fruit · foodway8 bonds · 8 sourced

cupuaçu

The fight over the name was a fight over who gets to own Amazonian knowledge.

sweetacidicveganvegetarian

Cultural layer

Origin

Amazon basin; relative of cacao, cultivated by Indigenous communities in the Brazilian Amazon

Routes

Amazonian Indigenous use, regional Brazilian ingredient, 'cupulate' (cupuaçu chocolate) as cacao alternative, biopiracy controversy

Context

A Japanese company registered a trademark on the name 'cupuaçu' in 2003, a form of biopiracy that would have prevented Brazilian producers from using the name of their own ingredient. Brazil mounted a legal challenge and successfully reclaimed the trademark. This is a landmark case in Indigenous intellectual property because it established that a community's ingredient name cannot simply be appropriated by a foreign corporation. The fight over the name was a fight over who gets to own Amazonian knowledge.

Behind this layer

História da Alimentação no Brasil (Luís da Câmara Cascudo, 1967)

Route

Pending

The routes are written. They are not yet mapped.

This entry's cultural layer already names where it came from and how it moved. What it does not yet carry is that movement as structure: ordered waypoints with real coordinates, and a mechanism on each leg. Until it does, the layer stays an empty slot rather than a drawn line, because a map built from prose would be a guess with a projection under it.

1 of 404 entries carries a mapped route · nutmeg is the prototype

What renders here when it lands