Mushrooms & Mom’s Rice: Learning to Love the Land in a Cement Jungle
October 15, 2020
According to the legend of the suns, the Aztec gods Tezcatlipoca and Quetzalcóatl were tasked with creating a new world and inhabiting it with life. Tezcatlipoca tore the earth monster in two and created the land and the sky while Quetzalcóatl explored the underworld to gather bones. To bring the bones to life, he sprinkled his own blood on them and the first two humans were created. But they were too weak and so the pair of gods went out in search of food. Quetzalcóatl shrunk himself down to the size of an ant to go deep inside the Tonacatépel Mountain, where ants guarded precious corn kernels. He chewed the corn into a paste and rubbed them onto the lips of the humans who then came to life. Throughout the Americas, corn was considered gifts from the gods and was worshipped as if it were one. Corn was synonymous with abundance, society and the meaning of life and death, and it wasn’t the only plant that the ancient cultures worshipped.
In journalist and essayist Heriberto García Rivas’ Pre-Hispanic Mexican Cooking, he writes about the importance of the quelite to the Aztecs of Tenochtitlan. The herb was a fundamental part of their diet and also held an important role in religious ceremonies. Priests would build miniature statues to the gods of war and fire out of toasted and ground quilite and amaranth seeds that were glued together with the blood of the victims of human sacrifices and eaten by the people as a form of communion. Corn was more powerful than the gods and plants were more valuable than human life.
The quarantine has forced me and my wife into a life inside. While I do venture into the outside world to conduct interviews, much of our life since late March has been spent inside our apartment. The more we are forced in, the more we try to manifest a life surrounded by nature within the confines of our apartment. Naturally, we began filling up the house with plants (of which we already had many) and now likely have more than 100. I began paying more attention to the fresno trees — our fourth floor apartment sits right at canopy level — and watched the leaves fill in and turn so green that at noon they feel neon. Our growing interest manifested into paying careful attention to the plants we consumed, how they were treated before reaching us and how we treated them. We have started making stock, drying and grinding orange peels to make our own tajin, turning lemons into cleaning agents and throwing everything else into a compost.
Although this sounds all consuming, we spend just a fraction extra of our day with new tasks like feeding the compost or pickling vegetables we don’t get to in time. Our relationship to food, however, has changed dramatically. I feel guilty when I let a beautiful head of lettuce wilt in the fridge and find it increasingly more difficult to purchase industrial anything. My taste buds crave the bread, hot sauce, mushrooms and fresh pastas created by individuals whose faces and names I have begun to know. The love in the hands that knead the dough or the emotional attachment of maintaining a fridge full of wild mushrooms is transcendental, passed into the food and then into me. It’s easy to understand why the Aztecs saw food and nature as godly, as something more powerful than them, food as nourishment and sustenance that should be respected and worshipped.
This retraining of the mind in this way is a choice. Like anything that goes against the hegemonic structures of modernity and capitalism, it is a choice we are actively taught to not even be aware of. Protecting and worshipping the essence of a single strawberry becomes a form of rebellion against socioeconomic structures that were never intended to benefit the land and its fruits or the people who live on it. And many of these changes are fairly recent products of massive and rapid urbanization of the mid-twentieth century — most of our grandparents or great grandparents grew up with subsistence gardens and animals. My wife’s 90 year old aunt loves to tell us about buying live chickens from the butcher — in Buenos Aires!
I wonder just how difficult it will be to reverse the path on a massive scale in a world that continues to disconnect humanity from the earth that feeds us and rebuild a connection to the food we put into our bodies and the story each piece of food has. Which is why I have been seeking out people like Erik Mejia lately. Mejia is a talented young cook who has come up in one of my favorite restaurants, Donnet, a vegan restaurant that focuses on mushrooms which I profiled in MATAMBRE’s very first interview. Mejia grew up in the countryside, swinging from trees and helping tend to a garden full of berries, pumpkins, tomatoes and fig trees. He moved to the city at age 14, where he quickly lost his connection to the land. At 18, he went full vegan and began entering kitchens but it wasn’t until this year that he began to feel a real connection with the ingredients he was using and the food he was making. I met with him at his apartment, where he is making omakase vegan sushi boxes on the weekends, where we tested out the following week’s ingredients: maracuya vinegar, carrots dressed in fermented cashew sauce, eggplant ohitashi and turmeric blitzed oyster mushrooms. We ate and talked about his childhood in the trees, his mother’s cooking, reconnecting with vegetables and the future potential of the pandemic’s DIY food culture.
What was your relationship with food and meat like as a child?
I grew up in the south of Buenos Aires province in a town called Monte Grande. When I was thirteen or fourteen my mom had to go out and look for work and we ended up here in San Martín. We moved here with my grandfather. It was a really big change. People were totally different. The kids my age here were like another breed. I grew up on dirt roads and houses made of aluminum and metal. I had a very humble childhood. I don’t know what my life would be like had we stayed there. I definitely would have gone down a different path. At home we ate a lot of meat. These men would pass through the neighborhood with carts with fresh fish or chickens in cages. Alive obviously. My grandfather would buy chickens, kill them, pluck them and cook. I remember he made soups but I don’t really remember very much about his food. I have more memories of my mother's food. We lived in a house with a really big garden and next door there was a chicken farm and a giant meat packing factory. All week long they were butchering animals and I remember on the weekends you could smell them burning up the carcasses, god, there were these huge birds that would come to eat them. We definitely had the best barbecues. I’m not going to lie. I never lie about that part of me. We definitely ate well. You could go into the factory and pick out a pig and the next week they’d bring you chorizo and half a pig that we would barbecue whole. Our house was where everyone gathered. The whole family would come to our house to eat.
What did your mom cook?
We ate a mixture of everything. She made a lot of typical Argentine food. At the time, she was dating a Paraguayan man so we ate a lot of Paraguayan food. Lots of sopa paraguaya. I loved that. Tons of chipa, obviously. And lots of soups that were seasoned with spices typical to Paraguayan cuisine. When my mom broke up with him and we came to San Martín, we started eating a lot of Peruvian food. Before we didn’t have a lot of closeness to Peruvian food even though my mother is the daughter of peruvians. When we came to San Martín, she met a Peruvian and that’s when we started eating lots of that food. We always had rice. On the weekends we would go to eat ceviche or criolla-style Peruvian food. She made a lot of papa a la huancaina which is a recipe I have a lot of nostalgia for. And she is really good at making anticuchos, which I used to love so much.
I am reading and talking to a lot of people lately about veganism and vegetarianism. I’m interested in its context in Argentina which I think is pretty distinct in other parts of Latin America. There is very little contact with vegetables. Lots of people can name all the cuts of beef and how to cook them but few people know the structure of vegetables or how to use the entire vegetable. At the vegetable stand, we have access to such little variety and what people take home is even less. I read recently that a lot of families live off of three or four vegetables here: potato, lettuce, onion and tomato. Obviously, there are socioeconomic factors at play but I’m interested in the educational side and access to information. Growing up in the country, what was your experience? When or where did you form a relationship with vegetables?
When we lived in Monte Grande, we had access to small farms that came by horse to the neighborhood with their products. Maybe from age 7 to when we moved here, we pretty much sustained ourselves with our own garden. We had two fig trees, berries, plums, lemons. We had pumpkins, greens and aromatics. We went on vacation to my grandmother’s house who lived in the countryside up north in Parana and she had a serious garden. They had pigs, rabbits and chickens and a huge garden. All of my family lives up there near my grandmother with their own plots of land. That is my ideal future. I want to have a garden where food is literally at my fingertips.
Do you feel like you lost that contact with your food and the land when you came to the city?
When we moved to San Martín we definitely lost a little bit of that. I was a 90s kid that grew up in the street. That was life. The south of the province, an area of families of very little purchasing power and the kids lived by the luck of the street. The street took you in and the kids all took care of one another. And all of us had gardens and everyone had yardwork. We were really wild kids. Extremely wild. I loved playing in the trees. We would get up on the plum or mulberry trees and eat fruit off the branch. I remember sleeping in one of our fig trees. When we came here, globalization and urbanization. That was the first time I saw a computer and the internet cafes where kids sat in front of a screen to entertain themselves. That was insane to me. My grandfather had a house here that was big but all the outside space was pretty much covered in cement.
Now you are reconnected to that part of your identity with looking at your diet a different way. How did you reconnect to that?
I started reflecting on my childhood and the things we ate and traditional Argentine food culture. I started to see how as a culture we consume food in a way that is totally out of control. That really started to mess with me. When I finished high school, that was when I really began to feel a change in me. I had a lot of girl friends that taught me, a lot of women mentors who taught me so much. I remember realizing how infinite knowledge was and that there are so many things to learn. When I was 18 I was working in a toy shop in the city and across the street was the best example of global consumerism, a Burger King and a McDonalds. I was still eating that stuff. One day, I went to eat a hamburger at a local spot and ordered a cheeseburger and it came almost completely raw. I ordered another and the same thing. It was this moment where I just said to myself, no way, I don’t want to eat this ever again at a Burger King, at a McDonalds, at my mom’s house, at a family barbecue. That hamburger was what changed everything.
Were you cooking for yourself and developing independent projects from that time too?
When I moved out of my mom’s place I started sustaining myself with what I knew best which was always cooking. I always loved my mom’s cooking. I liked cooking with her, helping her with what I could. I was really curious and I was kind of glued to her side in the kitchen. But it was more observing. I didn’t have her technique. She always made rice and her rice is perfect. Lots of people think rice is simple, you measure some rice and throw in the water and there you go. But cooking isn’t that simple. There is a spirit that we put into our food too. Around 16 I think I started becoming more interested in making my own food. I had vegan friends from a very young age. Like 16. I dabbled in vegetarianism but wasn’t very strict. I remember googling and googling and googling just looking for recipes but of course I was cooking with what my mom bought. She has always respected my decision but she isn’t going to change her lifestyle or make something especially for me. I started learning to adapt things. I made a lot of stews. Tortilla de papa. Gnocchis. I also ate a lot of textured soy and seitan. It was a long learning process to learn to eat and find myself as a cook.
How did you get started selling vegan sushi from home?
I started selling last year because I wanted to go on vacation and I wanted to travel comfortably. So I was like, ok I know how to make sushi. I know how to cook good vegan food. I think I can make good vegan sushi. Vegan sushi is having a moment right now but I started in November of last year!
Do you like working like this kind of underground?
It is incredibly liberating. I do a lot of different things and it all mixes together. Techniques, knowledge, products. I have a freedom here that I don’t have working in a restaurant. Right now I am in this moment as a cook that I am really beginning to understand what I want to cook. When you are in a restaurant obviously you are going to absorb the style or ideology of that place but each cook has something unique in them, you know. What I am doing here is really me. Working at a restaurant has a lot of limitations. There are plenty of restaurants that allow their cooks some freedom but at the end of the day, the chef has the final say. Here I have the final say. I am so thankful for what I am doing and how people are responding. People trust me. I’m doing omakase so people just give me money, they don’t choose anything. They have no idea what they will eat. I’m using whatever I have in the fridge that I was experimenting on that week like vinagres, ferments and other preserves and whatever mushrooms my purveyor brings me. So all I have are these materials I have developed a relationship with and my own curiosity and desire to seek this information out. I think those personal journeys are becoming more valued now. Behind all of this is a lot of investigation. And when it comes time to sell, I tell the client the number of pieces and that’s it. It’s what I have in the fridge. Do you want it or not? It’s that simple. I’m not going to tell you anything. You want a box or not? Last week I sold a ton of boxes.
In the pandemic lots of projects like this have been born that are incredibly personal. I would love to see post-pandemic dining culture start to look a bit more like this. Small spaces. Simple. Different creative expressions. That can also be a way to solve a lot of systemic problems too. Smaller scale means easier to create better working conditions. Less precarious. Less inequity. All these things that have been normalized in an effort to help huge, glittery restaurant spaces stay afloat.
I would love to have a bigger kitchen with more equipment. My own place, obviously. But nothing too big. No tables. I’d love just a window honestly. I’m in here. They’re out there. If I could put a little bar on my kitchen window I would do it tomorrow and I’d happily be the cook, the waiter and the dishwasher. I cook, I charge, I fill your cup with wine, I clean up afterwards, awesome. I don’t want a lot of ceremony. I don’t care about service protocol. Here I have a pot and a pan and nothing else. If I had more equipment I could make more stuff but what I have here is sufficient and I am thankful for what I have. Give me a small fridge, my jars, a blender and I’m good to go. I’ll figure out a way to make magic happen. I would like to see us return back to a more homey understanding of food. I want us to go back to something simpler and a real understanding of ingredients. Like, this is in season and this is what’s left in the fridge, what are we going to make? Work with whatever my purveyor has. Really worship that ingredient. Understand how to use it all. Right now I have 5 kilos of loquats in the fridge. I’m going to make something with the skin, something else with the seed and something else with the fruit. Use every last part. That is what is important to me. A restaurant can have a service that can be better or worse. It can have a nicer decoration or not. But it can never lose sight of quality. I want restaurants that tell me a story. There are tons of restaurants and grills and pizza shops that all sell the same product, they fill orders, great, but I want to eat somewhere that the food tells me about the person cooking it. I want that closeness. Something less robotic and systematic. That’s where my work is going. Cook what I choose and that people feel comfortable but that I do too. I cook with love wherever I cook, but here in my kitchen I cook with all my love, this comes from me. What I make at the restaurant also comes from me but it’s mandated from above. Here, this is my energy that has been pulverized or sweated out of me. I found this piece of myself only a few months ago. It’s wild. I decide what to make. They just have to sit and eat. No one is going to stop me. Nothing can stop me. Take it or leave it. No more rules.