Two emails about food, #1

Dear Seth,

I should have guessed that easternmost point in the Americas is the Latin equivalent of the world’s biggest ball of twine. Unfortunately, I insisted on this visit, and we dealt with a lot of traffic to get there, so now it’s Giovanna’s turn to choose an activity. 

Proximity to Africa is why Natal, my temporary home, was briefly the busiest airport in the world. During World War 2, Natal’s US airbase handled a plane every three minutes to supply Patton in Africa. The airbase doubled the population of the city and entrenched a lot of US customs (and children) in this corner of Brazil.  If the locals decide to stop at a crosswalk, they put on their blinkers, and then a pedestrian gives a thumbs up. The driver responds with one. Everyone throws thumbs up everywhere, when in America one might nod or wave. They picked up the gesture from American pilots 80 years ago.

We spent a holiday weekend in the city of Jão Pessao, (literal translation: Joe Person) home of Ponta Seixas, the eastern tip of Brazil’s nose. It’s closer to Africa than to some parts of Brazil. According to my guidebook, the point is 2,200km from Africa, “twice the distance to Rio Grande do Sul” but the closest African coast I could find with Google Maps was 2,900km.

The Brazilians marked the Easternmost point with a stone pillar inscribed with a poem about the land evolving, next to a bike path that had eroded into the sea. A barbed wire fence to keep the riffraff from falling off the edge had fallen off the edge. 

Jungle flora framed the cliff, leaves splitting and fighting for sun, and beyond their blades the ocean faded from turquoise to blue to horizon, just a normal old ocean, unfathomable, wet. 

Twenty feet into the continent, vendors had erected a schlocky development in the attitude of a McDonald’s Playplace, with plastic statues of Brazilian music legends, a jungle gym, and keychain-level souvenirs. Kids crawled all over and a live accordion player played what must be Brazilian dad rock, based on the reaction of the dads. A woman in a frock served us a sample shot of cachaça, (I puckered) which we chased with fresh coconuts. After eating the coconut meat, we discarded the husks in a pile of punctured coconuts, each rattling with a neon stripe to clarify why reusable straws in Portland have not eliminated the Great Pacific Garbage patch.

One of the plastic statues in the playground, next to the Brahma bull, was of this accordion-playing nerd in full grin and a buccaneer hat.

I assumed he was an offensive caricature, maybe the Brazilian equivalent of a lawn jockey, but it turns out he’s Luiz Gonzaga, Brazilian Elvis, long dead but still popular enough that we found an impersonator later that night.

In the 1950s Gonzaga popularized local, Northeastern dance music like Forró, and wore local folk costume while he played. The Portugeuse settled Jão Pessoa in 1585. Apparently these guys never moved on from the pirate hat.

A traveller’s easiest first impressions come from food. Maybe so many of our national stereotypes are food-related because one can encounter food without language or immersion. Even fluent speakers find it so hard to make sense of their own communities that “culture critic” is a job. Understanding a culture’s assumptions and values requires time, conversation, and observation. The tongue understands food without shaping a single new vowel. (Incidentally: ão really trips a stick in my spokes.)

Food does reveal clues about a country, especially its constraints. Northern European pickling traditions, including gifiltefish and rotten Icelandic shark, indicate how difficult it was to survive the winter. Westernized Chinese food cuts ingredients into tiny slices, to fry it fast and minimize fuel costs. (What do those recipes assume about labor?)

American cuisine at the very least assumes a corn subsidy and supply chains with cheap oil. My pandemic diet assumed a scarcity of ambition. It also assumed that money for takeout could not address any of my other needs ever in the future. Almost any cuisine indicates which ingredients used to be cheap.

Dinner in Jão Pessoa had what I like: large portions, cheap. The problem is, it’s a tropical country with a European culinary heritage, so I’m basically getting plates of fried hot dogs. I’ve never seen a happy cow in a jungle. European colonists in South American rainforests could be eating fruit and chocolate, look like Greek gods and laze around happy, but they insist on burning down jungles to graze miserable pigs and get fat on fried dough. Quiz: Papaya or sugar cane, go! The correct answer is papaya, and it’s healthier anyway. Instead they sell sugar cane for just enough cash to buy Spam. Brazil has one of the planet’s botanical marvels and they keep selling it for junk.

If one person owns lots of land, heaps of cash for sugarcane makes more sense than papayas and chocolate for everyone, also please do not complicate my very sensible economic analysis. 

We’re near the coast. Every third house in dirt-road villages has a hand-painted sign advertising shrimp. Often in front yards a man mends a a long rectangular net. Fishermen wade in the surf with the nets, closing in a circle. They drag the net to the beach and unpack a haul of shrimp, crab, and wriggling fish. 

The shrimp must be grown in aquaculture farms in the river somewhere, though. This area is major shrimp exporter.

After my plate of hot dogs, we drove a few hours into a rural area, and I saw healthy Brahama bulls and donkeys grazing on highway medians under palms. Maybe I was wrong about cows in jungles. Then I met a Texan who had the same complaint. Sugarcane fields cut squares into the treees.

In the dark, on our two hour drive home, we saw six big fires eating up trees.