This last day of 2012 has a good feel to it, and when thinking of Bolivia I see some harbingers of good for 2013. So it is appropriate to end this year with an upbeat article about the famous chef Claus Meyer, who is in Bolivia using local ingredients to create a new style. Appropriate - as this country has conrtibuted so much gastronomically to the world - what with the potato and so many other members of the Solanaceous family - Brazil nuts (see post on this blog about them, most are actually grown in Bolivia), etc.
Hopefully when I make my trip to Bolivia Chef Meyer's eatery will be up and running and I can write more from first hand experience - for now, here is the New York Times article:
High Ambition and Visions of Andean Haute Cuisine
By WILLIAM NEUMAN
Published: November 6, 2012
LA PAZ, Bolivia — Bolivia has not been kind to foreigners trying to import revolution. The attempt by the Argentine-born Che Guevara to set off a peasant revolt here ended badly. The verdict is still out on the latest foreigner to arrive in this impoverished nation trying to stir things up.
The Danish celebrity chef Claus Meyer is opening a restaurant in La Paz, hoping to start a Bolivian food movement.
He is a chef, not a Che.
Claus Meyer, a Danish celebrity chef and restaurant entrepreneur, is one of the owners of Noma, a Copenhagen restaurant that is a darling of food critics for its mix of locavore purism and avant-garde cooking methods. Restaurant magazine, a trade journal, ranks it the best restaurant in the world.
Now Mr. Meyer is building a restaurant here, an experiment in Andean haute cuisine that comes with hefty side orders of revolution and high ambition.
Mr. Meyer, who came to Bolivia for the first time last year and has been back three times, described the restaurant, Gustu, due to open in January, as much more than a place to get a fancy meal in the continent’s poorest country. He and his followers describe it as the start of a Bolivian food movement that will rediscover local ingredients like llama meat, chuños (potatoes dehydrated high in the Andes) and coca, the plant that is used to make cocaine but that has long been used here as a mild stimulant, a tea and a medicinal herb.
Gustu’s mission will be to teach Bolivians how to eat in healthier ways, spur economic growth, tourism and exports, support local farmers and turn Bolivian cuisine into the next world food sensation. If all goes well, Mr. Meyer said in a telephone call from Copenhagen, the restaurant will use food “to change the destiny of a country.”
The restaurant, being built in the upscale Calacoto neighborhood, hardly looks like a crucible of revolution. On a recent day, workers installed insulation in the roof. The kitchen was stacked with bags of concrete mix and plaster.
Michelangelo Cestari, one of the restaurant’s head chefs, said it would be the most advanced restaurant in the country, full of high-tech gadgets of molecular gastronomy that atomize, froth and otherwise transform foods.
The restaurant will serve only ingredients grown or created in Bolivia. Wines will come from the country’s handful of wineries and liquor will be limited largely to singani, a local grape brandy.
Mr. Cestari pointed to a tall wall where wines will be stored and displayed, although he said there might not be enough Bolivian labels to fill it at first. The idea, he said, is to help create demand for local products.
Mr. Cestari, a pastry chef, is from Venezuela and has worked for years in fine restaurants in Europe. So has his fellow head chef, Kamilla Seidler, who is Danish. The only Bolivian among the restaurant’s top cooks is Christian Gómez, the senior sous chef, who worked for years in Spain.
They are keenly aware of the risk of being seen as outsiders. “Perhaps it’s arrogant to think we can come here to develop a gastronomy,” Mr. Cestari said, “but we hope we can push something.”
He said the menu would include items inspired by Bolivian dishes, like a lamb on a cross, made by splaying a whole lamb on an iron cross and cooking it slowly over a smoky fire; or calapurca, a soup heated by placing a hot rock in the bowl.
Rather than simply serving typical Bolivian food done well, however, the kitchen will use the method favored by Mr. Meyer in Denmark of focusing on a few basic ingredients and trying to draw out their essence.
“We don’t want to do French food or fusion or nouvelle,” Mr. Gómez said. “We want to do something new with a Bolivian identity.”
Mr. Cestari said that the average dinner tab would be $50 to $60 a person, which he said is on par with other top restaurants here but still prompted several Bolivians to gasp. The minimum wage here is about $143 a month.
Mr. Meyer will address that contradiction soon by opening a bistro and bakery where people can eat more economically. And he said that all profits from the restaurant would go to charitable projects in Bolivia, which he chose partly because it was a developing country with a wide range of unique local ingredients.
The project also includes a cooking school for young Bolivians from poor families, which will provide a trained work force for the restaurant and, Mr. Meyer hopes, create a new generation of experimentally minded chefs.
On a recent morning, students at the school, which is run out of an ornate mansion in central La Paz, buzzed around a cramped kitchen, making pork chops and yucca fries. Then some of them piled into a van for a field trip to a nearby market.
Ms. Seidler, one of the head chefs, said that because she arrived in Bolivia only recently she often finds herself learning from her students. At a market stall, Ms. Seidler and a student, Belén Soria, pored over types of offal. Ms. Soria explained how indigenous women prepared a mixture of fried tripe and potatoes that they sell from carts at night.
Ms. Soria, 24, said she grew up helping her grandmother cook and sell api, a sweet corn gruel that is a workingperson’s inexpensive morning staple.
Everyone has their own knowledge, things their grandparents told them,” she said. But she has less time to help her grandmother now that she is focusing on her studies.
“We’re all curious to prepare new things, with our own stamp,” Ms. Soria said. “Original things.”
Monday, December 31, 2012
Thursday, December 27, 2012
27 December New York Times article
In today's New York Times - what is finally a focused and objective article on Bolivia, though, sadly, about cocaine which is not what Bolivia is about; one would hope that the NYT would spend time writing about the birdlife, orchids, indigenous festivals, social improvements under the MAS government, chocolate farming, mineral resources, coffee production - the list of positive things is endless, why all the attention on some stupid drug that people do to make themselves think they are cool?
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Coca Licensing Is a Weapon in Bolivia’s Drug War
Meridith Kohut for The New York Times
Augustine Calicho, 45, separating the seeds from dried coca leaves in Villa Tunari in the Chapare region of Bolivia. More Photos »
By WILLIAM NEUMAN
Published: December 26, 2012
TODOS SANTOS, Bolivia — There is nothing clandestine about Julián Rojas’s coca plot, which is tucked deep within acres of banana groves. It has been mapped with satellite imagery, cataloged in a government database, cross-referenced with his personal information and checked and rechecked by the local coca growers’ union. The same goes for the plots worked by Mr. Rojas’s neighbors and thousands of other farmers in this torrid region east of the Andes who are licensed by the Bolivian government to grow coca, the plant used to make cocaine.
Multimedia
Meridith Kohut for The New York Times
Meri Pintas, 30, center, harvesting coca leaves with her children in the Yungas region of Bolivia. Thousands of legal coca patches are intended to produce coca leaf for traditional uses. More Photos »
Meridith Kohut for The New York Times
A counternarcotics agent explained the eradication process to coca growers whose patch was two rows over the legal limit. More Photos »
President Evo Morales, who first came to prominence as a leader of coca growers, kicked out the Drug Enforcement Administration in 2009. That ouster, together with events like the arrest last year of the former head of the Bolivian anti-narcotics police on trafficking charges, led Washington to conclude that Bolivia was not meeting its global obligations to fight narcotics.
But despite the rift with the United States, Bolivia, the world’s third-largest cocaine producer, has advanced its own unorthodox approach toward controlling the growing of coca, which veers markedly from the wider war on drugs and includes high-tech monitoring of thousands of legal coca patches intended to produce coca leaf for traditional uses.
To the surprise of many, this experiment has now led to a significant drop in coca plantings in Mr. Morales’s Bolivia, an accomplishment that has largely occurred without the murders and other violence that have become the bloody byproduct of American-led measures to control trafficking in Colombia, Mexico and other parts of the region.
Yet there are also worrisome signs that such gains are being undercut as traffickers use more efficient methods to produce cocaine and outmaneuver Bolivian law enforcement to keep drugs flowing out of the country.
In one key sign of progress in Bolivia’s approach toward coca, the total acres planted with coca dropped 12 to 13 percent last year, according to separate reports by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. At the same time, the Bolivian government stepped up efforts to rip out unauthorized coca plantings and reported an increase in seizures of cocaine and cocaine base.
“It’s fascinating to look at a country that kicked out the United States ambassador and the D.E.A., and the expectation on the part of the United States is that drug war efforts would fall apart,” said Kathryn Ledebur, director of the Andean Information Network, a Bolivian research group. Instead, she said, Bolivia’s approach is “showing results.”
Still, there is skepticism. “Our perspective is they’ve made real advances, and they’re a long way from where we’d like to see them,” said Larry Memmott, chargé d’affaires of the American Embassy in La Paz. “In terms of law enforcement, a lot remains to be done.”
Although Bolivia outlaws cocaine, it permits the growing of coca for traditional uses. Bolivians chew coca leaf as a mild stimulant and use it as a medicine, as a tea and, particularly among the majority indigenous population, in religious rituals.
On a recent afternoon, Mr. Rojas placed a few dried leaves into his mouth and watched the sun set over his coca field, slightly less than two-fifths of an acre, the maximum allowed per farmer here in this region, known as the Chapare.
“This is a way to keep it under control,” he said, spitting a stream of green juice. “Everyone should have the same amount.”
Mr. Rojas is a face of a changing region. He makes far more money growing bananas for export on about 74 acres than he does growing coca. But he has no intention of giving up his tiny coca plot. “What happens if a disease attacks the bananas?” he asked. “Then we still have the coca to save us.”
The Bolivian government has persuaded growers that by limiting the amount of plantings, coca prices will remain high. And it has largely focused eradication efforts, of the kind that once spurred strong popular resistance, outside the areas controlled by growers’ unions, like in national parks.
The registration of thousands of Chapare growers, completed this year, is part of an enforcement system that relies on growers to police one another. If registered growers are found to have plantings above the maximum allowed, soldiers are called in to remove the excess. If growers violate the limit a second time, their entire crop is cut down and they lose the right to grow coca.
Growers’ unions can also be punished if there are multiple violations among their members.
“We have to be constantly vigilant,” said Nelson Sejas, a Chapare grower who was part of a team that checked coca plots to make sure they did not exceed the limit.
But there is still plenty of cheating. Officials say they are going over the registry of about 43,000 Chapare growers to find those who may have multiple plots or who may violate other rules.
“The results speak for themselves,” said Carlos Romero, the minister of government. “We have demonstrated that you can objectively do eradication work without violating human rights, without polemicizing the topic and with clear results.”
He said that the government was on pace to eradicate more acres of coca this year than it did last year, without the violence of years past. A government report said 60 people were killed and more than 700 were wounded in the Chapare from 1998 to 2002 in violence related to eradication.
But even as Bolivia shows progress, grave concerns remain.
The White House drug office estimated that despite the decrease in total coca acreage last year, the amount of cocaine that could potentially be produced from the coca grown in Bolivia jumped by more than a quarter. That is because a large amount of recent plantings began to mature and reach higher yields; new plantings with higher yields replaced older, less productive fields; and traffickers switched to more efficient processing methods.
Yet the glaring paradox of Bolivia’s monitoring program is that vast amounts of the legally grown coca ultimately wind up in the hands of drug traffickers and are converted into cocaine and other drugs. Most of those drugs go to Brazil, considered the world’s second-largest cocaine market. Virtually no Bolivian cocaine ends up in the United States.
César Guedes, the representative in Bolivia of the United Nations drugs office, said that roughly half of the country’s coca acreage produces coca that goes to the drug trade. By some estimates, more than 90 percent of the coca in Chapare, one of two main producing regions, goes to drugs.
Two Chapare farmers explained that they generally sell one 50-pound bag of coca leaf from each harvest to the government-regulated market. The rest, often 200 pounds or more, is sold to buyers who work with traffickers and pay a premium over the government-authorized price. One of the growers said he recently delivered coca leaf directly to a lab where it would be turned into drugs.
The central question is how much coca is needed to supply traditional needs. Current government policy permits about 50,000 acres of legal coca plantings, although the actual area in cultivation is much higher. The United Nations estimated there were 67,000 acres of coca last year.
Whatever the exact figure, most analysts agree that far more is produced than is needed to supply the traditional market.
The European Union financed a study several years ago to estimate how much coca was needed for traditional uses, but the Bolivian government has refused to release it, saying that more research is needed.
The push to reduce coca acreage comes as the Morales government is lobbying other countries to amend a United Nations convention on narcotics to recognize the legality of traditional uses of coca leaf in Bolivia. A decision is expected in January.
On a recent morning just after dawn, a squad of uniformed soldiers used machetes to cut down a plot of coca plants near the town of Ivirgarzama.
They had come to chop down an old coca patch that had passed its prime and measure a replacement plot planted by the farmer. The soldiers determined that the new plot was slightly over the limit and removed about two rows of plants before going on their way.
“Before, there was more tension, more conflict, more people injured,” Lt. Col. Willy Pozo said. “This is no longer a war.”
Friday, December 21, 2012
Jacob Ostreicher out on bail in Santa Cruz
While still not free, Jacob Ostreicher got a Chanukah present from the Bolivian government: he was allowed out on bail. There are complications to his case, which is not being helped by the presence of US politicians, journalists and out of work actors who are known to punch women. No need to name names.
Jacob is caught in this circus, an innocent victim of drug dealers and the GOP.
We continue to support his release, and to support the MAS government in Bolivia as it tries to clarify what is going on.
Jacob is caught in this circus, an innocent victim of drug dealers and the GOP.
We continue to support his release, and to support the MAS government in Bolivia as it tries to clarify what is going on.
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