Where does your food come from? - full roundtable now on Youtube
In April we brought our community together at Saber Fazer for one conversation around food politics, agro-ecology and education. Organised for the TY-CO project and in line with the ABR Festival's focus on sustainability and local culture, the afternoon traced the journey of food from local producers to the table, and asked a simple but uncomfortable question: what do our food choices really cost?
The full roundtable video is now on our Youtube Channel. In this blog post you can find a photo gallery of the event and below you can read a translated transcription of the discussion panel.
Read the Portuguese transcript.
Miguel Barbot, Barbot Bernardo and Saber Fazer, organiser
Sofia Ferraz, Porto Coffee Week / Lisbon Coffee Break, moderator
Pedro Rocha, O Quinto Elemento
Ana Helena Pinto, Nutritionist, Nutrition for Happiness
Monika Bloch, Venn
Snider Rodrigues, Venn
Part 1
Miguel Barbot (introduction)
The topic "where does your food come from?" might seem a little out of place in the context of what we do, but it is, in every sense, part of the essence of our work here at Barbot Bernardo and at Saber Fazer. Before setting up this company, I worked primarily in the agri-food sector. I worked in consultancy, from 2006 with agricultural cooperatives, and from 2008 to 2015 that became almost my main area of specialisation. And what we do at Saber Fazer is integral to any notion of agroecology. We work with natural textile fibres, which are fundamental to crop diversity and to the protection and rotation of soils. We work with wool, our core speciality and a fantastic output of extensive farming, but one that is unfortunately treated as a waste product today. So bringing in this topic turns out to be in complete alignment with what we do across our projects.
On the other hand, it also connects strongly with the strategic support work we have been developing at Barbot Bernardo in the area of culture and creativity, which has come to sit very close to this theme. The support we provide at the end of the value chain, in the food and hospitality sector. I often say that food is an act of culture, but it is also a creative act.
This event comes about through a Creative Europe project called TY-CO Typologies of Community. It is essentially a spin-off of a music festival called Alternative Brains Rule Festival, which has been running for many years in Cyprus and previously went under another name, Afrobanana Festival. It takes place in a culturally very complex part of Europe. Nicosia is a divided European capital, where one half is Greek-Cypriot and the other Turkish-Cypriot, with all the ongoing cultural and political dialogue that entails. It sits in a corner of the Mediterranean very close to the Middle East, in a territory with a degree of conservatism, and it is a festival that exists as a rupture with the local status quo. Nicosia is a relatively small city and the festival has had considerable impact over the years.
This project, coordinated by our partners at Alternative Brains Rule, involves our participation here in Portugal, as well as an organisation in Lisbon called Arroz Estúdios, which is organising a similar event there, and a design studio from Greece called Loonatics Design Crew. It is a small project that gives us the opportunity to test these models of community activation across different parts of Europe, building on the festival's legacy.
At the table today we have five remarkable people and four remarkable projects. I am very grateful to Sofia for accepting the invitation and the challenge of moderating; she organises Porto Coffee Week and Lisbon Coffee Break, among other things. Pedro Rocha, from Quinto Elemento and formerly of Noocity. Ana Helena Pinto, from Nutrition for Happiness, who brings a very important contribution. And Monika and Snider, from Venn. Beyond the very visible work with the restaurant, they have a whole body of behind-the-scenes work that we would love to bring into the open here. Thank you all very much, and I hope you enjoy this and that we all learn a great deal from one another.
Sofia Ferraz
Good afternoon. First of all, thank you to Miguel and Mariana for organising this and for putting together this remarkable panel. I will not need to introduce anyone here, it has already been done, which is wonderful. Just a brief word on why I am on this side of the table and why this subject makes such sense to me.
I have had the good fortune to live in countries with such gastronomically diverse cultures as the United States and Italy. So alongside my Portuguese background, I also carry these two other perspectives, which are entirely different from one another. I am a vegan chef and I work as a consultant on a ProVeg project called Prato Sustentável (Sustainable Plate), in which we work with schools on food education and the environmental impact of food choices.
But today we are not going to talk about recipes or nutrition. We are going to talk about politics, identity, survival, and the question of where our food comes from. Not just from the supermarket, but from the soil, from the people who handled it, from political decisions, and from human hands.
Pedro, I will start with you, because you said something very interesting in a meeting we had a few days ago, about the five thousand calories of food produced per person. And yet hunger exists. We know that hunger exists worldwide, but we have a surplus of production here. So where does this surplus go? What are we doing wrong?
Pedro Rocha
Are you aware of this? Five thousand calories a day are produced globally per capita, that is, for the eight billion people living on this planet today.
I come from the environmental sciences. We hear a great deal about energy, mobility, cycling, and we entirely overlook the food sector, which accounts for a third of the pie, does it not? And there is no sustainability without addressing the question of food. Forget it, it is impossible. It is the single largest cause of biodiversity loss, the largest cause of soil degradation, the largest cause of a great many things.
And we are faced with this evidence: five thousand calories a day for each one of us. If I only need two thousand, where do the other three thousand go? There are several reasons. One begins in our own mouths. Almost all of us eat badly, eat too much, and eat the wrong things. An American, on average, consumes over three thousand calories a day. It is extraordinary. Then there is the portion we throw away. And then, probably the biggest factor, is that we produce energy to feed animals, which we then consume ourselves. We overeat, we waste enormously, and we feed animals in order to feed ourselves afterwards. And you might ask: if we change our diet, is it not possible to improve the impact? And the answer is no, if we keep eating as we eat today, distributing as we distribute today, it does not work.
But if we eat differently, if we distribute differently, if we stop wasting as we waste, everything points to the conclusion that we have more than enough resources to feed twelve billion people on this planet, and feed them well.
Sofia Ferraz
One of the things I firmly believe is that eating is a political act. When you talk about a third of the pie, that is genuinely the area where we, as individuals, can exercise the most control. Other things involving decisions, such as how the energy we use at home is produced, are sometimes not as easy to control as what we put on our plates.
Ana Helena, in our conversation you spoke about what food implies, and what it is implicated in. What is it like to work with indigenous products, such as the Terra Maronesa project and local identity menus? And how can this change not only health, but the economy of a region like Porto?
Ana Helena Pinto
Thank you, it is wonderful to be here at Saber Fazer with this backdrop and all these materials that speak so eloquently about food without being edible, and to dedicate this time to a subject I care deeply about. I was genuinely eager to pick up on what Pedro was saying.
I am a nutritionist by training. Pedro mentioned coming from the environmental sciences; I come from the nutritional sciences. And so part of my mission is to bring the human and health dimension into sustainability. To ask, essentially, how we can preserve our individual health without compromising environmental health and the resources we consume, nor the economic dimension. Because when we speak about sustainability, we must acknowledge that the definition requires three dimensions: social, environmental, and economic. And it is only sustainable if it holds coherently and simultaneously across all three.
This is the work we have been doing at Nutrition for Happiness, where we are committed to advancing this vision of nutrition for wellbeing, focused on the implications of what food does: the origin of ingredients, where they come from, what we choose to eat, and where we choose to buy it.
In the approach we have been developing, indigenous products, or what we call food identity, offer a more accessible entry point, because they help everyone identify what it actually means to be healthier and more sustainable. This is what we have been promoting in our consultancy work with local authorities, with the restaurant sector, and with end consumers, with the aim of equipping people to make more conscious choices.
Terra Maronesa, for those who do not know it, and I warmly encourage you to, is a national association. As the name suggests, it is rooted in the lands where the Maronesa cow lives in extensive conditions, and it gives us a more conscious reading of what we call sustainable food, along with the many "it depends" that arise when we discuss these topics. One of those "it depends" concerns how dangerous generalisations can be, particularly on the question of animal husbandry.
Terra Maronesa is a national association that works specifically on the environmental benefits and ecosystem services of extensive animal production. This includes, for example, increases in biodiversity, which is the direct opposite of intensive livestock and agricultural production.
Terra Maronesa was one of the projects we collaborated on. We were involved in creating the Terra Maronesa Food Identity Manual, specifically to identify other indigenous products, which means regional varieties, genetic diversity, finding greater diversity in food beyond broad categories. I often say that in recent years we have grouped foods together: we talk about the apple, the plum, the bean. But we have forgotten that Portugal has dozens, almost hundreds, of regional varieties of bean, and it is through that variability that we can have genetic and biodiversity richness, nutritional richness, and then gastronomic value, in terms of organoleptic diversity, colours, textures, sizes, and cooking times.
What we have been doing is advising restaurants and chefs to do the upstream work. Our gastronomy has a classical training background rooted in a paradigm that is unsustainable, and at home we do the same thing: we think about what we are going to cook, search for a recipe online, look at the ingredient list, draw up a shopping list, and cook. This is a highly unsustainable paradigm. So we tend to say we should establish a new cooking paradigm, which is not new at all but is the traditional one, and that means reversing the sequence: looking first at the products we have, applying a household food management logic that reduces waste. In a restaurant, for example, this means looking at the region you are in, the possible suppliers, the producers working in the primary sector, what exists in that area and at that time of year. Then, with those available ingredients, thinking through the menus. That is our approach.
And how does this affect the economy of the Porto region? If we shift to more local suppliers, we are also financing our own community. When we talk about food and the local primary sector, we mean financing the cultivation of land close to where we live. That is an economic benefit for the local economy, and an environmental one too: the landscape, land kept productive, greater crop diversity. And if we move inland, towards the mountain zones, we are talking about the prevention of high-intensity wildfires, because a great deal of what happens there is precisely the result of rural abandonment. And it falls to the urban world, through its food choices, to finance the nearby rural world.
Sofia Ferraz
This brings us to a question I had for Snider and Monika, who told me they know ninety per cent of venn's suppliers by name. Is that sustainable in the modern business model? Or is it a luxury to be able to say that?
Monika Bloch
It is a question of the moment we are living in. In this world of ours, everything is very easy. We order everything from one place without knowing anyone, everything is delivered to our door, and the restaurant does not have to put in any work. Because, honestly, doing things this way does not actually take more work.
And what can we do? We can get to know our suppliers and return to a different pace, not least because it is much more interesting to use ingredients when you know that Mr Jose brings the maize or the potatoes that he grows and cares for. As it should be. But we live in a world of convenience.
At our restaurant, with twenty-eight covers, we work with a tasting menu and have many suppliers. We have suppliers of herbs, of forest and agroforestry produce, and of things that grow spontaneously. We always ask suppliers about their weeds and everything growing around the crops. But in truth, to be honest, most suppliers are not fully aware of all the riches in their own fields. There is an opportunity here. We talk about sustainability and diversity, but there are also trends, like edible weeds, which have become fashionable.
Sofia Ferraz
You launched the eat.bitz project, which helps customers read this biodiversity on the plate in real time. Would you like to tell us a little more about it?
Snider Rodrigues
Yes, but first I would like to add something about the modern business model. Food sourcing is an ancient practice. There was no cash-and-carry in the eighteenth century, and there are many things we should return to doing as before, because a great deal was done well in terms of soil management and in valuing small producers.
I do not think this is something that has been artificially created by policy, but rather something that concerns the way we behave as consumers and as businesses. It is not something we are inventing now; it is something we need to return to.
With regard to eat.bitz, this is our initiative. That said, I would like to say upfront that the digital will never replace being in the ecosystem, being out there. The project is simply a way of using technology purposefully, making use of everything that exists, including AI, to maximise potential, so that customers can understand and perhaps become curious about where the food they are eating comes from. Honestly, there are moments when people simply want to eat, and that is perfectly fine, but there are also people for whom this awakens something and who want to find out a little more. This platform allows for that within the gastronomic experience itself.
The technology has been designed not to be intrusive, built on a database we assembled with all the farmers we work with. We took photographs and created a biodiversity map, identifying the species present, where they grow, and what role they play in that particular piece of farmland. Borage, for example, has a very specific function in the soil. Dandelion plays a very important role for other plants to be able to grow. There are ecological relationships, and we simply want to make them visible in an interactive way so that people can understand them. That is the essence of the project.
Monika Bloch
So, how does it work? We essentially select the ingredients that appear at certain times of the year. At the moment, for example, we are working only with spring and summer: we choose the seasonal ingredients I like and enjoy using, and which then appear on the plate.
The customer has access to all the information gathered from suppliers, all the photographs, everything about the plant that grows and ends up on the plate. The customer can browse the menu like a small story, with an element of gamification. There is also a network view showing the biodiversity connections: how the plant on your plate connects with other plants on the menu. On the menu we have seasonal ingredients, some more familiar, some less so. For example, we have edible weeds, but we also have traditional things, like acorn, which stays with us all year round.
Pedro Rocha
Are you going to teach me to cook with acorn?
Monika Bloch
It is like a mushroom, it has very much a mushroom flavour.
Sofia Ferraz
On the question of value, price, and how we make decisions. I will give an example: I know a plant-based drinks company that a few years ago worked exclusively with organic and Portuguese products, and carried both certifications: one hundred per cent Portuguese and organic. Almonds ceased to be certified organic in Portugal, and they lost the certification. A significant question arose: do they buy Spanish organic almonds and lose the Portuguese certification, but maintain the organic aspect, and therefore be at least in theory more sustainable? Or do they drop the organic and opt to keep the Portuguese product? I would like to know what weighs more heavily in your view. What would you choose: organic or proximity?
Monika Bloch
Certification in Portugal is very expensive, so there are many suppliers who simply cannot afford it. For a small supplier, reaching the customer is much harder, and the customer does not have the budget for the certification premium. So we work with many suppliers who have no certification.
One of our suppliers holds a Demeter certification, but a very specific one, because she used to work with companies in Germany.
But there are others with none. And I think it also comes down to trust. We talk to our suppliers, we have to know our suppliers and our plants: that way you can go to the farm and see how everything works and know exactly what you are working with. So the question, certified almonds? Leave them in Spain.
Snider Rodrigues
This reflection is a process we are constantly engaged in. We stopped using products we once used to make many things in the restaurant, chocolate being one example. It was not the fact that it does not grow in Portugal that led to this, but the considerable body of evidence on deforestation, worker exploitation, and in some cases child labour associated with these products. So we removed these ingredients from our list, leaving it to Monika and the kitchen team to adapt and find ways to replace these flavour profiles we had just lost with something more sustainable. It is not a process where you can move from A to B overnight, but rather gradually. Along the way we also learn and find that there are other more interesting, sometimes surprising alternatives to use in the kitchen that can replace certain ingredients. Almonds, for example, which generally require a great deal of water, led us to use a little more macadamia as an alternative. That kind of thing. It is always a process and we have our own internal assessment to support good decisions.
Monika Bloch
We have to weigh our decisions carefully. Coconut milk, for example: people ask why we use it when coconut does not grow in Portugal. Ours comes through a Polish company that works with an organic and sustainable farm. It comes from outside the country, yes, but it is also the most sustainable choice we could make in the circumstances. As our kitchen is vegan, we inevitably have to choose certain things for which there is no local alternative. We are working through these challenges gradually, and we will keep trying to go further.
Sofia Ferraz
Pedro, do you agree that proximity should always take precedence over organic certification?
Pedro Rocha
It depends. And that is my favourite phrase in the food sector. It depends. In fact, proximity can often win over production method. Proximity has the question of transport, of the associated emissions. But I find it difficult when we are talking about almonds, which are a non-perishable product that can be harvested, stored, reach production scale, and be transported by ship, which has nothing to do with, for example, producing organic basil, as used to be done in Portugal, in Guinea-Bissau: basil is an extremely perishable product that requires maximum freshness and had to be flown from Guinea-Bissau to Portugal every week. So the question stands: what exactly are we comparing? It is not always straightforward, and that is precisely why you at venn face all of these challenges.
I think the important thing starts with whether we regard food as a product or as a common good. Whether it is simply a commodity or something like water. We need water to live, and everyone agrees that water should be a public good. So what is food to us? From there, we radically change the way we look at production.
For me there are three questions I always like to raise.
First: do I know who produces it? The moment a Hugo or an Antonio exists, and Antonio produces for me, the ethics that follow are natural, regardless of certification. There is a producer in the Alentejo with a highly intensive plum orchard, with weekly treatment cycles. And someone said to him: "Come on, do you give this to your children?" He said: "Are you out of your mind? All of this is for selling. I have my own plum tree at home for my kids." And there is the disconnect between the consumer and the person; what is needed is to bring humanity back into this question.
Second: how do they produce? Once I know who produces, I can begin to understand how they produce. This already requires some geographic proximity: being able to visit, being able to include information on the menu, being able to invite the producer to come to the restaurant and give their account, or even tell customers, "Would you like to go and see how they work?"
Third: what happens along the distribution chain? Understanding whether we are in fact paying for speculation. As when we buy a cereal that was purchased last year and held back in a port because it was being traded on the stock exchange, because it has become a commodity.
The food sector will be subject to considerable speculation. We will face the fertiliser question head-on, and we will see countries playing the game of withholding production because it yields a premium later on the market. And if people go hungry, hold on, "it is just a little while", as long as they have water they will survive. And so, to counter that, we have to understand what is happening along this value chain.
Sofia Ferraz
But this brings us to another question: is a sustainable product an elite product? We are talking about a cost of living that is rising, with the basic food basket becoming increasingly expensive. How do we ask families to seek out a product that at least appears more expensive, partly because it does not come through a supermarket?
Pedro Rocha
How much do we spend per month on food? I believe we need to start putting things in perspective. Nobody thinks twice about spending six hundred euros on a mobile phone, but everyone considers two euros per kilo of potatoes a scandal. I was an organic producer, and once, in the Rua Miguel Bombarda area of Porto, someone who certainly lives more comfortably than any of us told me that organic products were expensive. My question was: how much do you spend on a week's holiday? That figure vastly exceeds what you would spend in a year on a supply of local organic food. So it is a problem of the value we assign to food. And until we value food properly, we will not get there. In our list of priorities, it will always be placed second or third.
And there are those responsible for this. We are bombarded daily with advertising and messages selling us the idea of maximum quality at minimum price. This is a lie. Maximum quality at minimum price cannot exist. Either the quality is not the maximum, or the price is not what it appears.
Monika Bloch
And the truth is, the price is not what it appears either, because we pay it later in medication, in healthcare, in our own bodies.
Sofia Ferraz
My question was about calculating what the real cost of the food we eat actually is. Not just what we pay at the point of purchase, but what the planet pays in terms of emissions and pollution, and what we pay through our health. And who is doing the paying? How do we think about this real value? And how do you communicate to customers that, yes, you will pay twenty, thirty per cent more for this meal, but it will bring you a benefit that justifies that investment?
Snider Rodrigues
The concept is extraordinarily simple and comes directly from economics and accounting. We have liabilities, revenue, and margins. The problem that has occurred with food is that many products that are neither organic nor produced under decent labour conditions carry a low price not because their costs are low, but because they are subsidised, or because policies have been put in place to keep them that way.
In some EU countries, there is now a levy on the use of nitrate-based fertilisers, which does not exist in Portugal, and so the producer is not bearing that cost. The organic product carries a much higher cost, but in the long run it is better for everything. Think about the antibiotics in meat: scientifically documented health problems that will ultimately fall on the state in Portugal, because the state will have to treat cardiovascular disease and diet-related mortality. These are the things that constitute internal and external accounting.
And I think there is a misconception that plant-based and vegan food is expensive. That is, if you eat a Beyond Burger and call it plant-based food, then yes, that food is more expensive. But in Western countries, moving to a more plant-based diet, not entirely vegan, but incorporating more foods readily available in Portugal, legumes, vegetables, nuts, the cost of your basket is already lower than a diet based entirely on animal products. Or consider countries in the East. I grew up in a country where sixty per cent of the population, by choice, does not eat meat, which means more than seven hundred million people. A lack of protein is not one of their problems. It is something many of us keep returning to: here in Western culture, we have an obsession with how much protein we need.
Returning to the question of accounting: when something is cheap, it is because many costs are not included in the price. It is subsidised, and that cost is being transferred elsewhere, and someone is paying for it. Or it is not built into the price but into the "destruction" it represents. And so we understand what we can do: be free to pay the producer a fair price, without intermediaries, and of course, as a for-profit business, that changes the margins.
Sofia Ferraz
Until now we have been talking about the more tangible side of things: the distance of producers, the costs. But behind all of this there is another problem, which is food blindness. Because today's children grow up knowing how to use a smartphone, yet most people cannot tell parsley from coriander. And I include myself: we have parsley at home with a label saying "coriander". Whose responsibility is it to teach us how to eat?
Ana Helena Pinto
Yes. Before that, I have several notes on what has been said; I was eager to add to the conversation.
Returning to organic and proximity: I recall that a number of years ago, perhaps ten years ago, I was here in Porto in one of the organic food shops, observing. And in that hour, the majority of purchases were all organic products, because the shop sells organic products, but they were things like lasagne, ice cream, biscuits. In this discussion about organic products and proximity products, when we are talking about supplying a restaurant, we are talking about raw materials, the quality of the base ingredient. But when we are talking to the general consumer, it is very important to add the appropriate "it depends".
For me, the most important thing is to define the criteria: what are we looking for in a product certified as organically produced? That it is genuinely produced without pesticides, without antibiotics. That it is safer for human health and for natural resources. And in practice, with proximity, we can apply selection criteria for suppliers that approximate to those standards, without requiring certification. That is the "it depends" that proximity allows.
Just to add to that "it depends" when we are also dealing with different scales. If I have a restaurant with twenty-eight covers, knowing my suppliers is broadly achievable. But if I want this to become policy, to become a measure that works at scale, I have to think about how these same decisions are made at the level of the municipality, of school meals, or in a company with hundreds of employees. And there, we have to want it differently.
And a brief note on the question of price. Healthy products, raw materials, base products not processed with added sugars, saturated fats, or additives, are often proximity products we can find in markets, fairs, and food boxes. And we can negotiate with local producers and give them the assurance that their harvest will be purchased. If this negotiation is done before planting, at each new season, with each crop, we gain a far stronger economic and pricing basis. And in my view, this is the political turning point: a different approach to procurement that presupposes this prior proximity negotiation.
In political terms, we must also account for the current costs to health in Portugal. The chronic diseases that are on the rise, cardiovascular disease, hypertension, diabetes, cancer, all of this represents public expenditure. And so I always ask: why have we suddenly become massive producers of blueberries and kiwis? Where are our dozens of apple varieties, our bean varieties, our regional cereal varieties?
Sofia Ferraz
Another question: do children arrive at school canteens with their palates already shaped by the food industry? How does your work in schools try to reverse this? Can a palate be educated?
Ana Helena Pinto
First, I will say something that is also a little provocative: children do not arrive at school with their palates shaped by the industry. They arrive shaped by their families, who are responsible for the children. Obviously, families all have a range of constraints, financial management, time, social circumstances. But we also have an industry today that has been innovating: there are more and more products with no added sugar, no additives, with a short ingredient list. There are products that did not exist a few years ago and that are beneficial. I do not see the industry as the enemy.
I do not think we need to grind grain in water or wind mills; we can do it industrially, and that is also industry.
Sofia Ferraz
When I say industry, I mean not just mass production but also all the associated marketing, which is enormous and which unquestionably influences children. Parents do not have time: they work eight, nine hours a day, plus commuting time. There are not enough hours in the day.
Ana Helena Pinto
But the palate can be educated, yes, absolutely. Fortunately, that gives us a great deal of hope. It can be educated in children and in us as adults. We know today that there is a strong tendency to favour what one already knows. This goes back even to pregnancy: we know that a child recognises flavours it has already encountered, and the palate is shaped in that direction from very early on, through weaning and beyond.
Now, children are much more than a palate. What we see in working with them is that they are very receptive to stories, to the meaning of things. So food education in canteens and classrooms works best when it draws children in through the story itself, through discovery, through a challenge, a game, or play. There is also a tendency for children to act as drivers of change within their families. And I find that very hopeful.
I also think there are things that need to be regulated. Advertising aimed at children is regulated. Food advertising is a problem, but it is better than it was a few years ago. The regulation of children's food includes guidelines for school meals and school canteens, and there are recommendations for retail near schools. There is progress in recent years that we must acknowledge, and here it also falls to parents to ensure these guidelines are being followed. We are not in a perfect world, and we are still some years away from where we ought to be, but I also think a great deal of education is needed for parents and for adults more broadly, and general literacy.
I was called into a school, I believe it was when the regulations on school buffets came out. A range of products was removed from secondary school buffets, mainly in the public sector. I was called in by a parents' association in my capacity as a nutritionist to clarify some concerns, because parents were indignant and believed their children had the right to eat a chocolate croissant at break time. And some parents said: "But I cannot get through the working day without chocolate, how is my child supposed to manage?" And that is why I believe we need to educate everyone.
Monika Bloch
We ran a project called Mesa Aberta (Open Table), where we invited less privileged families to eat at our restaurant, and we saw something very interesting: it was not only the children who were reluctant to eat certain things.
I am also conscious that food can be complicated for everyone at times. Once I served a dish that was simply a polenta, very straightforward, very creamy, and also a beef heart tomato with nothing but salt, which was sent back to the kitchen. I asked why, and the answer was: because that tomato is strange. An organic tomato that actually tastes of tomato is strange.
In Poland, for example, I remember that at a primary school we brought in five varieties of apple, and opened each one to see how the seeds differed. We did a great deal of that kind of work with food and with the environment. And this was a public primary school, with no special programme and no additional cost.
Sofia Ferraz
Food education is essential. Let me just ask here, Pedro is keen to speak. Pedro, you worked with adults on the Ligado a Terra (Connected to the Land) programme. Did you find genuine interest among adults in connecting with the land? And should we focus our efforts on those who do the shopping, the parents, or on those who will inherit the system? Should we start by re-educating children so that in two generations' time things are genuinely different?
Pedro Rocha
Educating children and re-educating ourselves as adults. The Ligado a Terra programme had something of that intention: connect with yourself, connect with others, connect with the land, through food.
Because I believe deeply that food is a kind of erotic relationship we have with nature. It enters our mouth, it melts, it gives us pleasure, we experience smells and flavours, and it literally becomes part of our body. It is intimacy. There is no greater closeness. I cannot merge with a tree. But the moment I put a beef heart tomato in my mouth, it becomes part of me. And so there is a relationship here, and an opportunity for learning.
Now, I agree that we as families all bear responsibility. But I cannot overlook the fact that more than half of my son's nutrition happens at school. I cannot accept that the state should abdicate its responsibilities in relation to food education and everything that entails. I cannot be naive and ignore the fact that the industry has completely captured that share.
At this moment, in the municipality of Porto, there are only two or three companies capable of responding to a tender for supplying food to schools. And continuing with the logic of "maximum quality at minimum price", because the tender documents require maximum quality at minimum price, what is the only way out for the industry? Maximise processes and efficiency. Compromise product quality to deliver what is demanded: maximum quality in the sense of total sanitisation, food safety in terms of avoiding food poisoning. When you look, everything is compliant with the guidelines, but when you examine the actual ingredients being used, what you find is no longer a potato; everything is pre-processed. And this accounts for more than half of my son's diet.
In Porto we probably have three production units supplying all the schools, and when you look at children's experience of texture and cooking, they simply have no experience and no ongoing relationship with food in all its forms. At home, we sometimes discover that a child does not eat cooked cabbage but will eat it raw. We discover that there is a girl who would not eat vegetables, but eats all of them fermented, because she discovered she likes bitterness. And the school should be, and the public sector should be, the driver of all of this: of holistic health and of local sustainable agriculture.
So I do disagree with Ana Helena on one point, and only this point. There is a dimension here that does not help us at home, and then the industry is allowed, very aggressively, to target directly, to push a message.
Children can be agents of change, but they are also our weakest link, and that is precisely where the industry attacks, through advertising, through marketing, through enticing products, through the very layout of the shop that steers us towards everything that is not healthy. The chocolates are not up high; they are at a child's eye level, right there at the checkout.
So yes, we bear that responsibility. But not all of us will have the information and awareness to understand the impact of poor nutrition. And the state allows this to happen. And for example, almost every municipality, when you raise the possibility of incorporating other criteria into public procurement, says it is not possible because the Tribunal de Contas (Court of Auditors) would not approve it. And that is simply not true.
Sofia Ferraz
That was precisely one of the questions I had for you. You used the phrase "political aversion to the responsibility of feeding people". In what way do public bodies have this aversion? Why do you think they have it, and how can public procurement be the key to addressing it?
Pedro Rocha
Ana Helena touched on this a moment ago. Suddenly you have parents saying "are you going to take my child's chocolate croissant away?" If we start specifying a Mediterranean diet in schools, with the recommended portion of meat, they say "you are cutting costs, you are removing meat."
So yes, there is a problem. And because it is an electoral issue: school is somewhere every one of us sends our children, it affects people's perceptions very deeply, and politicians know it can cost them votes. And besides, it is not something people see directly. How many parents have actually seen what their child's plate looks like at school?
I would say that for politicians, this is not an issue that moves voters, that delivers votes. It can take them away if there is a food poisoning incident.
I think that from the moment we have the evidence, with children born healthy but later developing cardiovascular problems, obesity, diabetes, digestive cancers, when you look at the volume of diet-related oncological problems, and with all that evidence, with the Faculty of Nutritional Sciences saying "Mediterranean diet, this is the direction," how can we have decision-makers who do not do what is right? They should commit to that path, and when parents object, we will have Ana Helena to explain, and Monika and Snider to show that it is possible to do things differently. It is essential that this sits at the centre of the political agenda, but it does not. Of course, progress is being made: Torres Vedras making headway, Lisbon making headway, Porto trying to make headway, and many others I am not aware of, but we are still a long way from where we need to be.
Sofia Ferraz
I would like to raise a question here: should we have mandatory cooking and food literacy classes in Portuguese schools? Not just knowing what a cabbage is, but how to handle a cabbage. Is this not also a tool for freedom? If we know how to choose our food, how to handle it, how to cook it, should that not be part of the basic education given in schools? Including learning how to read labels and understand the real cost of food?
Ana Helena Pinto
Yes, I think so. But I need to say something further on this. I know the world of school meals very well from the inside, from the perspective of local authorities. And in fact, as a company, we have been working as consultants supporting school meal provision in municipalities that genuinely want to innovate. There are some things here we need to clarify, because they concern us. I do not agree that school meals are not a priority for local authorities, not least because in municipalities where parents are unhappy with the meals, it is the issue that generates the most mobilisation.
It can bring a school to a standstill, attract media attention, and put the local administration at risk. And we know that food affects people deeply, because everyone needs it, because it gives pleasure, but also because dissatisfactions that sometimes have nothing to do with food at all end up being channelled through it. What sometimes happens is that there is insufficient awareness of where we need to get to.
But I do think it is genuinely a political priority, above all because school meals have, through the devolution of powers, become the responsibility of municipalities. They were previously under the remit of the Ministry of Education. Now they belong to municipalities. So municipalities carry the responsibility, but they also have the capability. And that is why some municipalities have begun to engage with these questions. It also brings new room for innovation.
But it is important to understand that in schools, it is not the food industry that supplies the meals: it is collective catering companies that specialise in supplying canteens. The issue is that municipalities need to know how to procure. If I do not know what I want and only specify a price, I am procuring something that costs that amount. But if I know what I want, I specify: at this price I want this, this, and this. And there are municipalities where potatoes arrive whole and unpeeled because the municipality specified that in the contract. Other municipalities specified nothing, and the company provides whatever service it sees fit.
There are municipalities where the tender documents specify: fresh fish must be supplied twice a week, fresh rather than frozen meat, fresh and unprocessed fruit and vegetables a certain number of times a week, and potatoes must be whole. The problem is not with the collective catering sector; it is with knowing how to procure. Municipalities now have, with devolution, more responsibility, but also more freedom to innovate.
Neither the industry nor the catering sector is the enemy. Restaurants have to make money to survive, but they know they continue to exist in the market because customers value them. For collective catering companies specialising in canteen provision, their performance depends on the criteria municipalities set. The same company that supplies schools supplies private companies under completely different terms, and not because the company is unwilling or incapable. It is because client A, B, or C contracts a different menu. The problem does not lie with collective catering; it lies with the procurement process.
I hold the view that we are in a transitional moment of social awareness. We increasingly need education for life, education that allows us to make conscious choices. And food education is part of that. It is health education. We have health education clubs in schools, environmental clubs, and what is missing is placing food as the central driver of health. There are schools beginning to have kitchen gardens, there are external projects entering schools. The AECs (extra-curricular activities) are one of the major windows of opportunity, and there are more and more AECs dedicated to food education.
If we accept that citizens of the future need to know how to choose what they eat, and that this will determine their health and wellbeing, and that this will lead to a country with lower public costs because less is spent treating disease, while at the same time producing more conscious, more satisfied, more participatory, more productive people.
Sofia Ferraz
If you could change one single thing in the education system or in the political system, what would you change so that all of us had greater awareness of where our food comes from? Or so that everything became genuinely more sustainable?
Snider Rodrigues
I cannot speak to the political dimension, but I think about public procurement. Depending on the source, when talking about the EU, figures suggest that ten to fifteen per cent of public budgets is spent on food procurement, covering hospitals, schools, public kitchens, and everything else.
So if that changed, if the lowest price were no longer the only criterion, and criteria were added such as no processed ingredients permitted, whole ingredients only, or organic certification required, then whoever can only offer the base price could no longer win, because that price would not be viable. I think the greatest political change could come from there, and it would have a cascade effect, because when we talk about these budgets, we are talking about billions of euros. And that is where the system, which is built on cheap food where healthy food is considered expensive, can begin to change. That is what I consider a political artefact: it exists because policies have been implemented over decades to create that situation. So if it starts changing at that level, we could see the promotion of better and more interesting agricultural methods.
If I think about Portugal, this already exists in one industry: cork, within the montado system (a Mediterranean agroecological system broadly equivalent to the Spanish dehesa). There are very strict rules about when you can harvest, which creates an incentive to actually protect the tree in order to obtain the product. That is one of the unique industries where you extract something, but to extract it you must protect that very thing. So it is about developing that kind of system. And of course the most significant changes would need to come from the policy-making body, in this case municipalities, when it comes to school procurement contracts. That is where I see change as being possible.
Pedro Rocha
For me, the central change would be for municipalities to step away from the outsourcing model for canteens and move towards self-managed canteens. For each canteen to be able to function as a unit connected to its territory, with clear guidance to favour more sustainable and more local production models, with seasonality, and with a direct relationship with the producer. And a much more direct relationship with the people actually eating there.
Obviously, when you work with a highly centralised system, if cooked carrots arrive and a child does not like cooked carrots, that is it, there will be nothing else. But in a self-managed canteen, where the person running it knows that Joaquim or Maria does not like cooked carrots but loves broccoli, she swaps in broccoli. That is the flexibility. Large systems demand rigidity. Self-management is a more interesting model, even if it involves slightly higher costs.
And because municipalities suddenly find themselves in a position of "I cannot tighten the rules too much because, with things as they stand, I may not find anyone willing to respond to the tender." With self-managed canteens, space opens up, models become possible that work with smaller suppliers and different production approaches. When what we have in Porto today is contracts worth seven million euros, a company with considerable industrial capacity is required to meet the demands. That was the change I would make. It starts at home, without question.
Ana Helena Pinto
I would run a national food identity campaign. I think we need, as a country, to understand the value we have: the value of our distinctive products, our culinary heritage, our food culture. It is very important that we become conscious of this and of how differentiating it is. Alongside that campaign, I would work to preserve that identity, which must start with the primary sector: support for the rural world so that it is not abandoned. And so that the varieties facing extinction, because we are very accustomed to speaking of endangered animal species, but we have many food seed varieties facing extinction, are put back into the ground so that they continue to germinate and to nourish us.
Monika Bloch
Almost all of the answers have already been given. Do you agree that this could be resolved with three different approaches? I think so too. But I also think that we, as restaurants, can cast our vote on this question: organise workshops, with or without state support, bring together restaurants that think along the same lines, work from that direction. And our engagement with suppliers also moves in that direction: involving everyone.
Part 2: Audience Discussion
Miguel Barbot
Let us look at our national agroecology. The montado (a Mediterranean agroecological system broadly equivalent to the Spanish dehesa) is a human landscape more than two thousand years old, where the entire balance achieved between the holm oak, the cork oak, and livestock is very, very precarious, and requires the people who maintain it to be genuinely remunerated. But the policy we have does not support that.
What we have, and what is very easily misrepresented in public opinion, is a policy of: these farmers are providing an environmental service and we are going to pay for it with European funds. And it is very important that we keep these people on the land with a handful of sheep, with very low-productivity but highly valuable operations. In the language of industry: low productivity. But we are giving money to these people to keep their operations going, for the environmental service they provide. And the narrative in public opinion is that these people are all subsidy-dependent, that they are backward, that they are draining public money. But they are actually performing a fundamental role, and that message does not get through.
On the other hand, we also have the opposite: ethical radicalisation. We need livestock on the land, livestock have no predators, so we need to introduce predators. But that will cause disruption. This week I saw a wonderfully entertaining video of lynxes chasing cats in southern Spain. Is it good news or bad news? It depends. The lynx is there reclaiming its territory and displacing other predators, and the cat is in fact an exotic species. But they are our little cats. All of this is part of these balances and all of the many "it depends." Information must exist so that we can look at these things and make our decisions in line with our conscience, but informed decisions.
Pedro Rocha
All of that is a question of values and of communicating those values. How do we assign value? How do we account for the value of an ecosystem service? For example, a beekeeper earns perhaps six or seven euros per kilo of honey, but the hive is perhaps ten times more valuable than the honey it produces, through pollination alone. And the beekeeper receives nothing for that. How do we get there? How do we assign an economic value to something that is difficult to measure? In the case of bees it is relatively well studied, but there are others: carbon, soil fertility, the preservation of a variety. What is the economic value of any of that?
Continuing in the language of industry: how do you create scale so that there are genuine gains that allow things to be different from what they are today? For example, in the agroecological project at Herdade do Freixo do Meio, the vans that leave from there, which families do they reach? It is perhaps not a democratic thing. How do you democratise access? With scale? With more operations? With processes? With state intervention? It is a legitimate question. Are we creating processes that are not balanced from a social equity perspective? And I am not even talking about access to information; I am talking about financial access to things.
And there are other questions. For example, when we talk about cooperativism, the large cooperatives in Portugal today are entities that, despite their social economy and democratic character, do not differ greatly from a large company in their methods and ways of operating.
Ana Rita de Arruda
There are no democratic and equitable systems in any sector. Not in health, not in textiles. That is a fundamental problem of capitalism. The food industry is just slightly ahead of textiles. We do not live in an equal world.
Monika Bloch
Organic food also depends enormously on the country. In Poland, I buy it at the market at a much lower price than in Germany.
Ana Rita de Arruda
I read a study that identified essentially two food cultures, or macro-cultures, in the world: those that derive from wheat and those that derive from rice, and they function differently, because what is socially necessary for wheat, which is more individualistic, is different from what is necessary for rice, which is far more collaborative. And so rice-based cultures tend to be more rigid, more rule-bound, with greater need for social control, while wheat-based cultures tend to be more individualistic.
Pedro Rocha
There are actually four: wheat, maize, rice, and sugarcane, although the latter is not a staple for anyone. But this has had an impact not only in terms of social collaboration but also technologically.
On the question someone raised about why we produce blueberries or kiwis: production is driven by constraints, territorial suitability, availability of land and water. And there is the question of what economic value can be extracted. I would also add the constant need of consultancies to sell a new product. You have beaten the blueberry to death, so now what? Pistachio? And that carries along a whole group of people with land who do not know what to do with it into that particular madness.
We understand that we have a unique country, with unique regional identities, with a biodiversity that beats records at a European level. And we can recover all of that. What we cannot do is compete with the Turks on olives, or with the Poles on apples. But we can have, for example, the Arcos de Valdevez bean. We can have the only specifically Portuguese apple variety with a designation, the Bravo de Esmolfe. Who knows the Pardo Lindo, the Pipo de Basto, or the Malápio Fino de Gouveia? Nobody. And they are all there in Viseu. So we need to take hold of that and understand that those are our diamonds. Our gold is to start introducing these, with municipalities following on from Ana Helena's work, into children's diets. To bring parents along. But without surrendering to the temptation to think we are going to conquer the world with apples. The Poles would beat us ten to nothing on apples. That is not the point. What we can have is an olive oil with that "wow" effect.
Ana Helena Pinto
I have felt that things have changed a great deal in the last twenty years. What happened with agrochemicals is part of a global social evolution, the Green Revolution and this easy access to products that were sold as essential and productivity-boosting. But those who know the land and dedicate their lives to nature are astute readers of the system.
I have met several traditional small Portuguese producers, now elderly, who have come to recognise that what they used for a period, because it was sold to them and because it was seen as a great revolution, was damaging the land. And there is a reversal happening, driven by the producers themselves, without formal training, but with the empirical understanding of what they have witnessed over time, grasping the consequences and returning to the knowledge they already had.
In the interior we have forestry and agricultural associations seeking training again in integrated production methods, in grafting regional varieties. We have people who have dedicated their land to acquiring regional fruit varieties that were on the verge of extinction, with no commercial benefit whatsoever, but out of love for the land and recognition of its value. These are extremely positive signs. It remains a niche, but it is a niche we must focus on, not the only one, but one we should look at closely.
