, in turn, helped you connect with the families you are writing about?
My personal connection to food definitely comes from my grandmother. It was her love language, and she loved cooking for everyone. The kitchen was like her sacred space. I see cooking as a selfless act because when you do it for others it’s completely about them. You want them to taste that dish and feel cared for and loved. And my grandmother loved making us feel her love for us through her food. I think I only realised that when she passed away, sadly. We have a word in Spanish, sazón, which is what we call the magic that people have that imprints in the food they cook. We all have our own sazón, which is our own essence. Sazón is not something that you teach, it's not something that you learn in culinary schools. It's something that comes from the heart.
When my grandmother passed, I missed her sazón, because no one cooked the same way she did. Everything she made had her soul, her whole spirit in it. And so I remember, she used to bake birthday cakes for everyone on their special day, and I missed it so much that I started baking in the hopes that I would make something that was as good and similar. Although it was not the same, I would get pretty close to finding that essence, which made me really excited and energised to keep on baking and to keep on cooking. And when I share something that I made with people and see their faces lighting up, I understand why my grandmother used to love cooking so much. Because it is also a love language of mine. Maybe I inherited that from her.
Later in life, when my professional work led me towards food systems, and I started to learn about land struggles and peasant struggles not only in Colombia but also in Latin America, you realise that your food tells a bigger story than just what's on the plate. It's about the place where those foods came from, that landscape, the people who harvested it, and the route that those seeds had to travel to get to where they are. That fascinated me, and I firmly believe it's a powerful connector.
Can you share more about the significance of the title Para el Alma and how it relates to the memories and stories in the book?
Para el Alma in Spanish means ‘For the soul’, and I think it speaks to the purpose of these stories, that we’re honouring their memory through the food that they loved. It’s a gift to and for them, a celebration of who they were. When we’re cooking and sharing that meal together, we’re doing it in memory of their lives. To reinforce that this is something that is done with all the love and care for them. That they are still present with us. That their story will not be forgotten.
Food has the power to nourish not only your body but also your spirit. Food speaks of who you are, your ancestry and your lineage. These stories and recipes have been carried through many generations of these women’s families, and now they’re going to be immortalised in this book. People around the world can also cook them and make them part of their story.
What is the significance of recipes in remembering?
Recipes are typically understood as guidelines to make a specific meal. But in this book, they are much more than that. They are a moment in time — they represent an entire landscape and a whole lot of emotions. Recipes are made from heritage. It’s that homecoming to who we are. It’s the remembering of those who fought and endured everything, so that we can be here today. When we follow those recipes, we honour not only ourselves, but also those who came before us.
So, for example, you have a story like Betty's, where her recipe is the birthday lunch that she cooked for her son when he turned 18. That's the significance of recipes here — they are sharing with us a moment in time that sits deep in their hearts, something they can look back to with warmth and the deepest kind of love. A piece of their story that they want to share with the world in honour of their loved one. Other stories highlight their loved one's favourite dish, a meal they had at a family lunch, or something that is representative of their birthplace.
The mothers and sisters you’ve interviewed are not just subjects of the book. Over the course of your time building trust and listening to their stories, you’ve also developed deep relationships with them through food by organising shared spaces. Could you share the significance of these spaces, how you organised them, and how they turned out?
After I introduced myself to them and I started to learn more about each of their stories, there was a common factor in most of them. Many come from peasant families in the countryside. Some of them had to endure forced displacement when they were young, or they were displaced when their loved ones were killed. So there's this uprooting, that happens at some point in their life. When I was talking to them, they would tell me about how much they missed the countryside and cooking with fire, how much they knew about caring for the land, either planting seeds, harvesting corn, or taking that corn meal and turning it into arepas or envueltos.
I wanted all of them to have a space where they could reconnect with those roots. And so we visited a couple of farms to go back to the land and maybe learn more about agroecology, or just to plant special plots in memory of their loved ones, as we did in an urban farm in Bogotá. And we've celebrated special occasions together, like the end of the year, where we gathered around the fire and cooked sancocho, which is a very traditional Colombian soup.
For me, it's so important that they all have the space to connect back with their cultural foods and with the land because the soul of the project is not only telling their personal stories but also highlighting the connections they had to their birthplaces. And to me, it just made sense to have that in parallel with the writing process.
How do you envision these spaces growing and evolving over the rest of your project?
Every woman in the book has chosen a dish to honour the memory of their loved ones, and we are going to be cooking each recipe together. And in these spaces — whether a farm or the kitchen — they are free to invite anyone from their families to join and cook with them. That's one of our next steps, and I think it’s going to be a beautiful moment because when you share a meal and sit together at a table with someone, there's this magic that brews the opportunity for more stories and memories to come up.
Your work through this book is focused not only on weaving together individual experiences and memories around food, but also narratives that go beyond the plate. How do you contextualise these stories within the larger landscape of Colombia?
As I’ve mentioned, each woman in the book comes from a different birthplace, and they all carry different culinary cultures and cultural identities. Someone who comes from the Caribbean carries different traditions than someone who comes from the Andes. That gives us an opportunity to learn not only about their individual experiences, but also the realities of what each of those territories are like. We can also connect the many different ways in which the same food is used in different territories, shedding light on the diversity of who we are as Colombians. It also gives us a bigger picture of what conflict and life in rural Colombia look like, with some of the women’s own experiences of forced displacement. And I think telling our stories through food makes them more accessible, because usually when you talk about violence in Colombia, it's hard to escape the feeling of heaviness and just pure horror. But when you do it through food, I think there's a larger opportunity to see our shared humanity — to see ourselves there. It's like a mirror.
In what ways do you believe the inclusion of recipes and the memories associated with them will help bridge the gap of understanding and empathy between readers and the women in the book?
As Colombians, we hold a culinary culture that's present in all of us. Take, for example, a story like Betty's, who chose to remember her son with a sancocho. I'm sure almost everyone in Colombia has had sancocho at least once in their life. And it's usually a celebratory dish you have when you’re out with your family, or on a road trip, or when you are being celebrated. So I think traditional meals are something that we can all relate to because we've all had them at some point in our lives, and we all have a story that's significant to that specific meal. So if you also want to honour the memory and the life of a loved one in the book, you can also cook it yourself. Connecting to those stories through something as intimate as cooking sparks that human connection and that sense of empathy in a way that reading a really sad and heavy story just can't.
If we want to continue doing memory work in Colombia or anywhere in the world, we should also ask ourselves if leaning into pain should always be the way to go. And that’s what I want to challenge with this book. I think that doing it through memories of joy and memories of love can be as powerful as telling a story that's explicit in violence. I get how that can make you feel outraged and make you want to demand justice, but I also think there's a fine line between telling a raw story and revictimising the people who went through it.
Considering the sensitive and often dangerous nature of the subject matter, how did you navigate creating safe spaces where these women feel comfortable sharing their experiences?
Whenever we meet to visit a farm or cook together, what's most important to me, is that we all feel safe and that we respect the intimacy that the stories hold. These stories carry so much value, and I am very aware of the sacredness of so many of their memories. Whenever we come together, I make sure that it's them, me, and maybe two or three people from my own family or a very close friend to take pictures and document what happens, but that's it. When we need to have a conversation that is most likely going to be included in the book, I try to do it in a safe space, whether it's a restaurant that I know will give us a table where we'll be undisturbed, or a food market they feel familiar with. Some of them have welcomed me at their homes too.
So, to me, it's more about respecting the intimacy of those stories and making them feel like their story is safe with me. Whenever I finish a story, I let them read it, and I want to make sure that I am there, so I never send files or a PDF online. I meet them in person and share it with them so they can read while I pay close attention to their body language to make sure I catch if there's something off at any point. The green light for me is when they read through it, and they're smiling. That's what tells me that I've done my job because they see themselves from a place that allows them to smile through a story that, for so many years, has been so heavy and rooted in pain. I want them to be able to read this book and feel that they and their loved ones were represented in all their wholeness as human beings.
What lessons or insights did you personally gain from working on this project and spending time with the women and their families?
The biggest learning is how enriching and valuable it is to build trust. I think I made the right choice when I decided that I wanted to build relationships before I even started to ask questions. I don't even do interviews, to be honest, and that's part of my own creative process. We meet somewhere, we sit, we share a meal or a coffee, and we just have a conversation.
Building trust with the people that you want to collaborate with, the people that you want to build bridges with, and walk your path with, is fundamental, and it should be the first step. And leaning on that has brought me peace, knowing that these stories are going to do justice to who they are, and who their loved ones were. Now I’m grateful that we’ve built special bonds and that we can count on each other. That’s the most precious part of putting trust first, because, from that, you get to learn so much more about them than if you went up to them and said, “I have 10 questions, can you answer them?”
How do you envision the role of food and culinary traditions in Colombian culture as a pathway to peace, hope, and dignity?
When you learn about the armed conflict in Colombia, you realise that land is at the root of many of the injustices that communities go through. Land is the home to everything that we are. You can’t grow food if you don’t have seeds, and you can’t grow seeds if you don’t have land. So when we tell our stories through food, we're also telling a story of the land, and of the practices and cultures of the people that live in that land. The book then becomes a window to see the realities of our lands, the realities of our people, and also the richness and diversity of our territories through food.
We’re still going through a peace process that started in 2012. The peace deal was signed in 2016, and now we're supposed to be in the post-conflict era. But it's so hard to talk about post-conflict if you don't address the root of it, which is land. Previous governments were not interested in building a proper land reform, which could at least be the start of addressing the inequalities that are lived in rural Colombia — inequalities that are at the centre of the violence.
But we can't wait for policies to pave the way towards peace. To be honest, the past weeks have confronted me with what ‘peace’ means, and what ‘liberation’ entails. I feel much more called to speak of liberation instead of peace now. But it's a challenge to step outside of that box in my local context when peace is a term we have put everywhere for generations, like a dream one wishes for out loud over and over. But I think peace-building can be a fundamental pillar for liberation, and both need the undivided commitment from the communities that believe another world is possible.
We all need to take responsibility for how we are building that peace within our own circles and laying the ground for our collective liberation. And it doesn’t have to be heavy; that’s why we won’t succeed if we do it alone. And it doesn’t have to feel overwhelming all the time; that’s why we need to collectively weave our way through. And I think there are many ways to do that. It can start with something as simple as seeing parts of yourself in the story of a mother who lost her kid and chooses to call them into life by cooking their favourite dish.
Could you share some details on when you plan to launch your book, and how those inspired by your work can support this project?
It is most likely that we publish the book with Hammbre de Cultura, an independent publishing house based in Colombia that specialises in food culture and has brought to life a remarkable set of award-winning books. With all stories finished by the end of this year, 2024 will be the start of the book’s design, illustrations, recipe photos, etc. We are currently looking for funding partners who want to support the production and print, making this dream, years in the making, a reality. If someone reads this and feels inspired to contribute and collaborate to help us move forward, they are more than welcome to reach out!
This article Ale wrote for our substack a few months ago, highlights the interplay between memory and imagination in the context of agricultural history and the struggles of Indigenous and peasant communities globally. Ale reflects on how colonisation disrupted cultural memory and ancestral agricultural practices, leading to a loss of diverse ways of caring for the land, and emphasises the importance of going upstream, reconnecting with ancestral wisdom, and incorporating it into efforts for future generations.
This article by Andrew E. Miller for Amazon Watch uncovers that extrajudicial killings of Indigenous people in the Colombian Amazon are not a thing of the past. Seeking truth, justice and reparations for the Remanso Massacre in 2022, a group of grassroots spokespeople and their supporters confronted Colombian government officials in Washington, D.C. last week.
This article by Camilo Pardo for El Espectador tells the story of Raúl Carvajal, a father who spent 13 years demanding justice for the death of his son, soldier Raúl Antonio Carvajal, who refused to follow the Army’s orders to carry out extrajudicial killings. Earlier this year, 19 soldiers expelled from their battalion in 2008 for refusing to kill civilians spoke at a public hearing to expose the institution.
Every resource produced by A Growing Culture, whether a newsletter, article, post, or design, results from countless hours of research, reflection, and the synthesis of profound conversations held both within our team and with our partners and comrades. Behind the scenes, a wealth of effort goes into making these conversations happen, from overseeing our day-to-day operations, and securing our funding, to forging deep relationships with communities around the world who are leading food systems transformation. These relationships fuel our thoughts, inform our words, and inspire our actions.
We recognise that no single person can take credit for the work we collectively produce, which is why we prefer to sign as an organisation rather than as individuals. We believe that no idea is inherently our own and welcome anyone who sees value in our work to translate it, build upon it, adapt it to their own contexts, or share it however they see fit.