Shivi Ramoutar: How One Chef’s Jerk Chicken Became a Global Soft-Power Pepper
Shivi Ramoutar and the Paradox of the Global Kitchen: Why Your Next Jerk Chicken Might Start in a Frankfurt Test Tube
By the time you read this, Shivi Ramoutar’s new cookbook is already propping up a wobbly table in a Jakarta co-working space, doubling as a mouse-mat in Lagos, and serving as ironic décor above a coffee machine in Reykjavík. Across three continents, her name has become shorthand for “post-national comfort food”—a polite euphemism for the moment when grandmothers everywhere admit defeat and order meal kits.
Ramoutar, a London-based Trinidadian-British chef who looks suspiciously well-rested for someone juggling television, publishing, and a sustainable-seafood startup, has spent the last decade repackaging Caribbean flavors for an audience that thinks Scotch bonnets are a cryptocurrency. In theory, she’s merely another food-world polymath with a Netflix deal. In practice, she is the canary in our planetary coal mine, tweeting recipes while the rest of us choke on supply-chain particulate.
The global significance begins, as most catastrophes do, in a spreadsheet. Somewhere in Singapore, a commodities trader logs the price of cassava and wonders whether climate-exiled farmers in Guyana can still meet the demand Ramoutar’s latest cauliflower-jerk empire has created. Meanwhile, in São Paulo, a ghost-kitchen operator copies her curry-mango mayo recipe—omitting the mango because tariffs just made it 400 % more expensive—and slings it into a burger that reaches Dubai via cloud-kitchen franchising so tangled it would give a tax lawyer vertigo.
All of this would be merely quaint if it weren’t for the geopolitical garnish. When the EU briefly banned Scotch bonnet imports last year (someone claimed they were a “bio-security risk,” which is Brussels-speak for “someone’s cousin wants the contract”), Caribbean diplomats invoked Ramoutar’s sales figures to argue that jerk seasoning was now a strategic cultural export. The ban lasted six weeks; the phrase “soft-power pepper” was coined, and a German think-tank now lists jerk spice alongside semiconductors on its critical-supply watchlist.
Back in the test-kitchen, Ramoutar herself remains diplomatically upbeat, Instagramming reels in which she air-kisses plantains like they’re old friends at Davos. She has partnered with a Dutch biotech firm to cultivate “climate-resilient” thyme—code for a lab-grown herb that tastes almost, but not quite, entirely unlike regret. The venture is funded by a Qatari sovereign-wealth fund that also owns a chunk of European football. Somewhere, a philosopher drops his fork.
The darker joke, of course, is that for all her globe-spanning reach, Ramoutar’s core message is almost aggressively local: cook like your grandmother, if your grandmother had a film crew and a sustainability consultant. It’s a paradox the world keeps buying: authenticity, mass-produced and carbon-offset. Consumers from Copenhagen to Cape Town now brag that their oxtail stew is “Shivi-approved,” blissfully unaware that the oxtails were probably sourced from a Brazilian feedlot and flown business class to a pop-up in Shoreditch.
Which brings us to the broader implication: Ramoutar is not just selling recipes; she’s selling the illusion that culture can be franchised without being flattened. Every time a new market licenses her brand, another food memory somewhere gets uploaded to the cloud, stripped of its mosquitoes, power cuts, and inconvenient politics. The result is a planet where you can taste Trinidad in a Tallinn food hall while a local grandmother wonders why her own pepper sauce suddenly feels obsolete.
At the current trajectory, UNESCO will soon classify “jerk” as intangible heritage, by which point it will be entirely tangible—freeze-dried, vacuum-sealed, and available in zero-gravity pouches for the first Mars colony. Ramoutar will do the launch event. She’ll smile, wave a miniature Trinidad flag, and remind us that food is love. The Martians, one hopes, will have enough sense to stay hungry.
