FEBRUARY 2011

El Amor y su magia

An unlikely story, like all love stories

Valentine’s Day is here again and we celebrate a universal and powerful feeling that makes wonders in our lives. Love.

Whoever was, or is, touched by love has a story to tell which is personal and unique, a story where the predictable and unpredictable happen in such a way that defies any objective planning or any vision that one may have of the future. Love directs our lives in unknown ways to meet what life prepared for us.

The story I am going to tell is one of the many that illustrate how love not only changed the lives of two people; but expanded them in ways they never expected.
It is the story of a young man from Portland, Ore., who honored a sense of obligation to better understand the world, and joined what, in the mid 1960s, was a new initiative: the Peace Corps. He was sent to Cajamarca, an Andean city in Northern Peru, to teach Physics in La Escuela Normal, a college for teachers. And it is the story of a young woman from Cajamarca, who never thought she was going to meet a foreigner, someone who would change her life and her plans forever.

She had just returned home as a recent graduate of the School of Pharmacy at the University of Trujillo, the same University her father had attended. With her title of Pharmacist, the young woman dreamed to work in a lab, do research and help to save humankind with the magic medicines she was going to create. But soon she realized that Cajamarca was not the place for such kinds of dreams: only big cities, like Lima, or Madrid in Spain, could give her a chance; but leaving her home town, abandoning her widower father, her three younger siblings and grandma was impossible. She knew well their expectations and her responsibility to be with them.

Life had something entirely different in store. She received an invitation one day from the nuns of her former high school: an invitation to teach chemistry that she happily accepted. So, without any formal educational training she started to teach in her former high school. At the same time the young man from Oregon started to teach Physics in the Escuela Normal. The two schools were neighbors, and she often saw him riding his bike, always dressed in a suit, with a narrow tie. She also heard rumors that his students and other teachers were impressed by his way of teaching without formal textbooks. He generated his own written lessons and put his students to the task of learning by doing, under his guidance, or by creating their own experiments: forms of pedagogy that she had never seen before.

She, in her own way, also was discovering that she liked to teach and became fond of her classes and her students. But neither of them could imagine that teaching was going to play a crucial role in their future relationship.

They first met in La Casa de la Cultura de Cajamarca (a center for cultural activities in the city), thanks to her father, a very inquisitive man, always ready to learn as much about as many important topics as he could, who enrolled his entire family (children, not grandma) in the free English-language classes that the young man offered, twice a week, as an extension of his official work. Unhappily her attendance was not consistent; she needed the time to prepare her Chemistry lessons. But her father was an exemplary student and many times scolded her for not taking advantage of what the foreigner was providing.

After two years in Cajamarca and having received praises and recognition from the school for his innovative ways of teaching (one group of students carried his name as the official name of the graduating class), the young man left Cajamarca. Everybody thought he was going back to Oregon.

Two years passed, and the young woman started to attend the local university to receive her formal degree as a science teacher: the nuns had promoted her to teach Chemistry to future teachers in their Escuela Normal de Mujeres, but she would need official credentials to assume that post. It was at the same time that the Peruvian government mobilized an Educational Reform initiative, which received the blessing and support of UNESCO and UNICEF, two international organizations that cooperated with technical assistance and finances. The Educational Reform began by inviting science teachers from all over Peru, to attend Summer courses at the best Universities in Lima. By way of these courses, the teacher’s could expand their theoretical base and learn new methods of teaching. The young woman saw a very good opportunity to learn more about Chemistry and decided to attend courses at La Católica, one of Lima’s venerable universities. She went to Lima without knowing what was waiting for her.

She still has a clear memory of the moment. She was walking through the campus of the University, en route to the Chemistry Lab, when she saw in the distance a man walking in her direction carrying an oscilloscope. As he came closer she noticed that the man had a strong resemblance to the American who two years ago had taught and lived in Cajamarca. He couldn’t be the same American, he was already in Oregon, she thought. However, as the man approached, her doubts disappeared, the man was the same American! He, too, was surprised. He saw her and his eyes widened in startled recognition. Each of them stopped and began to ask, simultaneously—Are you …?—What are you doing here?—And both of them learned what they needed to know: the young man hadn’t gone back to Oregon, he had remained in Peru working a third year in the Peace Corps on the north coast of Peru. Later, he had been invited to teach Physics in the Summer courses offered at the Universidad La Católica, where he became acquainted with professors who were participating in the Educational Reform. She, in turn, explained her reasons for being in Lima, and wishing each other good luck, they politely said goodbye. Was this re-encounter a mere coincidence? Or something that was meant to happen? Who knows?!

After finishing her Summer course, the young woman went back to teach in Cajamarca, this time excited to convey and illustrate updated concepts utilizing the new chemistry equipment provided by UNICEF. One day while she was teaching, she was called to the Office of the School. An official letter sent by UNESCO had arrived for her. She opened it, and her surprise was truly great. It was an offer to go to Lima to join the Educational Reform. The Peruvian Government, in cooperation with UNESCO and UNICEF, had founded PRONAMEC (a national program for improving the teaching of science), which would operate in Lima under the direction of a fine physics teacher from Cuzco, a man who had studied in Belgium. The program needed a teacher for each branch of science. The young lady was invited to teach Chemistry, and the other teachers were invited to teach Math, Biology, and Physics. They would be developing the means and methods for training teachers at a national level. After her initial excitement, she realized that a great dilemma and a huge decision were now on her shoulders. Going to Lima, abandoning her family, leaving her work, both of them dear to her heart, would be impossible. On the other hand, the offer tempted her, to go to the big city, to train other teachers, to be close to resources she couldn’t have in Cajamarca. What to do?

One night, when she had decided not to go, she approached her father and asked him his opinion; she will never forget his words, spoken slowly and ceremoniously. What he said was this: Are you asking me for my advice? This is what my heart and my reason are telling you: Go, life is calling you to fly! All of us love you, and want the best for you. Don’t you know that by love parents raise their children, educate them and give them wings to fly? If a child is called to fly away from home, how in the world are parents going to hold them back? We are truly happy when we see our children flying. If they fly farther, more is our happiness. You said that you are afraid to make a mistake; but how can you know if you don’t try? Go and try, doing your best, and if you see that the job doesn’t suit you, come back home. Your house and your work will wait for you; you will have learned from your experience, and you will feel at peace—And the young woman went to meet her destiny.

Perhaps you can guess what happened on the first day of her arrival. The Director of PRONAMEC introduced her to the teachers who were going to work as her colleagues in the other science fields. Only one teacher was not present; he was teaching at the University and would be arriving the following day. When that man did arrive, he was none other than the American with the oscilloscope from a year earlier. Once again, life was bringing these two reaching souls close to each other, this time to work together in a program embracing a noble cause, a hope and vision beyond themselves. PRONAMEC was created with a strong conviction that the methods that are used to do science could be used as effective tools to teach science, developing in students creative and critical minds able and ready to test their own interpretations and trust in the results. The young woman from Cajamarca and the young man from Portland, Ore., worked in their respective fields, inspired by their colleagues and students, and convinced that they were helping to build a new generation of Peruvians: a generation capable of saving Peru from those who, for power and money, took constant advantage of every moment of ignorance. Working with common ideals, their friendship and mutual understanding began to grow. She respected him and admired his dedication and intelligence. He really felt that his job was meaningful and useful for a country that he had started to love, a country that had made him welcome. Neither of them realized that something was happening in their hearts, nourished by every occasion of working together. The few times they went out to dine or to listen to concerts were always in the spirit of sharing their teaching experiences. Or when, on Friday nights, they went to the house of the director of the program, they engaged in long conversations that kept all of them up beyond midnight as they drank delicious cups of hot chocolate cuzqueño prepared by the director’s wife. The high spirited discussions ranged across a diversity of themes: how a child learns; how education based on empirical observation could help Peru overcome poverty and economic disparity. They also bore witness to the enthusiasm of the director when he explained his “spiral” theory, which affirmed that all natural things and human events evolved following the principles on which a true spiral was formed. On other occasions, their souls vibrated in unison with the rest of the teaching team when they all sang and danced Peruvian music. It was by virtue of so many shared experiences that they found themselves connecting, touching at the level of their souls, and little by little, of their hearts, until they discovered they were falling in love, a love that kept growing until they realized they were meant to unite their lives forever.

He proposed to her during a field trip to the beach, to collect samples of rocks. She accepted completely, thrilled by his petition. His parents made a long trip from Oregon to Cajamarca for their formal engagement, and after a few months they married in two ceremonies. The civil ceremony took place in Lima surrounded by their PRONAMEC family. The Catholic ceremony took place in Jose Galvez, the same tiny shilico town where the parents of the young woman had married.

On the day of their marriage the whole town followed the couple, who walked from the house of the young woman’s grandmother to the church across the main square. Leading the entire group was the town band, composed of three young men, one playing the accordion, the second playing the violin and the third playing the saxophone. Once the priest had declared them wife and husband, everyone met on the small farm beside her grandma’s house to celebrate their marriage with abundance of food and music. Among the happiest of the persons present was the father of the young woman; he was delighted that she, his daughter, had married a good man, who also was none other than his former English teacher.

The couple continued working for PRONAMEC, and soon they were blessed with two sons that came one after the other, a situation that obliged her to resign from her job in order to raise the two boys. Meanwhile, the politics of the country had begun to turn, and the Peruvian government changed hands. PRONAMEC, which before had enjoyed significant control of its own activities, became part of a large bureaucracy, and quickly lost its autonomy. At that point, both husband and wife decided it was time to build their own family life, and they chose to raise their children in Oregon. They left Peru and journeyed to the husband’s home country.

He was returning home after 11 years of being in Peru, and he honestly declared that he felt more Peruvian than American. They made their home in Corvallis, where they were blessed with a third son. The husband, now father of three, decided to go back to school, and after selecting a Master of Science program at OSU, he began his studies to become an engineer. The young woman became a full time mother and home-maker, though she preferred to be called a “domestic engineer,” because she was trying to build three human beings.

Life was good for them. Their three sons grew up in Corvallis attending public schools and playing soccer and music. The three of them, like their father, journeyed to the East coast to attend college. The young mother could never have imagined she would live in the United States, or raise a family away from her own home. She was proud to keep the Spanish language at home, and tried to cultivate in her sons respect for both of the cultures to which they belonged, and to be proud of that. The young father found a job in the medical division at Hewlett Packard and kept working as an engineer. When her sons went to College, the young woman  combined her domestic duties with teaching, and became a Spanish teacher for home school students, and for the Community College of Benton County.

For both of them, life in Corvallis was unfolding smoothly in a way that felt right: she loved to be at home, dreaming some day to write her memories, making photo albums for her family and keeping herself worried over the future of her children—job that, like any mother, she stills has. He planned some day to retire from Hewlett Packard and spend time in the work shop he had built downstairs, designing practical inventions and keeping their home functional. Both of them wanted to travel more often to Peru to engage in some social work, and visit other countries when time allowed.

But life had other plans for them that they never imagined. This time the serendipity that brought the unpredictable came by way of their second son, who, after college, traveled to Peru under the auspices of Mercy Corp, Portland’s international non-profit organization. He desired to do something for Peru, and asked Mercy Corp to facilitate an investigative trip to Cajamarca, his mother’s town, to assess the needs of rural and urban communities. He went to Peru, sponsored in part by a retired Peruvian engineer, who later became a very good friend. While in Peru, he found to his surprise that the food was not only good, it was very good! When he returned to Oregon, the political world had changed dramatically, and Mercy Corps, like other relief organizations and civil society leaders, had turned most of their time and energy to the unfolding events in the Middle East. So he and his former sponsor conceived the idea to start a Peruvian restaurant, a cultural and culinary destination inspired by his encounter with the food and the people he had known, and guided by his sponsor’s experience in business. Drawing upon their mutual enthusiasm, and their dreams, and even without enough planning, nor thinking twice, they started looking for places in Portland and beyond, and soon found a fine corner space in the Pearl District. A restaurant that was only an idea soon was going to be a reality.

The whole idea of opening a restaurant came as a big surprise for his parents. They had never imagined, and never planned, to enter the business world. Now their son showed them a road and invited them to abandon what they had and had not imagined, and follow him down that road. The father was the first to respond to his call; she, the mother, was skeptical and considered his idea unrealistic and too risky. She did not want to be involved in a business she did not understand. But observing how her husband and her three sons engaged in the project more and more, she realized that, like it or not, they were going to have a restaurant, and a beautiful one, and possibly, a good one. She discovered that miracles can happen, and that what her son was doing was a variation of what she always, deep in her guts, had desired someday to do: to bring Peru to her husband’s home country. Suddenly she saw their restaurant with new eyes. She saw clearly that life was giving to all of her family a mission to accomplish: to tell the story of Peru, its past and present, by way of its unique and delicious food, and to tell this story not only to Portlanders, but to any and all who journeyed to the restaurant’s tables and chairs.

For her, the presence of the restaurant in Portland has become a way of saying thanks to her husband, returning with kindness all that his work as a teacher and his dedication had done for her people and for her country.

For the whole family, but especially for the young man and the young woman of the past, their restaurant in Portland is an homage and witness to love, and to its unpredictable consequences.

A toast to love and to everything that it makes possible.

Mama Doris.

Note: You probably guessed by now who the young man and the young woman are: John and Doris Platt; their sons: John Jr., Peter, and Victor; Peter’s sponsor was Jaime Saavedra, who remains a close friend. And the restaurant, of course, is our beloved Andina.

Wine paraphernalia

KEN COLLURA

Collecting wine is a labor of love, similar to other types of collectibles. As such, it also has its paraphernalia. Let’s address a few of the main participants, which I’ll list as Imperative, Pretty Important andBasically Useless:

Corkscrews
It used to be you couldn’t open a bottle of wine without a corkscrew. But the screw cap has changed all that, and for the better in my opinion. It’s my belief that fully two-thirds of the world’s wine should be bottled under screw cap. Why? At least two-thirds of the wine produced in the world is meant for immediate consumption. Does it matter if these wines have a cork or not? Very few things in this business perturb me more than opening a fresh young bottle and finding it completely corked and undrinkable.

Don’t get the wrong impression, because I seriously don’t want to see Penfold’s Grange or Chateau Margaux bottled with a screw cap. But for Macon-Villages, Beaujolais or $10 shiraz from Australia, I say let’s do it.

Still, possession of a corkscrew is Imperative. I once had a $150 beauty. It had a bone handle and looked really sleek. But it was somewhat unwieldy in my hand and I kept cutting myself with it. Looking cool doesn’t matter so much when you’re bleeding on the customers, so I changed equipment and now firmly believe in using simple, rubber-handled waiter’s corkscrews.

Decanters
Once opened, each wine has a very short window in which to sing its song. The older reds have waited quite a while to get their few minutes on stage. Why not give them a chance to sing out loud? I believe in decanting reds that have ten or so years behind them, and find they often blossom like flowers after fifteen minutes out of the 55-degree cellar. Pretty Important.

Conversely, decanting a very young and/or inexpensive wine is generally moot. If you plan to decant a bottle of 2009 chardonnay at home for your guests, it should be regarded as a visually pleasant, yet Basically Useless endeavor.

Glassware
Ultra-quality crystal stemware for the home falls under the Pretty Important, but not Imperative section. Using the right shape of glass does play a part in how your wine will taste. Obviously, you don’t want to go around the table asking your friends to cup their hands as you pour, but whether you need to pay $25 per stem is another matter. My grandfather drank his wine out of water tumblers, which is not recommended by the way. This section does not include the use of fine wine glasses for restaurants, which is Imperative.

Some of today’s advertisements for stemware are ridiculous. Each and every grape variety does not need to have its own shape. Look for a good size bell, a thin lip and a more or less tulip-like shape, which works just fine for the grand majority of wines. If you simply must have boxes of those fragile, elite jobs, that’s fine. Just expect to break a few each week.

Storage spaces
If you plan to purchase bottles with noteworthy aging curves, you better think about cold storage. Simply put, wines won’t live long unless kept in cool, dark spaces. Whether you own the storage unit yourself (gauge your needs carefully) or rent one, this section can be regarded as Imperative for the health of your wine. If you buy a few $10 bottles a week that you drink right away, who cares?

Other Areas

Wine charms
These are the little do-dads that go around the bottom of your stemware at parties. They indicate which wine is Suzie’s and which is Sam’s. They remind me of vinous Monopoly trinkets (I always wanted the Shoe or the Thimble). Kind of neat, but Basically Useless.

Media tasting notes
There are many choices here, and each reviewer has his or her own distinctive tastes. My call is try a few recommendations from one publication to see if you agree with the assessments. If not, try another. Take everything you read (or hear from friends) with a grain of salt. Once you’re comfortable with your own palate, buy every publication you can, just to see how varied and stupefying their comments can be. Pretty Important.

CSA state of mind: Andina son harvests lessons of the land

NINA LARY

Victor Platt, youngest son of the Andina family, took much of last year off from his duties at the restaurant to till soil in central Minnesota. Platt worked for five and a half months  as an intern at Ploughshare Farm. Named 2009 Farm Hero of the Year by Edible Twin Cities, Ploughshare operates within the field of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), a subscription-farming model that has become wildly popular in Portland, and throughout North America. Members buy a seasonal stake or “share” in the farm, inheriting some of its risks but reaping the fruits of its labor in the form of weekly harvests—sometimes delivered in boxes, sometimes picked up in person.
Platt is back in Portland now, lending a hand at Andina until he leaves for yet another farming job—this time in New England. He’s been kind enough to share his farming experiences and how they translate back to his community in Portland and at Andina.

N: Describe your typical day on the farm.
V: The farmer would punctually hold a morning meeting at 7:30 a.m. for a review of the balance of the day’s work. Our tasks would vary from day to day, and season to season —but the primary work on this farm, as on many small-scale, diversified vegetable farms, included the following: greenhouse care, direct seeding, transplanting, field cultivation (weeding beds by hand, hoe, wheel-hoe, or tractor), thinning of young crops, trellis-construction, irrigation management, harvesting, (washing, bundling, bagging), and packing.

As the farming season progressed out of early Spring greenhouse seeding to the harvest cycles of late Spring, Summer, and early Fall, our weekly schedule gradually gained a weekly structure. As part of a crew of five full-time farm hands, one part-time worker, and our crew leader, we spent Mondays, Tuesday and Wednesdays fully engaged in the harvest of crops that would, after cooling-washing-sorting-trimming-bundling-bagging, make their way into the share boxes due for pre-dawn delivery to a number of drop-sites on Thursday. The remainder of the week we turned our attention to the urgencies and projects that any given month or season presented. As many summer hours as we spent weeding and thinning our beds, we might later spend digging, curing and trimming our storage crops.

N: You told me that each worker was responsible for cooking a communal meal once a week. Did you learn to cook with new ingredients? Which meals stand out?
V: We learned, and learned together, a few immensely useful techniques and ingredients. First and foremost, the craft of fermenting, culturing and pickling foods, including yogurt, cheese, sauerkraut, sour breads, and whey-soaked grains. For a few months we baked with wild-fermented sourdough, incorporating the starter into whatever the desired recipe happened to be: sunflowerseed loaves or weekend pancakes being two lovely examples. Later in the season, with a new cookbook in hand (The Winter Vegetarian), whole buckwheat groats, and a friend’s hand-cranked flour mill, I attempted a buckwheat and poppy seed bread recipe from scratch. The entire process hinted at the wonders, and challenges, of baking with this famous world crop. Among the uniquely memorable meals were those a few of us cooked on spits over our fire pit: three whole hens that we culled, cleaned and prepared ourselves, and small steaks of venison and veal that were the kind gifts of the neighbors from whom we purchased our weekly par of raw milk and eggs.

N: Did your time working around food at Andina inform your choice to farm in any way?
V: The kinship between a restaurant and a farm seems to many, and may in fact be for many, a very close relationship… There is undeniable significance, for example, in the nutritional value of well-tended crops, in their aesthetic qualities, and perhaps above all, in their vitality of flavor, and the fact that this flavor can and will communicate the story of that crop’s origins.

But I am not a chef, and though I know and love the experience of eating locally sourced and sustainably grown plants (and all the foods and oils that depend upon them), my time at Andina informed my decision to farm for quite different reasons. Beyond and besides being a restaurant, Andina is and always has been something else for me: it is a family business, a busy business, and a business rather fiercely exploring the questions and possibilities that hospitality entails…I decided to farm because I sensed, viscerally, that small-scale farming entailed a similar quality and scope of intensity, and would, in turn, require and reward so many forms of similar engagement. This was indeed the case. Two separate worlds, for sure, but each—family restaurant and family farm—navigating on similar terms a challenging and yet enlightening course.

N: It seems that a lot of young people who are feeling overrun by modern life and technologies are turning to farming to reconnect with the land; and perhaps, a simpler life. Is this just a romantic notion?
V: No, I do not think this is just a romantic notion. If there is some romance in the turn of many young people toward a simpler life, it is not, in my opinion, wrongly informed or naive. But this simplicity need not involve the land alone. I know that a single season’s work on a farm changed me—and know how welcome that change has been. I do not know, however, if a simpler life will always involve the land. Ask those who have farmed all their lives – do they yearn for simplicity as well, and if so, in what imagined life?

N: What was one of the most satisfying experiences you had at Ploughshare?
V: Certainly the most satisfying experience was the camaraderie that emerged within the cohort of fellow apprentices; the friendships, too, with the farming family, and with our crew leader, Olga. The most satisfying activity was the harvest of our heavier crops—the summer melons, the winter cabbages, and the winter squash. Forming a line, from crop bed to tractor and trailer, we would heave and launch individual fruits or vegetables from one person to another. Because the harvest of almost every crop involved stooping or kneeling, the chance to throw and stand was unusually, and completely, gratifying.

N: What did you observe as the general attitude from the farmers/interns about the state of agriculture in the U.S.? Their part in it?
V: Not more than a year or so ago, I read an article in which a favorite writer had flipped a famous contemporary adage on its head. In light of the books he was reviewing and the line of thought he was pursuing, he suggested that instead of thinking “It takes a village to raise a child” there was reason to consider seriously that “It takes a child to raise a village.” I think this is somehow true of farms as well. It may well take a farm to raise a community: a community of a kind that may or may not have existed before; but whatever the  case, a community that it is worth our effort, understanding and engagement.

N: You have decided to do another farming internship. Where, for how long and how does it differ the term at Ploughshare? Why did you decide to farm again?
V: I will be working for eight months on Caretaker Farm, in western Massachusetts, about five minutes outside of Williamstown. Founded in 1969 as a homestead, and currently with about ten acres in active cultivation during any growing season, it is quite a bit smaller in size, though significantly older, than the farm in Minnesota.
You not only work different muscles when farming, you also live differently, at almost every level—more simply, but no less intensely. I chose to farm again because of the form, extent, and variety of instruction that stemmed from last year’s apprenticeship.

N: What do you hope to bring back to the Andina “family” with your farming experience?
V: Above all, a closer appreciation of a form of work that is quite old, and yet always, always new. By nature, new.