Mongabay Series: Forests of the World
In a small basement in Bogota’s Chapinero district, navigating the winds of political dysphoria and the widespread uncertainty that have characterized the year around the world, a startup is taking advantage of the enthusiasm of scarce food to create exchange networks that maximize Colombia. populations and ecosystems in which they live.
In the process, it expands the alphabet with which the culinary life of the country is written. The corporate is called Mucho and commits to answering a question: what is Colombia’s?
“The superficial abundance of supermarkets masks our reality,” his website says. “We don’t eat what’s around us. Our megadiversity has not yet reached our tables. “
In just over two years, Much has done much to correct this, achieving the fantastic double feat of building chains of origin for the forgotten ingredients of Colombian Big Yonder while instilled an appetite for them in the country’s capital.
Mucho’s pantry products come from 16 of Colombia’s 32 departments and come with pieces such as black corn arepas, Green Pepper from the Putumayo River, shipwreck trapped on the Chocó line, acai-like jabuticaba and Pacific borage wild fruit pulp, a mythical aphrodisiac.
The way to perceive The good fortune of Mucho is to perceive Colombia. The colossal Andes, a stone column that springs from the southern summit of South America, branch into no less than 3 mountain levels at its entrance to Colombia, making an entire mountainous country, like a New World Switzerland, tropical forests that rival those of Brazil.
More than a hundred other indigenous groups have evolved in the gaps of this geography, which, in combination with the descendants of Africans and Europeans, speak several dozen languages.
This topography is a blessing or a curse for the riches of the jungle and for humans looking to live off them, a legacy that the country is still learning to exploit, which produces incredible diversity, but makes shipping twisted and also mutual. understanding, while cultural divisions deepen geological divisions. Throughout modernity, forests have sometimes been subjected to a booming economy, serial extraction of one product after another.
After part of a century of war, there is a new opportunity in Colombia.
“Building chains of origin is a matter of meeting humans and moving on to positions that I hadn’t been to pass personally and that other people who buy us can’t pass,” Juliana Zurate, ceo founder of Mucho, said in an interview with Mongabay. . ” It allows us to be more informed about the intelligent and evil life in the jungle: evil is war, mining, all the things we read. It’s very touching and very difficult, and it gives you a lot of sense of commitment. “
Much is committed to paying at least 60% of retail value to producers, approximately double the cost of farmers. Much is still a young man, it was founded at the end of 2018 and has an effective workforce of eight, but the company has already done so. buys for more than $100,000 in food in Colombian remnants: the equivalent of about 410 monthly minimum wages. At any given time, it links with more than 60 suppliers to bring their products to market.
To a large extent, a proposal like Mucho’s considers the graceful face of globalization that reaches colombia’s remote communities, as the hard has shaken them for decades with its insatiable appetite for products such as coca and gold that invariably result in high-priced issues of origin. .
The concept of Zurate’s exchange is decidedly horizontal. ” We create in them a spark so that other things are possible, and they create that spark in us,” he said.
Juliana Zurate ran a startup of the same name in London before returning to Colombia, her motherland. In the UK, operations were simpler: Much was necessarily an app that measured users’ personal tastes and provided the exact ingredients for ready-to-use meal plans, all from established stores like Waitrose Duchy Organic.
“I entered the food area with the consultation of how to make better decisions, through a deep love of food, for aesthetics,” Zurate said. “What is the food in terms of health, durability and taste that I can eat with money?Do I have?”
With the signing of the peace treaty in Colombia in 2016, Zurate began to be attracted to the country that begat him, was hired to write about The Colombian Culinary Heritage for Vice Media and discovered along the way not only lost ingredients, but entire worlds. .
“With cassava, for example, it is the diary of one of the first travelers, a Spanish conqueror from the Choc Region,” said Zurate, who found the ancient document while researching an article on the link between biodiversity and languages. “There were a few pages about what the Yurumanguo ate, “referring to others whose language is now extinct. “They ate the leaf and not the root. But it took them so long to figure out how to eat the leaf. [They] now eat it in Africa, because the plant has traveled.
A curry recipe for cassava leaves would seem in the application of much in Colombia, but between the excitement of the discovery and launch of the application, Zurate and his team cross a valley of logistics. “We are not committed to building the chains of origin. “Zurate said.
But soon after, she and her partners had accessed Hermes’ accomplices in the depths of Colombia.
Practical disorders are, more than anything, as intractable as they are exciting.
“Building a chain of sources is building a story about how humanity and food travel,” Zurate said, referring to places visited more easily than in the past. “These worlds pre-Uber, as now, we all get in someone else’s car, yet they got on someone else’s boat, because that’s how you get there. “
Fondo Acción, a non-profit organization with great delight in environmentally sound progression in Colombia, has become the first institutional investor of Mucho through FIMI, its new vehicle for effect on investment.
Camila Zambrano, rural sustainability coordinator at Fondo Acción, said in an interview with Mongabay “The Chains of Origin of the Bottleneck”. the drive wheels deviated and communities had to fend for themselves. They needed a marketing arm.
“We thought we were building a guilty admissions platform and Much gave the impression at the right time. “Zambrano said. ” What a for-profit player needed, which can be economically viable and reinvest with the same philosophy. “
Today, Much relies on long-standing paintings by organizations such as the International Action and Conservation Fund to expand capacity in remote communities. Much now connects these sustainable resource products with the call of peoples that stimulates through storytelling and images.
The promise of a company like Mucho is difficult to exaggerate, the company’s modus operandi contributes to at least 12 of the 17 sustainable progression goals: poverty, hunger, innovation, inequality, life on land and in water, among others. By launching an invitation to explore the country in our palaces, Mucho reports a more invigorating national consciousness, a sense of country that Colombians can support.
Mucho is not the only Colombian company that works with ecologically delicate food as a form of national construction; For thirteen years, Selva Nevada has been creating a market for the wild tropical culmination by turning them into ice. Like Much, but with more delight in and simplified inventory, Selva Nevada establishes industrial agreements with associations of small producers in network for non-wood forest products. His style links livelihoods with smart environmental outcomes, with signed conservation agreements that keep forests in place.
The Catalog of Selva Nevada is full of culminations that you have probably never heard of, aromas such as araz, corozo, camu camu, gulupa. Developing a flavor for them is part of the fun, and an extensive family of gourmets at the forefront of the forest in Colombia jumped with either foot.
“A chef likes to experiment. They helped us introduce those flavors into urban society,” Catalina Alvarez, executive director of Selva Nevada and one of its founders, said in an interview.
Selva Nevada and Mucho are from a broader wave that includes restaurants such as Mini Mal, Salvo Patria and Mesa Franca that have placed Bogotá on the menu of the most demanding gourmets, serving dishes such as coca ramen a tucup, highly spiced yuca brava sauce, spoken in sacred tones like the ‘jungle miso’.
In early 2020, when Colombia collapsed to become one of the longest pandemic closures in the world, Selva Nevada was particularly vulnerable as a company that transports perishable products across geographical extensions. Restaurants and hotels, which in the past accounted for 70% of Selva Nevada’s sales, have been closed for nearly five months. The company mobilized a hercical effort, reinventing itself, among other things, by deploying an ice cream truck and selling directly online to customers.
“Many of the projects we presented during the lockout will have a widespread effect,” Alvarez said. “But for now, it’s about staying afloat. To start a business, you have to think long-term. “. Otherwise, it’s easy to lose your enthusiasm. “
But Selva Nevada is driven by something bigger than its old, long-term earnings.
“We don’t even know which forests they still house,” Elvarez said. “We harvest the most apparent, the culmination, but insects, other plants . . . nobody knows yet. We bought time in the jungle so the studios can do it. “
Few things obviously speak more of our ecological integration than food. We take a piece to our mouths and it becomes us. Where do we become one? A moment ago, there were separate objects, two or more other genetic flows, and now the barriers have collapsed and there is only fodder for new processes, new cells.
If we pass more upstream, we soon realize that the food we eat comes to us in a network of stories that spread all over the world and delve into history as deeply as you can imagine.
As such, food is the maximum non-unusual position of pleasure, but it is also a position of brilliant reflection. Food is full of meaning and nutrients, imbued with social and environmental implications.
When asked which of Much’s achievements he liked best, Zurate returns to curiosity: “I’m proud of the questions we ask about food. “
This appetite is part of a worldwide trend.
“Find out where the food is coming from and where it’s going; perhaps this wisdom can be transformed into a type of flavor enhancer,” wrote Olafur Eliasson in an essay on René Redzepi de Noma, the author of the taste of 21st-century locavorism. and Much uses and produces this sensitivity, elevating food to a form of aesthetic and ethical satisfaction, exposing the cultural meanings that food can have in Colombia. They respond perfectly to Claude Lévi-Strauss’s mandate that food should not only be smart to eat. , but also smart to think.
It’s a conviction.
“Mixing so many dots makes it very, very difficult to move those products, which is almost not commercially desirable,” he said. “It remains if we can do it sustainably. You have to do it because you have the political will, because there’s a purpose. Cash would be long-term, but we have to think it has a price for the country in terms of development, or for us as humans in terms of laughter and cultural diversity.
“We’re getting messages from other people,” I tried macambo-caa and replaced my life. I didn’t know it existed, where it came from here. “There are so many questions, because other people are baffled,” he said. Zurate. ” As a country in biodiversity, it is simply infinite. “
Headline image: Cupuau, another Amazonian fruit from Selva Nevada, grown in Colombia City through a networked organization that establishes plantations that combine cupuau in an awning that, along with other wood and rubber trees, with hens cross the forest floor for soil biology Photography courtesy of Selva Nevada.
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