What do Amazon tribes eat?

When people think of Amazonian tribes, one thing seems to pop up constantly, and that’s cannibalism, although it has been well documented throughout tribes across the world, it’s much rarer than people may think.

Tribes within the Amazon are often much friendlier than people realize and only want to protect their land and people. As for what they eat, tribes within this particular jungle have access to a wider range of food than any other jungle on the planet.

Because the Amazon is by far the biggest jungle, it’s also home to the widest variety of wild food, which has often been allowed to grow untouched for generations. The only difficulty the occupants of this jungle have is farmland, as openings large enough to plant anything are extremely rare, and chopping down a load of ancient trees with primitive axes is often too much work. Because of this, tribes normally live a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, which has served tribes that live here well for hundreds, if not thousands of years.

Here’s a list of some of the most commonly consumed plants and animals within the Amazon:

Fish:
Freshwater dolphin, sting ray, catfish, piranha, eel, freshwater crab, mussels, and various other small types of freshwater fish.

Fruit:
Acai berries, Camu Camu fruit, Passion fruit, tomatoes, Cupuacu fruit, oranges, Maracuya, Aguaje, coconuts, Lemons, grapefruit, bananas, pineapples, mangoes, avocado and Bacaba to name but a few. The reason that some of these are not better heard of is due to how costly they are the produce for the fruit yield they provide, making the Amazon home to a huge selection of fruit that no one has ever heard of.

Grain:
Maize is pretty much the only type of regular grain that grows wild in the Amazon and the only one that can easily survive in such humid conditions. There are various other small seeds that are eaten, but Maize is the primary grain throughout most of the region.

Vegetables:
Beans, Cassava, Cacao, Chia, sweet potato, squashes, yams and various plant roots. Vegetables are normally difficult to grow in the jungle as they require much more particular conditions than most other plants, and so are normally encountered with a single plant here and there as opposed to patches.

Meat:
Wild pigs, camen, alligators, monkeys, orangutans, tapirs, Jaguars, sloths, armadillos, ocelots, snakes, tarantulas, scorpions, otters, and various bird types.

Flavorings and other foods
Black peppercorns, mustard, vanilla, cinnamon, and of course, Brazil nuts.

Hundreds of edible plants can be found in this jungle and the list would simply be too long if I named them all. But these are the most commonly eaten foods for most jungle tribes throughout the Amazon. One interesting thing about the way these people cook is they have completely different understandings of what is considered a “safe” way to prepare food.

For example, there is one such tribe in the Amazon that cooks a type of baked Yam dish that they prepare by sitting around a large bowl, chewing up mouth fulls of yam to mash it up and give it some liquid, then everyone spits their mouth full of mashed up yam mush into the bowl. When there’s enough of it various flavorings like mustard and pepper are added, then it’s formed into small flat cakes and baked on a hot stone next to the fire.