Maarten Dankers is a BC-based freelance writer and young agrarian. Last year he founded Vanley Fresh Foods market garden and CSA in Langley. He’s currently winding up a three-month-long internship at Villas Mastatal in Costa Rica and is looking for landsharing opportunities for the upcoming growing season in BC.
Rice and beans, aka Gallo Pinto, the staple of the Costa Rican diet. It’s such a source of national pride that the normally peaceful country has waged a war of culinary excess to claim its dominance over the dish. In 2009, Costa Rica was awarded the world record after cooking up 6000 pounds of Gallo Pinto, enough to feed 50,000 people. Where did all those beans come from? The last few months have allowed me to gain some insight.
Since December I’ve been staying at Villas Mastatal, an organic permaculture farm on a hilltop near the tiny jungle outpost of Mastatal in western Costa Rica. Eight years ago, Javier Zuñiga and his wife Raquel moved from the capital San Jose back to the countryside where they grew up. Javier, age 33, says he was excited at the opportunity to move to Raquel’s family farm and breathe new life into it. The timing seemed right – not only was voluntourism taking off in the region, but he was looking forward to the quiet rural lifestyle after working a factory job for several years. Since their return, Javier and Raquel have transformed the farm from a coffee and cattle finca into a diverse education site that accepts volunteers and interns on an ongoing basis. They cultivate everything from pineapple, peppers, and oranges, to more exotic fruits like the sweet ‘n’ spiky guayabana and the blue-cheese-flavoured not-for-everyone noni. After spending a few weeks at the farm eating beans on a daily basis, I still couldn’t figure out where all those frijoles were coming from. That is, until mid January, when I got a crash course in leguminology.
The annual bean harvest started with a dozy early morning pre-dawn start. Along with a dozen or so volunteers, mainly from North America and Europe, we loaded ourselves into the back of Javier’s truck like a sleepy litter of boxed-in pups. Javier did a shoulder check to see if all our limbs were in, gave us the thumbs up, then grinned and cranked up the tunage as we sped down to a neighbouring farm, picking up a few more Costa Rican helpers along the way. After unloading ourselves, we hiked down a rough path to the valley bottom, forded a river, then passed through some cattle pastures to reach the elusive bean plantation, waiting for us in all its splendid steepness.
To harvest the beans, we lined up side by side and walked uphill in unison, pulling out bean vines that had been planted three months earlier, rolling them into bundles and leaving them on the hill to dry. Under the blazing sun, we played word games to keep our minds off the stifling heat, scratchy grass, and biting bugs. After a few hours we’d made minimal progress up the slope, but my vocabulary had expanded to include words like barbiturates and somnambulism. Towards noon, Javi called us all down to the bottom of the hill, sizing up us sorry-looking bunch of sweat-soaked and red-faced bum-tumbling gringos. As he sliced up a pineapple with a machete, he said he didn’t want us handling the pods anymore – with the increasing heat, beans were falling out of their dry shells too easily. If we kept going we’d lose too many of the little red nodules. So we called it a day, retreated to the valley bottom and enjoyed a refreshing dip in the languid Rio Negro before heading home.
Day two was basically a repeat of the first day – an early start combined with hot and stuffy vine pulling. On the third and final day of the harvest, Javier sat us all down in the morning, thanked us for our hard work and introduced us to a new Spanish verb: aporrear – to beat or bang away. He assured us we’d get a chance to experience that action later in the day. First though, we had to get the all the bean bundles off the hill. So we formed a snaking human conveyor belt, passing the leguminous loads downwards person to person. Once the cargo reached the bottom, we smashed the pods with sticks over a big blue tarp to loosen the beans from their shells. Afterwards, we swept them into sacks, swung the sacks over our shoulders, then trudged back up out of the valley one last time. We celebrated that night with a feast of Gallo Pinto.