Davie and I have been reading Michael
Pollen's book The Omnivore's Dilemma recently, and it got us
thinking about the stark differences between farms in the US and
farms in Nicaragua.
When I think of a farm, I imagine a
pastoral scene with chickens and cows and horses and a big red barn
and rolling fields stretching towards the horizon growing a whole
host of different produce. In his book, Pollen points out that the
majority of American farms no longer sustain anywhere near this much
diversity; most American farms are gigantic swaths of land that grow
one of two crops: corn or soybeans. Diversified family farms, Pollen
says, are a thing of the past in the US.
Here in Nicaragua, this is certainly
not the case. I can't speak for all parts of Nicaragua, but in our
area, farms are only small, family-owned, and diverse. North of
Esteli you find big tobacco plantations and south of us there are
enormous rice farms, but around San Nicolas these kinds of big-scale
farms just don't exist.
Agriculture is definitely the primary
industry in this pocket of Nicaragua, but maybe because of the dry,
rocky soil or maybe because of the general poverty of the area, small
family farms still reign here. Most farms have chickens, pigs, cows,
and horses. Farmers grow a whole host of crops on the plots of land
that have been in their families' hands for generations: beans, corn,
millet, onions, potatoes, and fruit trees. Many of the seeds that
they plant have also been in their families for years. Rather than
buying sterilized seeds from a big company like Monsanto every year,
Nicaraguan farmers just save the beans or corn from their last
planting season and plant those seeds again, year after year, passing
them down for generations. They call these seeds “criollos.”
In the US's industrial food system, the
majority of farmers can't eat what they produce; they sell their corn
and soybeans to mills, and their products eventually end up in the
hands of big companies who turn the corn and soybeans into processed
foods that show up on the shelves of the grocery store. Here, on the
other hand, farmers tend to eat only what they produce. Most farmers
around here are subsistence farmers; their families eat the corn and
beans that they produce and maybe sell some of it locally, but
because their leftover disposable income is so small, they can't
afford to buy food that they haven't produced. This is, of course, a
much healthier and more environmentally sustainable system, but it
also leaves these farmers at the whim of nature, with no money saved
up as a safeguard against starvation. (See this blog). Neither situation is ideal.
Because of this tradition of
subsistence farming, the Nicaraguan diet is based solely on grains
and vegetables that farmers grow in Nicaragua. (Processed chips and
soft drinks are new in the campo; people still eat very few foods
that didn't just come from a plant or animal). For this reason,
Nicaragua is still a corn-based culture instead of a wheat-based
culture like the US and many European countries.* Nicaraguan breads
and cookies are all made out of corn grown on family farms. Early in
the morning in San Nicolas, you see little kids carrying big tubs of
corn to one of the mills in town so that their families can make
tortillas for the day out of corn flour.
It wasn't until recently, in fact, that
people around here even started growing vegetables or eating rice. As
recently as 30 years ago, people ate only beans, corn tortillas,
plantains, eggs, cheese, and maybe the occasional chicken or pork
when they killed an animal for a special occasion.
Compared to the crowded feedlots and
dirty slaughterhouses in the US that Pollen describes in his book,
Nicaraguan animals have it good. Cows graze the rolling hills around
San Nicolas and chickens get to run around all day, in and out of
people's houses, pen-free. Even in town, lots of people keep chickens
and pigs – pigs are always snorting their way up and down the San
Nicolas streets. People milk their cows and harvest eggs from their
chickens until they're too old, and then they kill them and eat them.
I wouldn't say the tough “pollo indio” that comes from these
chickens is my favorite kind of meat, but it is certainly efficient,
turning laying chickens into meat.
Because of the wholeness of the
Nicaraguan diet, it is far easier here to eat in a healthy,
sustainable way that doesn't patronize big businesses and processed
food that traveled hundred of miles to reach your plate. At the
family-owned convenience stores in town (there is no grocery store),
we buy “huevos de amor” (literally, “love eggs”), which are
eggs laid by chickens in town. In the US, you pay more money for this
kind of product; here, huevos de amor are cheaper than the white eggs
in a carton that have been transported from far-flung mass farms.
Davie has recently started making his
own mozzarella cheese, and we were surprised to discover how easy it
is here to find the ingredients to make cheese. Because people here
make cheese in their homes every day instead of buying it from a
grocery store, you can easily buy rennet tablets at any tiny
convenience store for seven cents. Then, Davie goes to our neighbors'
and buys a gallon of fresh milk that came from their cows that very
morning, and he makes cheese the same day.
In the US, this kind of organic,
sustainable food is part of a trendy, expensive, hipstery subculture.
Here, eating whole, unprocessed, homemade foods is the norm. I'm not
trying to say that this makes Nicaraguans somehow morally superior to
US Americans – I know that if Nicaraguans had the money to eat and
produce processed foods, they probably would. But it does make me
realize how messed up the American food system is, when processed
foods that come from far away places are somehow much cheaper than
food that is, if labels are to be believed, “organic” and
“sustainable.”
*Although, with the advent of processed
foods made out of corn, you could easily argue that the US is really
a corn-based culture now too.
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