One of the more interesting items that comes form the jungle of Ecuador is chicha.
In the jungle, there is food, but keeping it fresh without refrigerators, canning and other modern conveniences is hard. Rodents are everywhere, as are bugs, rot, fungus, and all other kind of things that ruin food.
So, what is chicha? Yucca root, also known as manioc or cassava, is chewed up by the women, spit into a bucket and allowed to ferment. In the jungle, each woman makes her own chicha from her own batch of spit. Then to show their hospitality, each woman wants you to try her own special brand of fermented spit.
You may be asking, “What does chicha taste like?” Elizabeth says it tastes like warm, lumpy beer. Jerry says it tastes like a mixture of skim milk and vinegar. Both descriptions way oversell the quality of the brew.
So why do people make chicha, and more importantly, why in Heaven’s name would anyone consume it? Both are very good questions.
Adults consume chicha for two reasons. Since as long as history has been written, almost every culture and civilization has writings of epic heroes and recipes for beer. People just like to get drunk. I used to like to get drunk, and can’t for the life of me remember why I thought I was having fun. Go to most college campuses on a Thursday, Friday or Saturday and you will find a large number of young people spending their parents money. By studying? No, by drinking fermented beverages and thinking they are having a great time. Most cultures consume alcohol, and the jungles of Ecuador host a number of tribal cultures that like drinking.
The second reason is that from the time jungle children are young, they drink chicha. The water is mud brown and the open sewer from the Andes at 16,000 feet down to the 1000 feet of the jungle. That’s 15,000 feet and miles of human sewage. It’s hard to imagine that fermented spit is more sanitary than anything, especially river water, but in the Amazon chicha is definitely a cleaner beverage. Even a couple of days of fermenting will keep the starch from going bad. Being a liquid, rodents don’t go for the chicha, and mold is less likely to grow so in a really low tech way, chicha is a way to store starch.
Chicha is a comfort food for people from the jungle. It’s what fills your belly when you are a kid. It’s what you drank to get your first buzz as a teenager. It is what you drink after a tough day in the jungle or after a long hunt.
True chicha stories:
> Folks from the jungle will bring chicha on the missionary airplanes when they fly, since you can’t buy chicha in the stores in town. Since it is a fermented drink, it doesn’t like the drop in pressure as the plane goes up to 10,000 feet. Sometime when it is brought out of the storage locker under the plane, the chicha will burst out of the two liter coke bottle it flies in and soak the pilot or ground crew with fermented starch spit.
> I watched a jungle nurse, a man, suck down almost two bowls of chicha after work one day. I saw him again about 45 minutes later, quite tipsy. The alcohol is real.
> Chicha is drunk from a bowl, not a frosted mug. The bowl is made out of a hollowed gourd or a turtle shell.
That’s chicha. I don’t like it, but thousands of people who live in in the amazon rain forest have a right to what they like. Some people like to eat raw fish on a wad of rice, but sushi is a different blog.
