I settle at a rickety table by the ­window and order the nine-course tasting, a somewhat misleading term for the brisk, unfussy meal that follows. First comes a soup of jungle herbs sweated into a steaming broth of tucupi, a bracing ferment of cassava juice. Pungent with garlic vine and alive with the numbing tingle of the native herb jambú, the soup is earthy and acerbic, as if one had distilled vinegar from mushrooms: the flavors of the Amazon concentrated in a few energizing mouthfuls. There are morsels of water buffalo fried in their own tallow and snow-white beiju, roundels of cassava flour crisped in a pan. Chile-rubbed ­filhote, a type of Amazonian catfish, comes poached in the fermented juice of the tucumã palm fruit, nutty and dense and taut with acidity. Sweet and delicate shrimp from the nearby estuary bend like coral around a small bowl of piracuí, a candy floss of salt-dried fish common to the riverine communities deep in the rural interior of Pará, the immense state whose capital is Belém.

As dish after thrilling dish arrives at my table, the restaurant’s owner, cook and activist Tainá Marajoara, ­ricochets across the creaky floors, fleet and focused as a hummingbird. When we’d spoken by video call a few weeks ­earlier, she’d spent an hour railing against industrial agriculture in the Amazon and the hypocrisy of urban elites who swoon over Amazonian ingredients as the rainforest burns. She vehemently decried what she described as the predominant attitude among Brazilian chefs: “that the food of dark-skinned people needs to be updated, as though we don’t have a wisdom and aesthetic of our own.” Geometric patterns marked her face, a traditional practice for First Peoples across the Amazon, vivid even through the pixelated haze of a laptop screen.

In the days to come, we would have several conversations in which she would lambaste fellow chefs (though never by name) as corporate shills, government lackeys, and opportunistic thieves, her anger infectious and raw. Today, though, when she alights at my table, it is with an open smile and a small bowl of maniçoba, made by boiling manioc, or cassava, leaves for several days to sublimate their toxic cyanogens. Reduced to a lush green pottage and fried briefly with smoked pork and sausage—a European incursion on an Indigenous delicacy—it tastes, magnificently, like the forest floor. If Amazonian cuisine has a single emblematic dish, it would be maniçoba: a caustic ingredient transformed throughpatience and observation, an ancient technology reshaped by history but never erased. “These are unconquerable flavors,” Marajoara tells me that afternoon, dazzling and defiant. “Even after centuries, they’re still here.”

Growing up in Belém, Marajoara spent countless hours in the kitchen with her grandparents and great-grandmother preparing dinners for large groups of friends and family. Many were visitors from the vast river island of Marajó, an expanse of savannahs and seasonal lakes where Marajoara’s family traces its roots. They would make the trek bearing ingredients from home as tokens of appreciation: mild cheeses made from the milk of water buffalo (introduced in the late 19th century), or jars of larvae extracted from the nut of the tucumã palm.

For almost a millennium, Marajó, supported one of the most advanced pre-Colombian societies east of the Andes. Beginning around 400 C.E., a cluster of sovereign chiefdoms erected massive earthworks to protect their settlements from seasonal floods, excavated lakes that would capture fish when the waters receded, and crafted polychrome ceramics of extraordinary formal refinement. Despite this, many right-wing Brazilians choose to frame Indigenous peoples as recent occupants of the Amazon—unable to exploit the forest’s untold resources, and with no rights to claim them. Yet, Dr. Sidiana da Consolação Ferreira de Macêdo, a food historian at the Federal University of Pará, says, “We have archaeological evidence of the domestication of cassava that goes back [over] 10,000 years.” For millennia, those same communities developed fertile terra preta, or “dark earth,” soils to raise crops and cultivate fruit trees. In 2023, laser mapping found at least 900 geometric structures scattered across the Amazon, further proof of widespread human intervention. 

When the Portuguese made landfall in Marajó in the early 17th century, they encountered a patchwork of more than two dozen nomadic tribes. Despite studies showing a preponderance of Native blood in the island’s gene pool today, historical consensus has long held that Marajó’s native lineages ended shortly thereafter, subsumed into the bloodlines of European invaders and the Black people they enslaved. Marajoara, who identifies as a member of the Aruã Marajoara nation, grew up hearing that the “Marajoara” didn’t even exist.

Today, Marajó ranks among the poorest regions in Brazil. Riverine communities and quilombos—a term for settlements founded as early as the 16th century by resistors to Brazil’s regime of ­enslavement—subsist on fishing, farming, and hunting, and are broadly cut off from basic infrastructure for health and education. Many flock to informal settlements at Belém’s tattered edges, hastily assimilating into the city’s mestizo majority. Virtually no one from Marajó, neither on the island nor in the diaspora, identifies as Indigenous. And while Marajoara’s family in Belém may not have described themselves as such, in her house, “we learned the old songs, the old medicine, how to make our own fishing nets and utensils,” she tells me. “I was born into that Indigenous culture and knowledge.”

In 2009, Marajoara and her husband, Carlos Ruffeil, moved to São Paulo, Brazil’s largest city, more than 1,500 miles south of Belém, where she would pursue a master’s degree in oral history. By then, Amazonian food had become a ­shibboleth for culinary tastemakers. Chefs from Belém, such as Paulo Martins and Ofir Oliveira, started promoting their city’s mestizo-Amazonian cuisine as early as the 1970s, but it wasn’t until 1999, when chef Alex Atala opened his much-fêted fine dining restaurant D.O.M., that city dwellers in Brazil’s affluent south turned their attention to the rainforest. A born-and-bred Paulistano educated in Europe, Atala framed himself as an intrepid explorer of a lost culinary frontier. “Amazonian food had become a spectacle,” Marajoara laments, tweezed and corseted to meet Eurocentric standards, largely divorced from the cultures that had nurtured it into existence.

Marajoara and Ruffeil flew back to Belém regularly, traveling deep into Pará’s rural backcountry to ­document its disappearing foodways for a research project called CATA, or Cultura Alimentar Tradicional Amazônica (Traditional Amazonian Food Culture). Marajoara hadn’t visited Marajó since the late 1980s, when her grandmother died in a ferry accident between the island and Belém. Afterward, her great-grandmother, whom she describes as “a guardian of traditional knowledge,” forbade her from visiting her ancestral home until, she was told, “life calls you back.” After nearly 20 years, it finally had.

When she returned to Marajó in 2009, Marajoara found the island radically changed. Some shifts were inadvertent consequences of successful initiatives such as the 2003 Bolsa Familia program, which alleviated acute hunger through direct cash infusions to nearly 14 million families across Brazil. (By 2023, the revived program had reached more than 21 million families.) According to Mariana Inglez dos Reis, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of São Paulo whose research focuses on nutrition in western Marajó, “Mothers and fathers who remember being hungry as children say that things are much better now.” But, she adds, increased income, practically useless in remote villages with limited access to refrigeration, tends to push those families to urban areas where they use their subsidies on processed convenience foods, which has complicated health outcomes. Throughout Pará, Marajoara and Ruffeil heard countless tales of dwindling fish stocks and fruit trees replaced by industrial monocultures. Many communities had abandoned their ancestral crops in favor of processed foods, each tin of fruit or beans an imperishable token of a nebulous modernity.

Other changes were more nefarious: In 2011, the government of Pará invited the politically powerful Quartiero family, rice growers who had spent at least a decade clashing violently with Indigenous peoples over land disputes in the neighboring state of Roraima, to establish rice plantations in eastern Marajó. “They promised us development and employment, but at the end of the day, they brought machines and workers from elsewhere,” says Rosivaldo Moraes Correas, a leader of the Quilombo Gurupá, one of the communities directly affected. Correas recalls seeing baby howler monkeys stranded on roadsides, and lakes and streams drained and diverted to feed the paddies. Farmers, he says, sprayed pesticides that contaminated the water and detonated explosives to scare away wild ducks, which people in Marajó would braise in tucupi during the rainy season. Tellingly, this delicacy is still popular at restaurants in Belém, but is increasingly difficult to come by in its place of origin.

Marajoara, meanwhile, became involved in a growing network of activists, thinkers, traditional cooks, and community collectives, among them the Landless Workers’ Movement, which, since the 1980s, has expropriated unproductive plots held by wealthy landowners and used them for food production. Over the years, the network made steady strides. In 2010, the Brazilian legislature passed a constitutional amendment that guaranteed food security as a “social right.” Three years later, Marajoara went as a delegate to the third National Conference of Culture, where cultura alimentar, literally “food culture,” a concept she’d championed since the first days of CATA, was formally recognized as a protected element of Brazil’s cultural heritage, equal to music, dance, literature, and craft. Still, violence against activists persisted: In August 2013, days after filing complaints against the destructive rice farmers in Marajó, then-president of Quilombo Gurupá Teodoro Lalor de Lima was stabbed to death in Belém, one of 342 environmentalists assassinated in Brazil between 2012 and 2022, according to a study from the NGO Global Witness.

And in May 2016—the same month that Atala lauded Amazonian ingredients on the second season of “Chef’s Table,” and barely six months after UNESCO declared Belém a “Creative City of Gastronomy”—the state of Pará inaugurated the Belo Monte Dam, a hydroelectric power source that has devastated the fishing and foraging grounds of nearby Indigenous reserves while displacing thousands of inhabitants. The 2018 election of Jair Bolsonaro, who disbanded the National Council for Food and Nutrition Security, only reified condescending attitudes toward Indigenous peoples that had made such destruction possible. “The Indians do not speak our language, they do not have money, they do not have culture,” he said in a 2015 interview, even as science had long upheld that, without those cultures, the Amazon as we know it today would not exist.

For Marajoara, such contradictions raise a crushing, urgent question: “Why is our culture being massacred if you value our food?” she asks. “It’s as if the Amazon were just a great market of ‘exotic’ ingredients. But if the Amazon is alive, it’s because its people are alive.”

A few days after my first meal at Iacitata, I board the fast ferry from Belém to Marajó, where I disembark in the town of Soure and make my way to Fazenda São Jerônimo. The farm’s matriarch, Jerônima Barbosa de Brito, has invited me for a traditional lunch: chorizo-­studded maniçoba, fish poached in a tucupi as delicate as dashi, and lustrous postprandial pours of açai (arguably Pará’s most prized export), served as an unsweetened purée, ­trenchant, bitter, and cool. First, though, I watch her nimble fingers strip silken membranes from a pearlescent tangle of turu, ribbon-like bivalves extracted from the rotten trunks of fallen mangroves. Though turu has been a free, readily available form of sustenance for generations, attitudes have since shifted. Isabel Brito, a sociologist and Dona Jerônima’s daughter, says, “a lot of society here looks down on it” as an ingredient fit only for poor scavengers.

The Britos do not identify as Indigenous, but Isabel sees her family as participating in the same fight as other land-rights activists. Turu, like crabs and tucumã, form part of “a very rich culture around the economy of the mangrove,” Brito tells me. This ecosystem has long sustained the fishermen of coastal Marajó, “which is why it’s so important to recuperate our pride in these traditions,” she adds. But as long as tradition is equated with poverty, exogenous high-yield crops such as oil palm and soy, both of which require dangerous agrotoxins to thrive, will look to many like progress. Activist Marionede Juruna, a friend of Marajoara and one of those affected by the construction of the Belo Monte Dam, tells me on my final night in Belém: “Cultura alimentar is more than just food. It’s recovering our memories, preserving our way of planting and growing and cooking—our entire way of life.”

That process of recovery is already underway. Where the 2010 census counted fewer than a million Indigenous people nationwide, in 2022 that number nearly doubled, thanks in part to the census bureau’s decision to pose the question of Native identity to people not only in protected territories but in cities across the country. For Marajoara, who recalls being told that she “was a false Indigenous person because I’m from the city,” that simple change is a vindication. The morning after I return from Marajó, she tells me, “Just because you’re born in a city does not mean your Indigenous identity is shut off.”

Back at Iacitata, Marajoara joins me with a modest dessert. Buffalo-milk cheese from Marajó is slathered with a deep mauve jam made from cupuaçu, a cousin of cacao that tastes of passionfruit and leather, all dusted with a flurry of grated Brazil nuts. This simple dish is a palimpsest of cultures and histories embedded in the region’s fluvial soil: an emblematic product of Marajó, made using milk from an animal introduced less than 150 years ago, combined with endemic cupuaçu and Brazil nuts. It makes no claim to cultural purity. It’s offhand and elegant, elemental and dynamic. Cooking like this may or may not be a revolutionary act, but it is an optimistic one. Flavors like these matter most when there’s someone there to tell you that they taste like home.

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