I’ve never told anyone this other than Barry Estabrook: I grew up eating tomatoes planted in soil nourished by my own poop. My family’s zeal for organic gardening was unmatched. No, we did not have a composting toilet. Instead we used a 5 gallon white plastic bucket, filled up regularly, and carefully composted the old-fashioned way—in a steaming heap.

My family was a clan of Boston and Brooklyn-bred urban hipster homesteaders in the 60s, far before the trend. In the 70s, they went whole hog and bought 100 acres of land in the deep South where they could count on the sunshine and knowledge of neighboring farmers to help them carve an existence from the land.

Eco-freaks with art and design pedigrees, my family hated waste and respected art born from the crucible of a closed loop ecosystem. So they recycled cow bones, from the Chicago meat packing plants that supplied McDonald’s, into gorgeous jewelry that graced the pages of Vogue and the halls of the Smithsonian Galleries.

On the land, our access to food was limited by our skills and dictated by our natural environment: we grew most of what we ate, hand-pumped water from a well, bathed in the creek, heated with wood, kept bees, and aimed for the lightest possible footprint. We would consume meat only if we hunted it ourselves or if a neighbor did; luckily or not, we were in NRA and NASCAR country where hunting was de rigueur.

Occasionally when the wind howled and pickings were slim in our winter garden, we made soup from those Chicago bones. The soup was my favorite part of the whole operation. I’d spend hours prepping, stirring, and analyzing the flavors. Poop, reclaimed bones, then honorable soup seemed like a natural order. I partly resented our lifestyle, but mostly I was reverential, as I knew it had deep meaning. It was clear for me that the culmination of our ethics came together in the soup pot.

Fast forward from that white plastic bucket and the poop-nourished tomatoes. I didn’t stay on the family land. Still, my upbringing was simply too cool to rebel against. Goats in the living room would have been fine, so the best I could muster for backlash was to spend a decade in corporate environments, mastering the black art of communications, while my self-sufficiency skills marinated on the shelf.

In my adult life, I blamed my peripatetic career path for my mostly-tepid backyard vegetable gardening commitment. Instead of getting my hands in the dirt, I went after the best tasting authentically sourced food I could find–that was ethics enough for me. I remained serious about the kitchen: For years I was a foodshed nomad, living, working and sniffing out peak eating and cooking experiences in North Carolina, Japan, and Israel. I even tried Guatemala, with not much luck. Didn’t I earn that separation from the land after years of pooping in a bucket in service of that soil?

Returning to the U.S., I applied my communications chops in the Fair Trade movement, fighting for fair pay for farmers in developing countries. I loved my work, but I ran smack into monster-sized contradictions. I felt compelled to hide my love of food. It was not cool to rhapsodize over my homemade shallot sherry vinaigrette when coffee farmers were starving in Nicaragua. Visiting my friends, do-gooders like me employed at environmental and social justice organizations, I would cringe when I saw their kitchen trash cans stuffed to the brim with packaging from frozen processed fare—often vegan or organic—but inevitably from Trader Joe’s. Then again, who was I to tell them to shell fresh favas while Guatemala City sunk into chaos and poverty? I wished the social justice and environmental movements would ally with the good food advocates but the gulf was too wide. Where did this basic and critical connection of loving food fall flat for these otherwise enlightened people?

Over and over again, I saw the same issues: No time to cook, no skills to cook, no community with whom or for whom to cook, no cultural precedent, no acceptance of food beyond fuel. These challenges faced even those burning with desire for good food and thoroughly committed to their definition of what “good” was. I was sad that where everyone got off kilter was exactly the place where change could happen, three times a day: the market, the kitchen, and the table.

Now I am settled in Oakland, CA into a hybrid life of sorts. The native California grapes are ripening on the vines, my cucumbers are showing promise, and the solar panels are doing their thing on the roof. Sushi is a short walk up the hill, public transportation infrastructure is excellent, and the low-flow toilet sits serenely upstairs. My kitchen is not fancy, but it is the heart and soul of my house. I feed my friends who work for social justice and my neighbors who are too busy to cook. This morning I argued with my husband about soil amendments. A no-holds barred native-plant gardener, he strongly believes that a plant must make it on its own with minimum assistance. I know that to produce food from plants, you need to give the roots easy access to nutrients. You have to lend nature a helping hand, whether in the garden, in the kitchen, or in your own personal work for the roots of change.

I plan on sharing my stories about ironies, surprises, and challenges that accompany food to the last mile: from where we shop, to the kitchen, and to the table. I hope to make some new connections by telling stories about contradictions I see as the movement for good food gains steam across the country. In kitchens, at farmer’s markets, in community groups, in my backyard, and at work, tensions and stumbling blocks abound. Looking back at my family life, as committed as we were to sustainable food production, contradictions showed up there too.

The system’s level needs improvement and so do our individual relationships with food and with each other. We all have more work to do so that artichokes and beets make the leap from good-concept-but-daunting-preparation onto our forks. (Spiky thorns and red-stained fingers, oh my!)

I plan on creating a conversation, and perhaps offering tools, to make that last mile trip to the table a reality instead of a pipe dream. Stay tuned for my next post, an intense conversation with a valet in a Monterey, CA Cannery Row Hotel, who asks me what to eat, how to cook what he finds, and why he should bother. Plus, there is more to come including: crying over a corndog in Japan, generic cheese in Israel, and a pile of fava beans in Oakland.

Welcome to the Last Mile Access.

Photo courtesy of Vanessa Barrington

February 17, 2010: I crawled out of bed in a stupor this morning. The electricity blew out in my shared room last night, and by 8 o’clock, the bedroom—usually just tolerable enough to sleep in with the fan constantly whirring overhead–had turned into a sweatbox. I stumbled towards the kitchen for coffee and fruit. It wasn’t until I sat down and took my first sip that I realized it was finally over: Carnaval.

I peered over the high gate into the blessedly quiet streets. The wreckage remains, despite efforts late last night to begin to erase all traces of the City’s final summer fling. Confetti was stuck in the crevices between the cobblestones, beer cans strewn about, the last of the street vendors packing up their carts for the long treks back to the favelas.

Carnaval in Rio de Janeiro is the stuff of legends. Samba dancers decked out in elaborate headdresses and barely-there sequined bikinis, drunken revelry, free love. But after days of being confronted with constant noise, sweat, and groping (in the midst of our continuous heat wave, no less) around every corner, I’ve been waiting for this morning. A return to some semblance of normalcy.

I had actually been tolerating the chaos quite well for the first few days. Not coincidentally, those days coincided with a slight drop in temperature. I danced through the streets, kissed strangers (just imagine St. Patty’s day in Boston… and everyone’s Irish…for five days straight), faked the words to songs and chants I don’t know, packed myself into crowded metro cars for the ride to Ipanema’s epic blocos (street parties), and reaped the benefits of Rio’s lack of open container laws with caipirinhas concocted and consumed in the open air. But the partier in me wilted fast, and my frustration with the total shutdown of the city bubbled up quickly. The final straw came yesterday, Tuesday, when my favorite street market was canceled for the holiday. And so I spent the last day of Carnaval sulking, wandering up into the quieter reaches of my neighborhood in search of peace, waiting it out.

Despite my grumblings (and very real bitterness that Carnaval got in between my weekly produce grab and me), if there is one thing I’ll miss most about this city, it is the way virtually all life seems to be lived on the street. And although Carnaval is certainly a larger-than-life example, the way in which Cariocas interact with one another and with their food in public spaces—the way every meal, every beer, ever outing the beach can become a party—has become a point of admiration. When compared with the constant rush of New York and many first-world cities, and the way in which their cultures treat food as a necessary interruption to the mad dash of daily life (and is thus often consumed as fast as possible with as little effort as possible), the Cariocas’ attitude towards their food—its purchase, preparation, and consumption—has come as a welcome change.

Although I’m certainly aware that any food culture is the result of a complex history and set of norms, I can’t help but believe that part of the reason Rio has such a hedonistic attitude towards its food is its incredible beauty and variety. Since stumbling upon the enormous market at Catete station during a restless walk my third day here, I have been blocking off half a day each Tuesday for the market. Wandering through the stalls is, to me, as exciting and beautiful as Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, a Picasso canvas viewed for the first time, the Notre Dame cathedral. I feel giddy each time I step into a new food market, but none has ever been so stimulating, so strange, as Brazil’s. Mounds of produce both familiar and foreign, more types of peppers than I can count, cheese, honey, fresh shredded coconut, and piles of manioc meal greet me with each visit. The mingling scent of limp leaves crushed underfoot, the ice melting off from the fish stall, Minas cheese on an open grill.

The market is where I go to feel in my element, peppering vendors and other shoppers with questions about names, origins, and preparations of various foods. Nowhere have I had more opportunity to practice my Portuguese and also found myself more frustrated; if only I could ask the capsicum vendor to discern for me the heat levels of his many chilies, or engage the jaca fruit man in a conversation about where he harvests the enormous fruit (does he carry it out of Tijuca National Park, as I’ve seen so many do as I hike up to swim in the waterfalls there?) and why he has a folding table on the outskirts of the market rather than a proper stall in the square.

I shoulder my way through the crowds, but with no sense of hurry, often stuck for long stretches of time between old women squeezing and smelling produce, leaving their shopping carts in the middle of the already-tight pathways. I bargain. I taste. I buy too much to carry.

By high noon, I am always exhausted, and it is time to plant myself in the shade of the pastel tent and replenish my energy stores. Pasteis (fried wontons filled with all manner of savory concoctions) are something of a religion in Brazil, and accompanied by a cup of freshly pressed caldo (sugarcane juice), they provide the perfect snack for marketers in need of a break before the ordeal of getting their purchases home. The pastel vendors have quickly become friends, and are endlessly patient with me as I try to engage them in small-talk, posing for pictures, gleeful when I tell them how I wait each week for this hour of rest and people watching as I gulp cup after cup of their abrosial caldo. I always return home exhausted but absolutely content, already dreaming of how I’ll prepare my week’s bounty.

As the end of my stay in Rio draws near, I find myself speculating about how drastically different this city will be if and when I visit some years from now. In light of the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics, Rio’s mayor is instituting a series of policies to crack down on open air food vendors, an entire economy in and of itself and, as far as I can tell, the source of many of the Cariocas’ calories. Green coconuts can no longer be sold directly on the sands of the beach. Popcorn, grilled meats, and cut fruit area among the foods on the watch-list. An entire culture is being systematically dismantled (or at least an attempt is being made to do so) in order to promote Rio’s image as a first-world city. It seems to me this is as much sacrilege as banning Carnaval from the streets. Attempting to relegate Rio’s life to contained spaces, to sterilize, homogenize, “modernize”, isolate. At what cost? And to whose benefit?

As I anticipate my final market day next week, before I head on to Sao Paulo, I find myself struck, suddenly, but my first real wave of “saudade”; a preemptive nostalgia and yearning for the food culture that exists here, those distinct food cultures I have experienced elsewhere, and all those that may soon be lost.

February 11, 2010: I’m sitting on the terrace of my temporary home in Rio, Casa Amarelinha in the Santa Teresa neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro, feeling remotely cool for the first time in over a week. It’s been hard to think much in this heat—we’ve been topping 110 degrees regularly this past week, in one of the worst heat waves Rio has seen in recent memory (to exacerbate what has been an unusually hot summer all around), with about 75% humidity. When the mercury rises to about 90 back in New York, everyone retreats into their air conditioned offices and apartments or flees to the beach or countryside. But here in Rio, life in the streets goes on in full force, despite the blazing sun. I am so grateful it does, for what life courses through the streets of this city! However, the oppressive weather has made my volunteer work challenging to bear, even for a seasoned farm gal.

Heat aside, my work has been rather disappointing all around, but also a tremendous lesson. The garden in which we are working is just over two years old. The half-acre plot sits right at the intersection of bohemian Santa Teresa and one of the surrounding favelas (an elegant word that masks its true meaning: sprawling slum). A group of impassioned volunteers from the community (residents, doctors, artists, longtime home gardeners, agronomists, concerned community members) came together to reclaim a vacant lot and turn it into a verdant oasis of food production and a place for residents to spend time outside (their homes are quite small and the favelas use up every patch of ground available for housing and walkways) and congregate. The photos of the garden it its first year are lovely—neat rows of greens and fruit tree saplings, smiling children holding freshly-harvested sweet potatoes, volunteers holding hands in a circle, discussing the work of the day. But now, with interest and support having waned over the last six months (as so often happens with community projects), the garden has gone practically to seed.

Most mornings are spent cutting back the vegetation in the blazing sun, preparing beds for plantings (some of which never take due to lack of rain and Rio’s frequent water system malfunctions), and cleaning out the debris that has accumulated over the months. There are two other Western women and I plus a Swedish post-doc. in urban ecology, Daniel, who is conducting an experiment in the garden and engaging in community issues and conducting interviews as well. Community residents pop in occasionally to buy a bunch of herbs or chat, often mocking the other volunteers and I as “gringos locos,” crazy foreigners come to work on this little plot of land.

I spent my first day at the garden brooding in frustration, wishing for the rapid pace and glory of planting, weeding and harvesting in a production atmosphere. But as I slowed and talked with Simone and Aureo, the community members who run the garden, a sense of acceptance settled upon me. As volunteers just passing through, we have to be careful where we offer our advice and ideas, how many initiatives we try to catalyze, and generally try to toe the fine line between imposing our own ideas and plans and offering up whatever assistance is asked by the community. I realized, if work that needs to be done is to clear the garden—to weed endlessly, repair fencing, rebuild raised beds destroyed by flash floods—then that is what we will do. It’s true, working at the horta communitarian (community garden) hasn’t been as productive or educational as I’d hoped agriculturally, but sometimes I’m caught by surprise at the enormous education to be gained by simply engaging with people with similar interests in a different cultural context; noticing the parallels and examining the divergences in our methodologies, our priorities, our ideals.

I know I will have much more to say on the subject of the garden in time, but some of it will have to wait, to marinate, develop. It’s certainly food for thought, though, to notice the remarkable similarities in community-based social projects here and in other places I’ve worked, and in particular to hear individuals’ thoughts about gardens and farms and their roles in struggling urban communities.

So although I’m not harvesting and distributing crate upon crate of gorgeous organic produce as I had hoped (although we do harvest the occasional papaya, malagueta pepper, and stunning Brazilian greens for ourselves and neighbors), I am in the throes of an important learning experience. “The work of the world is common as mud,” wrote Marge Piercy in her iconic poem “To Be of Use.” I am not, I must remind myself, here to revel in my own glory or to turn a project on its head. I am here to help, to be of use, to give with my sweat and my blisters and my time. To leave my ego behind and open myself to another context, other ways of doing and thinking. To build trust and relationships. That is where the impact and fodder for lasting change lies.

This is the first in a series of posts from our new Foodshed Nomad column.

January 29, 2010
It’s difficult to explain, and I’m certainly aware that I’m still in a phase of first impressions rather than any sort of intimate. But in short, I find this city absolutely magnificent. There’s a phrase in Brazilian Portuguese that has no literal translation: saudade. It connotes a sense of longing, a deep yearning and nostalgia for a person or place, and is often used when expressing your love for something or someone while you are still with it or them (perhaps the sentiment Toni Morrison was trying to express when she wrote, “It is sheer good fortune to miss somebody before you leave them” in her book Sula). I’ve been here just a week, but it already feels like much longer. Rio’s languorous pace draws you in very quickly, and running around Brooklyn packing up and saying goodbyes already seems months behind me. One of my new friends and I were just discussing the intoxication that comes from being in Rio, the sense that you are living in Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, a place with no life or time outside its limits. Here we all move as one, and even those of us who move at the quickest pace in our outside lives are forced to give up the hurry here. It is as giving in to love.

The city is as full of sighs of revelry and pleasure as it is with bustle and pain. I find myself at times reminded of other places to which I’ve traveled — the chaos of Durban, the transplanted European elegance of Cape Town, the poverty and remarkable presence of the sprawling South African townships, the startling friendliness of Detroit, the multiculturalism of New York, the cosmopolitan beach neighborhoods and slow pace of Montevideo, the sultry street life and music of San Telmo in Buenos Aires, the heat of Belize, and the bohemian beauty of Montmartre in Paris.

But social inequity rules here—pickpocketing is commonplace and the homeless are too numerous to count. The standard police force works in tandem with the druglords, pocketing bribes to stay quiet and leave the traffickers to their business. And certainly, conflicts do arise. The sound of gunshots from the hills is common, as is the passing of police helicopters overhead. But unlike my experience in South Africa, violence isn’t random here. The wars are between the traffickers and those who engage with them—customers, suppliers, police, corrupt businessfolk. And as frightening and real as it is, life goes on, peacefully for the most part. The media has sensationalized Rio (as it has sensationalized so many places) to a point of ridiculous paranoia. One musn’t walk through the streets here with fear. The best protection, in fact, is to adopt the pace of the Cariocas—moving at a honeyed speed, filled with sweetness, passion, joy, and no sense of urgency at all; keeping your wits about you is certainly necessary, but carrying your terror on your sleeve only seems to make you more of a target of petty crime.

The scene is set: this is Rio. As usual when I arrive in a new place, I first set myself to orienting myself by food. By the afternoon of my first day in Rio, I knew I would be well fed. Small shops scattered all about the city vend all the basics, but alongside the streets and in the tangled jungle yards are where the real treasure troves lie. Mounds of fresh produce sold on the sidewalk, trees dripping with jeweled fruit in the yards, beautiful fish, green coconuts served with a straw for their nourishing water and sweet meat, juice stands on every corner, salgados (savory snacks) and sweets in carts everywhere. Bliss.

At first, adjusting to the heat, I wondered whether I would be able to take advantage of this bounty. My inclination was to go on an immediate spree and gorge myself. But in temperatures this high, you have to pace yourself. The Cariocas snack all day long — a mango or some jaca (jackfruit) here, a salgado or two there, juice and coconut water as frequently as possible, acai as an afternoon snack, and light grazing to accompany cold beers or caipirinhas through the long sultry nights of samba and revelry. This is true, as far as I can tell, across socio-economic lines. Almost everyone eats like this. The downtown elite hustle from their air conditioned offices to air conditioned restaurants for large platos executivos (set lunches) during the week while the majority of the city swelters, but for the most part, the Cariocas eat in bits all the day long, savoring the fruits of Brazil’s diverse cultures and climates and replenishing their energy stores to stay standing in the sticky heat.

And so I have quickly learned to do as the locals do. A banana and mango with my morning coffee, a suck of sugar cane in the mid-morning garden sun, a salgado or a cake and juice to carry me through until the sun finally sets and it’s cool enough for a small hot meal. Eating is as much as source of pleasure as samba, love, and the beaches here. And to appreciate it fully, this busy-bee New Yorker is getting a lesson in slowing down.

This is the first in series of posts about food systems issues in and around Brazil. Sara will contribute to a new column called The Foodshed Nomad. Look for her updates regularly.

I’m on the floor of my father’s Manhattan apartment, surrounded by luggage, paperwork, books and a sprawl of clothes and toiletries. It is a mere two days from my departure for Brazil, and it feels like there are mountains of tasks to complete before I get on the plane. Sitting here, pounding away at my keyboard, catching up on emails and typing up loose ends, I finally forced myself to find a moment to write.

Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Sara Franklin. I have worked in food systems for several years now in a variety of capacities— I have studied nutrition and agriculture; I have farmed; I have worked for anti-hunger organizations dealing with a lack of healthy, accessible food in urban areas; I have worked to build capacity among community-based groups across the U.S. using agriculture as a tool of empowerment to work towards eliminating hunger and poverty; I have been a restaurant critic, a freelance writer, and consultant for various organizations; and I have built gardens in cities and the countryside. But what has, perhaps, taught me most about food systems issues and their pervasiveness is travel. In visiting farmers and activist groups working in food and agriculture in the U.S. and abroad, I have learned that the issues related to food systems are a universal language. Food systems issues cut across cultures and create common ground, allowing space for us to learn from one another; issues of sustainability, hunger, wages, labor conditions, food deserts, malnutrition, livability in urban areas, the deterioration of rural communities… the list goes on and on. Although these conversations may look different from location to location, the themes remain the same. Those who engage with these issues share a common passion for their work, a dedication to finding lasting solutions to societal issues, using the lenses of food and agriculture as their frames of reference.

I’ve traveled extensively in recent years, yet much of my time has been based in the U.S. Northeast. Now for nearly three months this winter, I will live, work, and travel in Brazil.

My reasons for going are many—Brazil’s agricultural history, its tremendous urban migration, heated battles over land use and displacement, and enormous social inequities are just a few of the compelling reasons I have chomped at the bit to explore this enormous country. And, of course, an interest of any avid traveler: the food.

I have ideas and tentative itineraries for the months ahead, but of course, the best laid plans… What I do know is that for the first half of my trip, I will be based in Rio de Janeiro, the Marvelous City. There, I’ve hooked up with an organization that builds and maintains food security gardens and teaches cooking and nutrition education in low-income communities. Getting my hands back in the soil has been on my mind more or less constantly since I stopped farming in the fall of 2007 to move to Brooklyn for work, and I can’t think of a more exciting way to re-enter the world of agriculture than in a foreign (to me) cultural context. New techniques and crops await me, and I’m looking forward to sharing my own skills and knowledge with my Brazilian counterparts.

So stay tuned! I can’t wait to start writing from the road. Next stop: Rio.