Translator: David DeRuwe Reviewer: Theresa Ranft
The central theme of my life has been food.
I'll explain why in three stories.
The first story happened just before the Second World War,
in a little city named Dąbrowa,
between Germany and Poland.
Living there was a young girl,
curly blond hair, blue eyes, 14 years old,
called Magda,
She was the third daughter in a Jewish family
that lived in a big brick house
with many rooms, many paintings,
and many employees.
One of those employees was a young man, 17 years old,
green eyes, strong, called Michel.
He was the handyman of the house,
and he had a secret passion, not reciprocated, for Magda.
Magda didn't even know he existed.
The Germans invaded Poland.
Magda's family lost all their possessions.
They were prisoners and were sent to the Dąbrowa ghetto
where they lived in a little dark room.
From there, they were transported by train to the Auschwitz concentration camp
where they suffered great hunger and cold.
In Auschwitz, Magda's family was exterminated,
one by one, in the gas chamber.
On several occasions, Magda got into the gas chamber line,
and miraculously, she survived.
Magda became a number - 50950 - tattooed on her arm.
Magda was an Auschwitz prisoner from when she was 14 until she was 18.
And when the war ended, she weighed 30 kilos - 66 pounds.
Michel, for his part, fled to Siberia with his youngest brother,
where he also suffered great hunger and cold.
Michel's brother caught pneumonia and died.
Then, Michel was arrested and sent to a forced labor camp
where, sometimes, he was given a potato to eat -
all kinds of potatoes.
And a family, who had lost a son in the war, gave him a coat.
So, by luck, Michel survived.
When the war ended, Michel returned to Dąbrowa, his city of birth,
and looked to find someone he knew.
All his family had died.
In Dąbrowa, he heard it said that Magda, his past love, had survived.
But she had been sent to a refugee camp in Munich.
Hurriedly, Michel went to Munich
and found, on the list of survivors,
the name of Magda.
Michel and Magda met again.
They got married, and they had a daughter, Eva.
They decided that they didn't want to stay in Germany after the war.
They thought of going to Israel or the United States,
but because they had distant relatives in Brazil,
they resolved to catch a boat.
Traveling third class,
with little to eat,
they went to Rio de Janeiro.
Eva is my mother.
Why am I telling this story?
And why is this story so important to me?
First, because it's a real story.
It's a beautiful story of love
that shows the improbable can happen
and that luck can be on our side.
But, for all this to happen,
we have to have a lot of tenacity, courage, and confidence.
The photo shows a family that was totally unlikely to happen -
my Grandpa Michel, my Grandma Magda,
their six great-grandchildren.
There, too, is my mother, Eva, with her six grandchildren,
Before he died, my grandfather, Michel,
told me that what made him survive
wasn't the coat or the potato,
but the realization
that, behind the potato, there was love,
in spite of all he was going through.
The second story starts in my childhood.
I'm the third child, and I have two twin sisters.
I was always known as "the other one."
Playing with my sisters,
I had two basic roles
without which the games couldn't happen.
I was either the tree or the traffic light.
(Laughter)
Throughout my life, I learned
that to provide food is to give love, that love comes from food.
My most distant memories from my childhood
are of my grandparents, Michel and Magda, bringing love and affection,
every day, to my house,
in the form of white bread, ice cream, mortadella sausage, and filet mignon.
My grandparents would take me swimming,
and, immediately after, we would eat a chicken croquette.
In this way, we connected.
I felt loved, and we celebrated life.
I'm 10 years old in this photo,
ready for carnival and feeling much love,
until my adolescence,
when I started questioning my family's values -
like any good teenager.
My pattern of love changed.
My self-esteem started to be measured in grams,
and I started to become anorexic.
This anorexic period lasted more than a year,
and I was getting thinner every day.
It was a very painful period for me, and I suffered a lot.
It was like I was competing against myself,
and like I was imprisoned inside my own mind.
No matter how much weight I lost, I never felt satisfied with my body,
and my weight loss goals changed every day.
It was an unwinnable war without an end.
I had a calendar book
where I noted all my war strategies,
and where I noted how I felt.
I had stomach aches,
and I couldn't talk with my parents;
I couldn't talk with anyone
because I had to win that war.
In this calendar book, I also noted all the food that I would stop eating.
One day, I resolved to stop eating bread,
so I noted it and stopped eating bread.
Another day, I stopped eating ice cream.
Another, pastry.
This went on for a year.
In the end, I was only eating carrots,
and my hands have been yellow ever since.
I went for a year without menstruating.
One day, I was at home with my mother.
The phone rang and she answered.
My mother had obligated me to do a blood exam every month,
and it was the blood lab calling.
They asked her
if I had suffered an accident
or if I had lost my spleen
because I had such severe anemia.
In that moment, I was very afraid.
I was sure that I would die for lack of food,
not for lack of love.
So, I started "curing" my anorexia.
When I was 24, I graduated in Economics
and went to live in New York with my boyfriend,
who, today, is my husband.
I started to work in the financial market,
and I replaced the competition against myself of anorexia
with long hours of work
in a highly competitive field.
I started to have panic attacks.
My boss would send me to the bathroom
so that my panic attack could abate, and I could go back to work.
I didn't know what my dream was,
but that wasn't it.
I lived like I was on automatic pilot,
feeling like a hamster running in circles.
But, there, working directly with Americans,
I realized that I had an entrepreneurial spirit.
At 32 and still working in the financial market,
I had my first son, Felipe, and stopped working.
Soon after, my second son, João, was born.
It was the first time in my life
that I spent eight years without either working or studying.
I resolved that I would only nurture my sons.
It was in this maternal period
that I began to contemplate my whole life story.
My grandparents had starved during the war and not had love.
During my childhood, I had lots of food and lots of love.
In my adolescence, yes, I had food,
but I deprived myself of it,
deprived myself of love, and deprived myself of pleasure.
And now, in maternity,
I realized that love, pleasure, nutrition, and food
can go together.
In my fervor to provide good food for my children,
I went to great lengths to study about food.
I could have stopped there,
but, at that time, I realized
that I had a fragile, teeny-tiny seed of a dream inside of me.
I understood that to love is to eat, yes,
but to love is to eat well,
to love is to feed the soul.
As women, we spend a lot of our time and energy
thinking if we're too fat or too thin,
what's our fat percentage,
and if we did more exercises than our friends.
And we always use nutrition to lose weight,
forgetting that the most important nutrition
is to nourish our dreams.
The third story is about dreams.
I'll tell you my dream,
but I want you to think about your own dreams.
On a vacation trip to Hawaii, with my children,
I saw cold-pressed juices.
My first swallow gave me immense pleasure.
And I didn't feel guilty, like an ex-anorexic.
When I understood
that the cold-pressing method preserves all the enzymes,
all the nutrients,
without preservatives, without thermal shock,
and without pasteurization,
I decided that I'd start Rio de Janeiro's first pressed juice business.
In that juice, I found everything that I thought was most important:
the flavor, the pleasure, and the nutrition.
In that moment, I also decided
that I'd talk with the best health professionals and nutritionists
to make them part of my project.
I would find Brazilian fruits
and the best ingredients,
and I'd make the best functional combinations.
My mission would be to prove that, despite being healthy,
juices could be flavorful and pleasurable.
In my business, I'm the pickiest customer.
I put the best of me into the bottle.
This didn't all happen easily.
The cooling logistics in a tropical country were a challenge,
along with daily production and sales.
The juice only lasted three days because it didn't have preservatives.
To be sincere,
I didn't have the least idea how to make this company work.
And ignorance was a big advantage
for me.
Three years ago, I started to produce the juice
in my kitchen, with this machine I brought home from a trip, under my arm,
with my husband complaining about the baggage.
These are the first juices that I produced and sold to friends.
Really, looking at the photo, nothing seemed very promising.
And this was three years ago.
At that time, I learned
that if we wait for the perfect conditions
to start our dream,
we never start.
People thought I was crazy,
and gave me rational arguments of how my business wouldn't work.
They tried to convince me to freeze or pasteurize the juice,
so it would last a longer time -
but that wasn't my dream,
and I wouldn't take shortcuts.
That wasn't the best of me in the bottle.
And I thought of quitting several times.
I used to say that being an entrepreneur in Brazil is like a video game -
we can die or we can pass to the next level,
every day.
But I didn't quit; I believed in the improbable.
I had the good fortune to meet partners with abilities that complemented mine,
and, together with the 103 employees that we have today,
the best of me in that bottle turned out to be the best of us in the bottle.
What motivates me is to see the dream of each person
that works with me
happening inside of my initial dream.
Take Rebeca, for example.
She was our first employee
and is the first person in her family to attend college.
She started on the factory floor, literally, peeling pineapples,
and later she took care of the couriers.
She opened our first kiosk,
and today, she is the manager of several kiosks.
All this in two and a half years.
And this culture of opportunity
is what makes me feel more responsibility
that this company does well.
Today, we are the only juice business in Brazil
with a high-pressure machine
that kills the bacteria and preserves all the nutrients and all the enzymes.
This means the expiration period,
which, until four months ago, was only three days,
is longer.
Today, the juices last 45 days.
And today, we are the biggest pressed juice business in Brazil.
The improbable can happen,
and, in difficult moments,
I look at my family history to find the ingredients
that motivate me and motivated the construction of this dream.
I always remember my grandparents' story,
that the improbable can happen
and that luck can be on our side,
but for this to happen,
we must have much stamina and much courage.
And the next time you see this bottle,
receive all my love, think of your dream,
and ask yourself,
"Where can I put the best of me?"
(Applause)