Finding appreciation: where does our food come from?!

By: Emily (Emilia)

9/18/10

KEY WORDS: Food, Sustainability, Coffee, Work

Words in green: translated in the Spanish blog!

Imagine waking up at the crack of dawn with just enough time to stuff your tummy with a breakfast that will need to sustain you through the day. A day full of 25ft-tree shimmying, orange tree shaking, away-from-wasp running, bamboo tree planting, 45˚-slope scaling, garden weeding, banana tree hacking, cacao bean harvesting, coffee cherry picking, coffee cherry peeling, slimy coffee bean soaking, clean coffee bean drying, dried coffee bean shelling, green coffee bean roasting, roasted coffee bean grinding, coffee making, cow milking, milk boiling, milk and sugar to coffee adding, and café con leche drinking…the next morning anyway.

Though all the activities we are partaking in here at La Hesperia are exciting and worthy of note, this blog is about, “where does our food come from?!” So I will tell you ladies and gents, I have found the source! Today is Saturday, a most-often day off from work at home in the United States. However, when you are growing, harvesting, and milking your food and drink on your own land, a day off means no food or drink that day. Therefore, much to the disbelief of us who have stores at which we can buy weeks–worth of provisions, there is always work to do in order that we may have that food on the shelves and that milk in the refrigerator.

So what did I spend my day doing? COFFEE! You know that feeling when your alarm goes off in the morning and you first open your eyes, and as badly as you don’t want to get out of bed, you remember the automatic timer you set on your 12-cup CoffeeMate*, and thus all is well. The rich smell of Columbian roast, as it’s nutty, sweet nostalgic sensations rush through your veins before you even taste it you are summoned from your cozy night past.

Now imagine that same experience, but add 5 years and a few days to the process. Yes, I said 5 years! That is how long it takes for a coffee tree to become mature enough to use the fruit, the coffee beans that is. Then, in order to produce a single pound of coffee you need to pick nearly 20 trees worth of what are called cherries, which look like hard, red, quarter-sized, oval balls. This picking process took 4 people an afternoon’s worth of work. On the next afternoon, 12 people worked together grinding the cherries through a 200-year-old machine that somehow peels the cherry off the slimy been. These beans then go into a bowl of water to soak over night and, in the morning, are rinsed and laid to dry. After two days of drying we were able to attain our 1-pound of useable, ground coffee grains. Today, 5 of us spent 2 hours grinding the peels off the beans in a 100-year-old grinding contraption that somehow cracks the extremely thin, transparent shells of the bean without crushing the bean itself. Next, bean and shell can only be separated by blowing the light, pastry-like peels into the wind, this takes another hour or so. The next 2 hours were spent roasting the beans in two separate pans. A final 3 hours quietly slipped by as we focused our ears to the beans crackling and crushing into powder. By the end of the 8-hour period, the group had dwindled to 2 people with tired biceps, tight hamstrings, sweaty foreheads, and salivating pallets. I will never appreciate a cup of coffee in quite the same way.

As I sat back against the stove with my cup of café con leche that I was given as a reward for my hard work, I took in my surroundings. Soledad, the reserve cook who had been preaching for the last 5 hours or so, “mas trabajas y nesecitas mas patiencia,” meaning much work and you need much patients, was now stirring a large pot of milk she had just taken from the farm cow. Piotr, a fellow volunteer and my sole comrade at the end of our grinding process, was sitting in front of me on our grinding bench sipping his hot milk. A quiet, post-drizzle breeze brought floral-scented and dewy air through the outdoor kitchen. And a low mist poured over the rolling mountains of the cloud forest and the Andes that surrounded us. I was at complete ease, fully and truly comforted, and for the first time, by just a little coffee warm in belly.