muddled in shallow cups with fresh limes and plenty of sugar. mike and I spent the week swimming in a vat of the better stuff – much like flies caught in a deep pot of chestnut honey, perhaps scented with eucalyptus, shaved vanilla, and some kind of exotic citrus. like the fly, I wasn’t sure if it was a curse or just great luck.

in my own humble opinion I think that is the splendid knife that brazil seems to teeter on – is it a cursed land? or a land of great fortune? bright futures, song and dance, or unrequited demons…?

I had only ten days and sliced through only a shallow inch of brazil’s great carpet of land but what I came across was a patchwork of paradoxes. and not just a few – an unmistakable, continual pattern of opposing realities.

a few examples: brazil is home to one of the greatest divides between rich and poor anywhere, yet this country is the first of its size and stature to unbridle itself of the tyranny of oil dependence and literally leads the world in the field of biofuel. brazil’s cosmopolitan urban centers are home to some of the bloodiest violence this side of iraq: the favela, or slums, that outline most of its cities are locked in a cocaine-fueled war of drastic proportion – yet brazil has some of the highest voter turnout percentages on the globe. and one of my favorite paradoxes: in december of 1968, grammy award-winning singer-songwriter gilberto gil was thrown in jail and eventually exiled for “antigovernment activity” – yet – he is now the country’s minister of culture. I mean – what a place.

so the vita crew and I dropped right into the middle of this land of wonder – são paulo – one of the largest seething clusters of body, guns, culture, crack, bossa nova, and noise ever built – and yet in a matter of hours we were far away in an idyllic eden – swinging in hammocks – picking limes directly from the tree.



chapter 2. the golden valley of coffee. carmo de minas.


things in carmo de minas are good. really good. the land is fertile, maybe almost obscenely fertile. mangos, bananas, limes, deep-hued lettuces, blushing tomatoes, and curving laughing fields of coffee cling to the plump-breasted fat hills. dots of sunshine – a distinct variety of coffee called yellow bourbon that tastes like candy when picked bright yellow – decorate the coffee trees. happy cows graze, flocks of wild parrots flit, and bubbling fresh springwater is best when sucked through a banana leaf folded into a primitive straw.

and the coffee – mon dieu – the coffee is rich and deep and filled with butterscotch – (that is about as fluttery as I will get with coffee descriptions) – and as you stroll into the local cooperative that stores and sorts and sells the bulk of the beans from the valley you see progress and pride written in big letters. but go back ten years and things look different.

picture sergio dias, a big-eyed and passionate carmo native, striding across a vast ominous parking lot on first avenue in seattle (yep: starbucks world headquarters) – and paint in your mind a picture of starbuck’s top coffee buyer (pencil in a grimace – make the buyer frightfully intimidating in your mind’s eye) – across the deep conference table sits sergio with an armful of green beans – and then the verdict. as if it came hurtling down from mount olympus…

“this is shit”

and poor sergio had to return to his brothers and cousins, friends and fellow brazilians and tell them: “the road ahead is long and steep.” that the coffee of brazil had gotten a bad name for a reason – their practices were outdated, their trees were undernourished. they were overproducing and underdelivering – essentially: killing the beans. if they wanted to enter the big tent of specialty coffee  – things were going to have to change – drastically.

and in ten short years: they have. triumphantly. the new cooperative headquarters holds gleaming and churning flying gears of machines that carefully strip the parchment, sort the beans to a hair’s width, bag, and stack stack stack towers of coffee. anxious coffee – ready to pounce – awaiting the call from italy, japan, germany, seattle.

caffe vita + one pot on location: brazil I from hebb on Vimeo.

now illy café – the italian roasting giant – also loves brazil – they have championed brazil – and like a great hawk they carefully watch from an overhanging tree for the best beans – flash of feathers, some claws, and the bags head back to italy. and I must admit – to their credit – illy has helped regions like carmo – helped them almost as much as our hero sergio. and all of a sudden illy’s annual brazil award started falling to farmers from carmo de minas – year after year. and the other academy awards of coffee – the cup of excellence – well, carmo is kicking everyone’s ass in that competition as well. so sergio – we sing your praises. and illy – we give you a respectful nod.

caffe vita + one pot on location: brazil II from hebb on Vimeo.

 

feijoada is the national dish of brazil – a hearty black bean stew filled with several kinds of sausage, some pork shoulder, some dried beef, and as many of the less desirable cuts you can stuff in (think snout and tail). it is a dish eaten by every segment of brazilian society – gracing the president’s table monthly, cooked in the impoverished favelas, and even in far-flung amazonian villages. but its origins were not so cosmopolitan.

brazil is one of the most culturally diverse places on the planet – why? well, many reasons – but one scar burns bright:

“For sheer quantity of slaves, Brazil takes the cake. Over a two hundred year period, about three million Africans were brought here to work in private coffee kingdoms. By comparison only a half a million were brought to North America.”

—from The Devil’s Cup by Stewart Lee Allen

this savory dish was what you would have found on the humble stoves of those slaves. but instead of select cuts of calabreza and the delectable sausage called paio – back in those days a more likely ragtag stew of ears, trotters, snouts, and tails would have been simmering – essentially any piece of the pig that otherwise would have been discarded by the wealthy plantation owners. these cuts of meat require long, slow cooking – I am picturing a continuous stew maybe like that french peasant dish that also migrated to the big city – that dish of many: pot-au-feu.

caffe vita + one pot on location: brazil III from hebb on Vimeo.

 

so of course we cooked feijoada. the sun was high in the sky, bouncing about like a cheerleader, and much to my chagrin I was surrounded by three generations of high-cheekboned beauties – arm in arm in the small but perfect kitchen. and truth be told I was mostly observing.

precise cuts were made on five distinct kinds of sausage – ears and tails were slowly simmered in heavily salted water – the dried beef had soaked for forty-eight hours to leach off the sodium. black beans sat resting in an overnight bath of springwater. bacon and some pork rump were chopped into heavy fists. and then of course there was cachaca – the spirit of brazil – and the caipirinhas (again: add rum to much ice, freshly picked limes, sugar, mash it to bits) slid easily down our throats.

caffe vita + one pot on location: brazil IIII from hebb on Vimeo.

 

(“cachaca is a happy drink – you never drink it alone – it is for celebrating life – it is how we celebrate life in brazil” says the man with the harley embroidered leather jacket)

at around three in the afternoon the farmers arrived, dressed in their sunday best. these weren’t hobbyists – the lines of the sun were creased into their generous smiles. a seventy-year-old widower and her son, a crazy-eyed organic practitioner with wild locks of silver hair, more coffee-growing cousins than you could count, the town banker, the coffee tester from the local cooperative – all walked a casual path across the drying porches. the freshly picked coffee giving off a smell of warm hay – the sound of rakes clicking in the background.

after an echo chamber of warm hugs – the intention of the meal was announced – gentle warm eyes looked up at me and mike and daniel from caffé vita. we were certainly welcome in this enclave.

without much more than a toast, heavy dishes of feijoada were passed – I learned that brazilians don’t waste much time when food is afoot – the table seemed to bow slightly in the middle – happily – brazilians are like children on christmas when presented with this deep black delicious mush – and immediately – the talk began. I almost forgot: you must serve feijoada with white rice, toasted manioc flour, orange segments (the navel orange hails from bahia), and quickly cooked collard greens.

I wanted to know about the favelas – everything seemed lovely in carmo de minas – this community has bonded together and shared information – they have built a state-of-the-art cooperative – they are focused on quality of beans and quality of life – there was a natural conviviality to this gathering I didn’t see in guatemala – it was clear that they shared food and drink and culture on a regular basis. but how did they feel about the two towering cities (são paulo and rio) –each only three miles away and host to some of the most intense urban violence in the world.

eyes looked into the distance – and heads nodded gravely – and the elder at the table, sergio’s father, made the following statement:

“many years ago the government stopped supporting the coffee industry – and then the market crashed – people immigrated to the cities – many people – too many people – and the favelas grew and grew – and then coca and other drugs took over…”

but were these gentle and sincere farmers making buckets of money out here in shangri-la and quietly turning a blind eye to the rest of the country?

“here is a nice place to live – but we don’t make much money – no one is getting rich growing coffee here”

“it is important for coffee buyers to come here and see the relationship that exists between our workers and the owners – these are not large coffee farms – we need to treat each other like family – we depend upon one another”

and what about globalization – how did they feel about america – did they see our country’s successes and our many failures as a cautionary tale?

“we have worked hard to improve our coffee. we want it to be appreciated. we want a good price for our coffee. we are happy to do business with america. we like hollywood. we like levi’s. ”

I was not going to get the raised voices and shifty looks and the general tension that had mounted at the table in guatemala – these farmers and the pickers at the table were forward-thinking, they were in lockstep – this was their home – this was where they would watch their grandchildren grow tall and they seemed plainly excited about the strengthening of the global market. there was no guerrilla violence edging in on their farms – there was not a gun in sight – three months before we had arrived in guatemala there had been a bloody attack on one of the farms we’d visited – thirty pickers were massacred – a scene we associate with sierra leone and valuable commodities like diamonds – not people simply growing and selling a humble bean. but this community in the hills of sul de minas felt solid. and in the best possible way – rather unexciting.

so I decided to head to the city and see what the coffee crash had caused – most of us have seen the gut-wrenching movie city of god – was the imagery that scratched itself into our dreams genuine? was it really that dark in sunny brazil?



chapter 4. ghosts of a tormented past.  


rio de janeiro. famous for its intense beauty, half naked beaches, and boiling gang violence. untold amounts of cocaine surge through rio’s poorer districts – I wouldn’t be being overly dramatic if I underscored the situation as an all-out bloodbath between the gangs and the b.o.p.a. (or military police force). it isn’t uncommon for an armored truck to drive the streets of the favelas spraying bullets blindly in every direction – slaughtering anonymously. if you can – stop here for a moment. i mean imagine pulling the trigger – not looking – protected behind steel – slaying whichever man, woman, or child who happens to be in your path. coming from seattle, washington, I felt like alice walking through the looking glass.

and perhaps stupidly I wanted in. I had been held in the embrace of carmo de minas for a week – watching the cherry-sweet coffee berries go from tree to pulping machine to drying porch and ultimately to generous cup. I met a thriving community – a family of farmers and pickers and cows and parrots – but the same lovely bean is also responsible for these volatile slums – coffee is part of the story. not only did coffee bring the slaves across the waters – it is part of the reason these bright-eyed and passionate brazilians are stuffed into shoe boxes – in a way – trading one mild stimulant for a much darker – more dangerous – one.

(more soon)

 

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