MOCHE: A PERUVIAN COASTAL COMMUNlTi'— GILLIN 



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describe each meal of the day before, hsting specif- 

 ically all types of food consumed, with quantities of 

 each in conventional terms (spoonfuls, cupfuls. pieces 

 of conventional size, etc.). At the head of each paper 

 the student was retjuired to state his name, age. place 

 of birth, sex. school year, and "Mochero" or "foras- 

 tcro." Care was taken in issuing instructions to the 

 students to avoid any suggestion that our primary in- 

 terest was the diet as such, and to avoid implications 

 of invidious comparisons or prestige values which 

 might be involved. The contest was open to all mem- 

 bers of the third, fourth, filth, and sixth years in both 

 schools. Four prizes were offered in each school and 

 a consolation award of 10 centavos for each pupil who 

 turned in his three essays in complete form eligible 

 for the prizes, whether he won a prize or not. The 

 teachers examined the papers and excluded those 

 which were incomplete. They also graded them ac- 

 cording to the scholastic objectives set forth for the 

 contest, and the prizes were awarded on that basis. 

 The whole idea was to obtain a naive report from the 

 pupils themselves. 



After the returns were in. the papers were turned 

 over to me, and I checked all doubtful cases for their 

 social status, i. e., Mochero or jorastero. Then, with 

 considerable labor the results which appear m tables 

 4, 5, and 6 were tabulated. (Anyone who believes 

 tliat Spanish cannot be misspelled should try read- 

 ing a collection of school children's papers sometime.) 

 The material was also tabulated by sex, but since 

 the differences between the sexes on the whole did 

 not appear to be highly significant in either group, 

 these tables were omitted. Once the material had 

 been tabulated, the results were used for further 

 checking against observations of food habits, and 

 results of these checks appear in the descriptive 

 section on food and drink. 



A similar attempt was made to obtain the same 

 type of data for the campina by instituting a contest 

 in the rural school at Sun, but the director of this 

 school reported that he was unable to secure the 

 cooperation of the pupils on the project. Whatever 

 the difficulty, I was unable to press the matter under 

 the circumstances and with the time available, so it 

 is necessary to confine my analysis to the pueblo data. 



A detailed discussion will not be attempted, but 

 for those who enjoy the juice which can be .squeezed 

 from "statistics" the following drops are offered. 

 The usual warning should be issued to the reader, 

 that is, not to be too impressed with the appearance 

 of precision conveyed by numerals and percentages 



set in columns. \'ery small values, in particular, 

 have no statistical validity as such, but they are 

 included to complete the record and they also serve 

 the purpose of showing the range of variety in the 

 menus. Several other cautions and explanations 

 should be mentioned. (1) Although it is not cus- 

 tomary for children to drink chic ha for all thirst- 

 quenching purposes as do adults, checking showed 

 that a good many children had consumed cliicha 

 during the period of survey, but had omitted to 

 include it in their esgays because the hygiene lectures 

 by the teachers had taught them that chicha drinking 

 is considered officially undesirable. (2) Although 

 only the specific reports concerning seasoning items, 

 such as onions, have been recorded, it will be noted 

 that no students specifically reported aji, salt, black 

 pepper, and the whole range of picante seasonings. 

 Checking showed that invariably the cooked food 

 had been prepared and eaten with picante, but that it 

 never occurred to the pupils to consider sca.soning 

 "food." For this reason, there is no worthwhile 

 statistical comparison of the seasoning of the dishes 

 consumed between Mocheros and forastcros. (3) 

 The same is true in some degree of sugar. Warm 

 drinks, such as tea and coffee, are normally drunk 

 with sugar, but it did not occur to the students as a 

 whole that this was to be considered a separate item. 

 The sugar which was recorded was specifically 

 mentioned by the students, but checking showed that 

 many more had used sugar. (4) It must be re- 

 membered that the food consumed during 3 days in 

 July will not necessarily conform in all details to that 

 consumed during some other period of 3 days. The 

 actual details depend to some extent upon what is 

 available in the markets during the period in ques- 

 tion. Thus, beef was plentifully available at this 

 particular time and mutton was not, so the low 

 figures for mutton are not as significant actually as 

 they might appear to be statistically. Nevertheless, 

 some kind of meat or fish is eaten every day, and this 

 is the important fact when considering the food 

 patterns. (5) It is for this reason that, although 

 the items themselves are those written down by the 

 students. I have grouped them roughly into cate- 

 gories : beverages, soups, meat, fish, cheese and eggs 

 (animal proteins), vegetables and grains, fruits, 

 sweets, and miscellaneous. These categories cannot 

 be defended in strict terms from the point of view 

 of the science of nutrition, but rather conform to the 

 local ways of grouping food and talking about it. 

 "Tea" includes both herb tea and true commercial 



