Some call it a ‘fashionable seed’ or a ‘versatile super food’. Others dismiss it as a ‘fancy grain’, even though it’s not a grain and looks a bit like sand. But for those eager to move on from the gluttonous excesses of Christmas, quinoa can point you in the direction of wellbeing and vitality, thanks to its nutritional dissimilarity to brandy butter. Google data reliably informs us that internet searches for ‘quinoa’ experience a massive spike every January as people seek to establish exactly how good for you it is and, more importantly, what to do with it. But for every person who embraces quinoa as a healthy option, there will be three or four who ridicule it as the exclusive foodstuff of the middle classes – or, worse, hipsters.
In national surveys, pollsters have found the word ‘quinoa’ to be synonymous with elitism. It is said that Marmite is a polarising foodstuff, but it seems that quinoa has the power to precipitate class war. For the haters, it doesn’t matter that the Bolivians who’ve chomped on this stuff for millennia describe it as comida de los pobres (food of the poor), or indeed that you can find it sitting in boil-in-the-bag pouches in any British supermarket you care to mention. Nope, quinoa breeds a furious inverted snobbery, where anyone who eats it is considered to be a privileged brat who goes on endlessly about how they experienced a moment of self-discovery during a winter break in Machu Picchu.