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🌍 Country of the Week · A Spin the Globe Teacher's Guide
Peru
PeruSouth America · This week's dish comes from Lima
About Peru
Peru's cuisine spans coast, mountain, and jungle, elevated by waves of Japanese and Chinese immigration into ceviche, lomo saltado, and a world of native potatoes and ajíes. Recognized globally, it turns Andean staples and Pacific seafood into some of the world's most celebrated food.
Two immigrant kitchens have their own names here. Chifa is the Chinese-Peruvian cooking that arrived with Cantonese labourers in the nineteenth century and put lomo saltado in a wok; Nikkei is its Japanese-Peruvian counterpart, which rethought raw fish and cut short the time it sits in citrus. Ceviche's traditional knowledge was inscribed by UNESCO in 2023.
The Andes are a working farm at altitude. The International Potato Center in Lima counts more than four thousand native potato varieties across the highlands of Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador, each selected over generations for a particular soil and frost line, and the same cold that limits what will grow is put to work preserving it as freeze-dried chuno.
The wider picture: Andes, Amazon, and Atlantic all on one plate.
This week's dish: Lomo Saltado
Beef flash-fried in a smoking wok with soy, vinegar, tomatoes, and fries, Lima's Chinese-Peruvian icon.
Serves 3 · Prep 20 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 Peru 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. Lomo Saltado comes from Lima, in Peru. 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 Lomo Saltado. How have the people, trade routes, and history of Peru shaped what ends up on the plate there?
4. Compare Lomo Saltado to a dish your own family cooks. What is similar, what is different, and what one question would you ask a family in Peru about how they make and share it?
5. After you cook Lomo Saltado, add Peru 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