There’s nothing like Christmas lunch to make you think about food. But if, like me, you’re dining in the Amazon, the scenario gets downright odd. It’s not just eating out in the garden, under an avocado tree, with hummingbirds zipping between bromeliads and hibiscuses as the temperature soars, it’s what’s on the plate.
Forget Brussels sprouts, parsnips and chestnuts, they don’t exist here so we have to be innovative: very young cocoa pods can sub for Brussels, while peach palm fruits make plausible parsnips. Araucaria nuts – kept since their brief appearance in August – turn into sort-of chestnuts for the stuffing.
Advertisement
We made our own dried fruit this year for the Xmas pudding, drying strips of golden-papaya fruit and green curls of tangerine skin. We went local with the birds, too: ducks from a Japanese-Brazilian organic farmer whose children I teach English.
There’s yogurt between courses to clean the palate (local goats’ milk from another pupil), served with stingless bee honey or grated fresh green peppercorns. By the end, we will have eaten far too much, and Smell, the stray dog who sleeps under the porch, will go spherical on leftovers.
Throughout the year, we try to be good to Earth while having as much fun as possible. We routinely exchange language lessons for anything from eggs to aubergines, and all the while growing passion fruit, watermelons, tomatoes, okra and beans in the garden. But is it enough? I’ve found both inspiration and self-doubt in three books I read this year.
The most left-field is activist Jacy Reese’s book , which brings hope to those who are wedded to eating cooked muscle protein and drinking milk but who worry about the abuses to animals that multiple studies show leave most industrially confined beasts terrified and stressed.
In order to domesticate a species, that species has to have been sociable in the first place, which means quality contact with compatriots is a given. But the time traditionally spent with herd or flock has no place in industrial meat production. Reese’s solution is to culture the desired cells: textured and tweaked, they appear on a plate free from ethical angst and environmental impacts, and (eventually) tasting fine. Other than tradition, Reese sees no reason to continue to abuse the lives of other planetary inhabitants for our gustatory pleasure.
After immersing myself in Reese’s interesting but somewhat scary high tech, Gary Paul Nabhan’s was something I could relate to in a firmly soil-under-the-fingernails way. This is not so much about animal rights as quality food (Nabhan is a food writer by trade) and the ability of smallholders not only to grow at the local level, but to produce the kind of heritage specialties that brighten palate, stall and market garden.
While his book focuses on the US, it is deeply inspiring nevertheless because it makes you feel that you can eat well without worrying about the transport costs of that unusual sprig of greenery in front of you. With the focus on organics, soil conservation and low-energy inputs this is indeed conservation you can taste.
And then there is by veteran campaigner Eric Holt-Giménez. Happily he answers his own question with a resounding “yes” because we already produce more than enough to feed everyone. The problems are mainly where it is done, how and distribution.
Industrial-scale agriculture not only leads to the homogenisation of taste and product that Nabhan has been lamenting for the past two decades, but leaves smallholders worldwide unable to compete and, in their resulting poverty, unable to buy enough to feed themselves. Land re-allocation, growing regionally specific food and greater regionalisation per se are, Holt-Giménez believes, the key: that change, he emphasises, is well within our existing technological reach.
Meanwhile, can I, as a largely vegetarian consumer, do any more? Well, the Araucaria seedlings seem to be growing nicely…
