Translator: David DeRuwe
Do you know how long it takes us to prepare a recipe?
When you sit in a restaurant and order a dish,
do you know how long it took to prepare it?
When we pick a place to eat, we think a lot about our journey,
what we’re wearing,
the route to get there, how we’ll avoid traffic,
and how long the wait will be to get a table.
When we arrive there, we order the wine,
select the couvert,
order an appetizer salad,
we talk, look at our companions,
and we always wait until the last moment to select our main dish.
And you, when you order your main dish, do you know where it comes from?
Just as we choose what clothes to wear,
the producer chooses the seed and the soil to plant in.
They take great care, so that it all flourishes and gets to your table.
The clothes you wear on your body are what is ingested.
The quality of the threads is the quality of the soil.
The social responsibility of the brand we wear
is the social responsibility of the farmer who delivers that product.
If you think it only took five minutes
for your warm bread to arrive on your table,
I invite you to think about “levain”, the ancestral yeast or sourdough.
It needs time and warmth to make the dough grow,
to bring that warm-bread smell and beloved taste to the table,
paired with some acidity-balanced oil.
Speaking of oil,
did you know that an olive tree takes from 10 to 15 years
to start bearing fruits?
The tree matures at 100 years old,
and it can give us joy for approximately 500 years.
In fact, an olive tree is five or six grandmothers altogether.
And speaking of grandmothers,
both my grandmas were farm cooks their whole lives.
They bled and treated the wild chickens that ran around the backyard.
Treating meant slaughtering them, removing their feathers,
and searing them to conclude the process.
And many times, in the middle of this process,
some chickens would run all around the backyard with their heads chopped off.
With a Mineiro accent, a little angry, they’d say, “Wow, it escaped.”
Life on the farm was really hard for my grandmothers.
There was much manual work,
a water jug on the head, and many children to raise.
But I think that this life, for people in this 40-year-old generation,
gives us the feeling and certainty of what nostalgia is.
My grandparents on their agate plate,
and your grandparents on whatever plate they had,
served affection, power, wisdom, and ancestry.
This plate that I’ll show you here was made by an artisan named Oscar.
Oscar is nicknamed “Mineirinho.”
He heard his whole life
that if water hits on hard stone over and over, it will wear it away.
He only needed water and wisdom to carve this dish.
Oscar knew exactly when he would take this stone from nature.
Do you, when you sit at the table and look at your plate,
know where it came from?
Who was the supplier? Who was the craftsman?
So, I’m going to start my recipe here. We’re making canjiquinha.
We will use 100 grams of creole corn from the Jacu project.
This yellow corn never suffered any genetic modification.
Genetic modification
prevents organic products from being produced in Brazil.
We need the creole seed
so that we can have family-based agriculture,
supporting lots of families in our community.
The Jacu project comprises
3,000 square meters of agroforestry planting.
where they harvest 450 kilos of this seed.
From a macro perspective, this is almost nothing,
but for small ones, the families there, looking at the land,
it is synonymous with abundance.
I really like talking about canjiquinha because it reminds me of my grandmothers.
It is an extremely affective dish.
And I like my recipe very creamy.
For us to have this creaminess, I need a good cheese.
For that, I requested my good friend, Marina Cavechia,
who won as the best Brazilian cheesemaker this year,
to choose a cheese for us to use in this recipe.
If you could smell it from here, you’d know what I’m talking about.
This cheese traveled quite a few kilometers to be here.
It came from Serra da Canastra
and is certified to be from there by a Brazilian certificate of origin.
This cheese can only be produced there.
There’s no “Serra de Canastra” kind of cheese,
just the real cheese that comes from there in Minas Gerais.
What does a cheesemaker do?
In fact, the cheesemaker is the curator of the production:
They know who will manufacture the cheese,
the locale where the animal lives, the dairy products, and the process.
They select these people, and take care of everything from beginning to end.
The cheesemaker is almost the mother
of these people who often don’t have a voice.
And then I’ll end my recipe
by talking about the responsibility for the animal’s well-being.
As it likes to be called, the Animal Spa, takes care of the cattle process,
from birth to death.
And I don’t want to bring in carnivorism or veganism here.
There is no right or wrong. There is responsibility.
There is a sustainability seal: no water is diverted;
you plant what you give the animal and care for it until the end of its life.
In truth, folks, what I wanted to accomplish with this recipe
was to request that we all think when we are choosing our food, our dish,
that we think not only from our stomach’s point of view,
but from a responsibility point of view.
There are many extremely important people and processes
for the progress of food in Brazil.
And so I ask you: “Do you know from whom you eat?
Do you know where your dish comes from?”
Here in this plate,
with this creamy canjiquinha that you’ll taste,
I have
many stories, many hands, and much affection.
Thank you and bon appétit.
(Applause)