The Apiaká cuisine includes a significant variety of ingredients and different ways to prepare them. But the staples are a combination of fish and/or meat from animals hunted, cooked or grilled, eaten with manioc meal. These ingredients may be simply grilled or boiled in water and salt, or, more elaborately, roasted slowly or cooked with brazil nut juice, along with several spices. Breakfast may consist of a porridge of yam, or mashed cooked bananas, cooked in water or in brazil nut juice.

Brazil nut, abundant in the Apiaká territory, is part of sophisticated, festive recipes. In addition to being used for its “juice”, it is added to a kind of cake made of manioc that is wrapped in banana leaves and cooked.

The Apiaká eat a wide variety of fruits, both wild and cultivated. And when they say “there is nothing to eat” it simply means that there is no meat or fish.

The appreciation for certain types of foods varies from items that are excluded from the diet altogether to those that are “always eaten”. When there is nothing better, they may eat robalo (Amazon lungfish) and, in crisis situations, even jaú (a very large Amazon catfish). The Apiaká are very fond of tapir, peccary and capuchin monkey meat. But, as they say, “what the Apiaká really like is tracajá (river turtle) meat”, as well as their eggs.