Take a look at this dish. Now look at the plate of food, a traditional and fairly healthy Typical Colombian dish. Look at it.

Looks amazing and mouth-watering, right? Looks like it would Rock Your World, right? I hate to disappoint you but… your eyes tell lies 😂 Despite what other travel journals – usually written by white/European people – might say about food in Colombia, the country does NOT have a cooking/cuisine culture! In general, they eat for sustenance, not culinary pleasure.

“WTF are you talking about, Chinedu? How’s that possible!?”

Oh, you think I’m tripping? You need clarification? Read on!

No Good Cooking Spaces nor Tools

Look at the almost non-existent “kitchens” in apartments and most houses. They are usually more like tiny kitchenettes, or just six-foot spaces against a wall w/ a 2-stove cooker and no counter space. This applies to most buildings, but most especially new buildings and apartments. That said, one can find the occasional “older” building that has a full-size kitchen (until the house gets renovated and inevitably subdivided into smaller spaces). The vast majority of homes do not have an oven, although there are plenty of decent baked goods to be found at local bakeries.

This is from one of the AirBnBs where I stayed in Cartagena in 2022. Every time I turned around I was knocking things over. How does this claustrophobic nightmare count as a kitchen? I’d rather just order fucking Rappi, TBH

Lack of Fire or Flavor

“But how about the food itself”, you ask? Surely one can make delicious meals even without a full-size kitchen and exotic tools! Yes, in theory one could. But in Colombia, they do NOT. The local/typical Colombian food is super-bland, sauce-free, with zero flavor, zero spices, zero joy, sometimes not even salt, for Pete’s sake… NOTHING. The “patacones”, for instance, are basically slabs of cardboard. Some foods, like plantains, that have natural sugars and flavors? Somehow Colombian cooking DRAINS it of all flavor! Eddie Vee – a fun vlogger buddy who spent time in Barranquilla – recently observed that “Lots of places here are all about stuffing dough with cheese next to rice and fried fish”, and I FULLY agree with his sentiment!

If you’re accustomed to flavorful food, you WILL question your reasons for even having that meal. You will be annoyed at yourself for wasting the time to sit down and wasting the calories on chewing.

Sadly, you will NEVER find ANY of these in Colombia 😥

If you’re like me, accustomed to rich Nigerian, Liberian, Indian, Jamaican, Thai, and even your basic mainland Chinese food… after taking one bite of the empty sadness that locals call “typical Colombian cuisine”, you might have the overwhelming urge to flip the table and storm out of the restaurant. In fact, one time in 2022, I almost did just that!

Interlude: Some History and Explainers

Why are things like this? Let’s talk a little History and Colonialism (if this sounds boring, then skip to the next section). I want to take a moment to call out the afro-Colombians specifically. There is a strong hypothesis going around that the Europeans, while “freeing” the black slaves, STOLE their taste buds and sense of flavor, as a final spiteful “Fuck You” at the end of slavery. Hence you see a bunch of “our people” consuming what is basically water and paste, and calling it “food”.

These arepas LOOK like they should be delicious, right? Or at least sugary-sweet? Bring some joy to your mouth? No. They do not. They taste like nothing. Not even salt. In fact, worse than nothing, because they usually have CHEESE in them. So I get zero flavor, PLUS incapacitating lactose pain for 24-48 hours. What the fuck is the point of traditional arepas? I fucking hate these things. They need to burn in hellfire forever 😠

But, this “post-Colonial flavor-theft” is not limited to Colombia. Another great example would be Zimbabwe. You see, Zimbabwe was a British Colony for a long while. Even though President Mugabe basically kicked out white folks in 1999, it seems they took the Zimbabwean taste buds with them. Outside of the metropolitan capital of Harare, typical “native” Zimbabwean food is notoriously bland, perhaps even worse than Colombian food (crazy, right)??? So much so, that the West Africans living in Zimbabwe are known to have special “channels” and a few small markets where they can get peppers and other spices.

I know all this because some years ago I visited Zimbabwe – specifically the town of Bulawayo – and my GOD 😧 I had to subsist on crackers and store-bought junk food because at least THAT had some taste in it. My poor Zimbabwean then-wife was truly struggling to find me something palatable to eat, something that wasn’t all milky, bland, sour, and gross – which is what their typical native food is for the most part.

Typical Zimbabwean dish… usually savory/sour stuff, not even salt can enhance it (it “disappears” the salt). This typical dish is called veggies and beef stew with sadza. I tried it before. It’s more like “veggies and beef stuffed with sadness” 😂

A friend of mine hypothesized that this “post-Colonial flavor theft” was done purposely, changing the colonized peoples’ cuisine and taste buds as yet another way to erase the identity of the subjugated. And in the case of slavery, the added benefit was that bland foods were the cheapest and easiest way to keep the slaves miserable and productive. As a result, generations later, the formerly-subjugated people totally forgot what their original food tasted like, their bodies became accustomed to the lack of flavor… they basically just carried on, believing that what they call “native” cuisine is actually “normal”.

However, this hypothesis of “post-Colonialism flavor theft” doesn’t explain the rich deliciousness that is SOUTHERN USA cuisine, where most dishes can be described as “Juicy, tongue-pleasing, fiery Love and Gastronomical Decadence with a side of Totally Worth It Heart Attack”? 😅😅😅 Is it because most of the freed slaves in the USA originated from WEST Africa, where the cuisine is generally as hot as the weather?

I’m already drooling, y’all… Now THIS is the kinda food that makes me Proud To Be An American! Tastes so good, you gon’ wanna slap yo’ mama! 🤪

I’m not sure, but that’s it for hypotheses. I don’t wanna get too History Channel up in dis bitch so I’mma leave that there for now.

Let’s be more positive and talk about the good news: You CAN enjoy tasty and flavorful cuisine in Colombia… Here’s how!

Good Restaurants DO Exist

First of all, now that the era of random drug cartel violence is basically over and Colombia is more open to safe tourism, you can find a decent variety of restaurants that serve somewhat-flavorful – or even GREAT – dishes. Especially in the tourist-heavy cities like Medellin and Cartagena, or in the cosmopolitan capital Bogotá. Many of these establishments can provide you with some hot sauce (or something similar) upon demand… especially if they are accustomed to serving foreigners. Hell, in the Poblado area of Medellin, a buddy and I visited a small Venezuelan eatery. As soon as we sat and ordered, they just brought 5 bottles of various sauces without us even asking!

Some pricier joints already pre-season their cuisine, especially if they cater to tourists. The day before I published this article, I met up with a handful of new acquaintances at Sierpe Cocina Caribe, in the Getsemani tourist zone of Cartagena, Colombia. We had squid, crab salad, multiple alcoholic drinks, fish, potatoes, and plantain chips. Hell, one of the dishes was literally on fire, haha! None of the food was bland, it was all tasty (not spicy but flavorful), and we had a good time. Here’s my full review on Google Maps.

My Crab Salad was tasty and full of protein.

Stores Sell Spices

Secondly, unlike in Zimbabwe, most big-box grocery stores in Colombian cities carry a fairly wide variety of spices and seasonings! Visit your local Jumbo Americano, and you’ll find an aisle that has a complete shelf of dozens of spices, peppers, and other interesting joy-inducing ingredients for your culinary adventure and pleasure. The locals would rather literally DIE than season their food, so obviously these products are for foreigners 😂 Just about all the popular supermarkets including Éxito and Olimpica have an entire-ass shelf of amazing spices and sauces. Buy them, use them, and enjoy your food!

No, seriously, they HAVE spices… they just don’t USE them. Oh well, more for us extranjeros! 😁

Be Prepared With Your Own

Third, you can carry a bottle or two of spices and pepper on your person. Whenever I go out and I even think I might eat at a restaurant, I carry a powdered pepper mix or bottle of basic Aji or Amazon hot sauce with me in my “body bag”. If I don’t have it with me, and I still want to visit a restaurant, I make sure I go to one that I know has spices and sauces they can bring me with my order.

It’s like a buck fifty (6,500 pesos) at your local supermarket, and fits neatly into your purse.

Learn To Cook!

Fourth point – and this is an important one – Learn to cook at home, yo! I’ve been doing this since I was a pre-teen, so it comes naturally to me. However, if you’re accustomed to eating outside… well… you might have to change your habits a bit 😆 You can get most – if not all – the ingredients you need from a local store, and prepare the meal to your liking, all for a fraction of what it’d cost in North America or even Europe. I know this isn’t convenient or even possible for short-term visitors staying for just a few days or whatever… THOSE travelers can still buy a portable bottle of sweet heat for $2 and at least be prepared.

But WHY is the food like this, though?

I already talked about the “post-Colonialism flavor theft” theory, but there are other factors such as: lack of migrant communities, poverty, and epigenetics.

First, the lack of migrant communities. It normally takes 2-3 generations of immigrants from other cultures to establish communities and drive the demand for non-local cuisine. For example – setting aside historical geopolitics – the large Mexican immigrant population in the USA (a nation of immigrants) means that in almost any major city, you can find a Mexican restaurant serving authentic or semi-authentic Mexican cuisine. Ditto for Nigerian cuisine… now that there are 2nd-generation Nigerians being born in the USA, almost every big city in the USA has SOME Nigerian people, and you can find Nigerian cuisine. Same with Indian, Filipino, Russian, and various other cuisines. In contrast, Colombia has been “closed” due to narcotrafficking, civil unrest, and instability… It’s only relatively recently that Colombia became “safe enough to visit”. Therefore, the country hasn’t been “open” to tourism for very long, let alone immigration. Very few, if any, non-Latin American immigrants are settling here, creating families/communities, and growing the demand for any foreign or interesting cuisine.

Due to the nation’s difficult history and lack of substantial foreign investments, most Colombians are still relatively poor… so they really HAVE TO skimp on some things (like full-size kitchens). I mean, what do we think is more important to the average Colombian: spending a large chunk of their Minimum Wage on “fancy” spices and “weird” ingredients that will burn and/or confuse their colonizer-conditioned tongues… or just eating “same ol’, same ol’ “ stuff to which they’re accustomed, and getting on with their myriad Life Struggles? Some of this Bland and Boring Cuisine situation really is a matter of poverty, so we all have to be sensitive to that. We have to acknowledge our privilege and have Empathy.

When it comes to their literal taste buds, I’ve not found any official papers that explain why they are so damn sensitive to any seasonings or spices, so we can safely assume that it’s for the same reason that similar intolerances develop: epigenetics. That is, generations of surviving on a bland “sustenance diet” has simply “wired” the vast majority of native Colombians (living in Colombia) to be very sensitive to seasonings. And because Colombians are not (yet) known for creativity or imagination, they just “keep it going” generation after generation.

We can safely assume that IF Colombia EVER welcomes non-Latin American immigrants in significant numbers, the country’s CHILDREN will slowly branch out and, over a long time, residents and foreigners will start enjoying tastier and more varied cuisine.

remember: It’s THEIR Culture

All jokes aside and despite these subjective criticisms, typical Colombian cuisine is not “bad” at all… in fact, typical Colombian cuisine is “objectively good”. That is, it is not over-processed like North American “food”, so it’s healthier and better for your body overall. You won’t develop heart disease by eating it daily in moderation, drinking plenty of water + natural juices, and living an active lifestyle.

Still one of the “happiest” countries in the world 🤗

Besides, at the end of the day it’s THEIR culture, and we have to respect it! We’re merely guests who CHOSE to be here in Colombia, so it is WE the tourists and expats who have to adapt, not the other way around. No culture is “perfect”, and there are so many other WONDERFUL things about Colombia to discover and enjoy! For me personally, it’s still TOTALLY worth it to live here within a humble budget. I just need to find me an apartment that has a BIG KITCHEN 🥧 😅👍

That’s all for now. I hope this helps you be more prepared for your trip to Colombia. Buen provecho, amigos! 👍🏾

• Colombian Food: Worst of the Worst