The Indigenous Woman Behind South America's Biggest Male Chefs

Patricia Pérez uses her grandmother’s ancient map of the desert to forage for plants and herbs no one else on Earth can access.

Story edited by Brendan Spiegel

The straw-colored silt of Chile’s Atacama Desert stretches out across the plain until it meets the Andes Mountains, the natural splendor at odds with the noisy buses and trucks cantering across the lunar-like landscape. In the nearby transportation hub of San Pedro de Atacama, dreadlocked backpackers and couples sporting designer sunglasses shuffle through tiny shops, fondling llama key chains and multicolored hats. To them, the desert might seem, well, deserted. But one woman sees life everywhere: flowering shrubs, purple cacti, hallucinogenic leaves, Andean roses, stevia leaves.

Patricia Pérez spends her days foraging for dozens of these plants and carefully drying them in her workshop. With her company, La Atacameña, Pérez has made a name for herself among Chile’s best chefs and food artisans, who use her foraged herbs in everything from the rose-petal cookies at Boragó, a widely acclaimed high-end restaurant in Santiago, to the minty shampoo at the nearby five-star Hotel Cumbres in San Pedro de Atacama. It’s a job that Pérez sees as a calling as much as a career, a way to preserve indigenous traditions that date back thousands of years.

Pérez lives about 30 miles outside of the town of San Pedro de Atacama in a 12,000-year-old pueblo called Toconao. Her family has been there for as long as the mountains can remember. As we head out in her black truck to visit one of her favorite foraging sites, Pérez tells me that as part of the indigenous Lickanantai nation, they used to speak a language called Kunza. But now, most people only know a few words. “The Spanish would cut out our tongues if we spoke it,” Pérez says in Spanish, rolling her R’s. Mark Gerrits, owner of Santiago bean-to-bar brand ÓBOLO Chocolate, who uses Pérez’s herbs in his chocolate, translates for me from the front seat.