Food, Community, and Resistance in Hyperinflationary Venezuela

By Oriele Benavides

The Venezuelan crisis of 2014-2015, broadly characterized by a drastic drop in oil production and prices and harsh international economic sanctions, caused absolute disorder and intensified a diaspora that continues today. Effects included hyperinflation, beginning in 2015, that reached stratospheric levels when it hit 103,008% in 2018. At that moment, the government’s rhetoric presented the situation as an “economic war,” offering a framework that emphasized a polarized vision on the matter, while shifting focus away from its own responsibility in the managing of the crisis. The production and distribution of food was one of the sectors most affected by the crisis. In the collective memory, these harsh years are remembered via ingredients that came to represent time: the year of the mango, the year of the cassava, the season of the eggplant or the Chinese bean, and so on.

Two initiatives took place during this time that used food to draw commonalities in the face of destruction. These examples underscore the value of what French sociologist Claude Fischler calls “commensality,” the human tendency to eat together, which, according to Fischler, is “one of the most striking manifestations of human sociality.” They also point to a collective dimension that is activated to ensure the same existence of this “commensality.”

A handmade sign features red and black text promoting La Alpargata Solidaria.
Fig. 1. Image from La Alpargata Solidaria Facebook group. Image courtesy of the author.

The first, “La Alpargata Solidaria,” began in October 2015 in the Venezuelan capital of Caracas as a network of economic solidarity and responsible consumption. Its name refers to a Venezuelan proverb: “put on your alpargatas, because what’s coming is joropo.” “Alpargatas” are the local peasant’s footwear par excellence, a symbol of rurality in a country that has been drastically urbanized since the oil boom of the twentieth century. The joropo, on the other hand, designates the festivities of the countryside and its frenetic music and, by extension, its dance. The phrase “a ponerse las alpargatas porque lo que viene es joropo” thus refers to fast and intricate national music as a metaphor for ensuing difficulties and challenging and frantic dance as a way of naming tricks to overcome them.

An orange circular logo features two dancing figures.
Fig. 2. Image from La Alpargata Solidaria Facebook group. Image courtesy of the author.

The network, which at its largest reached about 180 families, was mainly organized around a monthly “collective consumption” that distributed vegetables from one of Venezuela’s oldest cooperatives, Cecocesola. The vegetables were weighed and sorted to be distributed equally among all participants. The consumo became an intense day of activity, lasting up to seven hours, with a parallel market of local products, childcare for caregivers, a music team curating the playlist, and a shared lunch prepared on-site using ingredients from the consumo, which varied according to Cecosesola’s monthly production. Even though the cost of the products purchased through Cecosesola was barely below the market price, I think it was clear to those of us who persisted in the initiative that the real reason for being there was to preserve the certainty that we were able to create something in community, even under the circumstances. Beyond, or rather around, the food crisis, the “Alpargata Solidaria” became a platform for care and solidarity at the beginning of the emptying of the city and rampant precariousness. The initiative lasted until the pandemic, which wiped it out, like so many other collective experiments.

“Aguantar la pela” is a Venezuelan idiom that has variants in other Spanish-speaking nations. It means to tolerate with fortitude the blows of a misfortune that is perceived as arbitrary and is expected to be temporary. Around the same time of the Alpargata, also in the heyday of the use of certain social platforms, a group with that name emerged. The “pelas” at that time were many, but again, this community began to organize itself through the sharing of recipes that substituted unattainable, missing, or scarce ingredients. In this way, a peculiar collective recipe book emerged, permanently nourished by the more than 70,000 participants, featuring a menu consisting of mostly vegetables and some cheaper proteins: plantain larded meats, carrot mayonnaise, cakes without flour or eggs, cassava, pumpkin or beet arepas, sardines cooked in every possible way, and many more dishes. In addition to addressing the decline in per capita calorie consumption and the absence of basic processed products such as sugar, flour, or oil, the site was characterized by a nostalgic and communal desire to recreate everyday flavors that had suddenly become inaccessible.

Jacques Lacan, who, like Sigmund Freud, resists the idea of a collective unconscious, nevertheless says that certain idioms concentrate forms of jouissance that are shared by a society. It does not seem trivial to me that the names of these two experiences are based on popular Venezuelan expressions. Their character reveals how colloquial language sediments the collective intelligence with which people resist precarity and violence, even if this resistance ultimately fails. They are gestures that, planted at the intersection of language and the symbolic dimension of food, encode a desire to continue living in community. Both “La Alpargata” and “Aguantando la pela” were ways of imagining (and enacting) survival that went beyond mere necessity, even if they were born out of extreme hardship. It was as if the language and communal practices around food outlined the situated strategies through which life—in all its excessive dignity: flavors, metaphors, companionship—is grounded and sustained.

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Oriele Benavides is a PhD candidate at Princeton University. With a background in Latin American literature and psychoanalysis, her research interests include Latin American novels, feminisms and social movements. Her work has been published in Mitologías Hoy, El Taco en la Brea, Mentekupa, and Latin American Literature Today, among others.


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Jess Clark (April 30, 2025). Food, Community, and Resistance in Hyperinflationary Venezuela. The Recipes Project. Retrieved May 24, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/13uqb


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