“There is no love sincerer than the love of food,” wrote George Bernard Shaw in his 1903 book ‘Man and Superman’. With the establishment of a new gourmet restaurant in La Paz, more of this love is coming to Bolivia. Could this move carve the path for creativity and its industry in the country?

Let me introduce you to Noma. The qualities that have placed this Danish restaurant at the top of the list of The World’s 50 Best Restaurants by the British magazine ‘Restaurant’, are that it is “innovative, inventive, and – of course – [that it has a] ground-breaking approach to cooking.”  However, that is not the end to this story. Following Noma’s success, co-founder Claus Meyer opened another gourmet restaurant, GUSTU, but this time in Bolivia. Now, you may be thinking, ‘why am I reading reviews about restaurants in Development Roast?’ Turns out, Claus Meyer is no ordinary gastronomic entrepreneur. It is precisely his “ground-breaking approach” to cuisine at GUSTU that might be opening doors in Bolivia towards a society more supportive of unconventional—yet still promising—career paths. Read More »

There are differing opinions on what poverty and development are and the role that happiness plays in them (see for example Development Roast’s January article ‘Opinion: Why happiness does not matter for the problem of poverty’). Aside from poverty itself, the world’s view on how to conceptualize and measure development has evolved over time. Factors that years ago were considered completely irrelevant to development are increasingly incorporated into our collective understanding of what it means to advance and the new directions of the concept’s evolution are proving highly interesting.

It is safe to assume that everyone wants to be happy; happiness is often referred to as the ultimate goal of existence at the individual level. However, a global scale evaluation of happiness levels, in relation to nations’ development, is rare since, for some, its natural subjectivity makes it inadequate for the analysis of progress. However, slowly, over time, views are changing. Read More »