this issue was translated by Pat Willard, from America Eats! – Thank you, Pat, for spreading my work among your audience!

In common sense, we think that the future is multiple and the past is only one. While the future is seen as something that can be molded and directed, the past would be crystallized and immutable—when, in fact, the entire past is a seam of selected patches. Not the available ones or the ones found along the way: the chosen ones.

It is customary to say that History is written by the hand of those who dominate. And what that hand does is smother and remove from the final version what seems unflattering to it. Learning to look at the past and reinterpret History is not an easy task. Mending the frayed parts that were hidden, reintegrating facts that were ignored into the timeline, challenging the canon—as historian, gastronome and doctor in nutrition, food and health Lourence Alves said in this interview—has its price. Generally, the discredit of those who question the status quo.

The transformation of this official History, which gains more biases and juxtaposed narratives, is something new, technologically speaking. Today, we don't need to write on paper, translate and wait months for it to cross oceans to disperse around the world. The patchwork of History is being stitched live, on multiple fronts – in academia, in civil society and especially in everyday life. Bringing the reading against the grain of official History into everyday life – the samba-enredo of Mangueira in 2019 is an example of this—in live or virtual conversations—is our way of lining the new understanding to the historical patchwork quilt. 

Raphael Brandão is 30 years old and approached the world of coffee by chance, in 2019, when working in a micro roaster as an assistant—he packed the roasted beans and glued stickers. In a matter of months, he slurped up what he could of the surroundings and started doing his own research. He understood that "black" and "coffee" were historically tied together around slavery. And he wanted to tear up the farm.

He created the Café di Preto brand in December 2020, relocating his race and class to another position in the world. In practice, as Regina Tchelly does, he points out new paths trying to change his surroundings. 

The reality of specialty coffee is expensive bags and cheap wages. And the reality of the Brazilian job market is that white people earn about 45% more than black and brown people. Farm and ranch owners are mostly white: 46.65% versus 8.28% black. Pardos are 44% of rural landowners. 

“All coffee produced by black people ends up being a microlot,” defined Raphael, in the midst of a digression while we were talking on the phone. It was difficult to transcribe that conversation. Between contextualization, outbursts and a lot of interference in the operator's signal (the call dropped three or four times), the interview turned into a conversation. I kept, in the transcript, only the main questions, without my lines and comments interspersed with Raphael's answers, letting the text follow a stream of consciousness.

Between 2020 and 2021, Raphael used the company's roaster in his spare time and launched the Dandara and Esperança coffees, tributes to black women who are historical references: Dandara de Palmares and Esperança Garcia, the cook who wrote a petition letter in 1770 . At the time, Raphael did not know the coffee market that well, and the suppliers he had access to were white.

The first volume, scheduled to last three months, sold out in just over a month , in June 2021. For structural reasons, he had to stop using the roaster at the place where he worked and the brand went into latency in September . In October, he started a crowdfunding platform campaign to buy the equipment and start working exclusively for his brand.

Things did not go as expected: after six months of campaigning, he raised R$14,800 and had to dismantle his computer – the best equipment he had at hand—to raffle the parts. He got more than R$10 thousand. Plus occasional donations from friends and strangers, it reached R$40,000 and can be used for a down payment on the equipment.

“I kept working where I was, I left in February of this year, because I didn't have the financial backup to pay the bills. What made me feel safe to leave work was because I live at the house of a friend who moved out of town, Mário. He exempted me from rent if I had a money problem,” he recalls. Another friend from the time at the Control and Automation Engineering college, Rafael, saw his fridge empty and stocked his pantry in early 2022. “For three months I knew I was going to make it work, because I had a place to live and something to eat. Mário and Rafael are two black friends. At the time we met, I didn't have that racial conscience. They helped me at the beginning of college and they help me today. Café di Preto exists today because I have this support network, these friendships,” he says.

Born in the Lagos Region of the state of Rio de Janeiro, Raphael has been living in Nova Iguaçu, Baixada Fluminense, for 11 years, having lived in the capital and in Niterói for short periods. Raphael started the new phase of Café di Preto with a roaster in his living room, in Nova Iguaçu, on April 19, 2022, with coffees from four black suppliers. In August 2022, he reached the mark of a ton of roasted coffee.

Café di Preto can be called an one-man-company. Raphael works alone in purchasing, roasting, selling and shipping by carrier, taking advantage of times when stocks run out to solve bureaucracy. 

The 90-minute interview has been edited and rearranged for better reading.

How is your routine working at Café di Preto currently? 

As the first stock ended, I'm solving bureaucracy. The part of the routine that I like the most is roasting coffee. Now I'm defining the roasting profile of Dandara, of Mr Ivan Santana. The roasting part, even though it is a repetitive process after the sensorial profile is fixed… I really like to see the coffee going in raw and coming out roasted. I see how rewarding the struggle is. I'm still roasting in the living room, I need to renovate the funds to receive people and give courses. But it is very gratifying to know that it was someone who cultivated, who benefited and then came to me. As much as roasting is the same thing, it always has a special taste to conquer something that is mine. 

This week I was just remembering. [Roasting coffee] tastes even more special because I worked [in a coffee shop] without even receiving the minimum wage. At the time, I thought those people were my friends. From the moment they saw my growth [with the Café di Preto brand], it seems that they wanted to put a halter on me so that I would continue to be just an employee. I left the cafeteria with nothing right, I didn't even have a roaster. I gave up a lot, what little I had, to conquer this here. It's a stop that I'm afraid, of becoming an example of overcoming. There was an article with [coffee supplier] Ivan Santana on g1. He bought a part of the farm where he worked from the age of 11 to 13 in coffee production. And then there are people who think it's meritocracy, that if you don't give up, you can do it. How many black people today own a property? How many fight and don't have a coffee shop, a roaster? I'm afraid they use my story like that too. I know I got lucky, because I had a great support network. I had poor mental health, I had moments when I was crying at work, it was exhausting and many times other people cannot overcome these barriers. The suicide rate is higher in black men.

I always say that I got over it, but I don't want to be an example of a story of overcoming. I believe it has to be easy for everyone. There is no meritocracy in the society we live in, there is no meritocracy in coffee.

To enter the world of coffee, I had to enter a coffee work day that was not necessary. Coffee is a transformative tool for opening doors. It's like Sueli Carneiro says in the interview with Mano Brown: there are more people who fight than people who win. 

Do you service other coffee brands or coffee shops? 

I was supplying Dandara beans for espresso at a coffee shop in Rio de Janeiro, but as I had to pass on the increase [in gasoline, coffee, etc.], the partnership was discontinued. When I started, I priced it wrong, because I was afraid of not selling. I priced with no room for growth for the company. Just to get out in a draw every month. I was stuck with the democratization of specialty coffee, but there was no point in my product being cheap and the company closing down. Then things don't work. I'm putting aside the democratization of coffee to make the company grow, and then I can democratize it later on.

In the special coffee, there is a lot of microlots of R$ 70 for a 250 gram package. But when you think about it, practically all coffee made by a black person is microlot: Seu Romão only has three bags, at most, to send. Café di Preto is a portion of a portion [of specialty coffee]: in addition to being planted by a black person, the roasting is also. People need to see that coffee is expensive for rarity. 

In this new moment of the brand, you are with black suppliers. Who are the people who work with you now and what are the coffees produced?

I have grains from the Peixoto Family (Santo Antônio do Amparo – MG), the Romão Family (Perdões—MG), Ivan Santana (Cape Verde – MG), and Luís Carlos Gomes (Santa Tereza—ES). The coffees were on pre-sale [until August 12] and have the same names as the first phase of the brand, Esperança and Dandara, but they are drinks with different profiles from those roasted for the first batch. They are tributes to Esperança Garcia and Dandara de Palmares.

I'm making Dandara with a yellow catuaí mocha from Ivan Santana. It's an entryway coffee, so I'm looking for beans with a caramel, chocolate, sensory profile, a more sensitive and friendly sensory profile to be the entryway. Who has never drank special coffee, if you start with a fermented one with notes of passion fruit… [not complete]. Anyone who starts drinking my coffees starts with Dandara.

Esperança is a 99 red catuaí , natural process, by Luiz Carlos Romão. It's more fruity, a step ahead of Dandara. It has caramel, but what stands out is the note of yellow fruit, such as peach, apricot. It has [notes of] rapadura, very sweet and fruity. I even find it nauseating when I toast and forget about the open buckets. 

Now I have a new coffee which is a special conilon Rita de Cássia , a canephora clone 153, by Luís Carlos Gomes . The name is a tribute to his sister. This coffee has the characteristics of conilon, it is more almond-shaped, more closed. It has nuts, cocoa. I went up there to roast with them once. This is the coffee that has everything to be the base coffee with Dandara. Luis Carlos trusted me and sent me the bags, since I only had to pay the freight. Just hearing my story, he trusted me. I had never spoken to him in my life. 

The fourth coffee is Auxiliadora , which at the moment is a natural yellow catuaí from the Peixoto family. The name is a tribute to Neide's sister-in-law, with whom I deal with the cafes. Auxiliadora helps in the cultivation and harvesting of grains. This coffee is more delicate, with more floral notes and yellow fruit. I bought a little of it, I don't know if it will always be the same grain. 

And there's Dona Edilaine, Romão 's wife who is honored in the fermented coffee. Their property is eight years old. He won the lottery and bought that little piece of land and produces 87-point grain for Esperança and Edilaine. This is a red catuaí 99 fermented and dried in a suspended terrace. It has acidic notes, such as tamarind candy, passion fruit and honey with lemon. The first crop was only 30 kg and everyone praises it a lot. Let's try to put this one in Coffee of the Year this year. 

Edilaine, due to the property's history and sensory profile, is my favorite. Even those who don't know much about coffee know that there is something in this cafe. The Romão couple do everything, from harvesting, processing and everything else. Their work is small, like an ant, and they are making an incredible stop. It's an awesomeness of cafes they make with the tools they have. I'm just the tip of the spear. Roasting is important, but the work before me is incredible. 

The history of coffee in Brazil is that of farmers who began to invest in production after other economic cycles weakened, such as that of sugarcane. The enslaved people, however, were the ones who had the technology, the know-how to work with that product. Even today, the workforce of black people in coffee production centers are hired for physical work, such as harvesting. But at the other end of the chain, in barismo and roasting, you don't see black people, from what I read in your interviews. 

There is a farm that is going to host an event. It has been producing coffee since 1852. The knowledge shared in this kind of event would be enriching, but I am not prepared for environments where there was blood and pain. It's something that still hurts me. I can not go. The structure is standing there, the colonial house, the slave quarters. These people at the forefront have a concern for the environment, but you don't see a racial concern, literally. There has to be a fix. The whole story of successful coffee farms [in Brazil] starts in the period of slavery.

These people are not to blame that their great-great-grandparents became rich through the forced labor of black and indigenous people, but there is no initiative on the part of these people to repair, to raise awareness, to create a fund to encourage the entry of people in the coffee world. There is no such debate. Everyone is proud to say that it is the fifth generation to produce coffee, but this is a matter of mathematics: it has not been possible to produce since 1850 and not have used slave labor at some point. 

The only program in Brazil that aims to give black people the opportunity to specialize in the coffee business is from the US, from Phyllis Johnson [co-founder and director of BD Imports]. In total, I received a contribution of R$ 10 thousand [from the Dona Ivone scholarship, from Coffee for Equity] to take a course, to travel to São Paulo to take courses that are out of my reality. 

My ambitions with Café di Preto go beyond getting rich and being able to buy a house and a car. I want to be an agent of transformation so that other black people take courses in roasting, barista and other things. For all this you need money. It's a tragic past, people should try to clean it up somehow. Here in Brazil I didn't find any initiative like that [like Coffe for Equity].

There are some initiatives, such as encouraging indigenous and gender groups, but black people are not talked about. There was a report by g1 news that talked about the coffee cycle and all the people who speak in the article are white. And when two black people appear in the eight-minute video, they are carrying bags and walking around the yard. Everything remains the same: white people in the condition of power and black people in the condition of cheap and unskilled labor, because there is no concern to insert and qualify them. The concern is to be sustainable, ecologically correct.

Even the question of the African people who came, they had coffee cultivation that is from Ethiopia, maybe some peoples had expertise in another type of agricultural production [similar to coffee management]. Black labor was changed because it was black and not because it was of low quality. Who roasted the coffees [during the period of slavery] were black people. When I went to the Afro Brasil Museum , there was an exhibition on sugarcane. And there was the part that talked about coffee. There was a roaster like the ball, but big. What separates me from that black roaster? The power and racial structure are the same. I'm a black person who roasts coffee for white people. The guy today who is rich and owns a supermarket, for example, did not get rich directly from slave labor, but the family of a coffee farm did. The coffee heir directly benefits from slavery. The division is the same: white people with possession, power and land and black people as labor force. It made me really sick to think about at first. Gradually I feel like an agent of change, but not yet as I wanted. When I Google "black" + "coffee" a couple of pictures of me now appear, and not just images that portray slavery. 

And today, a year and a half later, have you found more black people studying and preparing coffee?

Most of the people who follow me are black and work in coffee. Black coffee shop owners, or who work in some way with coffee and want to sell or serve my coffee. Sometimes, what we need is for us to see each other. The mother of a friend of mine asked me to tell my story to the children she teaches: “they need to see that they are in your reality, that you are close to them". What catches me the most to this day are messages that thank you for the brand to exist or for not giving up. It is a key change and turn tool. I know I'm not the first black roaster in Brazil, but I put this in crowdfunding to get attention. Conceição Evaristo says: “it doesn't matter if you are the first, what matters is opening doors.” 

I want to know what opportunities Café di Preto can generate for other people. Coffee can transform lives, but since 1727 it has been transforming the lives of the same people: white people. I want black people to be contemplated with this too. It can be as an agronomist, barista, roaster. Black people see opportunity in being a skilled workforce, or opening a small brand, working in a coffee shop or opening one. It goes far beyond getting rich. My greatest wealth will be 20 years from now having positively impacted other people's lives. 

Next year I want to provide roasting services, from having a coffee line to espresso coffee shops. But I'm still tight on the stock issue. I have problems that all roasters have, but I also have unique problems. How many black farms produce more than a thousand bags of coffee? Big [white people's farms] always produce more than a thousand. For Café di Preto to grow there is a bottleneck, which is the volume produced on a black farm. If they give me a million reais, I can't buy a million reais of black coffee. And I don't want to give up working only with grains made by black people. Since I started [buying only from black people's farms], it's been an indescribable satisfaction, knowing that these people who sent me these cafes fought hard for the small properties they have. I need to foster the cycle that comes before me. 

Everything is political. Coffee is political, because it is very connected to what happened in the past. Just as wealth was inherited, poverty is also passed from generation to generation, as a friend says. It is difficult to break the cycle of poverty. There's no way for a person to buy a special coffee if the regular coffee is R$20 a kilo, if it's R$9 a liter of milk. For black people to access the cafe, it's not just up to me. The situation in Brazil, in addition to screwing the black and poor person, it breaks my role, because my product is only in the bourgeois class, which are white people. I don't want it to be niche. In addition to all the rush, it needs a political movement from the coffee to the outside, and from the outside to the coffee.

It is not fair for a black person to have to win the lottery to buy land if there are people who inherit a share of the hereditary captaincy until today.

The Café di Preto brand has less than two years of history, but it has some important milestones, such as the three-month stock sold in just over 30 days. What was the "ideal functioning" you wanted at the beginning of the brand? Was it like this?

As more [volume of] coffee is coming this time, I thought it best to pre-order. The price of coffees has increased. If I took BRL 10,000 worth of coffee, it would be a smaller volume than the BRL 10,000 worth of coffee a few months ago. I bought nine bags, that's almost 600 kg. With pre-sales I can have more cash to pay my suppliers, who are family farmers. The pre-sale generates a boom and I already paid a portion more than I had promised in the negotiation.

I increased the stock so I don't have to break the offer. I bought more coffee to be able to sell the 12 months of the year without fear. 

In the beginning, I wanted to be a brand to bring representation, to sell black people's coffee. At the time, it was just me roasting, I had no ambitions, I was the only black person in the production chain. I still want to be representative, I want it to be democratic, but I want coffee to substantially change a person's life. Give her a course and she can enter the area, in whatever part of the production chain.

Black people are still discovering the world of coffee. There are people who still don't even know that their lives will be changed by coffee.

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low heat/fogo baixo just turned one year of existence on June 24, when the first edition aired. The name fogo baixo was set only in the second issue, though, and the English version was in August. My goal when creating this newsletter was to announce my courses, post links to my journalistic reports, and write about food writing from time to time. My inspirations were Alicia Kennedy and Rafael Tonon, somehow Bits to Brands, by Beatriz Guarezi, and A Hortaliça, by Vanessa Barbara.

Nothing I had planned – sections, text style, subjects – felt authentic when writing. I sensed a falsehood in the text, approach, and tone of voice. And as I wanted to write essays and also explore the seam between the backstage of the investigation and the results of it, I ended up embracing long-form pieces without blaming myself for it. This behind-the-scenes aesthetic, as I learned to name it after a JP Cuenca course, is what I identify today as a characteristic of mine. That's what I did here, here [Portuguese only] and here [Portuguese only].

This newsletter is the showcase of my authorial work, and I feel happy and satisfied to be able to do so by sharing it with a growing audience and having the support of readers. Thanks, thanks, thanks!

As many new subscribers arrived last week, I leave below three editions that deserve a careful reading, but that are not among the top at the moment (but read the most accessed too! I'm not recommending it, the readers are, haha):

fogo baixo

#5 | vegetarianism as a food aesthetic

this issue was translated by Luciane Maesp 📧 luciane.maesp@gmail.com clique aqui para ler em português In 2013, I proposed a blog to cover vegetarian eating-out for Gazeta do Povo newspaper, where I had been working for a year as a freelancer. I had just been hired as a reporter for…

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4 years ago · 3 likes · Flávia Schiochet

fogo baixo

[interview: Ravi Orsini] controversies in environmental vegetarianism

this issue was translated by Luciane Maesp 📧 luciane.maesp@gmail.com clique aqui para ler em português…

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4 years ago · 2 likes · Flávia Schiochet

fogo baixo

[interview: Taís de Sant'Anna Machado] "chef’s image is built in counterpoint to black maidservant cook"

this issue was translated by Luciane Maesp 📧 luciane.maesp@gmail.com clique aqui para ler em português…

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4 years ago · 2 likes · Flávia Schiochet

When completing a full year of work, Brazilians are entitled to 30 days of vacation. So I, as my boss, grant myself, my only employee, 30 days of vacation from this newsletter, to be taken in July.

Your inbox won't be free of my emails, though.

WHAT WILL BE SERVED IN JULY

I’m going to publish three editions.

1. A post with all the books that I have already indicated in this newsletter. This post will be updated constantly, by the way. If you buy one through the links that I will provide, I receive a commission without weighing your pocket!

2. Two commented recommendation posts: At first, there will be two posts with recommendations – books, articles, reports, essays, other newsletters, podcasts... I usually miss this list of things that I think are important to share because I send them via WhatsApp to friends or I share them on Twitter, but I don't organize them. I hope that with these July lists I can systematize this filing, lol. Editions with commented recommendations are scheduled for the 13th and 27th of July. I hope you like it! If the format works, I think about publishing a compilation once a month.

WHAT TO EXPECT FOR AUGUST

• A journalistic essay on food and identity in urban centers on the 1st.

• An interview on the 15th (to be determined).

• A list of commented recommendations.

Do you have any interviewee recommendations for low heat/fogo baixo? Write me: schiochetflavia@gmail.com

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Brazil has gone back decades in the debate on "real food" in Bolsonaro's government. If at the end of the 2010s the Dietary Guidelines for the Brazilian Population, published in 2014, was on subtext, after three and a half years we need to reaffirm the document as the starting point of the public debate to avoid fallacious arguments.

If the consumption rate of ultra-processed products in Brazil had not risen, we could even say that the Guide fulfills its function and, therefore, bringing it to the debate so often would be redundant. The next step would be to consolidate its role in the foundation of public policies to strengthen Brazilian food and nutrition security; but never loosen the understanding of what food is, equating ultra-processed products with complete meals.

Unable to tear up the Guide, Bolsonaro destroyed the game board, starting with the extinction of the National Food Security Council (CONSEA)1 on the first day of his mandate. Two months later, the Minister of Agriculture, Livestock and Supply, Tereza Cristina, announced the sale of public warehouses (of 180 units, 27 were in the first year of government and put up for sale) in February 2019, which implies, among other consequences, the decrease in storage capacity for rice, beans, corn, manioc flour and coffee, and the prices' regulation for the final consumer. These are the main ingredients in a Brazilian pantry, and the decrease in rice storage by the State caused 2021 the rise in rice prices and a controversy over the sale of broken rice.

The steps towards food insecurity began in the Temer government (vice-president of Dilma Rousseff, who took office in August 2016 after the coup so-called an impeachment), with the progressive reduction of the budget allocated to the Food Acquisition Program (PAA)2, reaching to reduce by 77.3% from 2014 to 2020, as well as the Cisterns Program, which had its worst performance in 2019, with an 80% drop in the number of cisterns built in five years. A weakened PAA and National School Feeding Program (PNAE)3 result in rural poverty as family farmers and smallholders lose sales channels. As there is no vacuum, the food industry, whose raw material comes from commodities, is who takes the place of vegetables, greens, bread, jams, and dairy products from small producers. The result: ultra-processed products from the industry replacing food that could come from the countryside.

The Dietary Guidelines for the Brazilian Population recommends a diet based on in natura or minimally processed foods (fresh, such as fruits, vegetables, and greens; or that undergo processing, such as rice, beans, nuts), culinary ingredients (everything that is added in food preparation, such as salt, sugar, oil, vinegar, etc.), and processed foods (which go through some process, such as cheeses, bread, pickles, etc.), avoiding the consumption of ultra-processed, which are industrial formulations that take only part of culinary ingredients, and are usually with higher salt, sugar and fat content than any other food.

Ultra-processed products can be ready-to-eat – snacks, cookies, biscuits, or loaves of bread –, or that need to be "finished" by the consumers, such as instant noodles, sausages, and frozen food (nuggets, hamburger, lasagna). In common, they are all hyper-palatable: they produce immediate pleasure, being recognized by the palate as "tasty". Nevertheless, they are non-food. Ultra-processed products are high in calories, but their nutrients and vitamins, even when added to "enrich" your formula, are not absorbed by our bodies in the same way as in fresh food. When in doubt whether a product is ultra-processed or not, pay attention to the packaging and the speech. Ultra-processed products have a great marketing campaign to promote their consumption – something that a head of broccoli or a bunch of cabbage never had.

Brazilians have almost 20% of their calories from ultra-processed foods. In Canada and the United States, this number approaches 50%. A population that eats poorly is a population that gets sick. In a country with a public health system4 like Brazil, this means burdening the sector with problems that can be avoided through investment in food and nutrition security and food education. The tool exists and we had a series of public policies that kick-started the promotion of food based on in natura foods. What we have now is an even worse scenario than the famine of the 1990s, when ultra-processed foods were still not as affordable as they are today. 33 million people going hungry in Brazil today, "thanks" to the disarticulation and exclusion of programs aimed at food security – Nexo Jornal provided an excellent summary of how we went from one scenario of hunger to another in 30 years.

The Bolsonaro government tried to amend the Guide, claiming that the classification by level of food processing was confusing. The argument is the same used by industry associations: that the guidelines are too rigid and make it impossible to feed the people, pretending that there are no tax exemptions for their large industries and the lack of regulations for their sector. Added to this, there is a lack of assistance and encouragement for those who produce real food. To give an overview, I recommend reading the interview with agronomist Nayla Almeida and article #11 | tossing cheeses into the litter: what hampers small farmers in Brazil to thrive.

The Guide remains in disrepair, still untouched, containing guidelines that cannot be followed by the public structure because there is nowhere to enforce them.

In this context of food shortages due to negligence by the State and academic papers that present increasingly robust evidence that the consumption of ultra-processed foods is linked to the increase in non-communicable chronic diseases, I requested an interview with researcher Carlos Monteiro, who coordinates the Center for Epidemiological Research in Nutrition and Health (Nupens), from the University of São Paulo (USP). Carlos suggested that the interview be done with Patrícia Jaime, professor at the Department of Nutrition at the Faculty of Public Health, scientific vice-coordinator of Nupens, and the Josué de Castro Chair of Healthy and Sustainable Food Systems. We did it by email, with Patrícia's participation especially in the last question, on public policies.

Created in 1990, Nupens is an interdisciplinary structure at USP, integrating researchers from different areas, such as economics, medicine, and nutrition, as well as other universities, such as the Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG) and the State of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ), and other countries. Its focus is to produce knowledge about public health and nutrition, develop research methods to study how Brazilians eat and produce analyzes and diagnoses to guide public policies.

The Center is at the forefront of epidemiological scientific research in nutrition and health. In 2010, Nupens published the Nova classification system, which updated the paradigm in force at the time, the food pyramid. In 2014, the Dietary Guidelines for the Brazilian Population, developed by Nupens using the Nova classification, was published by the Ministry of Health. The Guide is a document endorsed as an example to be followed by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the World Health Organization, and Unicef, and served as a model for the dietary guides of Canada, France, Uruguay, Peru, and Ecuador.

Monteiro was listed four times as one of the most influential scientists in the world by the British consultancy Clarivate Analytics, and from Nupens come studies such as the one by Maria Laura Louzada, which links the increase in the prevalence of obesity in Brazil to the increase in the consumption of ultra-processed foods. "In recent years, nutritional epidemiology has entered a new stage of research, analyzing the relationship between ultra-processed foods and diseases that, initially, would not be so directly related to food. One of these new lines of research addresses mental health disorders. Some articles have already associated a higher consumption of ultra-processed foods with a higher risk of developing depression, for example. These are indications of new harmful effects of these foods, but which still need to be investigated in detail so that a clear association can be established", wrote Carlos Monteiro and Patrícia Jaime.

Below are the main excerpts from the email interview with the two researchers:

The Dietary Guidelines for the Brazilian Population was built on the Nova classification system, which replaced the food pyramid. While the pyramid categorizes by nutrient type, the Nova classification considers the level of food processing. When and how did you see the need to change the categorization type for the processing level?

During most of the last century, the biggest nutritional problem registered in Brazil was malnutrition. The most vulnerable populations in the country did not have adequate consumption of important nutrients such as proteins, vitamins, and minerals, which led to diseases such as beriberi (vitamin B1 deficiency) or pellagra (vitamin B3 deficiency), among others. In this context, the food pyramid made sense: it organized food by type of nutrient, informing the population about the sources of carbohydrates, fats, proteins, vitamins, and minerals.

Since the 1990s, however, nutritional epidemiology has noticed a reduction in cases of malnutrition and an increase in the prevalence of chronic diseases, such as diabetes and hypertension. This is what we call the epidemiological transition. At the same time, data on food purchases by the Brazilian population indicated a drop in the purchase of items used for cooking (oil, salt, sugar) and an increase in the purchase of semi-ready or ready-to-eat foods – in general, ultra-processed. This process is called nutritional transition. With this new context, the food pyramid lost its meaning, since it placed foods such as brown rice and, for example, potato chips in the same category ("carbohydrates").

Thinking about the nutritional transition, we realized that it was necessary to guide the population from a new logic, which is that of food processing, through the Nova classification. Nova was created just over ten years ago and had its impact amplified by the Dietary Guidelines for the Brazilian Population, launched in 2014.

We are experiencing a food crisis that resembles the one in the 1990s when 32 million Brazilians were starving. Currently, there are 33 million. How to talk about nutritionally adequate food at a time when access to food is difficult and restricted? How can we begin to "fix" this scenario?

In situations of increasing food insecurity, as we see today in Brazil, it is really difficult to talk about adequate and healthy food. Much of the population faces barriers in accessing fresh food – and lately, the biggest one has been the rising price of basic items such as rice, beans, oil, coffee, and vegetables.

It is necessary to remember, however, that less than ten years ago Brazil celebrated having left the UN Hunger Map, which was only possible with a broad set of public policies on food and nutrition. These are initiatives that range from income transfer programs to actions by food and nutrition security councils.

We learned that hunger is fought by public policies, and this is certainly the best way to fix this scenario.

Nutritional epidemiology plays a fundamental role in this context, which is to generate data and analysis to guide the construction of these policies and decision-making through government agents.

Nupens is a world reference in research and two years ago launched NutriNet, which aims to monitor the dietary pattern of 200,000 Brazilians. How many Brazilians have participated so far? Are there preliminary results or hypotheses that researchers are considering at this early stage?

Today, NutriNet Brazil has just over 100,000 participants. They are volunteers from all regions of the country and have different social strata and educational levels. To participate, you just need to be over 18 years old, be a resident of Brazil and answer questionnaires sent by email every three months. Entries can be made by the site.

Later this year, the first results of the survey began to be published. The idea of ​​the study is to monitor the diet of the Brazilian population, understanding their different eating habits, their relationships with demographic profiles, and, above all, their associations with different health outcomes.

What are the research topics on ultra-processed products that are on the horizon for Nupens?

The next Nupens' research should involve precisely the data analysis from the NutriNet Brasil cohort. It will be possible to observe the associations between the consumption of ultra-processed foods and the occurrence of diseases of great frequency in Brazil prospectively – that is, we collect information at the time of exposure and follow the evolution of the participants for a long period. NutriNet also has relatively short periods between when food is consumed and the onset of illness. Obesity, diabetes, dyslipidemia, and arterial hypertension are some of the conditions that we will investigate.

Recent studies have provided robust evidence linking the consumption of ultra-processed foods to the increase in non-communicable chronic diseases, such as obesity, diabetes, and metabolic syndrome in different countries. The Dietary Guidelines for the Brazilian Population is internationally praised and served as a basis for guides from other countries, however, in Brazil the structures that would allow the Guide to be put into practice were dismantled, such as CONSEA and PAA. What role does the Dietary Guidelines for the Brazilian Population play when the structure that would put the Guide's recommendations into practice is extinguished and weakened?

It is a fact that it is through public programs and policies that the guidelines of the Guide are put into practice. A classic example is the National School Feeding Program (PNAE), which limits the supply of ultra-processed foods and expands the supply of fresh and minimally processed foods to public school students across the country.

Although we have witnessed the dismantling of several public policies on food and nutrition, the Guide, which is a document of the Ministry of Health, remains an official source of guidance for the adequate and healthy diet of the Brazilian population. In 2020, the attempt to amend the Guide generated a broad movement of defense on the part of the population, mainly by health professionals, and with good press coverage. This showed how the precepts of the document have been absorbed by the public.

Recently, researchers from Nupens published five fascicles dedicated to different populations (adults, elderly, pregnant women, children, and adolescents) that show health professionals how to apply the guidelines from the Dietary Guidelines for the Brazilian Population in individual consultations within the scope of primary health care in SUS. This is another role played by the Guide in Brazil.

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It didn't happen once, nor one hundred times in the past few years: whole artisanal cheeses, lacking an inspection registry, were apprehended and destroyed in a landfill – usually by incineration. The most famous ones were chef Roberta Sudbrack's case (350 pounds of artisanal cheese and sausages were confiscated at the Rock in Rio Festival) in 2017 and the almost 265 pounds of Farm Lano-Alto's cheeses on July 4, 2021.

In the first case, the products had the state inspection registry (SIE, in Portuguese), but were being commercialized outside their original federative unit – by the law, they had to have a federal inspection registry (SIF, in Portuguese). In the second case, an anonymous delation led the health surveillance inspectors to the farm and made the apprehension because the cheese pieces didn't have a municipal inspection registry (SIM, in Portuguese). Nonetheless, the São Luiz do Paraitinga city, where the farm is located, regulated its SIM 26 days later on July 30, 2021.

What farmers from Lano-Alto had passed is not rare in Brazil. "In cheesemakers' WhatsApp groups you constantly see images of health surveillance inspectors tossing out cheese," says Bruno Benati, agronomist and cheesemaker from Cuitelo Real. Along with his brother Enzo, Bruno retook cheese production in 2016 on the 20-hectare property in Itapeva, in the extreme south of Minas Gerais. The herd, of about 50 animals, had 18 cows producing milk that May when we spoke on the phone. Following his hello, I hear a lowing. "Never mind the noise, I'm here in the middle of the fields," says Bruno.

Bruno and Enzo make between 8 and 12 kilos a day – in pounds, the range would be something like 17.6 to 26.5. By area, size of the "team", and the volume produced Cuitelo Real fits the understanding of small property, according to the definitions of Article 143-A of Decree 5741/06. Family arrangements or with a lean structure of employees, with a varied agricultural production between legumes, vegetables, dairy cattle, laying birds or animals for meat are the basis of the economy of 90% of Brazilian municipalities with up to 20 thousand inhabitants, as revealed by the Census Agro 2017 from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE).

Theoretically, having a municipal inspection registry is the most accessible health registry for the small producer. "Theoretically" because, despite being a structure that the municipality could create to standardize the production of animal origin and guarantee the health safety of its population, its implementation is not mandatory – of the 5,568 Brazilian municipalities, less than half have an inspection service. This means that all over Brazil there are potential cheeses and salami with flavors and aromas unexplored due to a lack of investment in local inspection services.

Roughly speaking, inspection services consist of visits by health surveillance inspectors (generally, veterinarians), who check sanitary facilities and conditions in the space where the herds are kept and in the processing units; workers' practices in handling animals; the hygiene and storage of products; the health of the herd; vaccination against zoonoses; among others, in addition to monitoring the evolution of the activity, the results of exams and laboratory analyzes, and periodically collecting a random sample for analysis.

In municipalities that don't have the SIM service, it is common for health surveillance to accept labels with the registered number of the producer, telephone number, product technical manager, date of manufacture, expiration date, nutritional table and address of the producer, for example, for sale at fairs and other trading occasions. But in most cases, there is expected to be a state or federal inspection registry, otherwise, it goes off the shelf to the trash can. In cities where there is the SIM service, the producer would not be able to legally commercialize his production of animal origin outside his property without the registry.

The policies of municipal and state authorities were established by Law 7889/89, published one year after the Federal Constitution was granted. It aimed at decentralizing the government, giving it to regional bodies. "The only caveat is that the definition of these spheres cannot conflict with the federal one by being less demanding. But they can be more demanding," explains Judi Nóbrega, director of the Department of Support and Standards at the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Supply (DNS – MAPA). Each municipality is free to write its rules and requirements according to the local reality. In Minas Gerais state, the cheese culture is spread in cities of all sizes. That may be taken into consideration by local authorities when writing the regulation. In some cases, they can ask for a raw material analysis to make sure that the milk does not have zoonoses; in others, an analysis of the final product, the cheese, plus the documentation of the entire production process could be asked.

There is no coordinating body that structures the implementation of municipal records, nor do the governments of the federative units have responsibility for or legal force to oblige municipalities to implement the SIM service. MAPA does not even have information on how many Brazilian municipalities have an inspection service.

Regionalizing a health regulation is a change of scale: the smaller the observed universe, the better it is possible to see specificities.

"The municipal scale presupposes a closer contact between producer and inspector. It is not for the inspector to be a police officer, nor to relax the rules for his community. He can contribute to the process and build the local economy together. Depending on the pending situation, the producer does not have to stop his activities. You can tell him "you need to adjust this and that issue" and then talk about priorities and deadlines," says Fabíola Fernandes Schwartz, a veterinary doctor who has been working with organic products of animal origin consultancy and food processing for the food industry consultancy for over 30 years. "Unless, of course, it's a public calamity," she points out – she has also worked in health surveillance departments in small towns.

In practice, producers' reports repeat the same issues: mismatched information; long waiting periods to receive an inspection for the registry; requests to change small details until the next inspection (no date set), and denial of issuing the registry, making it impossible for the producer to operate legally, a period that can reach months. "The producer in Brazil already has the challenge of reaching the market and selling his product. We shouldn't put so many obstacles and hinder the guy who wants to produce. He hardly has the working capital to stay still for so long," contextualizes Fabíola.

To avoid the discarding of some of their pieces, Cuitelo Real doesn't send their cheese to any cheese store. "The ones that have had problems with health surveillance don't receive our cheese. We have many partners in Salvador, João Pessoa, Florianópolis, Curitiba and cities in the interior of São Paulo state. But Campinas and São Paulo capital, where it would make sense to sell my cheese because we are close geographically, we don't send it because of the inspection," Bruno says. At open markets, the volume of cheese is so small that it fits in a personal car, without the need for a van, a model that is highly sought after by inspectors.

Of the five types made by Bruno and Enzo, three are raw milk: Cuitelo (aged from two to four months); Cuitelinho (aged for 30 days); and Casca Florida (similar to Cuitelo in production, but kept in a humid environment to develop fungi and mites on its bark for about 45 days). There is also Boursin and Graúna (dry curd wrapped in charcoal and paprika, with Penicillium candidum inoculated into the rind to form white fungi; aged for approximately two weeks), made with boiled milk, as well as yogurt, jams, and honey. Their Cuitelinho and Cuitelo cheeses and the yogurt won medals in the 2019 editions of Mundial do Queijo and Queijo Brasil awards.

Cuitelo Real’s pieces and slices appeared on pages of gastronomy magazines and the social networks of famous Brazilian chefs – Sudbrack included. However, the legally selling of these cheeses could only be done within the farm itself, because Cuitelo Real was unable to submit its production to the SIM in Itapeva. The city passed the municipal inspection law in 2015 and has a veterinary doctor located at the health department, but Bruno was never able to schedule an inspection of his property, which has been adapted following the federative unit guidelines.

Bruno's last contact with the Municipality of Itapeva was in March 2022. Since then, Cuitelo Real has changed direction and pursued the registration of small agro-industry by the Instituto Mineiro de Agropecuária (IMA), with even more demanding and specific infrastructure. The Municipality of Itapeva was contacted by email, message, and phone calls to comment on the structure and functioning of its inspection service, but did not return with the requested information until the closing of this report, on June 3rd.

In the logic of bureaucracy, when the municipal instance cannot or does not have the means to issue the inspection registry, the producer should look for a higher instance, and ask for the state inspection service (all 26 Brazilian states and the federal district have SIE) or the federal one. But that's when the chickens come home to roost.

Without the municipality's attention to local production, the producer is at the mercy of more general legislation, such as the characteristics of the construction of processing units and the need to build them further away from the residence. “By custom and use, many producers have the cheese dairy next door, in humbler facilities,” exemplifies Bruno.

Regarding health standards, the objective is always to avoid contamination and outbreaks of diseases, so there would be no reason to be flexible in this regard. "Barrier measures are adopted to minimize problems until the product reaches the consumer. One of these measures is the registration of the establishment because this guarantees that the producer follows a set of rules of good practices and adequate facilities. Other barriers will be the pasteurization of milk, for example, to avoid the risk of developing brucellosis and tuberculosis, or at least 60 days of cheese maturation, a period that has been proven by studies to have the same effect as pasteurization. These conditions will be required in any inspection service," explains Judi.

Cuitelo Real opted for a state registry in Minas Gerais. That means they will have to change part of their recipes so that the cheeses have 60 days of ripening or are pasteurized. Despite having state legislation that recognizes cheese as a symbol of Minas Gerais identity (article 3 of Law 23,157/18), the understanding of the artisanal way seems opposed to the authorial way: the way of making artisanal Minas cheese, if invented in the 21st century, it would hardly be allowed to be sale with its 21 days of maturing.

"There is no pre-existing classification for our cheeses, because they have original recipes, from adaptations of traditional preparations to experimentations that worked," says Bruno. Without documentation of their methods of preparation with similar results by different producers – such as traditional cheeses, made for at least a century throughout the state of Minas Gerais –, it is unlikely that raw milk cheeses that are outside the traditions and denominations of origin will pass by the inspection bodies.

Pasteurization would de-characterize Cuitelo Real's cheeses, killing the microorganisms that transform the product throughout its life and that are responsible for the complexity of flavors and aromas. "We're going to register Cuitelo, which fits this 60-day maturing rule, and we're going to increase the time for Cuitelo to complete 60 days, probably leaving it refrigerated. We're going to have to change some processes for Casca Florida", explains Bruno.

In the understanding of sanitary barriers, proven healthy milk, handled in an appropriate environment, with good practices of cheesemakers, still does not configure as many barriers as possible to reduce the risk of contamination within the production unit. From the farm door out, the responsibility would no longer be the producer's, but the loss would. "In the case of transport carried out at the wrong temperature, a fungal or bacterial contamination will spread much more easily in a pasteurized cheese than in a raw milk cheese, which has a series of well-established microorganisms to compete for substrate," compares Bruno.

According to a survey by the National Conference of Municipalities (CNM) carried out in 2017 with 4,743 municipalities, 40% of them (1,917 municipalities) had a structured municipal inspection service. Among the reasons for not creating the registry, there are reasons for lack of budgetary and financial resources; few agro-industrial establishments in the municipality; lack of human resources in the sector; and lack of training and information for technicians. In the Guidance Manual on the Constitution of the Municipal Inspection Service (SIM), published in 2013, the motivations were similar.

As an alternative to increasing the number of municipalities providing the inspection service and increasing the number of regularized establishments, consortia of municipalities for issuing the SIM have come into force since 2018. According to the CNM consortium portal, there are 66 municipal inspection registry consortia, which can bring together up to 30 municipalities under the same SIM.

Constant criticism from producers is that if the requirements of municipal and state inspection are so rigorous and committed to guaranteeing sanitary safety, why couldn't SIM and SIE inspection records be valid nationally, like a SIF?

The Brazilian System of Inspection of Products of Animal Origin (SISBI-POA) is a strategy by MAPA to make the SIM and SIE equivalent to the SIF. Created in 2006, as part of the Unified Agricultural Health System (SUASA), SISBI is a voluntary membership program. Neither municipalities, consortia of municipalities, nor federative units are required to register. And, even after they are registered, there is no deadline for them to adhere to the SUASA common rules.

By the end of May, 23 Brazilian states and the federal district had adhered, as well as 14 consortia of municipalities (representing 257 municipalities) and 31 individual municipalities (out of a total of 448 registered on the platform). In other words, only 288 cities had a SIM that counts as a SIF since the creation of the equivalence system, in 2006. A drop in the ocean that Brazil is.

Another move by MAPA in an attempt to approach small-scale demands was Ordinance 393/2021, which simplifies the adhesion of small producers to the SIF. In the norm, as soon as the small producer's documents are approved, he receives a provisional registration to start operating. Everything is done digitally.

Within 90 days after the operation starts, an inspector from one of MAPA's regional superintendencies will visit the property to carry out the inspection. "Ordinance 393 is a revision of Decree 9013, published on August 18, 2020. For federal legislation, it simplifies as far as possible for low-risk establishments to obtain the SIF. In the classification made by MAPA, the production of cheese, honey, and eggs are low risk," explains Ana Lúcia Viana, director of the Department of Inspection of Product of Origin Animal (DIPOA) – MAPA.

In Fabíola's assessment, it is a sign that MAPA recognizes that the previous federal legislation was not very accessible to small producers. "The bureaucratic procedures are similar to the state service, and it depends a lot on the interpretation and goodwill of the inspector who is going to audit. But it is a way for the small producer to have a SIF, that is commendable".

Once the SIM, SIE, or SIF is received by the producer, the difficulties do not douse. The lack of direction persists, and it is understandable why inspectors do not identify themselves as counselors – also, in many locations, rural extension is little or non-existent. Outside the region of the strong performance of a research and rural extension agency (and especially if the crop or herd is not so economically significant), the rural producer has a world of possibilities before him, but he often needs to grope his way through the stones. Alone. Possibly going around in circles. And barefoot.

Brazil has 3.9 million agricultural establishments classified as family farming, equivalent to 77% of Brazilian rural properties. This percentage occupies 23% of the land destined for agriculture and livestock in Brazil. A more robust and coordinated action by rural extension aimed at this slice would be an important first step, but it would not solve everything. The main benefit commonly made available to small producers is low-interested credit lines. "It could have herd vaccination supported partially by the State, for example, because the sector of products of animal origin is strategic for Brazil. This type of public policy fixes the man in the field and guarantees the local supply," analyzes Fabíola.

The increase in the volume of rural credit in the late 1990s and early 2000s was responsible for the expansion of property purchases. The Ripka family was one of those who seized the moment. Working for decades in the production of vegetables, leasing the Chácara Tiniara, in Mandirituba, in the Metropolitan Region of Curitiba, the family bought the 4.9 bushels in 2001 through the National Program for Strengthening Family Agriculture (Pronaf). "About three years later, rural loans began to be released as a benefit and we sold half of the farm to pay the bill," recalls Danilo Ripka. "I am a wild card on the property. Administration, finance, logistics, management, sales. I am present on all fronts after my parents retired," says he, responsible for the poultry farm, whose health registration was issued by the state body.

Since 2009, the farm's egg production has been certified as organic and has reached 4,000 birds. Currently, there is a batch of 1,150 pullets that are "beginning to drip eggs" and 650 in late laying. The difference in the size of the lots is due to the deaths of the animals: as they age, the chickens die naturally or due to fatalities such as attacks by their companions. "At peak posture, any noise triggers them to get scared and start attacking each other. Every day I hang pasture in a tree or the middle of the chicken coop so they spend energy jumping to peck the burden. They also eat the leftover vegetables from the fair, like cabbage and pumpkin," says Danilo.

For almost a decade producing organic eggs, the family worked most of the time buying "leftovers" from middlemen, and never had a forecast of how many pullets they would have. Therefore, at the end of 2020, Danilo filed an application for registration for the management of birds with the Agricultural Defense Agency of Paraná (ADAPAR), which makes it possible to buy the lots directly from animal genetics companies.

The registration came out in November 2021 and, for a year, the family worked to meet the requirements. Among them, concentrating the aviaries in one point of the property, getting rid of subsistence chickens, making car disinfection arches in the accesses, and establishing a procedure to control who enters and leaves the property, among others. The bureaucracy has also increased: new pullets can only be received on the property if the older batch is documented to be sent to a slaughterhouse. Before, with smaller lots, the activity was not configured as a poultry trade and the Ripka could sell the birds to whoever they wanted.

The first batch that needed to be evicted under the new terms had around 800 chickens and revealed yet another constraint that small producers face. Danilo posted an appeal on Chácara Tiniara's Instagram profile in March when he had already been looking for a solution for "discard" (a term used for the slaughter of laying hens) for weeks. For months the hens had been in a separate space, without laying eggs, but they were still being fed the best feed and being cared for as the active flock. No slaughterhouse less than three hours from Mandirituba would buy discarded batches or accept such a small batch. The chickens ended up being donated to a buyer who paid for the shipping. The exposure on social networks generated a series of contacts and next time Danilo is going to send the next batches "for rides" with the thousands of birds from a nearby commercial farm.

Of the investments, tests, laboratory analyses, fees, and other costs to establish an animal production property, the most consistent offer from the State to Danilo and Bruno was rural credit. "We were able to take 30% profit before. Today to get 10% is difficult, even readjusting prices," reveals Danilo. "I'm studying Geography, doing this 'insurance' for myself, because if in three or four years the production doesn't work anymore, I have nowhere to run," he admits. Credit alone is not enough to keep a man in the field.

"The Brazilian reality, in terms of small producers and quality raw material, is unparalleled. We have a heritage: Brazilian poultry is very important in the world and the issue of biosafety is fundamental for the maintenance of this chain. But local production, for the domestic market, is not valued", laments Fabiola. "There is no subsidy to keep the producer in the field, as there are producers in the European Union," she exemplifies.

In Europe, by the way, small animal producers are considered the most authentic representations of local food culture. Raw milk cheeses, artisanal sausages, and eggs from small farms are part of gastronomic experiences that few tourists have access to. In rural Brazil, only agribusiness holders can pay.

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Hi there.

This email is not a new low heat issue. It's a notice: the essays and reports, which were being published every 30th or 31st of the month, will be published on the 1st.

But not from June on. Issue #11 [in Portuguese] is late and will be published until June 5th. I expect to publish the English version by June 12th. The piece will explain the bureaucratic obstacles faced by small Brazilian ranchers when marketing their animal products, such as cheese and eggs.

The interviews continue to be published on the 15th of each month.

In July, low heat turns one year old. I'm thinking of having a virtual meeting open to all readers. What do you think?

Certain of your understanding for the delay of issue #11,

– Flávia.

clique aqui para ler em português

🤝 this edition is a partnership with the tech site Manual do Usuário [Portuguese only] 🤝

All large-scale production requires simplification – optimizing processes, cutting down costs, reducing variables, testing flows, and speeding it all. Between the artisanal and the industrial extremes of the production model, there are as many configurations of productive capacity as there are cellphone models on sale – they seem to be the same thing just because they have the same goal. As with everything, there are gains and losses when scaling the production: it gains speed but loses the customization potential.

Since the publication of an excellent issue by the G1 portal about the kitchen condos' impacts in residential neighborhoods of São Paulo, there have been a series of reports in other vehicles that ended up giving a tabloid approach to dark kitchens. Dark kitchens (also called cloud kitchens, ghost kitchens, or virtual restaurants) are restaurants without a dining area, nor in-house customers attending, with a delivery-focused production. Many of these journalistic essays show confusion when describing what would be a dark kitchen. The most common mistake is to use it as a synonym for kitchen condo1.

It is not a brand new model. Previous to the delivery app era, production kitchens used to operate with their own deliverers' team, sometimes with a take-out counter. Auxiliary kitchens are also common for big bakeries, for example, where the centralized production gets distributed to their shops. "China in Box2 is 30 years old and it was born in a concept of pick-up or delivery only," exemplifies Célio Salles, ABRASEL's (Brazilian Association of Bars and Restaurants) administration board member. "Dark kitchen is a new word to describe something that already existed and had a strong expansion during the pandemic," he says.

A dark kitchen is not synonymous with factory-scale production, nor even with gastronomic operations densification. Most of the dark kitchen menus will feature dishes that can be serially prepared, to be able to attend to simultaneous orders fastly with minimal staff. Short menus work on keeping the stocks lean and avoiding expiration date losses. Upon the very tight profit margins of the gastronomy sector (often due to the lack of financial and management control), it's comprehensible the choice of the model of the dark kitchen in a fragile economy like Brazil's 2022: it cuts off the fixed costs as front-of-the-house staff, the expensive rent in a buzzy address, furniture, crockery, etc., and directs the energy into cooking, packing and handing it over to the delivery person.

In this optimization logic, large business people and conglomerate partners adopt big data management to guide their investments and interests diversification; very different from the entrepreneurs, who use their savings to start a business. While the former manages to invest in different restaurant brands to guarantee several market slices on their plates, the latter usually count each sandwich bread slice for the month-end closing – a reality for half of the micro and small business in Brazil.

Among the decisive factors to implement dark kitchens, there is the demographic density of the region; the possibility of testing products to define what will remain on the menu; new brands launching (which may be discontinued in a matter of weeks if the expected results are not reached), and of course heavy investments in paid traffic on platforms like Instagram and Facebook.

Those who don't have the financial capital to rent a good address (or can't frequently test new products' acceptance) get orientated by market trends and free information published by research institutes and by delivery platforms themselves. As dedicated as the small business owner can be, he won't leverage its sales with a new hot dog or donut recipe. In this race, who has more money starts ahead – same for the apps competition. "The first restaurant hubs started because they wanted to start a marketplace, like Porto Alegre's Delivery Center, which no longer exists. Setting up a delivery app is easy now, with R$ 10,000 (about US$  2,000) you can have one. Today's market's leader is the leader by expertise, not luck. The market concentration is another history," opines Salles.

In March 2021, the Ministry of Justice's Administrative Council for Economic Defense (CADE) prohibited Ifood from closing new exclusive contracts with restaurants after complaints of Rappi and ABRASEL made in the previous year3. At the very beginning, the delivery giant held a financial investment strategy: Between 2011 and 2018, Ifood raised US$ 591 million in seven funding rounds. With a hefty cashier, it's possible to buy minor competitors and start an artificial demand through discount coupons – similar to Kwai/Kuaishou’s temporary practice of paying users to stay on the platform – enough to drive a company the size of Uber Eats out of business in Brazil. At some point, the bonuses end, and restaurant owners have to handle the burden.

In Brazil, Ifood owns over 80% of the delivery app market, a sector that has moved R$ 60 billion in the intern market in 2021 (almost US$ 12 billion). Even though there are other online sales channels for entrepreneurs, such as WhatsApp and the good old phone call, the truth is that it's hard to escape from digital platforms at this point.

To be able to have their services and products featured in the marketplace showcase, restaurant owners undergo the algorithm's logic, making frequent promotions, changing the menu, and zeroing the delivery taxes. The race for customers has always been a topic in the sector, but the competing conditions gap has become wider with the digital platforms, where all showcases would supposedly be side by side and infinite, without the physical limits of the real world.

The apps ensure the convenience of gathering the orders registers and delivery logistic services for the restaurants; while customers benefit from shortening the time to make an order plus the variety of options available for delivery at home. This time-space flattening of the virtual world, though, has consequences on the offline physical world, such as poor working conditions.

The delivery sector had an annual growth of around 20% until 2020. At the pandemic's beginning, Ifood registered 39 million orders in a month, a number 32% higher than the entire amount registered in 2019.

In journalistic reports, many press colleagues ended up using the delivery sector data as if they were from dark kitchens, confusing the delivery method with the operating model. The correspondence between delivery and dark kitchen does not proceed, because the delivery of a non-presential-attendance-establishment could be, for example, a domestic kitchen one.

According to Ifood, 86% of the restaurants that use its platform are medium or small size. Salles estimates that almost 90% of food and beverage operations earn less than R$ 20,000 (around US$ 4,000) a month, which would classify them in the tax framework of microenterprises or MEI (initials for "self-employed individual micro-entrepreneurs" in Portuguese).

Around 30% of 1 million restaurants in Brazil closed their doors during the pandemic period, and 20% of the workforce got unemployed. Beyond the indebted entrepreneurs, and laid-off employees, the awful economic situation in Brazil put a lot of them into investing in creating initiatives to make and sell food as MEI. ABRASEL estimates that 335 thousand food and beverage companies shut down due to the pandemic, but the sector recorded almost 600 thousand new MEIs in 2020 and 2021 (a total between the categories of food supply for home consumption; restaurants and alike; snack bars, tea houses, juice houses and alike; and beverage retailing). "Entrepreneurship saved a lot of people in this pandemic. Many former employees applied their knowledge in the food and beverage sector to launch their brand," explains Salles. The main sales channel? Delivery apps.

There are no data on how many restaurants and food establishments operate from dark kitchens in Brazil. As there is no such distinction in the National Classification of Economic Activities (CNAE) code, many of these production kitchens may be registered as "Food supplying predominantly for enterprises" or "Food supplying predominantly for domiciliar consumption" as their main activities, which is subject of tax inspection. The in-house attendance establishments, in their turn, are classified as "Restaurants and other establishments of food and beverage service", and they may also feature the previous CNAE as secondaries.

Depending on the registered CNAE code, the company business may be monitored by the Ministry of Health, through ANVISA (Brazilian Health Regulatory Agency), or by the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Food Supply (MAPA). MAPA's legislation is the most demanding, and falls on manufacturing and production activities, especially on animal origin products. Thus, many eating-out food operations select codes that describe only the food marketing activity, so they don't fall under MAPA's jurisdiction. "[It's this way] or entrepreneurs have to go back and give up on producing the dulce de leche in the pastry shop, for example. Those who work with charcuterie need to have a legal register on MAPA, but there are difficulties with the framing. The inspector will treat it as if it was a big cold store, demanding the same stipulations of a cold store," explains Ana Paula Barddal, nutritionist and consultant specializing in food quality.

The lack of norms and guidelines for smaller-scale food-producing activity regulation opens a series of gaps in the gray area between the artisanal and the industrial. It wouldn't even be the case of having specific legislation for dark kitchens, but to regulate it according to its environmental impacts, such as the volume of solid and liquid waste, smoke, and other substance emissions, as well as the concentration activities with high flammable potential and cross-contamination, which can occur either if it is a kitchen condo complex or a shared kitchen subleased in the idle time. "There's no determination on how many kitchens can operate in the same property, on the production volume of that building, whether there are one or thirty kitchens," says Barddal.

"[The real estate businessman,] He is an entrepreneur that doesn't know how to measure the waste that will be generated, volume of smoke emissions, among others. He wants to lease that space and profit. The construction permit will be requested considering a basic impact, and that's how problems arise," analyzes Rogério Guimarães, a bookkeeper in São Paulo. That's what happened in the Panamby neighborhood, south of São Paulo: Kitchen Central would build 30 kitchens, but requested with the City Hall a construction permit stating that it would be just one kitchen. The construction has been halted.

Considering the concentration of food establishments, urban centers have plenty of examples: food courts in shopping malls, food halls, gastronomic avenues and neighborhoods, and downtown streets with restaurants for weekday lunches. "In regions like Rua Augusta [downtown São Paulo], where there is food business built-in small old locations, such as snack bars, already has a history of impact problems. New buildings, such as the kitchen condo construction in residential neighborhoods, could make deeper research to avoid known problems of other regions," analyzes Guimarães.

A city with fewer in-person restaurants has other side effects. Fewer tables on the sidewalk and in the lounge mean fewer people walking on the street, and less space for depressurization, socialization, and meetings.

"This is where the role of public management comes in. What are the incentives about advantages and taxation offered for large enterprises, and what are those offered to promote and stimulate local commerce? The sights [of the public management] are always on the taxing rules, and not on inducement and planning. It gazes straightforwardly at the number of job openings that an investor group's new shopping mall can create, but doesn't look for how much income can be generated by supporting small entrepreneurs," questions Guilherme Macedo, architect, and partner at Lona Group.

No other Brazilian city can be compared to São Paulo's capital, both in proportion and in the speed and dimension of the urban problems' escalation. Within this perspective, Barddal evaluates that the model of municipal regulation and inspection can be improved through collegiate action. "There should be a meeting of all the actors in this market to draw up regulations for the dark kitchen and kitchen condos reality in each city, with ANVISA, Secretariat of Natural Environment, Secretariat of Urbanism, ABRASEL, workers unions, and competent agency's technicians. The city halls are the ones able to promote it, even to decide which body will be responsible for these models,” she says.

For Macedo, the negative impacts provoked by the kitchen condos in São Paulo will accelerate the regulation discussion across the country with decrees, revisions, new master plans, and legislation. The model, however, won't prevail in the food and beverage sector. "Bars and restaurants are vital for the public space. A restaurant that opens to the city adds a connection point with it. Neighborhoods and regions need a mix of services in their streets so they don't have sectors limited to specific activities, for example with exclusively daytime commerce, which makes the city more unsafe at night," analyzes the architect.

People that have lower initial investment will continue to bet on dark kitchens, but dark kitchens won't be the ones responsible for closing street restaurants from 2022 onwards. The recovery of "normal life" after the Covid-19 vaccination is changing the scenario and has encouraged many restaurant owners to take the opposite path: leaving the delivery-only operation to open a physical establishment.

That's the case of engineer Felipe Petri, who started Petrisserie in 2019. He prepared frozen meals for home delivery in a production kitchen in the Bacacheri neighborhood, in Curitiba. At the beginning of 2022, he closed the dark kitchen, and in May, he opened his first food operation with in-house service, five miles away from the first address. In three years of branding, Petri never used Ifood delivery services. "Between giving discounts on a delivery app and investing in paid traffic, I rather the second. The orders were made via WhatsApp, and I organized the delivery route to deliverers partners of Ball's Log or O Pão Que o Viado Amassou4," he explains. With the same partners, the brand promoted reverse logistics for collecting back the containers at the customer's houses.

The change reflects what he believes a restaurant represents. "A restaurant is a meeting point. The dark kitchen helped me to start my food operation in 2019 with the lowest possible investment and attract customers. But having a physical space to host people makes them get in touch with the values and principles of the restaurant. The brand impact is different because everything is right in the face," reflects Petri. With the customers sitting a few feet from his kitchen, he can finally roll out the menu as he always wanted. "Now I can serve french fries without the fear of them arriving limp," he jokes.

The delivery should continue to stake high in the country, through dark kitchens, home kitchens, or in-house service restaurants. It is hard to know if the concentration of several professional kitchens in the same building will continue to multiply. "This movement has already reached its peak. The renting costs of these shared spaces are not low, because it's not only a lease, there's the management software interconnected between the restaurant's management system and all the delivery platforms. So, it ends up with an expensive administration fee," foresees Salles.

As the Ifood itself presents on its website, the dark kitchen is a kind of operation that only grows along with delivery apps. There is a strong campaign by Ifood to advertise social and environmental responsibility in its activities, however, delivery apps evade the direct and indirect consequences of their activities, such as the rise of dark kitchen condos. While digital platforms monopolize their markets – as in the case of Ifood and Meta (WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram) – these companies concentrate an enormous bargaining power with the public authorities and define the rules that dictate the functioning of the sector. They take advantage of the ambiguity of being between the virtual and the real, between being the main sales channel and the main intermittent working platform, at the same time they are "only" mediators of the restaurant-deliverer-client relationship.

Yet, there's no human activity free from materiality. A company always exists in a territory, operates from people's work, and is located in a historical period with a series of social conventions and consensus in force. Regulations, for example.

Kitchen Central decided to return the contact via press office, which did not occur until this edition's closing on April 29th. There was another contact attempt with the company via consultants to reach the communication team, without success. Ifood's press office returned our contact saying that the company doesn't have dark kitchens (a question that wasn't asked), ignoring the questions sent by email. Goomer did not return the email until this edition's closing, on April 29th. Aiqfome declined to contribute to the topic with the following message: "Unfortunately, Aiqfome won't be able to help with this agenda. The dark kitchens model is largely applied in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and other capitals of Brazil, where we do not operate. Our focus is on the interior cities, so we chose not to take a position about the dark kitchen theme at this moment, because we truly have no know-how to talk about this subject."

Big thanks to Ana Paula Barddal, Célio Salles, Erick Masteck, Felipe Petri, Guilherme Macedo, Luiz Breda, and Rogério Guimarães for your time and attention spent in the interviews.

This text was edited by Rodrigo Ghedin, from Manual do Usuário. Thanks, Ghedin!

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If the ideal food public policies were a person, they would very much look like Regina Tchelly: easy communicating, widespread, with practical sense, future vision, and focused on the collective.

Regina started Favela Orgânica1 in 2011 after raising around US$ 30 from her neighbors in the Babilônia and Chapéu Mangueira communities and preparing a workshop on full-use cooking techniques. The first group had six students, but the interest escalated and Regina roaded Brazil with her recipes – two years later, I met her in Curitiba when she was in the city teaching her workshop. The practice classes with tasting the recipes are the essence of Favela Orgânica, but Regina knows better than no one else to diversify the application of her knowledge.

For almost 11 years, Favela Orgânica has been working to transform its surrounding community and people's relationship with food. "It's a school about the food cycle," defines Regina. Currently, the initiative has different fronts of action: food and nutritional education for children; online classes of cooking and entrepreneurship for those who want to begin a business; a partnership with nutritionists to assist Babilônia and Chapéu Mangueira slums inhabitants free of charge, an educational web series with foods of the basic food basket; the workshops; and a restaurant, which is available by reservations.

Just like Favela Orgânica activities, the recognition of this work also appears diversely, of which prizes are a validation and important milestones to amplify its reach. In 2022, Regina received the Nise da Silveira Award, promoted by the Secretariat of Women of Rio de Janeiro, earning more than 51% of the votes in the Gastronomy and Culinary category. "This time I even got dizzy because about ten people came around me to say they were honored to be near me, that I was the reason they started their initiative with food and sustainability. It's so gratifying!" she said about the award night. "Lula's2 wife, Janja, told me once: 'you have a lot of clones'", she remembered. That's the beauty of Regina's work: the more they copy her, the better it gets for everyone.

The praises received by Regina come from all over the world, since the beginning of her activities. Carlo Petrini, the Italian founder of the international movement Slow Food, got to know her in 2012 at a Rio+20 workshop. Since then, he repeated the same statement in interviews: "She's the best chef in Brazil".

Although her philosophy agrees with Slow Food principles – that food must be good, clean, and fair – the basis of Regina's thinking doesn't come from suiting in some famous movement or hot trend. As Sabrina Fernandes, from Tese Onze Youtube channel, well exemplified, Favela Orgânica is praxis.

As an example, Regina has always prepared meatless recipes "Ten years behind, I didn't even know about this vegetarian movement", she replied to me in our most recent conversation. In 2013, when I had the opportunity to interview her face to face, she explained:

"I put myself in the shoes of those who can't afford to buy meat every day. If I can develop simple, budget-friendly, and healthy recipes, people will be satisfied without needing a steak."3

This year, she also starred in the Seu Negócio Tá Na Feira [Your Business is at the Street Market] web series, about entrepreneurship ideas with recipes using food that would be wasted in the street markets. "The marketers are super happy. I've already told the Secretariat [of Natural Environment] that they should be more responsible at the markets, which is a place where there's more food waste. And there are people in hunger!", she says. The web series shows 25 recipes: some using stalks, peels, and vegetable leaves, and other that shows how to use all the parts of squash, banana, and unripened coconut. "After eating the coconut meat, you can make a plant vase with its shell," she teaches. And it all can be sold to generate extra income for those who watch.

Seu Negócio tá na Feira is a synthesis of what Regina learned in practice by starting Favela Orgânica when she had to collect stalks and leaves at the street markets to use in her workshops. "With this partnership, I give back to the market what it gives me. The support of the Secretariat of Natural Environment of Rio de Janeiro on this project of reducing food waste is a mammoth win."

Born in Serraria, in the state of Paraíba, Regina has been living in the city of Rio de Janeiro for 21 years, 20 of them in the Morro da Babilônia, in the Leme neighborhood. "When I arrived in Rio de Janeiro to be a cook, I went to buy ingredients in the street market and I saw how much waste there was. I went nuts, restless. I wanted to do something different". The Babilônia slum has been the headquarters of Favela Orgânica since the beginning. A few years ago they got a dining room, in addition to the kitchen where Regina and 12 other people work between events, orders, and meals on-site. "It seats 40 people to eat or for a lecture, and about 80 if it's a dancing party", she jokes.

It's easy to know when someone is smiling just by listening to his/her voice. That's how Regina sounded during our 40-minute phone conversation on an April morning, while she and her daughter were finishing up their preparations for an event. There wasn't enough time for her to answer all of my questions, so we resumed the conversation a week later for about 15 minutes when Regina handed the phone to nutritionist Gabriela Ribeiro at some point. The main excerpts of the interview are below, edited, and organized for better understanding.

Favela Orgânica started in 2011 with practical classes, but it got many other fronts of action through the years. A meaningful milestone, I imagine, is the Seu Negócio Tá Na Feira web series, in partnership with the Secretariat of Natural Environment. What are you working on right now?

I'm making events, giving lectures and training in companies, and also finishing some other projects. At the training, people call me to teach full-use and conscious consumption of food for their employees. It's a program to motivate and talk about the quality of life for the teams. In the pandemic, I developed four things. One of them was the Cesta Básica Educativa [Educative Basic Food Basket] web series, teaching the better use of each basket ingredient to multiply the amount of food.

I teach how to make yield for 15 or 20 days a basic food basket that would last 10 days. When something [bad] happens, everyone mobilizes to donate basic food baskets. In this country, the basic food basket is pure lip service, it's given without tools, without recipes.

I saw that people would take the basic basket and only think about the immediate. Some people took more than one, forgetting that the other would need it too. It bothered me, and people were complaining that the basic food baskets were running out. That's how the idea of guiding people on how to save and have autonomy came up, because no one knew when they would receive [the basic basket] again.

The second initiative was the Nutrindo o Favela Orgânica [Nousiring the Organic Favela] program, in partnership with eight nutritionists who voluntarily attended 35 patients in Babilônia and Chapéu Mangueira slums. We combined the nutritional consultation with my recipes based on the basic food basket, street market ingredients, and wild edible plants that we can find in the community. Every week people have nutritional accompaniment, and we see how to improve their eating. We work on their self-esteem, showing that they can make it different. We got basic food basket donations, and also some organic ingredients donated by a French woman. There wasn't a penny invested, only partnerships. Now we're looking for investors to be able to serve more people, we have a demand of 200 patients.

I also launched Faça e Venda Sem Desperdício [Make It and Sell It Without Waste], an online course aimed at empowering 200 people to build their businesses from what they had. If they had a pound of beans, I'd teach them how to plant some of it, make bean hamburgers to sell, and cook it for themselves. With one kilo of beans, one can eat, grow and sell five hamburgers. It's a course with four simple online classes that change peoples' views of food.

The fourth project is the Favela Orgânica nas Escolas [Organic Favela at the Schools], for 200 children from Rio de Janeiro slums, based in a philanthropic school in the South Zone. It's focused on changing the kitchen, the classroom, and the surroundings – and it's having such an awesome impact! We talk about eating, about the food cycle. We've been modifying the menu with the school cooks as the kids work on science, geography, and other subjects. For now, this is the pilot. Everything I do at the school, I've already been doing here in my space.

You have always proposed to use fresh foods and to use them fully, with all the parts – peels, leaves, stalks. What are your bases to cook as you do? What or who inspired you in the beginning?

I love eating, especially my grandma's food. I started cooking out of necessity, I had to learn it because I went living on my own. I created the recipes myself and cooked some things from what I remembered my grandmother making. Some things I learned to do after people asked me. I learn when people explain, but I also do my research and read when I need to.

I cook everything by heart, I don't write it down. The nutritionists go crazy because I end up making it hard to pass on the recipes. I tease them: "is it my fault that I'm organic?" [laughs]. 

[You should] Talk to Gabriela, and she'll tell you how it is [she hands the phone to the nutritionist Gabriela Ribeiro, coordinator of Nutrindo o Favela Orgânica]

Gabriela Ribeiro, nutritionist: 

In the course, she cooks and we take on writing all the measures, watching how she prepares the ingredients to have a written recipe in the end. It's not a piece of cake. Nutrindo o Favela Orgânica is going online now. There was the consulting for the Babilônia and Chapéu Mangueira slums combined with Regina's recipes, and it was a success. Many patients are asking for more, so this year we'll open 200 free-of-cost vacancies for the residents, plus an online paid version to help cover the consultation costs and have some percentage directed for the Favela Orgânica initiative. There are a lot of wild edible plants here, and people do not always know [how to use them]. We give them quality nutritional education with accessible language and follow their reality. We're currently chasing sponsorship for these 200 free vacancies for the dwellers, and we already have the pilot's experience. The idea is that this project spreads to other communities over time.

How did you choose Favela Orgânica's name?

The word "favela" is because I live in the favela and because there are a lot of good projects and good people making things happen here. And "orgânica" is in the meaning of organization, of organizing my life and my consumption, about this movement of rethinking our consumption from the inside out.

The project has the word "organic" in its name. But most of your suppliers and your recipes don't only use certified organic ingredients, right?

Yeah, it's all-embracing. Teaching these preparations with what's available at the street markets, which is conventional, is already a step taken. Even though it's conventional, we have a method of sanitizing with activated charcoal and baking soda, to clean up the skins so we can eat the peels. Favela Orgânica's role is working with the food cycle. It's better to work with what's already available than going all the way around just for eating organics only, which is expensive. With the savings one makes by fully using the food, one can buy organic sugar, coconut oil.

When I started, I noticed that I could give back the seeds to the earth. Then you realize the economy you're making, your mind starts to change, and money starts yielding.It encompasses several things, like cultivating gardens in small spaces and making this alternative cuisine [of stalks, leaves, and peels]. For some recipes, I didn't need almost anything [from the supermarket], [I'd buy] everything on the street market.

If I don't have money to buy more squash, but I have its skin, I may sanitize it to make it safer to eat. That's people's reality: the lack of food. Or is it better to eat rotten meat, and search for bones in trucks? We must raise awareness of what's available and the best way to take advantage of this food, enabling people to choose what they want to eat.

The reality of eating only organics is distant, but there's a great possibility. In this hectic consumption ecosystem, we need to use accessible vocabulary to be able to explain the importance of eating food without poison.

Which were the biggest difficulties at the beginning of Favela Orgânica? Do you believe that, nowadays, after your trajectory, it will be easier for similar initiatives to establish themselves?

Favela Orgânica started in a very genuine way. I readily started asking for the market vendors, warning them that all of that [stalks and leaves thrown away when putting vegetables for sale] was food – while the street marketers kept saying that none of that would be eaten.

The street marketer's reality is deeply different from what we imagine. He leaves his home at 2 am. How will he keep the leaves and stems if the customer himself asks to take them off? How is the vendor supposed to store all of it after trimming the vegetables for the client?

They start trimming the vegetables as soon as they arrive, during the market assembly, and trim again halfway and another time in the end. It's a lot of waste in the same place on the same day. The street market lasts around 6 hours, but for the vendors, it's 10, 12 hours of work.

What do you consider to be your main contribution?

The courage to believe in me. I was going to receive around US$ 2,000 (R$ 10,000) at the beginning, but they denied it because my project was considered too complex. Then, I started with US$ 30.

You're a reference for many vegetarian cooks. How do you see your influence on vegetarian eating?

My food has always been all animal-free ingredients. I made it this way because people think that food is only good if there's meat in it. In Paraíba, if the bean stew only had vegetables, if there was some salad on the table, but no meat, people would say it was a weakling meal.

Daring as I am, I wanted to do something different, and so I did. All meatless! There are recipes using banana peels, watermelon rinds, to make it taste like chicken or shrimp. Same for squash. Making bananas taste like tuna or beef: that's what I wanted to show. Ten years behind, I didn't even know about this vegetarian movement. What I do is real food that's accessible to everyone.

Now that the Seu Negócio Tá Ná Feira web series has ended, how would you continue this initiative if you could choose to keep it? What would you put into practice if it depended just on you?

I would do a gastronomic festival on the food markets, with live tasting so everyone could try the recipes.

What is your long-term plan for Favela Orgânica?

[The plan is] that we can be self-sustainable, that our projects finance themselves. We're open for projects, selling our services, or being sponsored. But until becoming self-sustainable, we need investments for us to develop our initiatives. I wish we had a bigger space with a gastronomy school to teach about the entire food cycle.

Follow Regina Tchelly’s work on Favela Orgânica's site, Instagram, and Youtube, and buy the ebook Na Cozinha Tudo se Transforma [In the Kitchen Everything is Transformed, Portuguese only].

RECOGNITION

On the night of April 6th, I went to the Federation of Industries of the State of Paraná (FIEP) Journalism Award, because the report I made on yerba mate (Yerba mate's second wave bulks up in South Brazil) was an award finalist. I was very happy to have my article published in the food section of the Pinó magazine and portal competing with economy articles. I received the first place in the internet category, and I couldn't hide my amazement stepping on stage [minute 25 onwards].

A few minutes later, I also got the Regional Distinction award [minute 51 onwards]. It's fulfilling having this investigation recognized! Thank you to Roberta Braga, of Literato Comunicação, who was the editor that trusted my topic suggestion – and she, on top of that, is a paid supporter of this humble newsletter. 💖

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There are gestures I have automatized in my brief adult life. Put the linen napkin on my lap while I eat. Use the knife with my right hand. Place the cutlery inside the plate, from the center to the right side, when I finish eating. To behave at the table under these rules is to signal the mastery of a code and also an affirmation of social distinction.

I came across this subject after discussing with my friend Ana Spengler, a 20-years-experienced cook and an example of a hostess, about etiquette and what are the guest's duties. I wrote a draft in December about reception, service, dining, and table behaviour; in an attempt to apprehend what the petty-bourgeois ethics for lunch and dinner might indicate a pact of similar behavior to the group. I couldn't move on. In the afternoon before sending this piece in Portuguese (March 30th), I deleted everything and started from scratch. That's why this essay is shorter than the others.

What draws me into the subject of "how to behave at the table" is less the nature and reasons these rules have to exist and more the possibilities we have to re-signify while following or breaking them. I remember saying something like that back in September when I gave an interview for the digital newspaper Plural ("In a polarised country, going to a restaurant has become a political act", only in Portuguese). I affirmed the table is not a forgiving space, but a sharing one. When you are at the table, you have to respect the intrinsic rules the group has.

At Christmas dinners, no one ate before my grandma said a prayer; at the end of the dinner, every one of us took our dishes off the table to put them in the kitchen sink. When dining at a restaurant, the cutlery's position signs the waiter if you are satisfied or not; at a friend's house, you can help prepare the meal or clean the dishes. 

[In the last case, I learned that there are many possible etiquettes: depending on the occasion and with whom you are, taking off your plate after eating may sound rushed or a rude interruption of the good moment the group is having. I hope Ana will explain this publicly someday]

Most of the time, we know how to adapt our behavior or, at least, to mime discreetly the gestures of those who are more comfortable than us. There is a non-verbal pact that makes us sit at the table willing to be in consensus, but alert. The table is where you can let your guard down, negotiate, and build new relationships – it's not always a peaceful space, but it is always a stage.

"The one that doesn't know how to receive shall not invite". The sentence is declared in a disapproving tone in one scene of the French movie Delicious (Éric Besnard, 2021), while the Duke of Chamfort is having dinner with part of the nobility as guests. An entourage of waiters waits in the antechamber, dinner plates in one hand, hearing the guests give other dukes and duchesses a bad press. The Duke de Chamfort had set the evening's menu, and his cook, Pierre Manceron, had coordinated dozens of people to prepare and serve dinner to perfection. As soon as the dining room's doors are opened, Manceron serves a little pie stuffed with potatoes and black truffle, nicknamed "delicious", a dish that was not requested by the duke. An inexcusable faux pas. 

To make it worse, the stuffing was made of ingredients little valued by the nobility – "the only connoisseurs of the haute cuisine" – and the little pies and the china they were into were thrown on the floor. The humiliation felt by the duke made him dismiss Manceron. 

The cook moves to a baiting place a few miles from the Chamfort Palace. After a few weeks of melancholy, his son stimulates him to cook for the travelers that stop by, who complain about the boy's vegetable soup. I am not going to detail the plot, but I can say the film is a narrative exercise of what could have been the founding myth of the origin of restaurants, given that it takes place in the mid-18th century, in rural France.

Little by little, Manceron inserts technique and service that was exclusive from an economic-superior stratum in the popular baiting place's hall. He begins to serve a sequence of dishes in the same meal, having à la carte service and giving attention to each one of the messmates. And little by little, we see Manceron turn the salon into a social homogenization space. The restaurant is the big table that brings together the different ones.

To know and to practice as the protocol says is also a requirement to deny it – otherwise, the rupture is seen only as a gaffe. To show care for the importance of the ceremonial and even though to opt to leave the script also has value, as well as to make use of conventions to insert yourself in a context that is not yours. The states we give subverting the protocol hold power when there is a message to the status quo. That was my line of reasoning when I saw Will Smith slapping Chris Rock during Oscar's ceremony, and this is how I see the breaks that the newly-elected president of Chile Gabriel Boric made in protocols in his sworn-in, greeting personally service providers and workers.

The lawbook of good manners is constantly rewritten and justified by cultural hegemony. Nothing remains standing forever in what is considered the proper behavior. My poor but instrumental sense of etiquette was what made me adapt myself smoothly to the world of expensive restaurants and events when I needed to cover them as a reporter or when I wanted to get to know starred establishments on my own. Collecting information, contacts, and opportunities in a foreign universe requires the use of these codes. There are latent possibilities when entering power environments – and I know that. The norm is what makes us go unnoticed. Invisible. Belonging.

Every dinner is a political situation. Even if it is informal, there will always be some kind of power exercise made by one party and adequacy by the others. It begins with all the decisions the host has the prerogative to make – who the guests will be, the menu, the occasion, the time – and goes through creating a circumstance for the meeting. In some cases, the etiquette will fit like a camouflage. In others, we might perform a behavior so naturally that we don't even notice it. One thing never changes: the etiquettes only exist to mediate our social contact and guarantee that, if everyone is playing the role that is expected by the group, everything will go smoothly and all parts will enjoy the power of the encounters.

By appropriating part of the codes of nobility to serve food in his baiting place, Manceron weakens the hegemony of dukes and their symbols. These symbols receive new meanings when re-signified by different groups. This displacement is continuous and less noticeable in our daily lives than it is portrayed in the movie. Just think about the status of beef stroganoff1, which has gone from fancy to everyday food in just a few decades without a sudden drop. Every symbol is playable and can have its sign inverted. Everything on the table is up for grabs, not just the salt shaker.

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In 2010, the recommendation of removing Monteiro Lobato's1 "Pete's Hunting" book from the PNBE2 was understood as likely censorship for many sectors of society – including for one African literature in Portuguese language professor. I remember the uncomfortable feeling of reading the excerpts of the book quoted in the news articles and seeing opinions in favor of keeping the 1933's book on PNBE "because at that time most people thought that way". For a fact, some forgot to consider that it was a white majority thinking.

What was not on the public discussion's agenda in the 2000s and early 2010s was that Monteiro Lobato was an avowed eugenicist – he believed that some people were better than others due to some supposedly existent hierarchy between genetic, physical, and mental characteristics to value human beings.

In 1914, Lobato sent a letter to a widely circulated newspaper in which he said, among other things, that the "caboclo" was "unadaptable for civilization"3. This letter got published in the articles section, and he started writing publicly more frequently since then. Almost a decade later, the so-called author dedicated himself to children's literature – openly racist and with a very colonial subtext, to say the least. All of his writing stems from the same ideology, and it's easy to realize it when we make an effort to analyze it far from nostalgia, and not get carried away by the technical quality of his writing and textual composition. Just like color, erudition is not synonymous with moral virtue.

At the beginning of the 20th century, eugenics, the hygienist movement, and the "developmentalist" health walked side by side and shaped that time's public debate: medical advances, such as the vaccine, were reported on news commingled with events like the "Eugenic Baby Contest". Despite being blatantly present in this children's beauty contest, the pro-eugenic movement had (and has) many faces, whose actions and speeches are not always easily recognized. There is an elaborated material to understand the presence of eugenist discourses in the Brazilian public debate on the first season of Pelo Avesso podcast [Portuguese only], which precisely explains the arising of the eugenist movement until the disguise and never-eradication of this white supremacist ideology in Brazil.

Thinking about the complexity and disputes that make up the political field since the human being has organized into society, supporting Lobato's work nowadays goes from naivety (as I once believed it would be) to conniving. The workpiece, of course, could be edited with critical notes to contextualize the reader in a cross-disciplinary study involving History and Literature. Would this be a smaller effort than editing new books, by new authors, more plural, and that talk about today's society?

I have neither expertise nor education to analyze the possible impacts of removing Lobato's books of scholarly content in Brazil. However, I can see the effects one of his characters had on creating a stereotype of a black maidservant cook.

Thus, I expect you to read this low heat's month interview aware that the eugenist mentality (most of the time discreetly) led the public debate in the 20th century: whether cultural production, economic privileges maintenance, and the Brazilian colonial elite minds, who always had plenty of space and echo on the traditional media vehicles.

The first time I wrote down Taís de Sant'Anna Machado's name was in August of last year while interviewing Lourence Alves. I heard from Lourence that Taís' doctorate thesis was an academic milestone. I also heard that, just like Lourence, Taís is one of the researchers that is analyzing the world through a black epistemology, which articulates different subjects to investigate issues that were almost always treated from a distant perspective, where the "ethnic" was always seen as an object of study, and not as a knowledge-producing agent.

Taís holds a Doctor in Sociology from Brasília's University (UnB). In her thesis named "A foot in the kitchen: a socio-historical analysis of black women's culinary work in Brazil''4 she bethinks the work of black women in the kitchen between the 18th and 21st centuries, from cook Esperança Garcia to chefs and professional cooks of today – who remained anonymous to protect them of retaliation. Taís presents the working conditions in the kitchens and the different ways these women found to resist and act, despite facing disrespect, day after day, for more than three centuries.

This academic work will be edited as a book, and its content adapted to a less academic language. Regardless, Taís' text flows very well, even for the lay reader. "I took care about the language when writing the thesis because I want everybody to read it. It's an invisibilized history that has to do with most Brazilians", she said. Part of the 305 pages of the thesis will be synthesized in less space, and the book is expected to be released in the second half of 2022.

Taís talked to me by phone for about an hour and a half. You can read below the main excerpts of our conversation, edited and organized for better comprehension:

You open your thesis with a chapter that narrates the change in perspective you had when your interviewees showed that they'd prefer to emphasize their achievements rather than publicize the prejudice they suffered. Reflecting upon the authorial cuisine and in the proposal, these women present to the world, what histories these chefs you interviewed tell through their gastronomy and dishes? What are they proud of creating?

How interesting, no one asked me about it before! There's not much of it in the thesis. My work isn't a recipe compendium, as many people think. It would be great to have the screening of these recipes without the generic "African" or "ethnic" labels, as to how everything that is not French or Italian is labeled. But this wasn't the objective – the focus was the work in the kitchen.

As an interviewer, I see different contributions and paths. These women are impelled into a straitjacket of what they can cook, of what white people want them to cook, so they're very pushed to African and Brazilian cuisine.

As authorial cooks, they are diverse. There's one that's the queen of French techniques. There's another one who is "god-forbid" to make ethnic food: she wants to be contemporary and make fusion cuisine, to cook from references and ideas that pop into her mind – just like the classic white male chef that comes back from Thailand incorporating Thai ingredients in his dishes. Some of these women who cook with African influences have references from many regions and countries of the continent. There's also one that cooks Brazilian cuisine with wild edible plants.

Many of them have to leave their authorial repertoires to cook what people order from them. They said: "I know that [African and Brazilian cuisine] is what people expect from me, but if I don't, who will do it? A white chef?" These women have a lot of practical experience and circulate through many possible repertoires.

How do female black chefs and cooks evaluate and relate to those stereotypes of the quituteira or even of the cook that only knows how to make ethnic food, or to execute someone else's menu? 

Being seen as a quituteira5 or a black maidservant cook is one of their biggest frustrations. In the third chapter, I discuss that these women, either as professional cooks or chefs de cuisine, are in non-places. It's complex to understand the entrapment of the black woman in the kitchen, where she isn't supposed to be the chef, the first or second cook. She's expected to be the assistant or dishwasher. So, they've been occupying places where they "shouldn't" be. When we see the history of gastronomy from a racial, class, and gender perspective, the chef de cuisine's image is built in counterpoint to the black maidservant cook. The chef has to be everything that "she is not". Yet, when you see her as a maidservant, you won't see her for what she is.

Bianca Briguglio granted me the interview she did with Benê Ricardo [page 151], who passed away in 2017. Benê was the first female graduated chef in Brazil, and in this interview, she talks of all kinds of delegitimization and boycotts she suffered in professional kitchens. There were episodes like the kitchen staff putting shredded glass in a tomato sauce she was about to serve: an attempt to criminalize her. There are all sorts of stunts that mean "you don't belong here, you gotta get back to another job".

There are many types of harassment: your suppliers don't recognize you, the customers don't believe you're the chef. It undermines your everyday life. Nobody sees them as authorities. These women are in places that they weren't supposed to be. They say: "why do they see any white female chef as a chef, and see me as Aunt Nastacia?"6

Stereotypes such as Aunt Nastacia's, whose repertoire is about playing a role, and not thinking, belong to a project of a nation that slots black women in minor and subordinated places in a violent way – and this kind of work keeps the country running.

It is not by chance, it's intentional: black women imprisoned in these places uphold workforce prices for domestic work at a bargain. It's a project of white supremacy, of violence. It is at the core of the chef de cuisine definition: a role that wasn't meant for these women, but they are fighting to occupy it.

You say that, even without sounding combative and militant, black women used kitchens as a space of resistance and action, something little considered by common sense or even by the academic environment. Could you exemplify how black female chefs and cooks have been articulating agency and resistance in the kitchens over the centuries?

Kitchens are extremely racist environments. The mere presence of these women, their insistence on occupying these spaces as chefs and cooks, is itself agency and resistance. Racism, sexism, and classism operate in different ways and women's actions stem from the breaches they find. Those who could study in international courses or have worked in better workplaces, manage to stand up against some structures and bring other black professionals to these spaces. Those who couldn't access it because of a racist structure that affects their income and opportunities, have to give in on many points.

I had to leave out of my thesis many things I heard from these women because I could put at risk their professional careers. If [as a cook or chef] you talk about these acts of violence, you get sanctioned, and you'll be seen as a troublemaker.

There's also networking between them, an attempt to have mobilization, an openness for some level of discussion about racism against black people. These women share opportunities among themselves, set up projects, and fight for certain food repertoires and their authorship (usurped by white chefs). They strengthen quilombolas7 and indigenous communities so they can also claim ownership of their repertoires. Gastronomy is a very predatory field to the knowledge of native peoples, quilombolas, indigenous peoples, and terreiro8 populations.

It's important to me to point out that there are other mains of resistance because black people need to access them. The sanctions [against those who stand up for their rights and needs] are very tough, and fighters can even lose job opportunities like in every labor market. This fight is set in a field made for white men, in which the recognition policies were made to award them. We know that some famous chefs don't hire women and have no shame in saying it.

When you're a woman seen as a troublemaker, you might not get a job, and it means having no subsistence. Then, less direct and more silent resistances are required. That's why my thesis harps on this point: there is a long history and tradition of resistance which begins with a petition letter from the cook Esperança Garcia, in 1770 [page 45]9.

The angle from where you see the black women's work in the kitchen is still not very common in the academy. Even you chose this perspective after a few years of doctorate studies. What would you highlight as possible research that stems from your academic work?

My thesis is a water drop in the ocean. I focused on only one group in the kitchen, but it's essential to understand the relevance of critical thinking on food.

People lose themselves in this statement that food is culture, but not always culture is something good. It can be violent, as the thesis shows. Eating habits and recipes are always cataloged as if they exist spare from a structure of power, violence, and economic exploitation.

Black women [who work or worked as housemaid cooks] have always been put under impossible survival conditions in the kitchens. While white families had sumptuous feasts, the black maid's families were in famine. Sometimes the payment was the leftover food.

This perspective and critical vision work for every other research on kitchen work. It's an invitation to look at other things: how whiteness is seen as a model, how white people "dominate" cooking repertoires that aren't theirs and behave like it was somehow natural – as if they could do everything and understand everything.

In my research, I'm toning gender and race. It's important to think about how a black female chef will have an experience that is not "only" worse but different. Their connection with housework is worse. The kitchen is also a space of outrageous violence for white women, but it is an entirely different experience. Few studies are thinking about gender and whiteness, about white femininity. There are several possible paths to enlarge and discuss this point of view.

Your research brings many oral reports and realities that weren't written, documented, and validated by the academy. How did the examining board and your peers evaluate it?

I don't think that my work is flawless. I know I lost sight of certain perspectives because it is a pioneer work. Whoever comes after me can develop critical sight on it, we can all think critically about the kitchens' history. I'm not a historian, and I may fail [as using Oral History methods]. To talk about a history that was intentionally erased and made invisible means that, to uncover it, you have to look for it in other sources with other methods. It's a social analysis and I'm embracing all kinds of records: obituaries, letters, biographies, personal diaries, file registers, movies. I am looking for feminisms and black perspectives, Brazilian and American.

Because of the character of what I'm studying, I have to consider different sources. Also, what I make from this black perspective and what's in my theoric-methodological basis is the definition of undisciplined research. The theoretical canon of Sociology doesn't handle what I'm talking about, nor does History's canon. That's why I have to make this amalgam, to be able to talk about what I'm studying by articulating different fields.

Every research is fated to be limited, and I think there's no other way to do it. I'm making a methodological path as I go along. I didn't get criticized for this in the examination board, but I wasn't worried about attending a disciplinary rigor of History or Sociology – I was concerned about treating those black women's history and the way they wanted to tell it respectfully, though. I don't give voice to anyone, I evoke. I intend to serve as an echo of these histories that were silenced and to make sure people can easily access them.

In the post-slavery abolition, the public space, being on the streets, and street food were seen as a black domain. Then, restaurants and hotels inspired by European hospitality came up and took the public thoroughfare. What did this displacement and marginalization cause to black female cooks' work and the population's eating? 

The post-abolition process is tough itself because black people got free from slavery without any reparation. It was an extinguish and decimate project: there were a gamut of attempts to whitewash the population; land policies to impede land access; the impairing of education access; policies to criminalize black female cooks' work on the streets.

Impeding access to certain income-producing spaces is part of this project. So, the civilized white European country [as Brazil imagined itself] made black people's living conditions, which were already grim, even worse.

At the same time, cities depended on black labor. Taking black female cooks off their street work made the precarious situation even poorer. The food supply chain depends on the food circulation in the city, fairs, and on-street food, which has always been very common in Brazil. You'll always find a black woman with her food stall. They were removed from some city spaces, sometimes taken by force of spots that were getting urbanized and Europeanized. But they never leave the street work, these women just go to other places in precarious conditions – the streets remain black territory despite all the criminalization of this work. I quote in my thesis Bruna Portella de Novaes’ dissertation, "Whitewashing the black city: street work management in Salvador at the beginning of the 20th century", which is great research to think about this question, especially in Salvador.

What can you say about the difference in the opportunities between the city and the countryside that black female cooks could find in the post-abolition period?

The city means the possibility of accessing other jobs or other bosses. These women are astute, they can see how the structure above them operates and then find gaps to occupy certain spaces. The idea that black people are a subservient workforce is a whites' invention. They were always looking for other jobs, with better treatment, better wages, better labor conditions, to ease their child's care – things that may seem minor changes, but were often very significant in their daily life.

In the post-abolition, many women got stuck to the families that enslaved their families, and the blacks sometimes felt like they owed something to the whites. Ms. Risoleta went to work in the city with the daughter of the man who enslaved her father [page 107]. She, at 8 years old, was taught how to work. In the countryside she had less possibility of transiting and poorer living conditions, so she went to the city. There, she also works for a family, and then she realizes she can work in the newborn public hospitality structure of São Paulo. There were the big hotels with chefs de cuisine, and the boarding houses which had small restaurants that also served wealthy families.

These women are always moving: there's forced migration due to the people's traffic, then an obliged migration to get better living conditions. The labor conditions are far different between the city and the countryside, then the rural exodus happens because they needed it and not because they wanted to.

Cities were spaces to look for more opportunities, as in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. You go around and look for new conditions, which sometimes was a better treatment or the non-necessity of sleeping in the workplace.

In the cities of that time, the work in public space kitchens had more "autonomy and freedom" (between many quotation marks) than working in private kitchens?

I don't want to make general comments. It changes by case. Kitchen labor conditions were very unhealthy, it was considered a humiliating job, full of physical and sexual violence – it was not rare for those females workers to get continuously raped. There were all sorts of tortures, and people had to sleep on the kitchen floor. Working in the kitchen meant having the worst living conditions inside a house. There's a story where the proprietor says that she would put in the kitchen the enslaved she liked the least. The first part of my thesis is named  "Kitchen was not a place for people" because it was portrayed as a place where everything filthy happened.

Moving from the private kitchen to a public space kitchen means that now you could be with your children, have a partner, visit your family. You'd have a better income and a less violent and humiliating life. We can't generalize it, though: the streets may not be understood as a space of complete freedom and tranquility because it was also a space of physical and sexual violence. Women on the streets were frowned upon, and the work routine was also very strenuous.

The kitchen work is extremely exhausting at any time in History.

Working in the public space, maybe you'll manage to have a place to leave your stuff, but mostly it's an itinerant job where you have to walk miles carrying a heavy basket over your head. Even with the difficulties, it was better than being under one's yoke, being humiliated, suffering physical violence, and being at the risk of not being paid according to the agreement.

In "Bitita's Diary", Carolina Maria de Jesus shows that she was willing to enjoy her youth, but she didn't have time. It was a huge achievement for black women to go to balls. Ms. Risoleta reckoned that she would go six months without seeing the street. There were many layers until these women got the conditions of being able to be people, manage to minimally live their lives.

The balls are a present memory of the beginning of the 20th century – but they weren't a reality for black women, who were confined and imprisoned in exhausting work shifts. This kind of work was essential for upper-middle-class life maintenance. And it meant depriving people of being people.

A black woman in a precarious and strenuous job is the condition needed to support white middle-class people's lives. The pandemic showed the deepening of something that seemed stuck in the past but comes back now with full force: the project of non-guarantee of basic rights, bringing the past alive again. The way the pandemic has been managed [in Brazil] is a genocide of black and indigenous people – it hazards lives and increases inequity, impoverishing people and putting them in this kind of position again because there will always be demand for domestic work.

To read articles and check on other interviews with Taís, follow this thread on Twitter.

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to the Refoscos, kindly.

For a long time, the only avocado I knew about was the Fortuna type. As a child, I've learned how to prepare the fruit the way I liked – and strongly believed it was the only correct way to do it: cut in half, without the pit, with a tablespoon of sugar and half of a lemon squeezed on top. Scooping up and mashing the pulp, using its peel as a bowl, I could transform it into a chunky cream. If there was an avocado tree nearby, I certainly would eat two whole avocados this way. A few years later, I heard for the first time that "Brazil is the only country that eats avocado with sugar", and my convictions were ripened out.

Avocado was not an ingredient for fruit shakes or deserts in the rest of the world. It figures at the main meals such as the Mexican guacamole, the Chilean palta, or even in ceviches and salads in other Latin-American and European countries. As childish as it may sound, this information expanded my understanding of food and its possibilities.

The first time I ate salted avocado was also my first time eating coriander. It was summer in São Paulo, and I was visiting Flora Refosco, my friend since our pre-teens. For 20 years, our lives have been zigzagging between matched and parallel paths. In certain aspects, our history is less unequal and without the tragedies version of Lila and Lenu's – to boot, the alliteration between 'Flora and Flávia' is a coincidence worthy of fiction.

Flora is praxis, I'm theory. Flora tries it, I deduct it. Flora kneads the bread, I buy it ready-made. At 18, Flora cooked what she didn't know just for the pleasure of learning. I preferred to remain on the sidelines, fantasizing that, if I spent enough time watching, I could nail it on the first try. That night, Flora not only made guacamole with coriander but also made wheat and corn tortillas. I may have set up the table.

Our complimentary personalities have always acted as an incentive to each other, or so I like to think about it. Luckily, we met at the beginning of our adolescence, and I can see the soil that she grew up on. With her family, I ate short-grain rice1; seasoned the salad with black pepper twisting a wooden grinder; overdid the sesame salt2 over the beans; and tried a tall piece of filet mignon cooked in butter. What was that way of cooking? I asked myself, fascinated, in the early 2000s.

Despite the meat mentioned in the paragraph above, the food served was essentially vegetarian at Flora's house. Nobody was vegetarian there, and there wasn't a discussion about eating animals or not. It wasn't prohibited, but they seldom ate it. She grew up in an environment where the cooking considered the vegetable ingredients possibilities and its many potential transformations using flour and water. No speeches, things were just like that.

There was a culinary education – and here I'm referring to something learned innately, without systematized technical knowledge learning process – different from mine and what I had seen reproduced around me until then. That was a family with practices so different from those I knew, and today I can identify possible influences that her preceding generation may have incorporated before Flora arrived in the world. There was an influence of vegetarianism, of course, with hints of macrobiotic cuisine. But this isn't an essay on the genesis of the Refosco siblings' different cuisines: this is about what most unsettles me since I met them.

Last year's December, choosing what I would serve on Christmas Eve, I wrote a draft (which I lost) about what I called culinary thinking, a set of unconsciously undertaken truths and reasoning lines that pervades our understanding of food. It's not always evident, nor easy to set apart the individual seasoning of the cultural broth.

This culinary thinking is individual and results from the daily learning within the family, in society, and according to personal interests. A composition that complexifies as someone faces new experiences and limitations. Unlike systematization, which organizes and identifies the knowledge components, culinary thinking is self-guided, disordered, and unconscious.

Culinary thinking consists of gesture repetition, ingredients mashup, the choice of cooking techniques, and what is read as trivial food by the individual. It's not about rational food, chefs' and professional cooks' works, nor about the gastronomy printed in magazines and restaurant guides – a whole universe that, by the way, derives from cooking. It's also not about the cook as a knowledge guardian, who reiterates the meaning of each gesture when reproducing a dish. I'm talking about how you, without thinking too much, select tomatoes and onions in the greengrocers' shop, about what you pick to prepare a salad, and what you made for breakfast this morning.

In Philosophy, epistemology is the area that investigates human knowledge: what is knowledge and how this knowledge is acquired. As all culinary traditions and food productions (including the ultra-processed, produced by the historically recent food industry) are an output of existing knowledge, the assortment of individual thoughts – both in the hegemonic and the counter-hegemonic side – are countless. Same about the convergence of solutions and ideas found by different human groups throughout time to solve the same issues: harvesting, picking, grinding, fermenting; hunting, killing, cutting, baking.

There was a parallel development of similar techniques through human evolution. When we perceive this process over a timeline, we can see that the exchange of knowledge and ingredients got more intense as the physical displacement became easier (hello, caravels and spices!), and that this process accelerated for centuries until we reach zillions of recipes available online, marketplaces selling ingredients and imported produces, and the ease of crossing a border carrying wine inside the luggage.

With so many access possibilities, there's a false impression that today we have an epistemological plurality in cooking, and that there's room for all kinds of food. However, as in every cultural space, there are conflicts, overlapping, and narrative constructions. 

During the slow fermentation boom in the mid-2010s in Brazil, Italian, French, and North-American-style loaves of breads were spotted on Curitiba's bakeries, without dethroning the traditional rye bread (because of the German colonization in this region during the 19th and 20th centuries). At that time, rye bread wasn't the most common on the shelves, and certainly, the number of people who home bake then must wane year by year.

I live in a south-Brazilian state, far from France in many aspects: distance, climate, the way the land was occupied and worked through the centuries, the kind of social conflict that occurs in the cities and the countryside. Yet, I can find a great pain au chocolat to eat here, and I know more about what makes a good puff pastry than what makes good rye bread. Notice that I'm briefly comparing two commercial products, without getting into the issue of what we know about other food cultures, as the native peoples'.

To make your world view the predominant perspective is a cultural achievement, which ends up pasteurizing and flattening the point of view of those who "lose" this battle. I've already talked about epistemicide and how we face other people's food as if it was unfinished. Searching for my study notes on ontology and epistemology, I found this excerpt about marketing: one of the tools for spreading and conquesting culinary homogeny.

In industrialized countries, food marketing strategies may be more powerful than rational experience or traditional practices in influencing food habits  (ABRAHAMSSON, 1979)

(...)

Conviviality associated with meals has lost its importance. The diversity of the types of food adoptions according to the contexts (places, moments, convivialities...) has increased, and as a consequence, the range of expectations regarding the qualitative characteristics of food products has also risen. (LAMBERT, 1997, p.55)

(CONTRERAS, 2011)

I often think about the products that today seem staple in a pantry but weren't even known 30 years ago. Think about the olive oil, if someone in your family actually used to buy those rectangular cans in the 1990s. Fishes like tuna and salmon, seeds like pistachio, fruits like dragon fruit: none of those were in the repertoire of an average Brazilian 30 years ago, and none of these products was rejected by consumers because they were distinct from what people were used to.

Everything imported became a quality standard for the national production, and everything trivial in cooking became (even more) commonplace. Political and economic events in Brazil facilitated the entrance of imported products. Plus, political decisions and new credit lines launched the production and cultivation of new food products, as phenomena like globalization transformed the possibilities on the Brazilians' table. In recent decades, we have been zigzagging a bit lost and a bit dazzled between the supermarket shelves.

When I started covering gastronomy, between 2012 and 2013, I thought I was then having access to true knowledge, to the right way to cook according to the consecrated traditions – as if the execution technique would guarantee a dish's authenticity. Fortunately, the experience made me get in touch with many cuisines and ways of cooking and serving food. It made me notice that there are many ways to reach the same result and that it's almost impossible to pinpoint the origin of any dish.

I left this restaurants' universe when the pandemic arrived, and I got through thinking more about homemade food, the one for social reproduction, the boring cooking. I had to cook more frequently and handle the time and budget limitations, looking for surprising myself someway. I dug my memory to remember things I've tasted and liked to try those ingredients combinations and apply them in something I could cook myself. I challenged myself to cook with ingredients I had in my pantry but didn't seem to match. When I see myself trapped in a stir-fry looping, now I think: "How would Flora cook it?"

This is one of the rawest texts I've published here. It's an initial idea, questionable, still loosely tied. What I write is not science, so the only thing I expect is that this read raises questions around the education of those who cook and that we advance on the discussion of culinary and gastronomy, understanding them as multifactorial expressions of human development.

Thank you to Eduardo Alves, Philosophy doctorate student at PUCRS, for the off-the-record conversations about epistemology and rational disagreement, which indirectly helped me to shape this essay.

CHALLENGING NEWS

Now, with the opportunity to discuss a postgraduate curriculum in Gastronomy, I was able to have discussions like the one in the essay above when putting together programs and subjects for three courses.

I accepted Renato Bedore's invitation to take the executive coordination of three Gastronomy postgraduate courses at Positivo University: National Chef de Cuisine (370h), International Chef de Cuisine (370h), and International and National Chef de Cuisine (395h). We build a curriculum that reinforces the material and historical matters in the development of food and, consequently, gastronomy. We incorporated one subject about food restrictions and taboos due to different motivations and perspectives (religious, sanitary, political, etc). Also, on the Brazilian cuisine topics, the regional cuisines subjects gave place for an updated approach that considers the biomes we have in the country.

KEEP THE FIRE BURNING

fogo baixo (low heat) newsletter is an initiative of journalist Flávia Schiochet and financed by her readers. All the essays, interviews, and extra editions will always be available for free, and you can read (or read again) on the newsletter archive.

Consider becoming a paid subscriber to support my work for US$ 2 a month or US$ 20 a year (at the current conversion). Supporters have access to a virtual meeting monthly to discuss the most recent theme; a 10% discount in all courses taught by me; and nominally public acknowledgments at the bottom of all editions.

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On February 10th, a nine years old boy was shot dead in an assault against a family of farmers. While trying to hide under the bed with his mother, the boy was shot after seven hooded men shot his surviving father. Geovane da Silva Santos is president of the Associação dos Agricultores Familiares de Engenho Roncadorzinho (Family Agriculture Association of Engenho Roncadorzinho), in the town of Barreiros, in Pernambuco state. He got a flesh wound on his shoulder, either by luck or sadism. His son succumbed to his injuries soon after arriving at the hospital.

The town of Barreiros is tiny when compared to the size of Brazil and the amount of food produced daily in our territory. A story on Portal G1 talks about the battle for an area of 790 hectares by the 70 families of former workers of the bankrupt estate of Usina Santo André, who didn’t receive their labor rights. They have been there for 40 years. It turns out that ten years ago the land was leased (by the Judiciary itself?) to Agropecuária Javari, which started planting sugarcane in monoculture. For at least five years the conflicts have been going on: the destruction of family farmers' farmland, and deliberate use of pesticides to contaminate the water supply of these families and their crops. 

Harassment and executions in the field are the most faithful portraits of Brazil, from north to south. In Viúvas da Terra ("Widows of the Land", in English), Kléster Cavalcanti, a journalist, narrates the story of women who lost their partners to land and forest conflicts. In Torto Arado, the struggle for autonomy and self-determination of quilombo1 communities is shown in the plot, poetically at first, but raw in the end. One is journalism, the other fiction. Both are real stories that show how long ago the routine of killing to demobilize had started. To remember some of the names from the region where Geovane’s son died, the Comissão Pastoral da Terra Nordeste II keeps a timeline with the names of all of the workers who died in land conflicts from 1988 to 2016 at the end of this page.

If rightful occupations such as Engenho Roncadorzinho are under direct threat, familiar agriculture “without land disputes” (many quotes here) is under another type of siege, also debilitating to nutritional and alimentary security and sovereignty. But this one is clean and looks legal. “We call it ‘pressure’,” says Nayla Almeida, agronomist by Universidade de São Paulo (USP) and mastering in Rural Development at Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), who researches nested markets. We talked in early January, by phone, and she is probably about to defend her dissertation as you read these lines.

Small farmers usually have more diverse produce in their land, which cannot be traded in. There is a cash crop that may be predominant (sold to agroindustries and is the one that pays the bills), while the vegetable plot, aside, is destined to feed the family. It seems a sustainable logic if it weren’t more and more common for them to stop growing their own plot to increase the area destined for the cash crop. In the “pressure” many industries economically pressure this small producer. “The payment decreases, as well as the demand. They shunt the producer and the diversified produce loses space. In the rural area, expenses with feeding are very high, as shown by the Research of Family Budget. Much of this is linked to this pressure, a situation in which that property has to produce single merchandise to keep going,” she said.

That’s where Nayla’s research comes in. The concept of nested markets is relatively new in Brazil, and it refers to trade channels nested in social relations. The one dictating the dynamic in a nested market is not the product, but the arrangements that configure the trades within. 

"Soy market can happen anywhere in Brazil because it has technology for that. Nested markets, however, are connected to specific social and spatial contexts, built by people and ideas, and created in the space in which they have developed,” explains Nayla. Namely: soy (and other commodities) don’t need an established relation between territory, people, and the use of that product. 

I cannot stress this enough: soy, corn, sugarcane, and other exports cultivated in monoculture or that cover large areas in a small property are always taking away space that could grow food for the population of the country. The land is finite, but mouths multiply – we are 212,6 million Brazilians – and the pressure of the agribusiness to expand soy fields in the last years caused, in 2022, the smallest planted area of rice, beans, and cassava in the historical series. There will be less food and the prices of these ingredients will skyrocket again.

On the horizon of nested markets researchers is the idea of broadening the view of the society and governance to the need for familiar agriculture to have access to other spaces – selling in farmers markets, for supply centers or supermarkets, for example, are channels inside a nested market, but they cannot be the only ones.

"A channel other than the global market must be made feasible for agriculture. The farmer cannot be subordinated to a single channel. They should have more channels to have autonomy within the context of the farm and be able to choose which channel to access in the space he is inserted," she says. When there is one single way, such as the selling of produce to a large industry, is the equivalent of leaving the small farmer in the hands of the market, which does not consider the big picture, only the product. This is another way the “pressure” happens.

Public policies such as the Food Acquisition Program (PAA) and the National School Feeding Program (PNAE) guarantee extra channels (and a guaranteed minimum sale) for family farmers and made them have diverse produce to supply schools, hospitals, nursing homes, popular restaurants, penitentiaries, public stocks, and others. The vision of public policies was national, but it happened locally. With this diversity in production, the quality of everyone’s feeding increases – from the small farmer to other citizens – and the price of food is “payable” for all Brazilians.

Some say that the farming of fruit, cereal, vegetables, greens, meat, dairy, and eggs of familiar agriculture is little, but it’s by adding pounds that we get to tons.

Does an increase in the commodities yield guarantee a positive balance of trade? Yes. But the money originating from these exports hardly enters public coffers: the tax paid by agribusiness is minimum, while the values in tax exemption are huge. Using tax originating from the export of commodities is not enough to import food from other countries, and that has to be paid in US dollars (at this moment, one dollar costs R$ 5,13). As I said before, this is the less efficient way to feed a population. Balance of trade is not the only indicator of a country’s health, let alone in a country where agribusiness and processed food walk side-by-side. 

Nayla worked with rural extension focused on familiar agriculture instead of big markets, as usual in Agronomy courses. The group she was part of helped small farmers with documentation and intermediated contact with city halls. “I saw that there was much to understand in familiar agriculture beyond looking at the short distribution channels,” she recalls. “Every place will have specific dynamics according to institutional and governmental devices. Looking at the market allows us to understand the small farmer inside this dynamics of selling and purchasing food products. To what extent do social relations allow the shaping of a favorable market for the small farmer, so that they are better paid?” she questions.

I wrote Nayla after reading her article in Agência Bori on nested markets, in which I highlighted the following excerpt:

Of course, global alimentary systems will keep existing. Food flow will keep flooding the supermarkets with more of the same, with hundreds of new products seemingly diverse. However, at the same time and eventually, in the same place, there are other possible marketing arrangements: nested markets may be supply options beyond conventional supermarkets, as converging structures of the value produced by thousands of small farmers.

The interview was edited and organized for better understanding.

Was there anything that surprised you during the research?

I work on the idea of territorial markets, which are economic trades located in a space, but with characteristics such as cultural traditions, cultural values, mechanisms of economic trades specific to the location. I went on to study the Ubá mango, in Minas Gerais, in the city of Ubá. It is a variety that doesn’t have the market standards we usually see: it is small, really yellow, really fibrous, really sweet. There is a traditional celebration, a traditional sweet treat called mangada. Local inhabitants prefer this mango to the other kind. The Ubá mango market emerges from this area. You will have this product in the farmers market, houses of candy makers (who don’t even sell in markets) and there was even a process of patrimonialization started by the city hall.

There was a movement by large agroindustry that moved to the area to buy this mango because it is so sweet that it decreases the amount of sugar needed to sweeten the juice. The industry mixes the Ubá mango with other kinds to produce the juice. In this process, the specificity of the mango is lost. 

The farmers of the Ubá area are very independent, they don’t have a cooperative, and the assistance of Emater is not enough to help them. [Developing the specificity of this market of Ubá mango] Could bring advantages that are still dormant. This way, the demand is tied down and subordinated to a global market of concentrated juice. There could be, for example, a line of credit to cooperatives, a public policy regarding the production of mango. This is just one example of a single situation, but there are many specific products in Brazil based on social relations. It’s not only the global market through the law of supply and demand that commands economic trades. There’s plenty of produce trade with Ubá mango, there are farmers that donate mangoes to the candy makers to make mangada. It is a very particular local dynamic. 

You research familiar agriculture. At this moment, many of us can only tell that everything is dismantled. Can you exemplify what this dismantling of the PAA and National Council of Nutritional and Food Safety (CONSEA) means, direct and indirectly? 

Specifically in the PAA, there is a worsening of the quality of food supplied to schools and hospitals. There have always been critics because the price was low, but it was a guaranteed sale. It was a channel that ceased to exist. In this production, the farmer either tries to allocate somewhere else or stops producing, since there is no demand. They can even sell cheaper than they would sell to PAA or lose their produce. 

The CONSEA was the main place to debate food security. If it were in action, they would have researchers to assist the federal government and bring this data to create public policies. Since they ceased to be this intermediary between civil society and the State, there’s no link to think of public policies related to reality. 

The liberation of pesticides in Brazil and the levels of pesticides, which are beyond acceptable, was debated by the CONSEA. In the PNAE, for example, in which 30% of school feeding should come from familiar agriculture when there were some irregularities or hassle, that was solved by the city council. 

The PAA also had the role of regulating the price of purchase of food to keep in public stock. A visible result was the price of the rice, be it for agricultural issues or for consuming more than producing. When the stock decreased, there was no rice [in public stock to be put on the market] to regulate the price, and we had to import from Uruguay. The ones who profited from that were three big rice industries in Brazil. 

When you talk about nested markets, the dynamics that organize them happen through demand? Or demands, considering different consuming groups?

A nested market is a social institution and is not always inserted in the logic of financial gain, because it has no notion of gain. It is reciprocity, a real mutual exchange. The farmer has an abundant mango tree, he won’t miss it if he donates some. There’s the case of donating firewood for the candy makers to cook the candy on the woodstove. These local forces strengthen the local community and structure this society. That’s what bonds this area and permeates economic trades. 

In all these informal trading arrangements, it’s very easy to see these dynamics. We only call it informal because there’s no due date or contract. There’s less mediation by institutions, and the price is not the only factor that arbitrates the trade.

The PAA is a market that is not local, but many times it happens at a national area level. There was the simultaneous donation modality – institutional purchase for schools, hospitals, and charities. This is a formal market, but it acts locally. 

A public policy such as the PAA was the connection between agricultural produce and population with food insecurity. If we had a public policy that showed the link between these land and areas to the trading of these products, that showed the way this land was acquired, such as the land reform seal of the Landless Workers (MST, the acronym in Portuguese), maybe this would be perfectly clear: the fact that food doesn’t come from a vacuum, it comes from working the land. There are orchards [of Ubá mango] that are being reduced to plant guava to sell it for agroindustries, for instance. It is a land in dispute. 

We refer to this as pressure and economic pressure. The pay is smaller, and so is the demand. They shunt the producer and the diversified production loses space.

Do nested markets have to do with preserving traditional eating habits? 

Not necessarily. You can also be dealing with conventional products. The specificity of these nested markets encompasses social arrangements and economic trades. Inside these trades, there is reciprocity, monetary exchange, donation… there are many trades, not only in the scope of monetization. 

The production of milk, for example: it can supply for a big brand, but the producer will also make some amount available for someone to make cheese. This is a nested market, but it is not about a traditional eating habit. There can also be traditional eating habits within that. 

Only a few researchers are discussing this nested market matter in Brazil. But the FAO [Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations] already uses the term territorial market. In Brazil, it is an incipient debate, but it comes from the idea of short distribution channels. 

Is there a way to recover the strength of the PAA?

I don’t have such familiarity with the subject of the PAA, it was dismantled in 2016/17. The criticism arose with Operation Agro-ghost, in which there were reports of cooperatives using overpriced invoices. It was bureaucratic stuff. Since the PAA is a structuring public policy, it should have a closer watch. 

The PAA worked well, despite the troubles. It was not only a dynamic of purchasing food, but it made the organization of rural properties be in a completely different way.

The farmers needed some assistance with documentation and other stuff, they needed some human resources to deal with these demands and doubts. But after it was all settled, with support and direction, they could buy equipment, like a farmer that bought a vacuum sealer to pack cassava. They know how to grow food, the issue is this dialogue with the city hall and other institutions.

How can the rural extension be present in the small farmers' sector? 

From what I saw in two years, and see today in my field research, we have very few workers of rural extension to attend to small farmers. The EMATER [Institute of Technical Assistance and Rural Extension] are institutions that need human and financial resources to handle the demand. Farmers participate in many markets. They can produce soy, so they need a productive variety and instruction regarding pesticides. But they will also produce other things, for other kinds of consumption. They can produce green leaves for the local market and then will need assistance to find this market, where they will sell. When they have family living on the farm, they will have a higher diversity, and that is larger in cooperativism. They hire an extensionist to deal with this documentation.

All the farmers talk about having too much labor to end up selling to supply centers or agroindustry, and not to a market that pays for this added value. 

For example, specialty coffee demands a high investment, in addition to packing and knowing where to sell this added value product. The farmers have to be willing to perform multiple tasks, to dedicate themselves to finding the market that will pay for this coffee. These specialty products are only sustainable because that specific product is one of a series of others produced by this farmer. There is always some level of diversity in the produce of the farms, otherwise, they wouldn’t go on [producing something special]. 

There is a lack of human and financial resources. It’s very easy to have a large part of the production turned to soy, rice, or tobacco because it’s a market with standardized documentation 

The digital platforms are coming in strong, and these new arrangements will soon be a reality. It would be interesting to promote that, a website that could congregate for the town hall all the possible supply chains for the family farmer. I didn’t have this schematic chart of every producer and consumer in my research, but Zenicléia Deggeroni defended her thesis in December 2021 and has one [table of market typologies based on Sérgio Schneider].

Can the supply centers be understood as a channel to guarantee food safety?

The genesis of the supermarket is private. They have sales, they hold on to products, etc. Yet, the governmental apparatus has a more social side to it. The National Company Of Supply (CONAB) dictates the price of basic food practiced by the Supply Centers (CEASA). It relies on local context because it is a supply center. From that, small markets, farmers' markets, and others will stock up considering availability and price. And many [CEASA] have a food donation department. They donate to schools and institutions. The supply centers [CEASA] are essential regarding food supply. CONAB doesn’t have this anymore: now they buy in smaller volumes, and before they would distribute this [larger] purchase through CEASA to balance the price. These organizations are important for food safety and the centralization of regional food supply for distribution.

This brings me a question that I would like to know if it makes sense: buying on farmers' markets alone doesn’t guarantee the existence of familiar agriculture.

No. You have the organic market, collaborative stores, like Chão Institute and the Farmers Market Institute, and they are very good, but the main criticism is that they all act on higher-income neighborhoods. What is there in the low-income neighborhoods? Big chain supermarkets, farmers' markets are far from dense populations. You see a lot of açai stores2, for example, mini markets. It’s a very recurring phenomenon. I want to study this phenomenon of the food system of a large urban center. 

The existence of farmers' markets in low-income areas is very rare and industrialized products prevail. When you see this you start thinking differently. Organics are not a priority in this context, it’s a much deeper issue. 

There will always be someone to fill in the gaps. Fundação Getúlio Vargas has created a platform connecting small markets to consumers. But we would like the State to give this support.

In this moment of highly individualized eating habits in larger urban centers, based on specific diets that assign a different value to food (e.g. people who think it’s healthier to eat gluten-free pasta than rice and beans), what can be done to reconnect people with local food in big cities?

It’s very complicated. In Agronomy, we would discuss environmental education. How can you discuss that when most people don’t have basic sanitation? Some researchers discuss these themes by talking about the environment, market, and eating habits. How can you talk about this in urban centers? We always get back to the public apparatus. I think about urban gardens in schools, for all age groups, to nurture this consciousness from zero to 17 years old, that environment and eating are deeply connected. 

For adults, stimulating debate and connecting eating and environment, explain that they are communal. If you can choose, you can also choose how to impact the environment. I feel uneasy about this. I used to have a gig in this farmers market, and we went to this luxury gated community once, they would have the market there once a week.

The biggest concern of these people [gated community people] is that they have to buy vegetables that are free of pesticides. How can you discuss environmental consciousness with these people if their way of life itself is degrading and they feel no consequence of that?

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As I write this first sentence, the 8.8 ounces coffee pack I usually buy at the supermarket costs US$ 2,85 (R$ 15, at the current conversion). Two or three years ago, it was half of this price. It is not an expensive coffee: it isn't organic certificated or fair-trade labeled. It's just an arabica from a market giant, with a well-known Brazilian coffee region name printed on the package. Between August 2020 and 2021, the commercial coffee market price increased by 37%, according to the Brazilian Supermarket Association (ABRAS). Even so, it costs around three times less than specialty coffee – the sort of beverage I would like to ingest every day.

Having coffee at a coffee shop was the thing I missed the most during social isolation. I've been living in Curitiba for ten years, and I can't count how many times I wrote or read the epithet "the Brazilian Seattle" as a reference to the reputed and high-quality coffee shops and baristas of the city. "Curitiba is that place where you're walking down the street and bump into a national champion," laughs the gastrologist Vitor Haubert, barista and partner at Manana Cafés, a coffee shop opened in November in downtown Curitiba.

And that's true, especially if you're in the expanded downtown area, where the main coffee shops are. Almost all of them opened in the mid-2010s when Curitiba began to pile up recognitions and awards – at the Brazilian Barism Championship, for example, most of the competitors were from Curitiba, and not hardly they figured on the podium.

In this short time, it's no overstatement to say that specialty coffee was the gastronomic product with the highest consumption growth and added value in Brazil. The understanding of coffee as a special beverage is relatively recent in the country: it happened in the late 1900s when we were the biggest coffee producer in the world, but not the best. From here, we were exporting the largest volume of commodity coffee bags, while neighboring Colombia was dealing with premium quality bags.

It's impressive what the coffee sector achieved in 30 years. In 2020, Brazilian specialty coffee production represented 15,6% of all coffee harvested in the country territory. Plus, in recent years, the value of this product has been rising, especially for exports. In 2021, 19% of the total amount of exported coffee was the specialty type, sold for 122 countries at an average of US$ 207,53 per bag (measure unit of 60 kilos).

Each pound of specialty coffee is worth two times the commodity one. In its producing line, specialty coffee requires more expensive inputs; more dedicated time; better-trained eyes; and comprehension of all the processes and principles that can develop that fruit into a complex drink. Naturally, the volume processed at a time is smaller, so that the human hands and knowledge can control the final result. In January 2022, a bag of Brazilian specialty coffee cost around R$ 1500, while commercial-grade coffee costs almost R$ 800.

— This added value accumulates in pockets other than the workers' – and baristas are one of the blue collars. I could talk about the Land Law of 1850; the three centuries of slavery; the importing of the cheap workforce; the land-grabbing; and the other institutional gaps and devices that set up and maintain the coffee production line. Yet, I chose to talk about the last end of this chain: the barista, the avatar of specialty coffee in urban daily life. —

Specialty coffee may be on the rise, but the barista is not. Its career is no different from other grassroots workers of the food business. As the cook and the waiter, a barista spends his six days working week standing on his feet to receive a category of work minimum payment of R$ 1,400 a month (about US$ 265 – just above the national minimum wage, which is far from providing a decent life). Even if he reaches a coordination position, his prestige will be greater than the value printed in his paycheck.

"Both the barista and the coffee shop are keeping the wolf from the door", says Ellen Krause, barista and certified instructor by the Specialty Coffee Association (SCA). Baristas are the professionals that most represent the precariousness that a customer service establishment stands on: they have to handle a series of activities that extrapolate their job description and responsibilities; the technical training is merely operational – but the knowledge that will make them stand out is frequently self-taught; and, on the top of it, these professionals often work in at least two different jobs or careers to be able to make ends meet. It's a fast-paced rhythm, and the irony is that caffeine stops kicking in after a while.

They should have a certain level of technical knowledge from the crop to the roast. The appeal for continuous improvement is much more empathic than what's expected from a line cook, as an example. However, a progression within the area does not necessarily relate to the accumulation of professional titles, such as roastmaster, instructor, and Q-Grader. These courses costs – in the beginner modules – are between R$ 1,000 and R$ 1,500, and may be carried out in just a few hours. That's a whole month's wage invested in one day.

Looking closely, most of today's well-established professionals got here due to a backlog of work – designers, journalists, and advertisers were the types I met the most in these almost ten years I've been working as a food journalism reporter –, without vacations, using their other jobs and freelance incomes to invest in the dream of the proper coffee1. It's a profession of enthusiasts.

Baristas are the professionals most exposed to unreasonable work demands, something quite naturalized in the food sector – aside from being a kind of individual speecher to every customer who sits at the counter, in between taking, preparing, and serving orders, cleaning tables, washing dishes, and charging the bill, it's possible that the barista still has to clean the bathrooms and the grease trap. "The backlog of work happens due to the size of coffee shops. Most of the time there is no way to hire more people because they are small businesses," explains Ellen. 

Between being attendant and salesperson, the barista accurately and nimbly executes slow processes such as a filtered coffee extraction, while keeping an eye on the tables, heating a pão de queijo2, and washing the cups. "Some abilities we discover in practice. Being quick-witted, reading the customer's desire, making your latte art..." lists Ewerton Lemos Gomes, a graduated barista from SENAC3 course and Geography doctoral student. For five years Ewerton has kept the Tour CWB Coffee page on Instagram, with his partner Paula Hirano.

One can always ask, and the barista might be willing to answer about the coffee origin, its smell, mouthfeel, flavors, why does one or other method bring more body to the drink, which coffees have more acidic, how was that harvest, tips on improving your brewing at home, about the roasting process of that grain, which home grinder you should buy, etc. It's an endless list, so is the patience of many of them.

"We place the baristas who deal better with the public at the espresso machine at the counter, to let them talk with the clients, and shift to the filtered methods the baristas with great technique but not so skillful on the public attendance," reveals Ellen. The error rate of pulling an espresso in a machine previously adjusted by the senior barista is much lower than making a filtered extraction from scratch, which requires much more concentration and precision. That's a human resource allocation to optimize the client's experience.

The barista is a variable controller: time, temperature, grinding size, extraction method, weight, intensity, number of shots. To regulate the espresso machine, he needs to know about the coffee profile, grinds it in different sizes, pulls one, two, five, ten espressos at different times, until he finds the best recipe for that coffee batch. "Some coffee shops don't allow the barista to pull more than three espressos to adjust the machine. It's an 'economy' of coffee that doesn't make sense if you're pouring a special beverage," observes Vitor.

The qualification process of baristas is one of the most interdisciplinary of gastronomy – knowing by heart the terroir characteristics and the beverage notes are not enough, but rather understanding the principles of the transformations that the fruit goes to, what happens physically and chemically on these processes, besides having the scientific discipline to study on their own.

"I bought different methods and coffees to make my tests at home, so I could expand my repertoire," remembers Vitor. Empiricism is the barista's greatest teacher, and also his main asset. The more one can test and learn from the tests, the better he can extract coffee in different methods. "The school is the counter and the curriculum is the cup," summarizes Ellen, who, on her coordinator times, paid attention to the organization of baristas. "You gotta learn that washing the pitcher is the first thing to do after pouring an order," she recalls. A prerequisite to keeping the workstation clean and organized.

In one of the many notebooks I piled up over the years as a reporter, I sketched an infographic about the specialty coffee value chain while chatting with Maria Mion, barista, educator, and SCA-certified instructor. Four years ago, in the south of Minas Gerais state, at São Gonçalo do Sapucaí's heat, we drew paper while enjoying the porch of a house of Capadocia Coffee's farm. It was a flow sheet with icons and arrows, where the icons represented the raw material's stage and cost; and the arrows represented the percentage of added value inserted by human labor to the coffee: seeding planting, pest control, manual harvesting, drying, sorting, transport, warehousing, roasting, cupping, packaging, distribution, grinding, filtering, front of the house service, dishwashing.

The diagram started with the seeded plant and ended up on the cup of coffee. Unfortunately, this infographic never came out.

Even without the visual aid of this scheme, it's easy to notice that the coffee's added value comes from the worker's hands while the profits go to only a few pockets. The worker that manually selects and harvests the coffee is paid by the hour or on a contract basis; the farm owner, per bag; the roaster, by weight; the barista, by wage.

Most of the coffee chain professionals will never be able to pay periodically for the specialty coffee they produce.

For the barista, who has to drink specialty coffee as part of his good work, the value of the hourly wage is worth one espresso – precisely R$ 6,36 (or US$ 1,20), according to the category's labor union in Curitiba (Sindhotéis). A freelance barista in Curitiba earns between R$ 10 and R$ 13 an hour. "It's a wage that we've been trying to raise for years. During the pandemic, we gathered a group of baristas with the agreement of not working in coffee shops that would pay less than it. But that's not something everyone could choose about, unfortunately," says Vitor. At Manana, the work hour of a freelance barista is R$ 15, a value considered the minimum by the co-owners and partners Vitor and Dora Suh.

Some coffee shops pay below because there is a relative abundance of labor at this moment. Every three months, 20 fresh new baristas complete their 160-hour course at Senac, a workforce that can be readily absorbed for freelance work or the to-go coffees that multiply fast through the city. "A third of the course is theoretical. Everything else is you and the machine preparing and drinking dozens of cappuccinos," reports Ewerton. "The technical course prepares you to master times and movements: grinding, tamping, flushing, fitting the portafilter, making the extraction. The pre-infusion, brewing ratio, moves on the container to homogenize the essential oils of the drink. You repeat these movements until they become muscle memory, an automatic act," he adds.

On the proliferation of chains of self-service micro coffee shops, the customer faces queues for a cappuccino in a paper cup. With no dining room, few menu options, and staff training from scratch within the chain itself, the operational cost decreases. The moves and recipes taught are part of the business plan strategy to expand units and output a stable quality product, but with low sensorial complexity.

In a way, it is an unprecedented simplification that we're seeing in the third wave of coffee: the removal of the variables and making the barista's function merely operational. The first espresso machines created and spread in the early 20th century required the presence of a machinist able to understand that imponent steam-powered machine operation, which sometimes could explode because of the higher pressure. By the way, it's from the physics pressure measurement unit, bar, that the term barista comes from – oh, the irony!

Between earning little and earning poorly, there's a trickling, but continuous movement of baristas who prefer to open micro-roasters to sell their own coffee brand or even a small shop to serve their short-menu specialty coffee at a fit4 value. On Manana Cafés's back wall there's an A0 size poster that reads:

trabajar menos
trabajar todos 
producir lo necesario 
distribuir todo5

Thank you Bruno Bortoloto do Carmo, Coffee Museum of Santos’s historian; Dora Suh, of Manana Cafés; Ellen Krause; Ewerton Lemos Gomes; and Vitor Haubert for your time to talk with me. And to all the coffee professionals who have given me an interview since 2013. I learn a lot from you all!

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Consider becoming a paid subscriber to support my work for US$ 2 a month or US$ 20 a year (at the current conversion). Our next online meeting will be on Monday 21 February, at 5 PM (GMT-3 / East UTC-3), and we’ll talk about working conditions in the hospitality sector (in Portuguese). Supporters have a 10% discount in all courses taught by me and also nominally public acknowledgments at the bottom of all editions.

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Many cosmogonies understand the word as responsible for the world's creation. When uttered by one or more entities, its chant is the genesis of humanity and the universe – it happens in the Word of Catholic's Bible, and in a conversation between Tepeu and Qʼuqʼumatz on Popol Vuh (the Mayan Book of Counsel), to name some examples that are fresh on my memory after reading Martin Puchner's The Written World.

Among the divine words, there are expressions of desires, decrees, the ordering of the world, the setting of things by just naming them. The mouth as a creation portal is also in the Egyptian creation myth, in which Ra spats his son Shu, god of air, and regurgitates his daughter Tefnut, moisture goddess. For us mere mortals, the word is continuity – from the phatic function of communication to traditions maintenance and knowledge transmission in oral cultures, or even the expected standing of written records.

It is through the discourse (the articulation of all languages, alphabetical or not) that the greatest conflicts of the recent past are located. Just think about how powerful the official historical narratives are: they still hide and curb colonial crimes.

The mouth conceives, utters, and creates; also grinds, absorbs, and homogenizes.

Maybe I enjoy interviews that much because of the weight that written and spoken words have – they are the feedstock of interviews. It would be possible to write a report by silently observing something, checking and crossing information from research on databases, primary sources like historical records, and quoting excerpts of previous publications. Interviews would not. Interviews require a conversation in which one asks; questions; or brings a theme for the other to develop reasoning; answer a query; go through data and facts. The dynamic is to receive and give back, and that's why we journalists call ping-pong the type of interview I publish here: you can't play by yourself.

Once I interviewed Lourence Alves in August and heard her speaking of questioning eurocentric canons and dialogue with authors outside the white and colonial epistemology, I remembered Tainá Marajoara's speeches, whose work I've been following since 2015 after reading this interview on the sociologist Carlos Alberto Dória's late blog e-Boca Livre.

I've been in the Iacitatá Food Culture Spot at Belém do Pará in 2019, then I had the “uncolonial” coffee1: coffee, fresh juice, cocoa cake, beiju, Abaeté bread with Marajó cheese, jambu paste, cupuaçu jam, scrambled eggs, manioc porridge, and chestnuts. I took several pictures of this beautiful table set up and recorded a video interview with the cook, cultural producer, and activist, but I lost all these files when they were downloaded to the newsroom's computer.

That was the first and unforgettable time I talked with Tainá. When I asked her to help me describe the Marajó cheese, I thought about comparing its texture with a famous cream cheese Brazilian brand. She immediately denied my parallel proposal and made me realize that I used my words in an attempt to facilitate the reader's understanding, and ended up diminishing the history and the know-how held on the Marajó cheese production.

Our most spontaneous reactions show up our world vision and our deepest benchmarks: in my case, I'm a southern white city girl, a set of features understood as "neutral" in today's world. I can't be anything but this set of features, but I know the way I behave and occupy my place in the world can be different. I could have picked better words.

I apologized for the faux pas and nowadays I tell this anecdote in classes as an example of what-not-to-do. "I don't remember this specific situation, but we always hear people say this sort of comparison: "oh, this cheese seems like mozzarella", or that "canhapira is a feijoada," Tainá told me on January 6, 2022. "It's a food imperialism, a no-effort to expand the repertoire", she completed.

Iacitatá Institute was created in 2009 by Tainá Marajoara and Carlos Ruffeil, in Belém, mapping ingredients and preparations from the Amazon, and establishing a short chain between food producers and consumers. In 2014, Iacitatá Food Culture Spot opened to the public in an old mansion of the Cidade Velha neighborhood. There, it's possible to have breakfast, lunch, buy food, ingredients, and utensils made by the Amazonian communities and the MST (Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement) settlement. For over a decade, she has been building knowledge among hers, promoting debates, moving/putting forward concrete actions, and getting in the infight of institutional politics.

It's Tainá's credit that food culture was included on the 2013's National Conference of Culture, a pioneer institutional understanding that affirmed food culture as a cultural expression of Brazil. It's also her merit that the community, agroecological and native-based, and the traditional and popular culture spaces were covered by the Aldir Blanc Law, an emergency act of assistance for the Brazilian cultural sector enacted in 2020.

"Even though we dialogue with the Oral History Center of the University of São Paulo, we draw this concept from listening with the ancients of Cachoeira do Arari, at Marajó. I went there to hear what our old people had to say for us to make the academic crossover", she says. Tainá keeps the "moquém2 burning" for years, carrying on the resistance and fight efforts of various folks – despite the fact some people came across the issues of food sovereignty and food as a human right more recently, with the destructive turn of Bolsonaro's government.

Bolsonaro's government has a pretty clear intention of exterminating the multitude of ways of living and cultural expressions – not as if this intention didn't exist before. Unluckily these have been the worst years of the past decade to promote epistemicide, that is, the erasure of the ways of understanding and being in the world that is apart from the neoliberal western ideology. "It is more than an erasure, it is annihilation. It's meant to don't leave any trace of your way of living, nor of your knowledge", defines Tainá.

As the agribusiness agenda strengthens up in the congress, 2021 was the year that we saw on major newspapers and portals news about the indigenous leader Txai Suruí's presence on the COP26, and the indigenous people camp against the Marco temporal timeframe land rule. Every intensification increases the contrasts between the parts, and it seems that the subjecteds' voices can only be heard when the situation comes to the edge.

At the beginning of the Sars-Cov-2 pandemic, Ailton Krenak said "We're indigenous, we've been resisting for 500 years. I'm worried if whites will make it". I can imagine how tiring it is to make your culture stay alive for 500 years when the entire institutional structure created in the meantime works to eliminate every symbol and every inch of your land.

Tainá Marajoara talked to me on the phone for around an hour, when she probably repeated for the umpteenth time things that she and so many other activist groups diminished on the institutional politics have been saying for centuries. Below, is the transcription of the interview, edited and organized for better understanding:

Iacitatá Food Culture Spot is an example of short-chain articulation that promotes local food for local people. What changes have you noticed over the years?

The first meaningful advance is the awakening for the guarantee of rights and markets opening. There is a prejudice against food coming from family farming. It was worse before, but it still exists. There is racism in eating: "I won't eat black, poor, indigenous peoples' food". The kitchen has to be anti-racist to be truly transforming. This positioning directly affects the consumption practice. There are many pejorative thoughts in between, like assuming that it's dirty, that is no good, that it has worms. Transforming the consumer that came from this mindset – often because someone in the family got sick – has opened spaces for market and trading. We're opening up political spaces through this consciousness, and also structural politics so these populations have dignity. And so forth, we can walk towards a good living.

The debate on food sovereignty and food culture is directly linked to the land propriety issue, and Brazil has never had a strong public policy on indigenous land demarcation or other territorial ownership recognition, as for quilombolas. About food culture, there is a work of knowledge registering made by Iphan (the National Historic and Artistic Heritage Institute of Brazil), perhaps it is the most complete public policy aimed to maintain cultural traditions, which comprehends the notion of territory. Do you think it is possible to keep working with the public policies that were leftover from this government, or are we in a scorched earth situation?

There are both. The scorched earth situation with the destruction of the Ministry of Culture; of the Consea (National Council for Food and Nutrition Security); of the Ministry of Social Development; of the Ministry of Agrarian Development; and of the public policies to combat hunger. It is a scorched earth reality. Along with this government structure, many other politics are brought down – politics that could be faulty, but they had meanings anyways, as was the case of the national and international dialogues on cultural diversity. Brazil left discussion and groups directed for cultural and environmental safeguard. There are a few methods that promote the safeguard, but there also is the criminalization of processes that aren't recognized by Anvisa (Brazilian Health Regulatory Agency), which implies the impossibility of safeguarding them. The understanding of what is food culture and its role for the country and the world has to show up immediately. The colonialist subordinated mind should be left behind, for us to face the time of now, a world that is torn down by climate change and environmental collapse.

It rained hail in Belém at 2 PM. Pantanal caught fire. Pará is once again breaking records of deforestation and reaching very high temperatures. São Paulo got dark at 3 PM. And they talk about an agenda for the future... The future is an invention to postpone what has to be done today.

When indigenous people plant bacuri, they're planting it now for the next generations to eat. It isn't for 2030, it's for now. The need to survive is now, so it's possible to maintain life later.

With the destruction of food cultures, the peoples starve. And that is on purpose. The hunger generated in the countryside and the middle of the Amazon forest is a tactic to destroy the people of the Amazon. Amazon represents the higher rates of food insecurity in the country. How is it possible for a biome to have the highest biodiversity and the highest rate of food insecurity?

There are many layers of colonialism and discrimination to keep with domination practices, a deterritorialization of taste. The increasingly heavier insert of industrialization takes away from us the taste of food: people have to leave the lands, the countryside, to live in the city. It's a historical and cultural issue that makes the Amazonian peoples not seen as part of the history of humanity, as humanity's history was invariably out of the Amazon. It's always in Egypt, in Europe, in the American Revolution – but never in the Marajoara people and its complex living culture. It is more than an erasure, it is annihilation. It's meant to don't leave any trace of your way of living, nor your knowledge.

One of the first criticisms of yours I read was in 2015 on the sociologist Carlos Alberto Dórias's blog, about the ingredients appropriation that "great chefs" make by using an ingredient and ignoring its place of origin and its context of use. Is there any possible way for this gastronomy world to be a partner of preservation of food culture or is it a relationship that will always benefit the chef's side?

I say that the ingredient is seen as if there wasn't a population behind it, as if it popped up itself on the table. It is the output of culture, of knowledge.

The ingredient can be produced here at Furo do Palheta, in Marajó, and be even eaten by the Queen of England. The point is that spectacularization is done as if the ingredient existed without anyone's hands, as the industry produced that from scratch, synthesized it. Contemporary cuisine has a very strong focus on the product, on the ingredient, and this contemporary cuisine is part of the pinnacle of ultra-liberalism – it's an exponent with its white, colonialists and proprietor chefs, who see themselves as the people's saviors.

The cultural appropriation takes place in this other market: the chef wants to say that he is using an Amazonian ingredient talking about sustainability and that he's a friend of nature. That's the distorted part. If he only wants to use the goods, why does he use the ingredient and say he's protecting my culture?

For contemporary cuisine, the origin of the ingredients is only convenient as a marketing tool. If it wasn't market appealing, the source wouldn't be talked about. There's a whole cultural-based process rooted in bringing an ingredient: there are other affections and perceptions set on this food production. An Amazonian ingredient that you find in South or Southeast Brazil can be from a grabbed land, as an example. You never see chefs campaigning against pesticides. Books about manioc, Amazonian ingredients, Cerrado ingredients are published, but where is the discourse that pesticides are poisoning this food and that these foods are rarefying in its territories? And that, if the product is getting scarce is because whoever produces it is dying, getting contaminated. The native people understand that ingredient not as a cooking ingredient, but as an extension of their bodies, their affections, and their territory.

People may say that unifying gastronomy and food culture is utopic, that we are the ones that contrapose food culture and gastronomy... I do not only see the union of food culture and gastronomy happening, but also practice it on our Food Culture Spot. It happens as well at MST's Armazém do Campo warehouse, on the cuisines based on the land cycles, with the quilombolas3 who are occupying their spaces, in the indigenous cuisines themselves. We are happy about lighting this moquém and that this debate is taking place all over the country.

Is there a possible healthy intersection between this world of "high-end cuisine" and the valorization of food culture, though?

Starting from the "high-end cuisine" expression: for how long will we consider high-end an environment of poor working conditions, food waste, and use of land grabbing ingredients? There's no high-end when people have to die and be slaves so others can eat. This is gastronomic, colonial, and contemporary imperialism. It is within the universities, technical courses, in speeches that talk about the evolution of cuisines. It is not possible to call high-end what is made in a place that people get subjected to so others can eat. From 1500 until now we're talking about an expropriation process. The intersection between food culture and haute cuisine happens a few times, in some projects, but besides focusing on the high-end cuisine, it's a discourse built to subordinate these peoples.

In the heart of Amazon, there are no public policies to local food consumption, and basic food baskets are distributed full of processed ingredients. We have the greatest concentration of oilseeds, fruits, and vegetables, and at the same time, children getting sick and malnourished. It's needed to let these peoples take their protagonism, without whites' hands showing they're "saving the Amazon".

The sentence "eating is a political act" is showing up in more and more places, but I've been seeing it most times only used as a catchphrase, without a clear action or proposal. How do you see it?

I see both the trivialization [of the phrase] and the discovery that eating is a political act. On one hand, the trivialization and appropriation of the term, as the industry did with the "real food" concept, as it was almost done with the "food culture" concept. When you see these concepts in the mouth of the industry and of the chefs that are cover boys for agribusiness, it means that these concepts also make sense for marketing products.

On the other hand, we see many people willing to come together with indigenous peoples; strongly desiring to support the Landless Workers Movement; understand the climate issue and the collapse of the planet. We have reached the point of non-renewal of natural resources a long time ago. The intensification of this collapse is also due to our consumption choices. I highlight that it's extremely necessary to understand that it is the indigenous lands that guarantee air and moisture where they yet happen – without them, it all would be desert and drought.

We know that it isn't only the individual: the economic and trade strategies imposed by large corporations are the ones responsible for the collapse of the planet. Cities run out of water while large farm holdings consume most of the potable water. Just closing the tap doesn't save the Earth. There's a political and economic conjuncture that's making pressure through lobbying.

You are one of those people that are always one step ahead in debates and statements made when discussing food culture and gastronomy. I feel that many people are starting to talk today about what you've been pointing out for over a decade. Who are your interlocutors?

I exchange with people who build knowledge and discuss reality: the indigenous peoples, the genial Naine Terena, Eliane Potiguara, Daniel Munduruku, Ailton Krenak, Márcia Mura. I exchange with lawyers and prosecutors, with the human rights prosecutor. With the Landless Workers Movement, with other cooks, with Thiago Vinicius, of Solano Trindade Popular Agency, with Eliane Moreira, a socio-environmental prosecutor from Pará. With the professionals of the Brazilian Agroecology Association, with Antônio Nego Bispo. 

We also have to decolonize our references. We need a radical transformation of power structures, of the way we build thought, and spaces that we can act. We can't talk about food culture and remain on this gastronomic track. If I'm talking about food culture, then culture is diversity. It's from the diversity that we reach concepts and formulations – and the forward transformation and public policies will be a reflection of it.

Enough of knowledges that came in the caravels. We need breaths, the forest repertoires.

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I made this December an unusual month on purpose. Shorter than February when it comes to working days and collective efficiency, December accentuates my anxiety to the point that, for some years now, it has been the month when I need to double the dose of my antidepressant to maintain a minimum emotional balance. This year, I wanted to change another part of the equation and I got fewer jobs to reduce the number of tight deadlines that always accumulate in the first half of December. I had to give up a lot of things, but for the first time in six years, I didn't have to increase my antidepressant dose.

Earlier this month, I said that I wished I could spend less time at the computer and so I did. I made my hands busy with something concrete: peel and chop vegetables; cut and season meat; wash, portion, and tear leaves. As a consequence of the free time I spaced out in my schedule, I cooked much more than in the previous months and shared some of the extra portions with my brother, which is also my neighbor. For almost two weeks I packed lunch for him and got into a looping of reasons to-forget-the-computer-for-a-while. It worked. I made béchamel sauce with bacon and broccoli to serve with pasta; steak with onions and slightly crunchy and spicy potatoes; pork chops with laurel and carrots; chicken pancakes; creamy rice with shredded chicken and corn; and some more dishes I already forgot. 

I felt the mood and curiosity I had as a teenager when miscooking was routine (as well as eating what got wrong). More than a decade later, I make fewer mistakes and get it right more often in first-attempts. In 2021 December, cooking became once again an energetic activity; from which I leave calmer and more excited. Less venlafaxine in my body, more dirty dishes in the sink.

So I was courageous enough to go back to the blog that inspired me in my first steps in the kitchen – not the everyday cooking, but something more. Even though I barely had access to sicilian lemon back in 2008 and thought it was obscene to use so much butter in a recipe, Technicolor Kitchen, from Patrícia Scarpin, is one of my first references. TK was presented to me by my lifetime friend Flora Refosco, and its pictures and how Pat explains the steps of the recipe and why she chose to combine those ingredients caused a huge impact on me. Just reading her blog taught me more than I can measure. 

Two of TK's recipes were slightly adapted by me in the last weeks, and I prepared them more than once – that's how much I loved them. One was the pear, olive oil, and chocolate cake, in which I ignored the pear and added cocoa powder to the dough, and shredded white chocolate as a topping; and also made another version, in which I put garam masala in the dough, ignored the chocolate part and changed the pears to apples. The other one was brown butter brownies. I put a mix of nuts instead of only pecans and topped the dough with white chocolate so it caramelized when baking.

Cooking is an activity that interests me in many aspects, as you can tell by what I have published so far in my life. To be back at my beginning, such as the mood and to one of my great references, made me think about the culinary thinking. 

I've made a draft with topics such as the starting point to imagine a meal (is it from a cut of meat? is it from a starchy ingredient? is it from the cooking point of a vegetable?); how we pick out ingredients from our preferences and preparation repertoire (and how this can form and rebuild throughout life as we are exposed to new practices); and how all of this changes over time due to external issues (the availability of ingredients, for example) and internal issues (such as mastery of a technique). I plan to talk to a few people before finishing the piece and publish it in one of the issues of this newsletter in the first quarter of 2022.

The unusualness of December was also due to the christmas dinner that this year was at my house. I made a four-day schedule to guide me in shopping and preparation, and ensure that on the 24th I only needed to cook the rice and roast the meat. We had a small board of cheeses, fruits, and nuts; festive rice that would serve well the two wings of the family (for those who eat everything, a mix with parsley, toasted almonds, and sicilian lemon zest to spice up the white rice); voluminous farofa with onion, carrot, and rosemary, prepared with lots of butter; a salad of leaves, tomatoes, and hearts of palm with slices of gala apple baked with little butter and sugar; two dressing options for the salad (mustard and honey; and soy sauce with ginger and garlic); and a dessert (the brown butter brownie I linked above, served with a homemade strawberry jam, and bought a gelato to finish off).

My parents brought the meat: a pork shank previously seasoned with garlic and onion powder from a slaughterhouse at Corupá, a small rural city in Santa Catarina near my hometown. I added laurel and fresh rosemary to the shank, and also sicilian lemon juice, olive oil, potatoes, and carrots. It yielded two meals for the four of us and a lunchbox for my brother.

Choosing the menu, running it without fuss, and hearing my parents and brother praise me positively surprised me. I didn't make bold choices – on the contrary: I walked very close to the basics – but I also didn't expect them to eat with such enthusiasm. Unlike curiosity, a quality that has accompanied me for decades, the satisfaction of serving was unknown to me on this magnitude.

I have never seen myself playing this role of hostess exemplary. Preparing the christmas dinner steeped in meaning and memories was a rite of passage, and sharing it with my family was one of the powerful experiences I had this year.

In between preparations, I've sketched a series of notes about being a host, which I plan to write in the coming months after talking to people much more spontaneous and experienced in receiving people at their houses than I am. Let's see if I can capture the complexity of the whole thing.

All this to say that there is no essay on this December 31st – not because of free time (which was plenty, but who would have time to read so much?), but due to the anguish that always haunts me in this hot month of summer and deadlines. After all, this December, despite being atypical, remains inevitable.

WE'LL SEE EACH OTHER (LITERALLY) IN JANUARY 

Newsletter supporters will start the year with a virtual appointment.

On Wednesday, January 26th, at 7 PM, we will make a video call to get to know each other and comment on some topics already covered in this newsletter's pieces. The idea for this first meeting is to understand what interests and intrigues each of you, and also what you disagree with or what you would like to point out.

Invitations for this meeting will be sent on January 20th to supporters of the monthly (R$10) or annual (R$100) plan (at the current conversion it would be equivalent to US$ 2 a month or US$ 20 a year). Those who supported this newsletter during 2021 or want to start supporting from January 2022 will also receive an invitation to participate in the video call.

If you are viewing this issue through the Substack page and not in your inbox, you will not be able to read the public acknowledgments that are posted at the bottom of each issue. I copy them here so you all can see:

Thanks to Antônio Senkovski, Cristal Muniz, Fernanda Farias, João Frey, Jo Bulla, Jussara Voss, Kate McDermott, Laura Mingoti, Mariana Ceccon, Murilo Bomfim and Pat Willard for their support.

fogo baixo/low heat is a newsletter written by journalist Flávia Schiochet, translated by Luciane Maesp (except this one you just read, I translated it myself), and illustrated by Marina Kinas. All essays, interviews, and extra issues will always be available for free and you can read (or re-read) them by accessing the newsletter archive. Help spread the word:

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On both Saturday mornings I attended Joana Pellerano's Aesthetic Movements, Gastronomic Movements [Movimentos Estéticos, Movimentos Gastronômicos] open course, I held the pee for longer than urologists would recommend. It happened because of – and I was aware of – Joana's ability to speak 50 words per second, knitting concepts, and weaving a beautiful reasoning line with countless references. I couldn't leave my desktop for a minute; if I did, I would lose about 300 words and the sense they build together.

For this reason, I wrote 11 whole pages in less than six hours and complemented them with more notes when I reviewed the classes the following week. I also spoke widely during the course, as, unlike my bladder, my tongue is uncontrollable (in hindsight, this had better be).

Joana is a communicator, anthropologist, researcher on food matters, and a professor on Gastronomy, History, and Culture post-graduation course at SENAC. I came to her through Bia Nunes de Souza, the woman that most knows and recommends interesting gastronomy people.

In Aesthetic Movements, Gastronomic Movements, Joana makes a retrospective from Lúcia Santaella's work Aesthetics: from Plato to Pierce [Estética: de Platão a Pierce], and interwoven the historical thread, presents the transformations that acts of cooking and eating have taken place over the centuries. Marchesi & Vercelloni, Montanari, and Perullo also appear to unroll the skein and reveal intersections with the themes of identity, food choices, behavior, and constructions of meaning in eating. Among the authors esteemed by communicators, Bourdieu and Benjamin neaten the last stitch.

The greatest contribution of this course for the ones who like to think about food – no wonder Joana is one of the brains behind the scientific divulgation site Comida na cabeça [Food in the head] online since 2013 – is contextualizing the social construction of taste at different times, emphasizing the complexity contained in the daily choices that may seem trivial, and, of course, showing how a ruling class call the tendency shots and distinguish itself through food consumption.

Therefore, it was amazing being able to take one hour of Joana's time to interview her and make myself free to ask some preposterous questions. The main excerpts of this conversation organized and edited to fit in this newsletter are next on:

During the course, you said that contemporaneity is a time when we have a myriad of references, that not everyone is looking to the same past. Among this diversity, can we point to examples of food aesthetics of our time?

In this post-modern aesthetic period, we have the possibility of accessing several different food practices, of knowing they exist, and that it's possible to listen to other narratives not only those related to European cuisine.

The possibility of having so many references today doesn't weaken identity?

In post-graduation, we have a subject exactly on it [laughs]. We now have access to ways of eating; weakening of food rules, which are less clear; a very large individualization. These three factors are problematic, but at the same time, they make people feel free to make their own decisions about food choices. That doesn't necessarily mean a loss because the opposite movement also happens: as new developments arrive, people feel impelled to protect what they hold.

Food is a hard nut to crack. Eating what's edible seems simple, but the meanings we give to food are quite complex.

One thing I like to endorse is the complexity of the food act. The choices we make to eat are more complicated than they seem. When we're lucky enough to make three meals a day, these decisions, choices, exchanges, and meanings remain backstage. People who are privileged to eat what they want and when they want, who could think better about food practices and their meaning, don't even chew on it. If they tried to understand this complexity, everyone would benefit.

This line of reasoning that whoever can choose what to eat should make choices thinking about the collective is what I tried to draw on that vegetarianism essay. I just got afraid of reading it again and finding an argumentative loophole [laughs].  

I get the impression that people focus on the wrong issue. For example: following a vegetarian diet. They don't try to understand the logic behind it, which is eating everything but animal protein; they miss objective guidance and a magic solution. Then, they go along with digital influencers because they believe these people have secrets to share.

The secret is to have repertoire and autonomy. It's having enough information and leveling it up to knowledge. Even with knowledge, maybe they won't want to make decisions or take the ones we don't judge right. It seems to me that some think that if we tell everyone that the food industry is unhealthy, people will stop consuming. They may stop, but they may keep this consumption as well, and take responsibility for their choices – to save time or because they find it tasty. 

Even though it's not easy to list examples of our time's food aesthetic, I wonder if we could say that there is a hegemonic aesthetic based on products loaded with flavor enhancers, and lots of salt, sugar, fat... Would the food industry be one of the resonant voices of our time narrative?

The food industry is paradoxical because it offers a larger variety, shelf time, and outreach. On the other hand, food industry choices are oriented to raise profitability, and its specific objectives don't consider food diversity, so it ends up limiting the possibilities we have.

Whenever there is irony or something misexplained written down, I wonder myself if the future archeologists would understand what it was really about. In other words, with such an enormous amount of highly processed food sales and advertising everywhere, in a thousand years, will people understand that was a lot of effort on the other end of this food-tug-of-war to tension the debate?

[laughs] It all depends on the registers and how they will interpret it. I'm not an archeologist, but I know they are concerned about avoiding anachronism and understanding the pieces of evidence in their context. I believe it's possible to see these differences from what we've been recording.

This battle against the food industry as a whole, from when they serve ready-to-cook meals to when they manufacture what comes inside our homes, is complicated. When these developments came out, the idea was to provide more food and nutrition; to standardize the production method so it won't harm people. A portion of fast food with lots of flavor enhancers, salt, and fat offers a meal with strong and noticeable flavor – whether it's good or not – that gets done quickly and cheaply. This kind of creation revolutionizes the market. People understand it's tasty, low-cost, and fast.

We have a meaningful criticism of the food industry because it still needs to change a lot to offer us beneficial outputs. It brings potential advantages to people, even if we food scholars don't see it as an advantage. The industry does not create a market failure: it takes advantage of pre-existing gaps, and within it either solves or creates a necessity – but the gap was there. The food industry is able to offer ease that people appreciate, such as time-saving, shortcuts, ready-to-eat meals, or at the very least, pre-processed or minimally processed food. As a home cook, industry saves you time, and indeed people look for saving time. Cooking probably shouldn't be a side task, but there are people who have no choice.

That brings up a question that we had no time to discuss during the class, which is about condensed milk, the creation of brigadeiro, and its impact on Brazilian cuisine. I can't imagine being against brigadeiro, but this story is longer and deeper than we know, isn't it?

Brigadeiro1 was created because of or created right after condensed milk was created. The traditional brigadeiro recipe was born with this industrialized product. People tend to think that condensed milk is an issue because it reduced the variety of traditional Brazilian sweets recipes. We used to have all kinds of pudim then it became pudim de leite2 only. It is a concern because we lost variety and flavor, but the condensed milk recipe was practical, low cost, and always worked. As it saved time, money, and frustration, condensed milk reached its place in the national imaginary.

Before, there were dozens of pudins, each cook's own variations. As an example, the orange pudim could be made with more or less orange juice and sugar, measured with a saucer or a specific glass. After condensed milk becomes part of the recipe, it brings a pattern and the can itself becomes the measure. Débora Oliveira researched it in her Masters, and her dissertation turned it into the book "From recipe notebooks to tin can recipes: industry and culinary tradition in Brazil'' [portuguese only].

Today's recipes are minutely detailed, but back then [19th century and early 20th], recipe registers were for people who knew how to cook. The recipe was a reminder and no detailed orientation was needed. Nowadays, people think that the recipes were written that way so the "secret" wouldn't be given away. I believe this is an anachronistic way of thinking. At that time, people used their own knowledge to reach the right point, to know how much an ingredient was enough.

They drown upon the construction of repertoire and culinary knowledge, which we no longer have: people lost the autonomy of reading a recipe and thinking about the amount of an ingredient it will take and the expected cooking point.

Before food industrialization, was there any equivalent transformation that changed the aesthetics of what we eat?

The great navigations deeply altered how we eat. First with the most privileged people, who managed to have access to spices and ingredients, but in the long run, this transformation reached everyone – try to wonder Italia without tomatoes, an American plant. The Industrial Revolution is another point: it changed even agriculture, the way we grow food. There was an acceleration in society and those developments were readily incorporated, so the effects were perceived in the short term.

I have to ask you something I already discussed with a friend, and I don't remember if we reached any conclusion: Can a dish have an aura, according to Walter Benjamin's concept? I ask because currently we understand that haute cuisine has excellence in the dishes it builds and presents, but to be actually tasted for someone, it must be reproduced. An artwork scale reproduced diminishes its intrinsic value... I even doubt whether it would be possible to apply the aura concept for food because there's no way to provide its experience without necessarily reproducing it.

Well, you answered it. The reproducibility is in the food dish production system upfront. In gastronomy, dishes are built to be different. Even restaurants that cook what's available on market, like [kilo] buffets3, the menu changes weekly, and despite using the same ingredients, recipes end up being diverse.

We could say the ingredients are limited editioned, but the dish reproducibility is part of a restaurant operation. It's an interesting discussion. Even though reproduction creates a reaction in people, I'm not sure if we can guarantee that it could be at some point compared to seeing the aura.

As an example, dadinho de tapioca4 is a recipe that has very few registers before it was included in Rodrigo Oliveira's Mocotó restaurant. After serving the dadinhos at Mocotó, the recipe became popular in Brazil and worldwide – even industrialized versions are available now! Adriana Salay, researcher, and Rodrigo's wife says that someday she'll open Instagram and find a Dadinharia [dadinho de tapioca shop] that will sell every possible flavor of dadinhos. We're living in this time where food has been more fashionable than plastic arts. Food gets in use, reproduced, passed down, and then sooner or later settled in people's lives.

Establishing feijoada as a dish that represents Brazilian identity and based on the idea of the "three races union" brings up many questions – especially at this time where we try to think back with the intersectionality prism to understand our colonial history, which wiped out native and enslaved people's culture. In this context, would it be possible to pick iconic dishes of any country?

Whenever we try to point representations it is a cutout, it will always leave something out. These choices are the ruling classes' choices, which have influenced power in society, due to their political and/or economic dominance. This happens when feijoada is understood as a “three races union”5 dish.

Feijoada is adopted precisely as an attempt to include those who were so far left outside. It's a pretty condescending intention to compensate for the lack of political power these dominated peoples had by giving them cultural power, I'd say. As if by handing cultural power it would be possible to erase all the harm of the past. This appraisal is randomly made, and not according to what these peoples identify as important contributions from their culture.

The national representation topic is tricky because how would it be possible to find something that contains so many different aspects of Brazil? A country this big, with so many people living in, talking and eating in such different ways? Even feijoada, which is prepared all over the country, is made in distinct ways – with vegetables; seafood; pork; beef. However, some symbols are recognized as Brazilian throughout Brazil, even if some people don't see themselves represented in it, such as rice and beans. So does farofa, either from corn flour or cassava flour, depending on the region.

Paula Pinto e Silva seeks for these ingredients and ways of eating in the book "Flour, beans and dried meat: a culinary tripod" [portuguese only] in which she talks about these three ingredients and their variations, as different varieties of pulses instead of beans; the diverse processings of corn or cassava flour; and the protein source, which can be dried meat, jerked beef (charque), sun-dried meat (carne de sol), dried shrimp or even dry-aged beef [laughs]. Through this triad, we can include many more people.

But national cuisines will always be choices, and almost always a political choice that aims to bond people around something collective. It's a symbology that looks for unity.

Do you have a suggested interviewee for LOW HEAT? Email me! schiochetflavia@gmail.com

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Honestly, November was a bad month in terms of productivity. I devoted less time to the newsletter to spend afternoons sitting on the grass, going to the movies, having drinks and coffees among friends, and enjoying my newborn goddaughter for a few days. For December, I plan to keep walking, wandering, letting the cellphone off, and talking with people face to face, then I might relax my jar and ease my back pain.

Sure of your understanding,

- Flávia

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this issue was translated by Luciane Maesp 📧 luciane.maesp@gmail.com

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OTHER PEOPLE’S FOOD

a note on how we face the exotic

Every night between midnight and 6 AM, on a U-shaped counter, a cook takes orders and serves his clients. The rectangular room has a kitchen area on the back that occupies half of the space, while the bar area is on the concave side of the counter. It takes a few steps between the front door and the bar stools, where halfway customers take off and place their coats on the wall hangers. As they sit down, they order the usual and look around to check who is there tonight. 

These are people on their break from work or ending their journey – some are having dinner after a razzle-dazzle. Between the small talk, gasps of those who take delight in the frying sizzles and bubbling pots, the cook witnesses confidences said only at a bar table.

This place and its habitués are the starting point of the anecdotes of Midnight Diner: Tokyo Stories series, available on Netflix, and which I've seen two episodes only. The first one is titled Lamen and begins with the preparation of Tokyo's Kanto regional dish: the tan-men, a sort of noodle soup with pork and vegetables. We watch the recipe from the start when the pan receives slices of what seems to be pork belly. Then comes the vegetables: carrots, Chinese cabbage, bean sprouts, garlic chives. A light broth is added – probably chicken stock – and lastly, the cook pours it all over a cooked noodle in a bowl.

In the following scene, two acquaintances talk about preferring having tan-men at night because it's "lighter than lamen". They stop the conversation when a newcomer taxi driver asks for "a tan-men, no noodles, please". Both the acquaintances look spitefully at each other. "Tan-men without noodles is just a vegetable soup," scoffs one of them later in his radio show.

The broadcaster's estrangement hints at the obvious script that will come ahead – it ends up with the two acquaintances ordering a tan-men-no-noodles. It substantiates that the actual disposal for "I don't know because I don't like it" must be the reversal "I don't like because I don't know it". Watching a dish we love being "disfigured" stirs our pride.

We have our particular rules and measure other people's choices by our metrics, focusing rather on the differences than on similarities that related things have.

Cast the first napkin if you never frown upon other people's culinary idiosyncrasy – ketchup on pizza, grated cheese on yakisoba, slicing spaghetti. We wince at it even if these dishes aren't among our affective memory, as if holy food had been desecrated. 

That's it, then. Food is a sign historically constructed by the actions of a community in space and time. This social repertoire includes choosing what to eat according to what is available; preparing it according to the knowledge accumulated through generations; serving it according to the regards and significance that were given to ingredients and preparation methods. If we deviate from this collective code we might disrupt, and it botters the group cohesion (the peeve on vegetarianism comes from it, but I won't talk about it this time).

As the two acquaintances at the Japanese restaurant felt, being at the same table with someone that breaks the rules brings eyes and ostensive curiosity. I may say it would be a light contrast annoyance. Now let's intensify it: what about eating according to your own rules, but among a social group that follows other standards?

To get that, we should step back and see our own food as other people's food – another folk, another culture, another rule. Next, I'll make an example on the utmost contention ingredient: meat – on didact proposes, but the same parallel could be drawn on insects, fruits, different culture techniques to prepare the same ingredient, etc.

Beef is a Brazilian specialty. Known for its land extension and for raising millions of heads of cattle as commodities, Brazil's weekends' churrasco is the ultimate symbol of home leisure.

Churrasco can be made with many different beef cuts, like ribs or hindquarters, seasoned with coarse salt only, or a family marinade recipe. The pieces are roasted in a skewer or directly on a grill over the fire, controlled by the churrasqueiro, a charge usually occupied by men of the house. On the day after, the leftovers are used to prepare a carreteiro1 dish.

The Brazilian herd is one of the greatest in the world, surprisingly larger than the Brazilian population: There are 218.2 million heads of cattle and 212.6 million people in the same country. The domestic market consumes a large part of the beef production, and between 20 and 30% is exported, mainly to China.

Beef can also be prepared as picadinho, a kind of chopped braised beef stew, served with rice or mashed potatoes; as steak with caramelized onions; as a base for soups; or as a pot roast. Not all the beef cuts are eaten: Brazilians prefer to leave aside giblets and look for tender cuts, such as tenderloin and picanha2, or the fatty ones as ribs. Chuck and foreshanks, if possible, won't be on the shopping list.

The text above is a general overview, and if you know the Brazilian culture a little deeper, you may think that many parentheses and phrases should be included to better explain the complexity of these cultural and social habits, recipes, regional particularities, and points of view. Nonetheless, for those who live under a different food system, this briefing might be a satisfactory introduction to Brazil's food culture.

As an imaginative exercise, I wonder if a reader who doesn't know the Brazilian context would pop up with a few questions: why are there more heads of cattle than people in the country if most of the production is for domestic consumption? If an ox is a large-enough animal to yield several family meals, why is the herd so bulky? Why is the handling of the fire and meat an almost exclusive men's task? Which dishes are made with giblets, and why aren't them prized? Why do Brazilians prefer beef rather than other meats?

I believe I listed genuine doubts so far, questions that would open discussions and magnify/broaden the understanding of beef meaning to Brazilians. However, along with the query could come, indirectly, value judgments. Another imagination exercise here: Why cook meat over the fire when there are so many ways to use this noble ingredient? Why season it just with coarse salt?

At a certain place and time, it could be considered primitive and even clumsy to prepare the meat, for example, in a fogo de chão3 with coarse salt only. One could even say it demonstrates poor hygiene, lack of advanced cooking techniques knowledge, and an uncivilized way to serve meat.

Food is context, and the outsiders' judgments weigh differently, depending on who points and who is pointed out. In cultures that have been portrayed as uncivilized and incapable for centuries, the understanding of its food as unfinished, transitory, and primitive endorses the stereotype that there is no socially constructed knowledge in the dietary choices of those people. Who stands for such discourse tries to hold off the observed, emphasizing the differences and acting as a spokesman of a culture that overcame such behaviors.

(As if there was a human being group that would opt to pass to their descendants the least efficient strategies for survival and reproduction! As if it was possible to rank civilizations' evolution degrees in a colorful infographic!)

Perhaps you, like me, just started to notice your blind spots when thinking and talking about other people's food recently: along with the increase of decolonial studies and publications; the discussion on natives, yellows, and blacks peoples whitening; or even on how the colonizers' food culture perpetuates structural racism.

There was the Bon Appétit case, in which non-white editors had lower wages (even if more experienced and specialized than whites), asked for duties outside of their contract function, and used in videos as a display of diversity. In 2021, articles and academic debates around colonization, ethnic and racial identities occupied the pages of specialized media; then also emerged more essays ready to promote a public debate on xenophobia and food prejudice.

But as you can see by the links, it was all published in English. In Brazil, where this discussion would be very fruitful, we face other highly urgent issues such as the deterioration of public policies for food matters, suchlike the Bolsonaro government's disregard on information treat. In this interview with Lourence Alves, she shares ways to break the spell of the addicted gaze of whiteness.

We whites are not the standard. It is not out of what we know that other knowledges are structured and differentiated. In this ideological blindness that penetrates our whited minds, we end up daily reproducing and perpetuating inequities that, besides other effects, strip down the meanings and character of other people's food. This inequity perpetuates when we present recipes we didn't know as "typical" or "ethnic"; it perpetuates when we make jokes about yellow people eating insects or dogs; it perpetuates when we say all Indian food tastes the same; it perpetuates when we arrogantly look down indigenous people food strategies. This list can be even longer, but I think I made my point clear.

There is an abysmal difference between approaching due to curiosity or fetish. The avid interest that many of us show in other people's food can be predatory and sentenced two ways: the exotic is either disgusting or a trophy.

While the first verdict is easy to identify on the examples I listed above, the second one slips in a messy road.

In tourism studies, promoting local gastronomy is understood as a way to create an authentic aura for the destination. This consumption of local food and products goes beyond the physiological function to work as a social and cultural marker for the tourist.  The food tourist, then, perceives it more intensely because it creates symbolism layers.

One of the authors I included in my Master's dissertation was Kevin Fields, who presents four types of tourists' gastronomic motivations: physical; cultural; interpersonal; and status and privilege. I'll introduce the two that dialogue with this article's theme: cultural motivation and status and privilege motivation.

The cultural motivation is the interest in local food, seen by the tourist as a tool and a means for understanding the history, practices, and reality of someplace. It's how we see ourselves traveling: authentically interested in local culture and open to the unlike. Maybe we won't take the path of thinking about the exotic as a trophy, but it could happen.

The status and privilege motivation is a step further. I'd say it can be understood with an intersectional view, including social status. This tourist is motivated by discovering something unique, rare, experiencing the exclusive. Accessing these experiences doesn't always require financial capital – social and cultural capital can also be involved. Also, this type of tourism has a symbolic value that's given not only by the consumption itself but also by being seen consuming it. The book chapter in which these categories were first published is from 2004; now, when social media posts replace face-to-face interactions, this consumption exhibition becomes even more performative.

We can't always notice how big are the chances that we are gathering records of dishes and pictorial situations as a trophy, that we are looking for a unique experience on exotic gastronomy, and that we are interested in what other people can teach us so we can take ownership.

I don't have the answers, either a good-manners guide on approaching other people's food or on how to behave when traveling to countries whose food culture is heavily different from yours. Actually, this article is part of a self-criticism process because sometimes I'm one of these food tourists with cultural, status, and privilege motivations. I'm the one that judges eating sushi with a fork and knife. It was (is) the way I found to tone my behavior and demonstrate curiosity and respect for other people's food as a food journalist, instead of exercising pure informational extractivism. It's not easy to get it, but I keep going.

I want to thank Jasmin Endo Tran, a student of my open course called How To Write About Food, who deepened the discussion we had in class and brought a lot of references. Also, I want to thank Bia Nunes de Souza, who is always in about the food editorial world events, and generously shares them with me.

Two reports I mentioned in this article were found on July's newsletters of food journalist Rafael Tonon's Ao Ponto, and writer Dianne Jacob's Will Write For Food (author of an even-titled book).

Lastly, I suggest reading a report series on coronavirus and the impact of the pandemic on food culture, signed by my friend Mariana Ceccon and published on April 2020 [Portuguese only]:

Pandemia do novo coronavírus mudará a forma como nos relacionamos com a comida

Do exótico à herança cultural: os mercados de carne úmida sob condenação internacional

Coronavírus pode reduzir consumo de carne e alterar a base da dieta no mundo

Fim da glamourização: coronavírus transformará os negócios de gastronomia

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In The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri topped the door of Hell with the phrase "Abandon all hope ye who enter here." This sentence rejuvenates every century and nowadays, 700 years after the death of the Florentine writer, it would be ideal to greet those who arrive on Earth. Let the Devil get by to find a new sign.

During COP26 – the United Nations (UN) climate conference held in Glasgow, Scotland, between November 1st and 12th, 2021 – the UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, mentioned in his opening speech that the sea level has doubled in the last 30 years, the oceans are warmer than ever and that the Amazon rainforest emits more carbon than it absorbs.

Humanity has set a record in the emission of greenhouse gases – a group which includes carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), and nitrous oxide (N2O) – reaching, respectively, percentages of 149%, 262%, and 123% above pre-industrial levels. Illustrating the reports on global warming accelerated by human activity there are images of cars and factories spewing smoke and cows grazing – sometimes cows grazing in front of the smoke from fires.

[I have a suggestion for those who will forge the new Earth portal: make the expression ALL HOPE in bold capital letters.]

I'm not advocating for deindustrialization: this is a point where Brazil already is, and that’s why there are so many cows and soy eating out our fields. But it is a case of thinking about strategies to reduce the emission of these gases and thus postpone the end of the world by a few years.

In the sphere of individual actions, there is the reduction of meat consumption, usage of fossil fuels, and the demand for more conscientious public policies – part of them goes through control of livestock processes (rather than forcing the citizen to become vegetarian). I talked about the first practice with Ravi Orsini, a researcher, scientist, and environmental manager who graduated from the University of São Paulo, the same institution where he completed his Master's degree, in 2019.

His dissertation is entitled Environmental vegetarianism: a study of the controversies in the relationship between vegetarianism and greenhouse gases emissions, and the research is available here [portuguese only] – on page 124, for example, there is a table with strategies to mitigate greenhouse gases emissions in livestock.

Ravi has mapped some of the controversies present in the debate over vegetarianism (on page 136 there is a box summarizing the top seven). Since every academic work is just a frame, Ravi focused on some of the climate issues. "There are numerous relationships between vegetarianism and environmental issues, and even within my scope, the seven controversies I found were the ones I had time to identify and connect in my research. These aren’t all controversies that exist," he explains.

A vegetarian for decades, Ravi had been an activist for the cause, participating in movements and groups, but it was in environmental science that he found himself. In his research, he uses the concept of environmental vegetarianism to present a path to food sustainability, which can be done by abstaining from or reducing the consumption of animal foods in the human diet for environmental reasons (page 54).

"If we stopped eating meat, we would have a lot of arable lands, because 75% of these areas are devoted to cattle raising and grain production to feed them. However, hunger isn’t about the amount of food produced. Hunger is about social inequality, and there's no way to take this issue out of the equation," he explains. We talked on the phone for two hours and I edited our conversation to fit in this newsletter.

Was there anything that surprised you during the research?

The magnitude of the environmental impacts of livestock compared to plant-based alternative products: of all the agricultural land on the planet, 25% is for the production of plant-based food, and the remainder is for animal feed or pasture production. For every BRL 1 million in revenue from extensive cattle raising in Brazil, there is BRL 22 million in environmental impact that is not compensated or even accounted for in the final price of this operation. If we take soy, another agribusiness giant, this figure for environmental impacts doesn’t reach BRL 3 million (page 52).

These environmental impacts include the emissions of greenhouse gases themselves that aggravate global warming, deforestation, fires, air pollution, water pollution… livestock is one of the industries that most pollute water in Brazil.

There is soil degradation: clearing, burning, planting grass, and putting the oxen to eat this grass in a super grazing area. This does away with the vegetative cover of the soil. Cattle tread and compact the soil, which impairs gas exchange and water infiltration and might lead to desertification in warmer areas. When land grabbing is practiced, there is an impact on biodiversity due to the animals' loss of habitat – by clearing pastures and by farmer’s hunting to eliminate predators. For example: near the Amazon biome there will be jaguars, and farmers go out to hunt them.

In Brazil, livestock is the human activity that most occupies territory. Agriculture produces much more food and calories per square meter in about half the area that livestock requires.

Some points are not so obvious. Ruminant herds in Brazil have a direct emission of methane – they consume pasture and burp methane. We have more cattle than people in Brazil, and for each molecule of methane emitted, there is an equivalent impact to 72 molecules of carbon dioxide. Another direct emission is animal waste. A cow can produce up to 50 liters of excrement a day, which generates nitrous oxide, and each molecule of nitrous oxide is equivalent to 310 molecules of carbon dioxide.

Indirect contributions are deforestation and fires to open pasture – which is called soil use change. In a decade, 80% of deforestation and burning in Brazil was used for pasture, foremost for bovine cattle raising. Deforestation and burning generate mainly carbon monoxide and dioxide gases. 

Besides, there is another indirect contribution which is agricultural production to feed animals, where deforestation and burning to open the agricultural pasture that will generate the grains occurs again; plus, the fertilization of this agriculture with nitrogen compounds that will emit nitrous oxide. The entire meat transport and refrigeration system also contribute to the impact: the amount of meat produced in Brazil needs refrigerated transport and with that, there is carbon monoxide emission.

The global demand for meat is expected to double by 2050, driven by the development of the BRICS countries – especially China. Meanwhile less industrialized nations such as Brazil are decreasing their meat consumption for the same reason: the economic one. The onus of production, however, remains with the less industrialized. Do you identify any alternatives to deal with this besides the individual ones?

There is this growth of meat consumption in the BRICS and some countries in the African continent. Although this increase is frightening, the so-called developed countries have reached a ceiling on meat consumption. Several studies show that as income grows, so does meat consumption. It varies from place to place, but it is a general rule in the world.

It's worrying because of the discrepancy I mentioned: to produce food for the animal, the impact grows disproportionately in the resources consumption. That said, meat as a commodity to export is a problem, but 80% of the meat produced in Brazil is for domestic consumption. 20% seems low, but the volume is large and it makes a lot of difference.

Ceasing meat-eating postpones the environmental apocalypse for dozens of years. It reduces the impact but does not solve the situation.

I see two levels of solution: a superficial, remedial one; and a structural one. At the first level, one obvious thing would be to have both systems and public policies that help people reduce meat consumption; to have legal systems, policies, and mechanisms that acted on environmental impacts, such as greater inspection of deforestation to curb deforestation for pasture, and make illegal deforestation really onerous. Some talk about climate taxation on meat, which would be putting a tax on consumption. I didn't study this possibility in-depth, though.

Reaching the structural level, many people say that Brazil is corrupt and that this is a domestic problem, but actually, it isn't. In the dissertation, I present studies that show that the money that finances the environmental degradation, and the livestock and industrial agriculture system as a whole come from outside. This money, traced to tax havens, comes from European countries. Whoever is winning with this is not in Brazil. The structural discussion considers that it is not just about reducing meat consumption, but also involves the economic system of exploitation of basic resources in Brazil, this entire network of lobbying financing for these companies, and the cash flow that comes from developed countries. Ideally, these remedial and structural solutions would be combined.

In your dissertation’s conclusions, you indicate that the plant-based diet is the best option to (individually) begin to mitigate the impact. However, depending on the choice of ingredients and provenance, this might just be a little less bad, right?

I do not recommend it individually, but I do endorse the recommendation for this diet. As optimistic as we are, not everyone will want to go vegetarian. There are places where discussing reducing meat consumption means impacting food security. It's not in the urban centers. Not everybody will stop eating meat, not all people should, but the direction is still needed. And that direction has to be less meat. The plant-based diet concept encompasses different types of reduction in meat consumption; vegetarianism included.

Consuming less meat isn’t the ultimate solution. Indeed it is significant impact mitigation and the fastest switching point of consumption through food, but it is not a structural solution. If we continue to consume from agribusiness, it won't work: we have to consume local, family-produced food and promote fair trade. A widely used example is quinoa, which had a negative social impact on the Andean producing countries because it was massively exported, and the price for the inhabitants has risen.

When we talk about environmental vegetarianism we are not talking about ending subsistence hunting or artisanal fishing. What other practices don't fit in environmental vegetarianism? A family herd?

Whenever I talk about environmental vegetarianism, I’m describing a part of vegetarian criticism, from people who stopped eating meat because of the impacts on the natural environment. Vegans have ethics concerning animals as their primary issue, but there is also the environmental issue.

One of the conclusions of my research is that all this vegetarian environmental criticism only makes sense in these industrial systems that are impactful, and in the large-scale consumption systems that create this demand of wanting to consume meat three times a day.

This criticism of environmental vegetarianism makes no sense in all systems where animals are produced and consumed on a small scale, locally, where the microenvironment will absorb the impacts. There are places where the population's food security depends on animal production. There are places, for example, where the soil does not allow agricultural production, only pasture, or places where you only have ice, like the Inuit people. Riparian populations that practice subsistence fishing, indigenous populations fishing, and subsistence hunting.

Closer to us, for those who live in rural areas, we have our grandparents and great-grandparents. There was hardly any beef every day. When they killed the ox, they salted the meat and tried to preserve it for a long time. They had low-impact meat daily like chicken, and not always every day. If you're reading this interview, you probably don't fit this exception.

You also list obstacles to adopting a plant-based diet and "alternative carnivorisms". What do you identify as good practices within this diet that is not (or will never be) totally free of animal products?

Alternative carnivorisms is a concept by nutritionist and sociologist Elaine de Azevedo. This is another important topic: these alternative ways to consume meat (pages 35 and 129) lead to sustainable livestock farming, that is, to produce less impactful systems that, in many cases, are even beneficial.

There is no way to relativize: these systems exist and are possible. In sustainable cattle raising, the practice of intensive cattle is growing, which reduces the amount of deforestation and optimizes the use of pasture. There are criticisms, and this is the system I consider the least sustainable: there is less pasture, but the impact of deforestation goes to agriculture: huge areas are required to produce grains and cereals to feed the animals, and the impact changes from direct to indirect. As my focus is on the environment, I do not mix these ethical issues because that would be another dissertation and another research.

There is no guarantee that intensive livestock farming won't increase the size of the herd and thus increase the emission of detritus and gases in the same area. This is the most problematic way out and is where the industry has increasingly pointed out.

I place the future in another way. The most sustainable would be the extensive system based on agroforestry with pasture, which absorbs a lot of impacts locally. I wouldn’t say that it is a limitation, but important detail: these extensive systems have lower productivity than the extensive ones with deforestation. One way or another, we need to consume less meat and stop eating meat three times a day.

I believe that within these alternative carnivorisms, the meat we are going to consume in the future will have to come from these agroforestry systems, to be consumed once or twice a week.

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In 2013, I proposed a blog to cover vegetarian eating-out for Gazeta do Povo newspaper, where I had been working for a year as a freelancer. I had just been hired as a reporter for Bom Gourmet1 and had been living in Curitiba for almost a year. Between the moment I moved to the capital of Paraná and writing the blog proposal I took my first steps in vegan cooking, curious about the challenge of learning how to make cakes and pies without butter, a change that seems simple to me today.

Curitiba proved to be an oasis of price and variety for me, who had been living in Florianópolis for five years, where I only knew pickled mushrooms. In Curitiba, a tray with 10 ounces of Paris mushrooms cost less than a dollar in the nearest green-grocery – white, firm, and giving off its light earthy aroma2. From 2012 onwards, my food was much fresher. Instead of concentrating on shopping at the supermarket once a month, I started to buy only what I needed, when I needed it, in shops nearby. I hadn't eaten meat very often to save money, so I stopped cooking it at home.

The blog was approved a few months later and Verdura sem Frescura (a name that would sound like "frilless greenness" in English) went live in September 2013, days before the largest vegetarian event in Latin America, the VegFest congress, in the Agronomy studies campus of the Federal University of Paraná. That same year, two vegan establishments had opened in downtown Curitiba, the Semente de Girassol snack bar, in March, and the Veg Veg emporium, in May.

These two places opened the doors to many ventures and changes in the eating-out scenario that developed in Curitiba. I documented part of this process on the blog and in 2016 I studied the period in my Master’s. The small market that was beginning to form in Brazil was driven, at first, by amateur cooks, with few hours of cooking, and who met a repressed and undemanding demand.

Until the first decade of 2000 what we had was vegetarian buffets at lunch and cheese or the heart of palm snacks in cafeterias. Sharing recipes on the internet made many people start to prepare substitutes of meat, dairy, and eggs from scratch at home. A multitude of these homemade preparations were the main products sold at the beginning, which helped to reinforce the stereotype that the vegetarian eats a food simulacrum.

Amidst this consumption acceleration and little complexity in the elaboration, there were two interesting moments that we reported in Bom Gourmet: in 2015, the restaurant sector in Curitiba evolved into a professional vegan cuisine, which cooled off a few years later. At that time, it began to emerge an issue that became unavoidable and ended up getting central in the debate: "lab meat".

I start the first class of the How to Write About Food course by saying that we've all been eating and telling stories for millennia. I spare the students and I will spare you, reader, from hearing for the umpteenth time that sapience and sapidity have the same etymological root, and jump directly to the statement: if language is a living knowledge, so is the cuisine. When I wrote about this in my dissertation, I was looking for a justification in Massimo Montanari's proposal for the nomenclature adopted by vegetarians for a traditional recipe without meat, such as vegan feijoada3. The reasoning is as follows: if the preparation uses the same techniques, the way of serving, the dinner rituals, and the occasion, then adaptation is a valid expression of the current food culture, even if one of the ingredients is not present. In the case of feijoada, the meat.

Montanari considers that the lexicon of a people's way of eating (that is, the set of practices) is composed of animal and vegetable ingredients (analogs to morphemes) available in the region. The construction of the dishes (formation of words) would take place through the use of cooking and preparation methods. Thus, the same base can be cooked up into preparations with different appearances and functions. A pie and a bread are examples of this: both preparations share the etymological root wheat flour, but they are distinctive things. To briefly advance this reasoning, I highlight this excerpt from my dissertation:

The rhetoric would be how this food is prepared, served, and consumed. The expression power of food, as well as language, is the adaptation of speech to an argument. In this way, the substitution of an ingredient (morpheme) in a dish (word) – either by necessity or an arbitrary alteration – guarantees the continuity of the system.

Just as language has its variations in different regions and these differences do not exclude dialogue, the same goes for the way of eating. If the morphology of the food is respected, then it fulfills its function: an example would be mashed manioc or mashed potato, where manioc and potatoes are used as morphemes, and mash would be the word.

In times of grain shortage, peasants increased the bread dough with earth, and even that preparation was named bread. For an omnivorous culture in which meat is one of the main morphemes, the exchange of this ingredient for another that fulfills the same function can be observed in vegetarian diets: in the hamburger (preparation and presentation of the dish) of beef (morpheme), it can be used legumes such as lentils (morpheme) or mushrooms (morpheme), among other ingredients. The rhetoric of vegetarian cuisine is identical to the omnivorous one: food traditions such as churrasco4 and feijoada are still linked to the specific way of preparation and to the situation and ritualization that involves the diners. It is as if the replacement of animal protein by vegetable ingredients were a synonymous neologism: a heart of palm moqueca5, lentil hamburger, vegetable feijoada, coconut milk brigadeiro6, textured soy protein barreado7, jackfruit coxinha8.

At the time I was taking my Master's, there was no point in discussing the aesthetics of food choices, but this was always the topic that most interested me in gastronomy. I consider all the sensory information of a preparation that has been intentionally developed by the cook from what he has in his hands to be aesthetic. Thus, the sensory information of a tomato comes from its natural characteristics, while the sensory information of a tomato sauce – flavor, aroma, texture, color, meaning – was created with aesthetic intent.

Vegetarianism, which uses ethical decisions to compose its eating strategies, is always in danger of getting carried away by the functionality of an empty meaning substitution. Textured soy protein (TSP) is perhaps the best known of this trap: an industrial by-product of vegetable oil extraction, soy meat is not an intentionally produced food. TSP is only on the supermarket shelf (and in your pet's ration) because it's convenient to sell it.

IT'S AN AESTHETIC CRISIS

I was a vegetarian for five years. I've lived through all the phases: discovering new flavors, judgment, enthusiasm for cooking, conflicts at the table, tests that go wrong, proselytizing. I lived the curiosity and expectation of trying vegan sausages and cheeses, tasting vegetable bacon, making hot dogs with soy sausage – perhaps the most honest of all the adaptations since the animal sausage itself is a food simulacrum.

Adaptations that simplify a preparation, flattening its nutritional, historical, and sensory values are practical for times of scarcity. A recipe that uses cornflour, food coloring, and potatoes can be used as an ingredient that melts under heat, but it is not cheese. To be cheese, in the reasoning I follow from Montanari, is to be a mass with fat and protein, fermented or cured, to the point of developing aromas, flavors, consistency, and a new appearance.

The peasants who added earth to make the dough yield didn’t do it for pleasure: if they could, they would mix other cereals in wheat. The application of a cooking technique to emulate a texture or to fulfill a function in a dish is in opposition to (but just as limiting as) seeing only calories in food. Choosing one of these poles dries up all the juicy discussion between them.

Banana, jackfruit, apple cashew, green coconut: the pulps (and peel) of these fruits are present in traditional people's stews, moquecas, braises, and marinades long before vegetarianism was a market trend. Its availability for collection and cultivation means that its use has been multiple throughout history, and its preparation varies according to the variety, maturation point, and culinary knowledge of those who cook it. Real food contains more stories than we can record.

The transition to a meat, dairy, and egg-free diet can be difficult until the palate gets used to flavors that have less fat and a lower intensity of free glutamate per mouthful. The missing silhouette of a steak on the plate and the lack of resistance that the muscle tissue offers to the teeth, I dare to say, must be what makes many people opt for merely scenographic products, such as isolated vegetable protein burgers, gluten sausages, and potato-and-starch cheeses.

Amateur cooks prepare their best mockups; the industry, with an eye on the ill-prepared market, takes care of its lip service and packaging. Both will deliver something that will be aesthetically poor, but that will be consumed as if they were better than nothing by people who don't know how to cook and who believe they are contributing to a better future for the planet. However, active actions – choosing what to eat for its aesthetic characteristics and ethical production – are more efficient than the passive ones – replacing a product that violates its ethical principles for one that is aesthetically inferior and whose ethics may also be questionable.

In the 2010s, the Brazilian market was flooded with plant-based products. I've tasted much of what's been released over the years – even after I've gone back to eating meat – and despite the façade set up with flavorings and flavor enhancers, you soon see a weak and compromised structure, historically and nutritionally speaking.

An ethical diet is never the result of individual conduct, nor is it mediated by the ultra-processed food industry. Food is a cultural expression within a historically and socially constructed food system, with its limitations and possibilities. When the food industry sits down at the table to serve up its brand new products, it serves it up with an extra greenwashing topping to mask the acrid smell that comes from its unsustainable production chains.

With this comparison, I do not want to diminish the plasticity of a food strategy made during the transition to vegetarianism; I have resorted to these practices many times myself. But if we can create food by manipulating molecules through bioengineering, we also have the creativity to adapt a diet without projecting a hologram of hamburger, steak, wings, and ribs onto the plate. It is possible to add fat, smoky aroma, and umami tastes by letting plants be plants – not dressing them up like animals.

The Brazilian food lexicon is very rich in bolinhos9, stews, ragouts, fried foods, porridges, bread rolls, fermentations, preserves. There is enough technique repertoire to mix potato and starch to obtain different and equally interesting results that do not simulate cheese melting. It bothers me to see that there are still merely plastic vegetarian food choices – visual and tactile, but inert – and the comparison that comes to my mind is implant surgeries: the result at the first glance may be satisfactory, but it is an illusion. There is no built structure and for that reason, it is temporary and fragile.

When vegetarianism doesn’t take into account the food system that produces its meat substitutes or other animal-derived ingredients, it doubles the problem. I understand the line of reasoning that defends that if we would stop eating animals massively, livestock would be discouraged and it would reduce our impact on Earth. But the food industry definitely cannot be a substitute for taking over the pasture or poultry farm space.

Maybe I'm late in posting this as the 2021's lights out. I need to be honest: my Instagram algorithm has gotten me interesting profiles and posts about vegetarian eating for the last year. The ministers of the study group Regional Kitchens in Brazil are the best example of this: five vegetarian cooks who present their regions from an original perspective, critically exposing historical information, taking a closer look at techniques and preparations of native peoples and quilombolas10, and pointing out ways for a vegetarian diet closer to our origins. No proselytizing.

Congratulations to Malu Cerise (Comendo Plantas), Bruna de Oliveira (Crioula Curadoria Alimentar), Carol Dini (Cebola na Manteiga), Ruan Félix, and Marcella Cabral.

BIG THANKS!

As I write this issue, there are 529 subscribers on low heat, which means I've hit my personal goal of reaching 500 subscribers before October 31st. So in November, I will write an extra post!

Thank you so much to each of you who signed on low heat over the last month or who remain here. Being a self-employed professional and publishing a personal project like this (small on the internet, but laborious as an individual activity) means celebrating each page view and new subscription with the same intensity. And when you share or comment, I open a bottle of sparkling wine.

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A NEW GOAL

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By the way, I have to publicly thank Luciane Maesp, who started translating the issues in September (this and this one) after reading the interview I did with Lourence. The amazing notes that contextualize and explain terms, cultural peculiarities, and State programs are also hers. Thank you so much, Luciane!

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this issue was translated by Luciane Maesp 📧 luciane.maesp@gmail.com

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NATIVE SEEDS RESIST BRAZIL’S DISMANTLEMENT

selected and planted by families in the Semi-arid1 region, seeds ensured food and sustenance after the historic drought and during the worst period of the Covid-19 pandemic

At the end of September I participated in the Bori Press Agency's Exploring Food Agendas event, and there I met Adriana Amância, press officer of Brazilian Semi-arid Articulation (ASA)2. In one of her speeches, Adriana mentioned an impressive fact: 70% of families in the Brazilian Semi-arid that stock and plant native seeds maintained the normal volume of food production even during the most critical period of the Covid-19 pandemic.

This is one of the results of a survey carried out by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO–UN) and ASA between July and December 2020 with a representative sample of the 200 thousand families served by the One Land and Two Waters program (the P1+2) from ASA. The program adds a cistern for the use of water for food production to families who have a cistern to store water for use in hygiene and cleaning at home, built by the Brazilian government's 1 Million Cisterns Program.

That's why I wanted to talk to Antônio Gomes Barbosa, sociologist, master in agroecology, coordinator of Dryland Adaptation Knowledge Initiative – Living Semi-arid project (DAKI – Semiárido Vivo). He coordinated the One Land and Two Waters Program (P1+2) and the Semi-arid Seeds Program, both from ASA.

Foram entrevistados moradores do semiárido em nove estados brasileiros: Piauí, Ceará, Rio Grande do Norte, Paraíba, Pernambuco, Alagoas, Sergipe, Bahia e Minas Gerais. 

There were interviewed residents of the Semi-arid region of nine Brazilian states: Piauí, Ceará, Rio Grande do Norte, Paraíba, Pernambuco, Alagoas, Sergipe, Bahia and Minas Gerais. The region suffered from the worst drought on record between 2012 and 2018 – in some places, the drought began in 2010; in others, it lasted until 2019 – and then had to deal with a pandemic of the new coronavirus.

The research aimed to measure the impact that social isolation and trade closure had on this population's lives. Most respondents are women, between 40 and 50 years old, living with more than three people, and cistern owners – for use at home and cultivation. They plant mainly cereals, oilseeds, fruits, vegetables, tubers, but also flowers and other commercial crops. There is also the creation of animals in small herds, for subsistence.

The P1+2 is an ASA program that started in 2007 intending to guarantee access to water for planting and livestock raising to families that are already served with access to drinking water. "The research shows that the program of access to water for drinking and production makes families change their condition: they stop being families that need to be assisted by income distribution programs to become families that produce food and generate wealth for the region", says Barbosa.

The main obstacles that these families face are not the Semi-arid climate, but the lack of State investment in cisterns and other strategies that allow them to store water; the discontinuation of credit lines that were contracted by families to invest in the property, and its production improvement; and the monoculture of transgenics in the region, which ends up contaminating native’s seedbeds and gardens with the propagation of their pollen.

"It is necessary to resume the journey of what we call an action of coexistence with the Semi-arid region", summarized Barbosa in his last answer. He responded in audio to a series of questions I sent him via WhatsApp. The interview below is organized and edited for better understanding.

When we talk about native seeds in the semiarid region, can we exemplify the main species and explain how this work of selection, storage, and exchange of seeds is carried out?

There are many species. Beans are one of the species and this species has varieties. The same for watermelon. In the Semi-arid region, there are more varieties of beans and corn, but also broad beans, tubers, and a set of other genetic materials that families keep to plant again. We surveyed families from the Brazilian Semi-arid Seeds Program, and most of the seeds they keep are from the family itself over the years. Then, come the materials traded through the community from other families.

When we talk about native seeds we are not just talking about genetics, we are talking moreover about them being plants adapted to the climate, and also about the knowledge bundled to that material that families keep: where is the best place to plant, whether it should be planted together, what is the correct timing to plant, what should not be done.

Families in the Semi-arid plant only when there is rain, and then sort the seeds between the grains that are food, and the ones that will be stored as seed. It is a tradition of many farming families throughout Brazil. Farmers in the Semi-arid region were in a process of losing their seeds, there was genetic erosion. And even so, they set up their strategies: instead of planting in the swidden, they plant in the backyard to produce seeds. To our pleasant surprise, the research shows that whoever kept the seeds had more autonomy. At a time when everything was closed, and even accessing seeds [from other places, such as companies and cooperatives] was harder.

Those who live in the Semi-arid region leave it when it is not the rainy season. They go to the North, Southeast, South, and if someone glimpses an unknown seed, he brings it back with him. This makes the Semi-arid possibly the most biodiverse area in the country's seed field. Farmers plant these new seeds in small quantities and keep testing and developing knowledge. The exchange also happens a lot: if one finds a bean, he plants and gives seed to another family. There are also non-vegetable native seeds, such as caprines – 93% of the goat herd is in the Northeast, and most of the herds in the Northeast are in the Semi-arid region.

We are talking about 1.1 million families whose basis is in saving, protecting and exchanging, testing, and adapting native seeds. It is a job that also ends up being an environmental service. Corn on its own [has a cultivation history of] some six thousand years being selected. The mass selection [made from the phenotype, that is, from the visible characteristics of the plant or animal], in which they manually select – "oops, this grain is better than this other one, so I'll separate it" – is a manual work of care and of associated knowledge that is something astonishing and enchanting.

Adriana had mentioned that native corn seeds in the Semi-arid region are at risk of being contaminated by transgenics. What are the states and regions in which these plantations are threatened and what measures can society take to support the small producer?

Today, the main threat is the contamination of these seeds by transgenics, especially corn. At ASA, we carried out contamination tests and the numbers increased over time. We are currently with ASA and Embrapa3 together in the program called Agrobiodiversity of the Semi-arid [launched in 2019 with 53 municipalities in the states of Sergipe, Bahia, Paraíba, Pernambuco, and Piauí], which works in seven territories. No state in the Semi-arid region does not have contamination, which occurs in a variety of ways, as yet distributed by seed houses.

There is a lot of transgenic material and corn pollen is the one with the easiest propagation. In all places and regions, some materias are 60 to 100 years old in the family now being contaminated. There is no policy in Brazil to protect farmers and their materials. There is no policy to punish companies that contaminate since today it is possible to know which company produced that transgenic. Nowadays, Brazil's policy is to expand transgenics with all in.

The State promotes a seed distribution policy and not an incentive to seed production, storage, and enhancement of local genetic material.

We have been working with protection policies for this material so that farmers can harvest, test for transgenics and not plant those seeds next year. Then plant part of it and test it again: if it is contaminated, save the first batch of material and replace it.

The main crop in the Semi-arid region is corn, which represents a whole logic of divinity and celebration4, and this material is largely contaminated. We are building alternatives with Embrapa as perspectives on how to protect this material, discussing with the seed houses, and building backup copies of this genetic material.

The research showed that producers with sufficient access to inputs, extension, credit, and post-harvest services maintained normal income during the pandemic period. How is this offered in the region? In the case of credit, most are from state banks, but what about the infrastructure of inputs and post-harvest services?

The research shows that families that have more land and more access to available resources and materials, technical assistance, and credit produce much more, and confirms that the right path is to provide families with drinking water, water for production, build strategies of banks and community houses of native seeds and build strategies for short commercialization circuits, such as agroecological fairs, exchange spaces, commercial spaces, such as grocery stores.

But what we have most of the time is non-access.

Credit, especially Pronaf5, has almost disappeared. Before, there were specific Pronaf lines for the Semi-arid, for agroecology, for youth, and women. But these policies are being weakened and farmers have a hard time getting them because the government no longer differentiates by property size.

One of the ways to obtain credit is through technical assistance [among the criteria for applying for credit there is participation in rural educational programs, for example], both by the state and by organizations that do this monitoring free of charge. If you dismantle this structure [that is, it reduces the availability of technical training in the region and the presence of researchers and professionals who can help the farmer to work his land better], you harm the farmer, who cannot build other incomes. The research reflects the issue of the pandemic: people have no credit, have come out of a great drought, will finally have water, have part of their seeds saved and now that they could start planting again, they cannot sell.

It’s very difficult to measure because there are several disarticulations. The water policy itself is being dismantled: it stopped at the beginning of the Temer government [in the 2017 budget, the government cut down by 92% the budget for cisterns implementation in the Semi-arid region] and the Bolsonaro government is trying to boycott any water policy in the Semi-arid [in 2020, the 1 Million Cisterns Program had the worst performance since its creation in 2003].

If you provide technical assistance services, make credit and land available to these families, they do not need to be beneficiaries of income distribution programs. With access to water for drinking and production, families leave the need for assistance to become families that produce food and generate wealth for the region. This study that represents 200,000 families in the Semi-arid region proves that during a pandemic situation, those who had water for production generated income.

Looking at the results of this research and at the reality in Brazil today, in which family farming is increasingly unsupported, for how long is it possible that these communities remain resilient with these practices?

We went through the biggest drought in history that we have known since the arrival of the Portuguese, and even with the lack of water, there was no rural exodus, no looting, no malnourished children. And this was because these families had water to drink, they didn’t need to leave their homes. This water can now be collected from rain, if there is no rain, it is distributed via a water tank truck. There will never be a permanent river or stream in the Semi-arid region, however, there can always be water, if strategies are built to expand storage so that water doesn’t evaporate – especially cisterns and plans to create integrated systems for quality water access. If this policy moves forward, life in the Semi-arid will change.

Even though the research data shows that part of the interviewees expanded their production and that they are now living in a food security situation, these people had great difficulties. The State was not there to perform its duty. Townspeople were building their strategies, such as selling via WhatsApp and Facebook, for example. It was the creative power of these families that brought them out of isolation. The research could not measure these elements because of time.

It is necessary to expand and allow access to the Food Acquisition Program6, allow them to market their products, and benefit them to add value. We are talking about people who generate the food consumed in that region, who provide food security and identity. It is necessary to resume the journey of what we call the action of coexistence in the Semi-arid region.

Without thinking about the bleak scenario in Brazil today, what State actions do you think the results of this study could inspire?

Brazil is in a state of dismantling. This Semi-arid region had few public policies, apart from the 1 Million Cisterns Program. Today there are 1.2 million cisterns. And ASA has a second water action. There are 200 thousand families in the Semi-arid that are privileged compared to others because they have second water to use in production. If these families don't need state assistance, what's their problem? They don't always need access to credit, but they do need to sell their products.

The dismantling of the Food Acquisition Program (PAA) and the National School Feeding Program (PNAE)7 has a significant impact on the lives of these families. Imagine for other families that do not have access to water for production? Some families also need access to land, because if they build a cistern on their land, they have no space to plant.

BEFORE YOU LEAVE

I can’t help thinking that if a region forgotten by the State such as the Brazilian Semi-arid thrives on using traditional knowledge, can you imagine the power that this food system based on native seeds would have in a region that is hydraulically favored and with government policies backing it up?

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Next month this newsletter will become biweekly, with an interview on October 15th and a journalistic essay on the 29th. I haven't defined a subject yet, but I'm inclined to talk about gastronomy professionals whose role is one of the most undervalued despite the high demand for their technical knowledge. Does anyone dare say which one it is?

this issue was translated by Luciane Maesp 📧 luciane.maesp@gmail.com

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[as always, a prelude]

CONCERNS THAT SCRATCH

When I see chicken feet, I remember the tongue clicks that my great-grandmother Filomena did when she sucked the soup broth that was kept between the skin and tendons. One foot was always hers, and the second one was disputed by her offspring of children and grandchildren. But I, her great-granddaughter, avoided chewing all kinds of tougher textures, such as cartilage and fat; and that's why I was never curious to try chicken’s foot1.

The urbanization of the city I grew up in was accelerated by the clothing industry and the growth of a motor company that would become a multinational. Directly and indirectly, it is the industrial sector that employs a large part of the low or highly specialized workforce and raises the average salary in the city. With so many companies, so many jobs (even if many are on the shop floor) and so much taxes (even with tax evasion), the city boasts one of the highest human development indices in Brazil. Great-grannie Mena's descendants did not work in the fields, but swiped their cards in an industrial shed or provided services to the city's economic elite.

That is why no chickens were scratching in my grandmother's backyard during the 1990s when I lived my childhood perched on a guava tree in front of my grandmother Chica's house or playing in Great-grannie Mena's garage, nearby addresses on a dead-end street. At lunch, I separated the chicken thigh’s meat from the gristle and bone with a knife, without making a fuss, to not offend the older generations with my childish palate.

Nobody thought critically about the consumption of chicken feet or the existence of rice grits until the Bolsonaro government was elected and wore out the threadbare and patched up the purchasing power of the Brazilian. The prime cut meat, which has always been a luxury, disappeared from the plate with impressive rapidity. The drop in Brazilians income makes them choose to consume cheaper proteins so that there is no lack of sustenance.

Chicken feet consumption wasn't left because it's not food. Chicken feet were left off because the distance between our table and the ground where they scratch is getting longer and longer.

Chicken's feet were no longer eaten because animals are produced for slaughter in a larger quantity than the human population. We stopped eating chicken feet because the production volume is so large that we can choose which piece of the animal we want to eat, being able to fill a barbecue with dozens of chicken hearts for a meal, without having to worry about cooking the rest of the animal.

ANA MARIA IN A TWITTER SHELL

On September 27th, 2021, the presenter Ana Maria Braga opened one of the segments of the Mais Você television program talking about the increase in prices that beef (30.77%), fish (3.93%), and chicken (25%) suffered in the last 12 months, and makes the point: "So, many housewives appealing for you know what? For chicken feet. So there is no lack of protein on the table"2. On the screen of Mais Você's studio, reporter Luiza Zveiter appears in Dona Graça's3 kitchen, the character found by the production of the program to illustrate what the presenter has just described.

Dona Graça is a Bahian cook who lives in Rio de Janeiro that earns around 700 Reais a month4. She used to prepare oxtail, tongue, and leg beef shank/hind shank before the price of meat increased. Nowadays, the menu takes turns between chicken gizzards, necks, and feet.

The choice of the theme for Mais Você was criticized by internet users for being "a romanticization of poverty" by "teaching how to prepare chicken feet". I went to watch it two days after it went on air, curious to know about the recipe and the tone used by the presenter.

As you might imagine, I don't know how to prepare chicken feet. The knowledge of how to kill, pluck and eviscerate a chicken has been lost in my family for decades, and today, if I needed to prepare it, I would risk boiling it directly in the soup. I don't know whether it should be seasoned long in advance, or whether it needs to be sealed or scalded. Ana Maria didn't help me either: she said goodbye to Dona Graça and ended the segment.

I’ll sum up my opinion:

1. I didn't see romanticization, but a statement that chicken feet are food – Dona Graça and Ana Maria are from different social classes and, in a way, when Ana Maria Braga says that chicken feet are tasty is a validation of Dona Graça’s choice made (within of her possibilities), without ranking cuts of meat, nor constraining the interviewee;

2. There was contextualization and it was explained that the choice is due to the economic issue – the worst in 30 years;

3. Any food preparation was taught. There was no meager gastronomic information in the eight-minute segment;

4. The fact that the country's largest broadcaster has a history of discrediting politicians with a leaning to the left and being responsible for creating the motto "o agro é pop"5 makes us conclude that there is a calculated omission in not talking about public policies for food. Either because the topic would need more than eight minutes; either because it is understood that it would be too "complex" for the "housewife". As it is a dead-end, I adopt the optimistic perspective of points 1 and 2.

When Ana Maria Braga wore a tomato necklace to talk about the increasing price of the fruit in 2013, the criticism was that it "sported an expensive product that many Brazilians couldn’t afford". Yet, not eating tomatoes for a period does not affect us nutritionally. Ana Maria did the same thing this February, appearing with a string of tomatoes when the price of fruit increased by 23% in São Paulo. She also used a rice and bean necklace in 2016, and another one made of garlic and onions. By the way, the rice collar was repeated in September 2020.

On her social networks, the presenter was in favor of the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff in 2016. In May 2021, she used the same network to ask for the impeachment of Jair Bolsonaro.

Maybe it's time for the tweeter to understand that the Mais Você program is not made for him, and that's why the programming won't live up to his expectations.

The subjects that Rede Globo's production selects have the same origin as those that guide the gastronomy editorials of large media vehicles: trending topics and Google Trends. These immediatist oracles deliver the curious theme or the controversy of the day, just picked from social networks, fresh farmed in the kitchen of newsrooms. And served rarely, otherwise, it would lose its freshness.

PARENTHESIS: the cover story of the Extra newspaper on September 29, 2021, was a good lesson on how to take the subject of the moment and find its ballast in reality. A few months earlier, we had other reports along the same lines, with the sole of the reporter's shoe wearing out on the streets of Cuiabá and Recife.

WHAT DOES FOOD JOURNALISM FEED ON?

on the algorithm and popular hashtags

People think they understand food because they eat it every day and because they like to see what's in and what's missing on the supermarket shelves in their neighborhood. It is not through this practice, however, that statements are postulated – neither in journalism, nor in academia, nor market research. The story about rice grit showed it.

Journalism has its method and prerogatives, which everyone thinks they understand as well. "Simplification is something journalism has always done. It's different from academia. Journalists speak more colloquially and they don't need to make the state of the art for everything", summarizes Guilherme Lobão, a journalist in Brasília at CBN Sabores, and creator of the open course Comida de Pensar. Guilherme was one of the press colleagues I called to talk about the title of this newsletter.

The point was to discuss the public's reaction to the articles about firewood, Miojo ramen noodles, and the sale of bones in the butcher's shop6, which received criticisms very similar to those directed towards chicken feet in Mais Você. "The title cannot hold all the information and bring the context", reported Lobão.

Editors know about it. The rush provoked by social networks makes all publications done on the spur of the moment, trampling over the checking and reviewing process in exchange for clicks and the scoop. Lean newsrooms, overloaded reporters, pressure to meet audience goals, and increasingly increase the number of stories published per day are some other ingredients.

Food is a cross-cutting matter in press editorials: as in gastronomy (as cultural expression, restaurant sector, and reader service), economics (agribusiness, business expansion, food price increase), and politics & society (market regulation, public policies, prohibitions, or regulation of sectors). The editors' fight for the current topic is as commonplace as the newsroom's coffee being bad.

The approach of coverage for food matters varies depending on the editorial that wins the dispute: the economy may speak of a record harvest and gains for the State with the opening of new fields, while the gastronomy will be reporting the difficulty of small producers to obtain guarantees to continue producing. This editorial schizophrenia happened in another way during the pandemic: on one May day, Folha de S. Paulo reported that the level of social isolation was the lowest since the beginning of the pandemic, and April had been the most lethal month. On the next day, Guia Folha7 published a list of bars that would exhibit the final of the Brazilian Football Championship. On Twitter (always on it), users pointed out the contradiction of the vehicle.

"The editorials have different goals. The food editorial does its job that is to encourage this sector, but the reader gets bewildered. Each editorial does its job without necessarily knowing what the others are doing," Andrea Torrente described to me by telephone. We met at the Bom Gourmet newsroom where we worked together between 2013 and 2018 when I left the gastronomy section to cover behavior at the extinct Viver Bem editorial team, also from Gazeta do Povo newspaper. In February this year, the independent news vehicle Jornal Plural, from Curitiba, launched a gastronomy editorial section, and Torrente was responsible for structuring it.

He was able to define the qualitative criteria that guide the local coverage of food journalism and set the concepts of the slow food movement – good, clean, and fair – as its basis. "I don't think big industry and fast food are worthy of being reported in a gastronomy editorial, because I don't think this food is good, clean, or fair. The quality of the ingredients, the large-scale production that results in low quality, the exploitation of raw materials, and workers in these enterprises… none of this is good, clean or fair," he said. It is difficult to find a food journalist who disagrees with this view.

In September, Luciana Fróes, who has been working at O Globo newspaper for 30 years, 20 of which dedicated to gastronomic journalism, wrote an article about "gourmet Miojo ramen noodles". "It was the most read on the site for days," she told me. "It wasn't to magnify it, it was to talk about the impoverishment of food. I start the text with: Fresh pasta is hanging on a thread. I even said I wouldn't sign the article, but at this point, I'd rather talk about Miojo than talk about foie gras" she claimed.

I asked her if the combinations suggested by the chefs – with expensive ingredients such as seafood – didn't make the story sound unlikely to what she had just told me. "The middle-class standards have also fallen, and they have to resort to Miojo to make a meal. The selection of ingredients was made by the chefs", she defended.

My reading is completely different from Luciana's and comes close to how Victor Matioli, O Joio e o Trigo’s journalist, analyzes the issue: "In Brazil, gastronomic journalism has a very obvious class cutout. It is for a social stratum group that wants to know about chefs' news, and when talking about recipes that need to yield and diversify, calls upon chefs as if they were the only holders of culinary knowledge".

A title that chose to combine the words Miojo noodles and gourmet is an old trick to get the attention of whoever is scrolling through a timeline. This accessory function, relegated to the gastronomy editorial, is part of a commercial strategy – no potential advertiser gets offended when there is nothing indigestible published – in which the covers smooth and simplify debates, and bet on service journalism, amenities, and in entertainment as a tonic.

Before gastronomy became the main subject of Sunday newspaper supplement (now part of the web portals of major newspapers), fashion and decor occupied this place. "Vehicle owners also have their responsibility. In the newsroom structure, gastronomy is seen as a perfumery, as banality, as if it were a piece of cake. But it requires specific repertoire and knowledge", points out Rafael Rocha, a reporter for the Cumbucca portal and MaisConteúdo editorial of special reports for O Tempo newspaper, in Belo Horizonte. By the way, a specific multidisciplinary repertoire, in addition to curiosity and interest in subjects that spillover from the professional kitchen to the field and industry.

IN SERVICE OF WHOM?

In a country with more and more famished people, making hotlists of bars and restaurants and teaching cooking techniques for ingredients seems frivolous to many readers. "The cultural itinerary always had a large space in the news, because service is very important in journalism. Gastronomic journalism had to be the service of restaurants: where to go, what to eat", contextualizes Lobão, who was part of Veja Comer & Beber8 and had a gastronomy magazine, named Chef.

For Torrente, the main function of food journalism is “to help people to eat better”, and he identifies the restaurant recommendation and presentation service as the main content. With small newsrooms even in large media vehicles, journalists are used to season press releases to relieve their work hours and fill up the homepage with new notes and articles. "When you receive a material that is chewed over and has beautiful photos, clearly the work gets simpler. Those who have more economic power are more likely to gain space in the media," said Torrente. The opposite of the current labor conditions seems like a distant dream for any section of major newspapers today: having the budget, time, and availability to investigate topics and move around the city to discover subjects and places.

"Journalism is the supervisory entity of the public power and needs to guarantee polyphony to the debate. To bring the service, but also confront public affairs, and to defend people’s interests, not companies. In practice, food journalism is done less beautifully and is more likely a gastronomic social column", criticizes Lobão.

Rocha also defends that the scope of food journalism must be broader: "There is no way to think about creating journalistic content in gastronomy today without talking about food sovereignty, public policies aimed at food matters and the high use of pesticides in Brazil." This does not mean that these are the central issues of all agendas, but that they modulate the angle and tone of reports: nothing is created in a vacuum, everything has an origin, a consequence, an intention.

Matioli advocates a similar approach. "I see a fundamental role in food journalism as the guardian of the country's food culture, to bring people closer to the kitchen back again and make them understand the role of food, nourishment, and food culture ingredients in their lives and society."

Walking this line of recognition of food journalism as part of cultural journalism, I consider this summary published by Bori press agency in August to be a good starting point:

• Food systems based on monocultures and distribution concentrated in few companies can be even more harmful in the context of the pandemic;

• Agribusiness production records do not guarantee increased food security in Brazil;

• Open markets, small businesses, and family farming are solutions with the potential to create healthy and sustainable systems.

When faced with these statements, a journalist has to make a stand. The clearer it is for the reader which premises the journalist started from, the more journalism there is on that page.

Even if the agenda seems innocent, there are many choices and positions made when covering food, cooking, and gastronomy – and gastronomy journalism will not move on as long as it tries to pretend to be impartial.

Many thanks to Andrea Torrente, Guilherme Lobão, Luciana Fróes, Rafael Rocha, and Victor Matioli for the time they took to talk to me. And to Luiza Fecarotta, who made herself available, but couldn't reply to me in time.

THANK YOU FOR READING LOW HEAT

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