Fertile ground

Pedro Méndez paddles a canoe-load of freshly-picked vegetables through the canals of Xochimilco. A taxi delivers the harvest to Luis Jhon’s home by 5:30 am, and Jhon shuttles the produce to Gabriela Cámara’s kitchen at Colonia Roma’s Contramar restaurant.

Image:Luz Montero

The shrimp and arugula salad at Contramar is made with greens from Xochimilco’s chinampas.

When you savor camarones y arúgula a la naranja in Contramar's chic dining room, you are eating arugula that traveled across the city from a chinampa, an island of aquatic plants and earth that Nahuatl tribes began farming hundreds of years ago. Southern Mexico City’s agricultural tradition once sustained the citizens of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlán: the chinampa-grown produce on your table today represents a worldwide back-to-local trend.

Cámara, a 32-year-old Mexico City empresaria who owns four eateries and bars, recently started buying from Productos de la Chinampa, the collective of Xochimilco farmers that Jhon promotes.

“The difference [in quality] is just very, very obvious,”

Cámara says of Productos de la Chinampa. She’s serving a “superior” flavor while “helping to maintain an extraordinary part of the city.”

Slow Food Values

With 86,000 members in 130 countries, Slow Food's guiding “eco-gastronomic” philosophy emphasizes the connection between what you eat and drink and where it comes from. Slow Food promotes local food that is “good, clean, and fair.” Human health, human rights, the survival of the planet, and the simple chance to really enjoy what you put in your mouth depends on it, argues the movement’s Italian founder, Carlo Petrini.

Slow Food held its international congress in Puebla last November, the first time it had left Europe since its 1989 inception. There, Cámara met Karina Morales, a recent graduate of Slow Food's University of Gastrononmic Sciences in Italy. Morales now consults for Cámara’s restaurants, coaching her and her chefs on the application of Slow Food principles: shortening the distribution chain and promoting small-scale, local producers to preserve cultural traditions and protect biodiversity.

Ruth Alegria, a straight-talking foodie from New York, points to Mexico’s rich gastronomic history and vibrant market customs, then to a modern culture that considers a cup of Ramen noodles a meal.

“People used to eat more green,” she says, serving me a glass of water mixed with minty chlorophyll at her Condesa apartment. “We’ve got to look after ourselves.”

Alegria, who ran Mexican restaurants in New York and New Jersey before moving to Mexico in 2004, keeps a food blog and leads culinary tours. She joined Mexico City’s Coyoacán Slow Food chapter (the country’s first) before teaming with Cámara to start the Condesa/Roma convivium (local chapter), closer to where many expats live. They launched with their first soirée last October.

“A great many people who join just want to go to the social events,” she says. “The leaders have to compel different projects that will benefit producers and consumers …and the earth.”

Living up to Slow Food

The challenges inherent in Slow Food's “local first” mission aren’t lost on the group’s supporters. Luis Jhon says he isn’t about to give up Coca-Cola, and Cámara says, “I’m not against trade and getting truffles from the north of Italy.”

She points out the complicated relationship between socioeconomic status and nutrition, aware that the vast majority of Mexicans can’t afford to eat in her restaurants. implies, making Slow Food choices takes time.

But, says Ruth, Slow Food’s principles are good guides: she hopes to organize a weekly tianguis (market) of local products in the Condesa area, create more links between local producers and restaurants, and sponsor more educational events.

Challenges to growth

Slow Food first took root in Mexico in 1997, when Carlo Petrini asked friend and fellow journalist-turned-gastronome Giorgio De Angeli to introduce the concept here.

De Angeli and his wife, Alicia, have authored numerous Mexican recipe collections and founded El Tajín restaurant in Coyoacán. De Angeli, a Ph.D. in economics, believes that restaurants are the cornerstone of the movement. “Chefs form gastronomic opinion,” he explained over lunch one afternoon at El Tajín. As we savored spoonfuls of lightly sautéed escamoles (ant larvae) from Hidalgo, De Angeli pointed out the biggest barrier to Slow Food’s growth: Unlike multinationals like Nestlé, “small producers are not constant.” When El Tajín’s soft-shell crab supplier in Veracruz doesn’t have any, the kitchen has to change plans on the fly.

Two days after our lunch, De Angeli explained this to a room full of small producers at a meeting of the Grupo Mexicano de Antropología de la Alimentación at UNAM.

A woman who runs a Michoacán trout farm asked how she could improve her business. De Angeli replied that two obstacles for restaurateurs who buy from small producers are dealing with an unsteady supply chain and producers who, not being registered with Hacienda, can’t give a receipt.

Lessons learned

Luis Jhon credits Gustavo Muñoz, a member of Slow Food Coyoacán and one of the owners of Los Danzantes restaurant, for teaching him the key to supplying restaurants: steady, on-time delivery of high quality products.

For Xochimilco farmers, these lessons are opening new distribution and marketing channels. Seven high-profile restaurants, including those belonging to Cámara, send Productos de La Chinampa their grocery lists for squash, tomatoes, tortilla masa, and arugula.

This incipient conversation between local producers and Mexico City chefs will benefit all of us who like to eat.

As Gabriela Cámara says, “Good food is based on good ingredients.

JOIN IN: There are 11 Slow Food conviviums and 1200 members in Mexico. To join the one nearest you, sign up through www.slowfood.com.