The Andes, the world’s longest mountain range (longer than the continental United States is wide by 1,000 miles), finds its midpoint in Peru, whose Incan ruins first captured my imagination in college. Eight years after that “Art of the Americas” course, my brother and I are in the Andes, plodding along their narrow rocky paths, stopping regularly to inhale oxygen from the thin air, a precious resource at 12,000 feet above sea level. And I’m cold—and getting colder.
We are taking the Lares Trek to Machu Picchu, a labyrinthine city hidden from the plundering conquistadores of the 1500s by green mountain ranges and good civic planning. Unlike its main rival, the Inca Trail, it offers no camaraderie with other Westerners, save others in your tour group. (Our group comprised me, my brother, and a young British couple.) We have trekked for two days, and the only people we have passed are Andeans. They live in the Sacred Valley, surviving by farming and selling simple wares.
Packing as I had been in the muggy Midwest, it was hard to imagine pulling on fleece thermal underwear in the middle of August, as REI’s “Lares Trek gear checklist” recommended. But the end of summer in Chicago is the end of winter in Peru. And now, on this second day, our porter is taking us through Condor Pass, at 15,150 feet the highest segment of the trek. As we approach, we look up, hoping to see Andean Condors riding the thin air above us—but raindrops, then snowflakes, then hailstones spit into our faces. We keep our eyes down, on our boots hitting the ground in front of us, lest the wetness slip us off a cliff. Damp and cold, we reach the top and snap a few photos before quickly descending the other side of the pass.
Our campsite for the night is buttressed by two deep-blue lakes that look deceptively refreshing. As the bit of sunlight fades, I become chilled. I pass the late afternoon lying in four layers of clothing in my sleeping bags. I have flashbacks to a Girl Scout camping trip at age nine, when it got so unseasonably frigid one October night, I couldn’t move. A scout mom (who was also my real mom) had to undress me and put me in pajamas. Tonight there is no mom of any sort to get me through the approaching night, when temperatures will drop below freezing. Truth be told, I’m a bit scared.
Then at 5 P.M., our tour guide, Juan Carlos, calls us into the meal tent for merienda (happy hour). Tonight it consists of cancha salada, corn kernels fried and salted and mixed with hard cheese; tequenos, white cheese wrapped and fried in flaky empanada dough; and hot chocolate and tea made from the famed coca leaf. “Headache? Have coca leaf. Sore muscles? Have coca leaf. Heart broken? Have coca leaf,” says Juan, who grew up near here. He is the region’s biggest evangelist for coca, whose leaves are commonly found in Peruvian marketplaces and believed to heal pain, fatigue, and altitude sickness. We have drunk coca tea at every meal and will go on to chew coca leaves in the way men of an earlier era chewed tobacco, wadded up in the gums. But for now, the tea is not changing the fact that I’m very cold and can’t think of any way to get warm.
After merienda is dinner, and that’s when warm relief finally appears in an ancient and universal form. The cooks bring each of us a medium-sized bowl ladled full of soup. Squash, beans, carrots, zucchini, onion, leeks, potatoes, and quinoa mix together in a rich broth base. Quinoa is an ancient Andean seed (not a grain, as is typically believed by Whole Foods shoppers) that, upon being cooked, sprouts to reveal an unmistakable white circular thread. The Incas are said to have cultivated quinoa 3,000–4,000 years ago. I take a sip of the soup, then another, feeling the warmth trickle down my throat. As we sip in silence, I start to believe the night won’t be so long or so cold. The soup—that endlessly adaptable, reliably filling staple—will get me through this night. Going down it feels wholesome and healing. It feels like love.
Soup features in every human culture, in part because it requires the simplest of ingredients and methods to prepare. Water and a hunk of meat or vegetable set over a flame in a heatproof container creates a nourishing broth, extracting new flavors. (Soup was invented, says The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America, about 5,000 years ago.) Over time, national cultures have developed their own twists on it: borscht, miso, chowder, minestrone, Campbell’s tomato. The lineage of restaurants is linked to soup: In the 1700s, French street vendors sold an inexpensive soup called restaurer—lit. “restorative”—which was advertised as an aide for exhaustion. Soup typically resides in a humbler place on the menu, meeting the most basic of needs. The needs of people who visit a soup kitchen, say, or those like the titular character of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s account of life in a Soviet labor camp, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. “Freezing and famished,” he writes, some prisoners look upon “a bowl of thin cabbage soup, half burned,” and welcome it “as rain to the parched earth. That bowl of soup—it was dearer than freedom, dearer than life itself, past, present, and future.”
Our merry band of trekkers went on to sip a variety of soups on our hike. Though we diverged in occupation, nationality, and faith (from Catholic-Incan blend to skeptical agnostic to run-of-the-mill evangelical), we bonded in silence in our persistent need for replenishment and warmth. The Book of Proverbs says, “A bowl of soup with someone you love is better than steak with someone you hate” (15:17, NLT). I also think it is easier to love someone with whom you share soup than with whom you eat steak. Where the latter distinguishes and separates the haves from the have-nots, soup levels the playing field, reminding us all what is truly necessary to survive a harsh climate, or life. Food is fuel, as it certainly was for us while we hiked 21 miles. But it can also be a means of grace—one of the many ways that we come to understand that we are more nourished, protected, and cared for by our Maker than we knew or thought possible.
And when we receive grace, in whatever form, it is only natural that we want to share it with others. It has been only 10 days since my brother’s and my hiking journey through the Andes, and I am already researching recipes for Peruvian soup in their endless medleys: so pa criolla (beef and angel hair), aguadito de pollo (chicken and cilantro), crema de zapallo (squash), quinoa and vegetables. I would like to tell a few friends about our hike over Peruvian soup. I am finding that there are as many varieties of soup as there are occasions to need a bit of comfort food. Which is to say, a lot.
Katelyn Beaty is managing editor of Christianity Today.