Welcome to Out of the Kitchen, our ongoing exploration of the relationships that build and sustain the food industry. This year, we’re traveling the country to look at how sustainability has become a rapidly growing movement within the food world. Chefs at the forefront of this trend are introducing their patrons to local farms, fresh ingredients, and innovative dishes while farmers are educating chefs and consumers about where their food comes from and what it takes to grow the food served. Their practices and personal customer approaches provide a bigger impact to the community at large, hoping to create a better and more sustainable future for all.
Cuba in 2001 was in crisis. For over a decade, it had been suffering under the so-called Special Period, an age of crippling austerity after the Soviet Union fell apart and its subsidies and shipments of much-needed oil and food and vanished, leaving Cubans so hungry that animals from the Havana Zoo were known to disappear at night.
That's when Madelaine Vazquez Galvez published her first book, Ecological Cuisines of Cuba, detailing ways and recipes by which Cubans could eat sustainably for the first time in decades. In other words, she was trying to completely reinvent the Cuban palate. And by bringing a culinary education and appreciation for organic food to the population, she helped her customers and viewers experience better-tasting, better-for-them foods every time they cooked a meal. "I think that our spirit should connect with our health, and that of course has to connect with eating a certain way, and the techniques the farms that make our food use," Vazquez says.
Madelaine Vazquez discusses the history of the sustainable-food scene in Cuba while taking a stroll on friend Fernando Funes's farm, La Finca Marta.
She was well-placed for her future position as an advocate for sustainable cooking. Trained as a food engineer, Vazquez worked at the gastronomy department of the Ministry of Trade for 12 years. She founded the ecorestaurant Bambu in a botanical garden outside Havana, designed to demonstrate to the Cuban people how the rich biodiversity of the island could feed them, if they'd only try to learn how. "We didn't even have a garden at first–we had to collect all the fruits from the botanical garden over a year and cultivate them for the restaurant," she says.
Vazquez and her colleagues created a veritable organic buffet growing by the restaurant, loaded with celery, parsley, thyme, basil, marjoram, peppers, calendula, hibiscus, and even an apiary for honey. For lunch, they served vegetarian meals of cassava, corn, taro, rice, beans, pasta, mushrooms, and desserts made form algae and fruit and beet juices. They even made a sugar-free ice cream from sweet potatoes, juice and a little milk. All the while, they held workshops for regular people to learn how to eat organically and the benefits of going vegetarian. "We wanted to each them to improve their diets, that there was another way besides eating everything fried, as everyone did at the time," she says.
A tableful of sustainably grown foods are available for a luncheon at an open-air restaurant near an organoponico.
But it wasn't easy: "Convincing people to eat vegetables and fruits, and farmers to grow them instead of sugarcane, was very hard," Vazquez says. "People didn't want to change their natural habits."
Those habits were centuries in the making. When Cuba was first settled, the people who called it home cultivated grass-fed pork, and grew plants that were native to or well-suited to the sun-drenched island–taro, plaintains, bananas, cherimoya, guayaba, sweet potatoes–healthy both for themselves and for the land. But after the Cuban revolution, the badly inexperienced new government focused agricultural production on sugar to a greater extent than ever before, almost obsessively, trying desperately to raise capital for a country that had suddenly lost its primary benefactor, the United States. "People went to study and left the fields, and we cultivated only sugar cane," Vazquez says. "We ate only sugar, and not our wide variety of native fruits. And now our people don't know anything about our own native, Cuban fruits. After the revolution, our people ate sugar and white bread. pizza, fast food, sodas. Our palate is narrow."
So Vazquez wrote her first book, which became a bestseller. And in 2006 she went multimedia. For nine years, she starred in a cooking show on state television, teaching viewers how to use organically grown eggplants, okra, carrots, cabbage, cucumbers, beets, and herbs in their meals. She encouraged the spread of *organoponicos–*organic gardens that used traditional, sustainable methods to grow vegetables and fruits that people could use to feed themselves in urban areas. Along the way, she developed friendships with organic farmers like those at Finca Marta and Finca La China, where the sustainable methods and products she'd championed. Finca La China sits on a lake in La Lisa, in the far outskirts of Havana, which aims to eventually become a farm-to-table agrotourism site. "You'd go out and choose the fish you want yourself, and maybe even have the clients participate in catching and cleaning and cooking in a restaurant where everything's very fresh," says owner Hortencia Martinez del Valle.
Fried whitefish is a common Cuban dish, and farmers and fishermen have focused on more sustainable methods to feed the country seafood.
"She's getting training on how to raise animals with an eye toward their welfare," Vazquez says. "She wants them to live under humane conditions."
Vazquez is now the editor of a Cuban magazine devoted to encouraging solar energy, as well as the Havana consul of Slow Food International. Though she no longer appears on television, she still advocates cultivating organically, preserving traditional farming techniques, supporting farmers, and making sure the food Cubans eat is both healthy and tastes good. But when she thinks back over all her accomplishments, it's making a difference in her clients' lives that sticks out.
"I worked with this elderly student group for four or five years, and at the beginning they didn't even recognize carrots or beet roots," she says. "I showed them all these different cooking methods, how to cook okra or aubergines, maybe pineapples or cucumbers or cabbage. At first they didn't like any of it. By the end of our time, they were preparing cabbage soup and carrots all by themselves. And they told me: 'This is nice. This food is tasty.'"