I arrived in Chile this morning; I’m here to give a talk at the World Congress of the World Association of Chefs Societies. It has been a long day, but in a good way.
While out walking, I stumbled into a little market–more a row of vendors along the river–one of my favorite things to find. I happened to get there late in the day, as many stalls were closing up. In addition to seeing the biggest ears of corn of my life, I was struck by what seemed like the accepted practice of leaving all the unusable produce on the sidewalk. 
I asked the woman who sold me a few plums about it. From what I understood, the city would clean it up. But every day?
They have some help. When I left, a few men were picking through the remains, some of which seemed edible, but barely. Not all of the stuff had been edible–there were many husks from the aforementioned grande corn. But there were plenty of old peppers, tomatoes, lettuce and cucmbers.
An image I won’t soon forget is of a man squatting and sipping the juice from a halved cantaloupe. He was making the fruit liquidy with a stick and then drinking it. Now that’s getting the most out of food.
One final thought–Chilean fruit is amazing. Especially when it hasn’t been airlifted to other countries.
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5 responses to “In Chile”
As with any produce from another country, never mind from the US, I worry about what chemicals have been used on it. Was is possible to tell at this market if the produce was produced without chemicals?
Thirty years ago my husband was stationed in Sicily and we made it a point to only buy from local growers that we could watch as they grew their crops. Because we took an interest, the locals made sure we got the best produce, rather than what was sold to the tourists.
They need a central wormery there! That would be a lot of compost!
Hope you have a wonderful adventure in Chile, Jonathan.
Today’s post reminded me of the year my husband and I lived in Mexico, more than 35 years ago. When we first arrived, we were appalled by how much garbage (real garbage like orange peels, corn husks, banana peels, etc.) was left in the streets and alleys at the end of the day by the vendors and their customers. But by every morning when we would venture out for the day, the streets were clean. It wasn’t long before we caught on to the system: at night or very early in the morning, pigs and sometimes goats would be herded through town, to and from we never really learned. They ate most of the garbage. Whatever was left was swept up by prisoners from the town jail. These were mostly drunks who had been rounded up to sleep it off overnight, and most of them would be let go after their clean-up duty.
Good timing, Bellen. Since visiting that market, I picked up a brochure on Chilean fruits from the Min. of Agriculture. It said not to eat fruits where you don’t know how they were grown, because sometimes irrigate with water that’s not so great.
And thus endeth my visits to this particular market.
Thanks, dee dee. Pigs, goats and drunks…not a bad labor force.
It’d have to be a pretty massive wormery, Robert! But not a bad idea. Sounds like a business plan for an adventurous soul…
There are worm operations that large. I saw one in South Carolina that is about half as large as the average Wal Mart and the feed the worms ground up pallets and cardboard. What is left is sold as compost at major big box stores like Home Depot.