A telltale detail gave away the changing way of life for the indigenous Machiguenga women living around Peru’s most important gas project in the Cuzco Amazons: they had stopped harvesting yuca. Why bother planting the traditional tuber that was the mainstay of their daily diet if they could simply buy it at one of the dozens of little shops that had sprung up around the Camisea gas project installations? Indeed, why bother with yuca when one could easily buy rice? “If yuca is needed, you just buy it,” Eulalia Andrés Incacuna, an indigenous woman from the Kirigueti community, told us in 2006, when we first went to the far-flung villages two years before the gas project actually began full operations.