Jama
Food, grub — and "jamear", to eat: the Peruvian street register for its favourite subject.
Related lesson: Peruvian Spanish: A Survival Guide.
Hear it in context
La jama de ese huarique está buenaza y es barata.
The food at that hole-in-the-wall place is fantastic and cheap.
¿Ya jamaste o pedimos algo?
Have you eaten yet, or shall we order something?
Después del tono nos fuimos a jamear un caldo de gallina.
After the party we went to eat a chicken soup.
What It Actually Means
La jama is food, and jamear is to eat — the informal pair Peruvians use whenever the table is between friends. In a country that talks about food more than any other subject, the slang register unsurprisingly has its own full kit: la jama (the food), jamear (to eat), un jamón has nothing to do with it, and the place you do it well and cheaply is el huarique.
Where It Comes From
From the old replana, Lima’s street slang, most likely by clipping and reshaping jamar — a gitanism for eating that Spain’s own slang has used since the nineteenth century (caló jamar, to eat). Peru kept the verb, built the noun, and made both standard equipment for a food-obsessed capital.
How Natives Use It
Between friends and across counters, never on menus: ¿qué hay de jama? (what’s to eat?), ya está la jama (food’s ready), vamos a jamear (let’s go eat). It travels with the register’s other daily-life words — jato, pata, misio — and with Peru’s genuinely untranslatable food institutions: the menú (the fixed-price lunch), the caserita, the chifa.
Common Pitfall
Don’t order with it. To the waiter it is la carta and ¿qué me recomienda?; jama aimed at staff sounds like you are demanding grub, not requesting lunch. And note the false friend inside Peru itself: jamear means to eat, but jalar — which learners mix it with — means to pull, to give someone a lift, or to fail an exam. Me jalaron en mate is a bad day at school, not a meal.