Translator: Rômulo Santos Reviewer: Claudia Sander
A silent revolution happens, today, in many cities around the world.
The name of this revolution is: from plate to plate.
Ending the plate-to-plate cycle is transforming your own trash into food.
The composting of organic waste produces a high-quality fertilizer
which is excellent to be used in urban gardens.
Since 75 percent of the planet population live in cities,
providing a correct destination to trash that we produce is essential
to recover the health of the planet and the health of all of us.
Look at this: each Brazilian person produces 1kg of waste organic per day.
That means 200 millions of kilograms produced in Brazil each day.
We already have a Federal Law, the Solid Waste National Policy,
which is in force since August, 2014.
Unfortunately, this law hasn't been put into practice
due to lack of options in the incipient market
which provides only landfills as a solution, for now.
The fact is we don't need to wait the creation of public policies
and even less conform ourselves to this sad situation.
Composting can start from our houses.
And, for the time being, the best solution are the wormeries.
To keep a wormery at home is easier than it might seem.
Few people know, but even those who live in a 30m² apartment
can have a wormery and start to recycle their own kitchen waste.
On the Internet we can find many tutorials
that teach us how to build our own wormery, like this one,
even from recycled materials as boxes and buckets.
It's low-cost and accessible to everybody.
Some years ago, I ordered a wormery on the Internet,
and I received it at home, by post office, a little closed box.
My husband came running to open the box, excited,
because he thought that some books he'd bought on Internet had arrived.
So he opened the box and encountered 250 Californian worms.
He ran away, scared of the worms.
(Laughter)
But I can assure you
that worms are very organized, efficient
and much cleaner than we are.
It is incredible how much a wormery can change the life of a family.
Recently, the City Hall of Sao Paulo, where I live,
has distributed wormeries to 2,000 families of all social classes.
And the results of the first researches
show that 78 percent of participants
changed their eating habits;
they proceeded to consume more fruits and vegetables.
In addition, they started to plant.
People started to plant on terraces because they had to provide
a proper destination to the fertilizer they were producing.
And, finally, one third of these people told that they started to teach
neighbors, friends, relatives, how to build their own wormeries.
So, even without knowing, they created a net of people
capable to change the reality surrounding them.
And that was what happened to urban gardeners.
Urban gardeners are those people who like to garden,
those who live in city but still keep a little garden, even in apartments.
Those people were once isolated in their homes, gardening.
And social media enabled them to meet each other.
And, quickly, urban gardeners, like me, started to exchange gardening tips.
And, suddenly, we started to picnic for seeds-and-seedlings exchange.
And then we moved to community gardens in a jiffy.
It was a period of protests, as we can see here.
That is a garden in the middle of Paulista Avenue,
few people know about this garden, including Sao Paulo's people.
it's not too large, it has 30m².
And it is located, curiously, where people meet to protest,
where they gather,
so it is a very emblematic garden.
In 2011, we had just one community garden in Sao Paulo.
Nowadays, we have more than 40.
We are fathering, approximately, one garden per month.
And those gardens have become spaces of social interaction,
and, in fact, reoccupied places in the city.
There has been a lot of exchange.
Most of the times, we don't know each other.
We are not friends, we don't know each other,
but we recognize each other in the common desire of changing the city,
of making a better city.
So, we proceeded to arrange picnics.
There is somebody who walks across the city,
picks mulberries or Brazilian cherries when it's in season,
from trees on the sidewalks,
makes jam and when we pull together, he or she takes the jam to share out.
And then we have discovered non-conventional edible plants.
Frequently, that little shrub, on the middle of the sidewalk,
that you don't value,
it can be not only very rich in nutrition,
but also it enables us to make countless recipes from it.
You don't need to pay a lot of money to buy good food,
it is closer than we think, it is more at our hands than we think.
So, I remember I got a little seedling of nasturtium.
I got Barbados gooseberry too and I started to compost it at home.
It became big, beautiful.
But I didn't know how to eat it, because it wasn't on my diet,
I didn't learn from my mother how to eat nasturtium.
So we started to exchange and search new recipes.
Then you start to pay more attention to what you are eating,
to what you are ingesting.
Well, from this all...
I am a journalist, as he introduced me,
but I wanted to make more.
I wanted to extend this virtuous cycle to other sectors of society.
Well, those of you who have had the joy or the displeasure of going to Sao Paulo
know that, beyond cars and pollution,
we have a very rich gastronomic scene.
Imagine the amount of waste produced by restaurants.
I also have seen a talk of Yunus.
I said, "OK, I will make my social business too."
So I decided to establish the Guandu Institute
with the aim of doing selective collection of organic waste produced by restaurants,
turning it into fertilizer and giving it back in form of gardens;
the garden can be at the restaurant or be at the urban farmers.
Sao Paulo has 1,000 families of urban farmers,
there is backcountry in Sao Paulo.
They are not recognized by law, there's no public policy for them.
So we also intend to bridge the gap
between those producers and the restaurants,
in order that producers may grow
the form of producing pure, organic food,
and restaurants may improve the gastronomic scene
offering products of better quality to their guests.
Well, I didn't have millions to invest in, I didn't have a business plan
and, obviously, I didn't have investment funds.
Then I thought, "Well, I have to get it started."
So I started, I talked to one or two restaurants
whose owners were already touched by the cause
and I started to carry the waste in my car trunk.
I am a mother, a housewife.
So, when I realized, I was driving, carrying the children, the cat, the dog
and the waste in the trunk.
"Mom, for God's sake, I don't want to go, you have garbage in the car!
What a bad smell!"
Nobody said that it would be easy, huh?
But I had a purpose; it was more than a job.
This is a purpose of life.
So, I found an underused ground of a factory, here in Sao Paulo,
I called my brother, who was unemployed and needed a job,
and I said to him, "Let's take some garbage!"
We started to carry 300kg of waste
to compost in that ground.
Gradually, we thinned down, I lost a lot of weight, we got some muscles.
It is better than a gym.
We call it "agrofitness."
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Well, that composting is a bit different, with no worms,
but catalyst enzymes which accelerate the composting process
especially because restaurant waste is quite hard.
We gather bones, fish carcass,
I even found a head of a goat.
It is a very hard waste.
I needed to make experiments, so I took some of the compound,
which takes a while to mature,
I took it home in order to make experiments.
The compound, while it is not mature,
it exhales a not too pleasant smell.
So, I remember one day when I got home,
my family, neighbors, everybody was snooping around
because it seemed there was a dead animal nearby.
Where is this animal?
And I kept quiet, you know.
I have no idea.
(Laughter)
Now we have one and a bit year of activities,
we have ten partner restaurants.
Not too bad for a crazy, totally pioneering business
that I haven't never seen anywhere in Brazil nor the world.
And we have already bridged the gap between some producers,
they are managing to sell to restaurants
and the chefs are setting the menu according to the products
they have to offer;
and the cooks, who were quite fearful initially,
because they would have more work, work in the kitchen is hard, very hot,
and they said, "Oh, now we'll also have to separate the waste."
However, in about 15 days they realized that separating waste, actually,
is very easy, very practical, you just need to get it started,
and it even helps to organize the kitchen.
And gradually, they noticed
they could harvest a fresh product to be used in the kitchen;
because it's much better, you can touch, feel the smell, the quality of taste,
that is what they are always pursuing, the best taste.
This is Jairo, he is harvesting wormseed which is a plant, also a little shrub
used in some Mexican plates.
A chef brought a seedling of lemon verbena
from his farm in the hinterland of Minas Gerais state;
so we managed to multiply those seedlings
and now they are able to develop and serve plates with such seedlings.
The housecleaner, Lindinha, harvests the lemon grass
and makes juice to the workers at middle afternoon, what cheers them up,
when there's no juice, they say, "Bring more of it!"
The confectionery boy remembers his grandma,
who came from the backwoods and likes the backcountry stuff;
he asks for a seedling, takes it home so his grandma starts to plant,
and she rejoices because she's in touch with soil again.
This is Hilda,
there she is receiving basil to put it on tomato sauce.
Look how joyful she looks.
Then we think,
what does Hilda have in common
with an engineer of a big construction company,
with an ambientalist who is trying to save Amazon
with a public school teacher of Brazil's hinterland.
What bound us, invariably, is the plate of food.
We all are different
but we are completely interdependent.
So, I would like to propose, today, here,
everyone of you to breath deeply,
face up your own waste,
because the revolution we most want starts from our kitchen.
And eating can and must be a political act.
And cheers for worms!
(Applause)