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🌍 Country of the Week · A Spin the Globe Teacher's Guide
Paraguay
ParaguaySouth America · This week's dish comes from Asunción
About Paraguay
Paraguay's cuisine leans on corn, cassava, and cheese, with Guaraní roots in dishes like chipa bread and the cornbread sopa paraguaya. Terere (iced yerba mate) is drunk all day in the subtropical heat.
Sopa paraguaya is not a soup and never was: it is a dense cornbread with cheese and onion, baked in a tray and cut into squares, and its name is one of the reliable traps for outsiders. Chipa, the cheese-and-cassava-starch ring, is the other everyday bread, sold from baskets on buses and long-distance roads.
Terere is mate served cold. Yerba is packed into a guampa, iced water poured over it, often infused first with medicinal herbs called yuyos crushed to order, and the thermos is carried everywhere through the subtropical heat. Paraguayan terere practice, with its yuyos, was inscribed by UNESCO in 2020.
The wider picture: Andes, Amazon, and Atlantic all on one plate.
This week's dish: Mbejú
A chewy, crisp-edged starch-and-cheese griddle cake, gluten-free and pan-cooked to order, eaten with cocido at daybreak.
Serves 4 · Prep 10 min · Cook 15 min · Difficulty: easy
See the full recipe: ingredients, steps and dietary swaps →
Grown-up jobs: any step that uses a hot stove, oven, boiling water, or a sharp knife is for a teacher or parent. Children can measure, mix, and assemble.
Discussion prompts
1. Find Paraguay on a world map or globe. It sits in South America. Which oceans or neighboring countries does it touch, and roughly how far is it from where you live?
2. Mbejú comes from Asunción, in Paraguay. Read its ingredient list together. Which of those foods do you think are grown or raised nearby, and how might the country's climate and landscape explain that?
3. Read the short story behind Mbejú. How have the people, trade routes, and history of Paraguay shaped what ends up on the plate there?
4. Compare Mbejú to a dish your own family cooks. What is similar, what is different, and what one question would you ask a family in Paraguay about how they make and share it?
5. After you cook Mbejú, add Paraguay to a classroom map and give it a stamp. Write down one fact about its food or geography that you did not know this morning.
🌍 Spin the Globe · Geography through food · spintheglobeofficial.com/for-teachers