Manuel Antonio: Finding our Food

Having found our way to our first apartment and familiarised ourselves with our new domestic infrastructure it was now time to venture out and discover the next level of infrastructure that we would need to navigate – the local food system.

It’s worth taking a moment to do a compare and contrast with how things were for us back at home in the UK. Just as we had with the changes to our domestic infrastructure we were going to experience the same thing with the local food infrastructure. In Canterbury where we have been for almost 20 years we have in-depth knowledge of this infrastructure and are able to navigate it easily. From my work in foraging I have knowledge not only of the wild edible plants in the area but also many of the local food producers. Both myself and Rachael are very aware of the provenance of our food, the methods by which it is produced and the wider implications of this on the landscape and local environment. We are conscientious consumers in this respect plus we have had an allotment in the area for over 12 years where we produce much of our food. I don’t want to stress the point but these are things which are very important to us and in the same way that we all go about constructing that domestic infrastructure to support our habits and routine we had created and connected with a food infrastructure which enabled us to eat according to our beliefs. Along with our allotment we would go to the local farmers market (The Goods Shed) and buy great organic & biodynamic produce from local farms many of whom I would know from harvesting weeds on their land. Just 2 weeks before we came to Costa Rica I had organised a trip to a local regenerative farm for members of our allotment site. Suffice to say that we are very interested in food!

Another recap is that a large part of why we are here in Costa Rica is to create time and space to explore regenerative pathways and lifestyles as a family. An inherent and central part of this in our imaginations was how we would enjoy the wide diversity of tropical produce once we arrived. We were in for a bit of a shock!

Discovering the kind of local food system that we were able to depend on back home is often a slow and rather chance process. Over time you get recommendations from other people and you are able to explore and discover yourself. We are very lucky in Canterbury to have somewhere like the Goods Shed which can be a bit of a one-stop-shop for good produce. It has also taken us over a decade to gradually create and learn the systems we use at our allotment and at home to grow and process our own produce. Coming here we had rather abruptly unplugged ourselves from all of that which had taken so long to build and to find.

In a new country where you are not fully conversant in the language you find yourself looking for the obviously identifiable. This process is actually very familiar to me through foraging as well – when our ancestors (and of course current hunter-gatherer societies) moved to a new location they would have been looking for food and I presume that they would have been looking for things which they recognised as food. When you travel slowly on foot or by boat this transition would be gradual. I can tell you from experience that when you fly this is not the case. I have experienced going from a landscape where (in addition to the infrastructure I’ve been writing about) the plants and features which make it up are all known to me and I can name them and their uses, to landing somewhere where I suddenly have no applicable knowledge whatsoever. It is unsettling. It’s what many people experience with learning a new language where you suddenly find yourself not knowing the name of anything. It’s in many ways being thrown back into infancy. For most people these days they probably don’t know the names or uses of the plants around them and so might not find this specific element unsettling but the rest remains true for nearly all of us.

The point I’m really getting to here is that we found ourselves in the same situation where we were looking for something which we could easily recognise as a food source. That something in the modern day ends up being a supermarket. They are easily identifiable and they are dependable in that you can assume that they will contain something ‘edible’ (sometimes in the loosest possible sense of the word!). For us travelling around as a family trying to explore new regenerative pathways we found ourselves in Manuel Antonio sadly looking to supermarkets as easy sources of food. Once we entered the shop the same process repeats on a smaller scale – scanning the shelves for familiar products. This is entirely understandable as well because in that setting I’ve described, where our domestic infrastructure is new and unfamiliar, we were already facing a challenge to employ the culinary repertoire that we had acquired at home without the tools that we were used to having for the job. We were looking for at least something familiar and easy. Things which we knew we could turn into meals using our cooking skills and the limited cooking equipment that we had. It’s not easy to adapt quickly to these changes. Now throw into that mix an 8 year old and a 4 year old and you’ve amplified the challenge! Children can often be cautious about food which we’re sometimes told is a useful survival instinct – they’re like an extreme version of the situation I described above where they are looking for familiar and safe things to eat and without years of experience their choices are usually narrower than for an adult. So when you combine the ‘fussy’ eating of young children with the fact that they too are in unfamiliar and unsettling territory you get some tough shopping trips and even more so if you’re trying to shop with some degree of ethics.

In those first weeks it was tough. To be fair, fruit was a bit of a salvation although looking back now I see that we hadn’t yet started to find the local ‘feria’ and so our fruit selection was really limited to pineapple, watermelon and bananas. For a short stint the girls seemed to be hooked on cheap hot-dog sausages and we were frustrated and at least a little concerned that this might be their diet for the whole stay here – that and the occasional pizza! It has got better thankfully and for any other families who might try a similar adventure I would say to be patient as the children gain their confidence and broaden their horizons. This is all a completely natural response to the highly unnatural environments that we find ourselves in.

When I think back to that point of our ancestors moving from one place to another and having to rediscover food I realise that they would have had similar experiences too. We tried the granizados here which are cups of shaved ice (amazing watching the block of ice being shaved with a modified plane) and then an assortment of syrups, powdered milk and condensed milk all built up in layers. On first try on a hot day visiting nearby Quepos they seemed like the perfect well-timed cold refreshment but shortly afterwards with kids complaining about bad tummies they didn’t seem so good. They tried them once again on one of our final days at the beach here and neither child finished theirs. They’ve not asked for one since. And it strikes me that it must have been the same for early food pioneers; to try a fruit for the first time, maybe experience an upset stomach, try again and confirm that this was not good food. Sometimes these things can’t be rushed and we all need to be allowed to do the experiment and learn from experience.

I can offer a small spoiler now to say that at our current point in time things are much better with regard to food although still a long way from that intimate knowledge we had of the food culture back at home. Sometimes the supermarket is the default option. We miss being able to compost which we have always found to be an issue when travelling. Sadly, at a moment in time when we desperately need to be building soil across the planet composting is still a niche activity and there is rarely any provision for it. We still do other things that we would always do – for example if we cook a chicken then the bones are cooked up for stock before they go out but at home the bones would then have gone into our bokashi bin to feed the compost which in turn would go to feed the soil on our allotment.

Little by little we are having to build a new kind of infrastructure. To find processes which allow us to eat good food without having a permanent base. To build a flexible repertoire of recipes which uses local ingredients and can be adapted according to whatever cooking facilities we have to hand. To be able to come to a new location and quickly find our way to local food sources. It’s a work in progress and we hope in time to have more useful knowledge to share in this regard.