Our World in Food

Siempre esta lloviendo. Yup, it rains all the time.

Last night one of the girls I’m staying with at Rancho Mastatal said, “You know what? When we grow old, we are going to be able to tell stories about what it was like to live in a rainforest.” Rancho Mastatal is on the edge of La Cangreja National Park, so it basically feels like we are in the middle of a rainforest.

So what is it like to live in a rainforest? This might sum it up:

• Discovering more insects in a week than in the rest of my life
• Surrounded by different shades of green
• Feet are always muddy
• No internet
• No meat (no pasture)
• Trying new fruits I’ve never heard of
• Nothing ever dries (no drying machine)
• Little black mold appears on all cloth
• Butterflies and hummingbirds everywhere
• Cold showers
• Pooping outside
• Electronics get fucked up with the humidity
• Hundreds of creepy sounds in the night
• Sound of cicadas and rain all day long
• Eating bananas every day
• The rain and sun come on and off like a light switch, without warning
• Cockroaches in my shit, literally and figuratively
• Bats swooping overhead as I run at dusk
• Ants of all kinds, everywhere, and they all bite
• Mosquito bites all over my legs

Path to the main house. Very slippery! Hence the muddy feet...

Bananas growing in the garden

One of the tree houses a few care takers live in, quite literally in the rainforest!

I had to dedicate one post to the biodigester at Rancho Mastatal because it is actually an integral part of all the cooking that goes on here. Let me explain…

This ranch is the most unbelievably sustainable dwelling I have ever stayed in. One goal of sustainability is to eliminate waste, meaning to reduce, reuse and recycle as much as possible. Here at the ranch that means that any organic matter is composted or reused, including poop! There is only one toilet in the facility and because the septic system is so weak it can only take urine, nothing else. Therefore, all other business has to go on in one of the composting toilets or preferably in the biodigester. There are two toilets connected to the biodigester.

The biodigester works like this:

1. Do your business into a tub and toss your toilet paper into a bin to be composted later
2. Wash the excrement down with water  into an underwater pit
3. There is a bell sitting on top of the water (which is on top of the pit) that collects the methane that bubbles up from the pit (hence the Meth Lab)
4. As the bell fills with methane is starts to lift out of the water it is sitting in
5. There is a pipe connected to the top of the bell that runs all the way to the kitchen stove where you can cook with the gas.

There is no smell anywhere. Not at the toilets, the bell tank or in the kitchen. There is a regular stove we can use to cook if we are running low on methane, but I am staying with 8 people at the ranch, and that seems to be enough to power the kitchen for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

The one thing is…the toilet is outside and a ways out from the house. Which is great, it gives you your privacy and it has an amazing view. But, if you have to go in the middle of the night, like I had to on my second night here when I got sick, you have to put on a head lamp and walk out into the creepy crawly, dark unknown. Apart from that, I love the biodigester!

Here are some photos to illustrate. What do you think? Would you like to poop here?

You have to walk down a steep slope to get there, but the structure itself is quite nice

The bell I was describing, this fills with methane. See the pipe coming out the top? That leads to the kitchen.

The toilet with the hose to the right to wash things down

The view as you do your business on the toilet, nice ay?

The stove powered by methane from our poop! It doesn't smell at all

After a pretty harrowing bus ride, I made it to Rancho Mastatal! It has been raining so much for the past few days that the road I was coming in on (a super narrow road on the edge of a cliff) was washed out! They were just fixing it as we drove past in our bus full of 60 locals and me. As we went down steep slopes all the kids on the bus would yell, “ahhhhhh! We’re going down! See you in heaven!” But I was never scared. The sights out the window were just too jaw-droppingly stunning! Try and imagine lush, green, rolling hill after hill of tropical beauty!

Mastatal is in the middle of rural Costa Rica, South of San Jose. The town of Mastatal is tiny. There is one bar, one mini market and one internet cafe with two computers and cable internet. Thankfully I have my little netbook!

You can check out their page to learn more, but essentially Rancho Mastatal is an environmental learning center run by interns and volunteers. They frequently have school groups come through for a week, and right now a University of Washington group is here!

I will be a volunteer here for about three weeks. They give you the freedom to take on what tasks interest you most on the farm, so you know where I’ll be most of the time…in the kitchen! We all alternate cooking and cleaning duties and we get to cook up all the yummy produce grown on the farm and in the surrounding community of Mastatal. In the community there is a sugar plantation, coffee, cocoa, a dairy and so much more!

Fridays are bagel night, so all day today I’ve been helping make bagels and bread. We will soon bake them in a cob oven!

Here are a few photos I’ve taken today, many more to come!

The front porch of the main house, but there are about 4 dwellings.

Hammocks are all around the porch to chill in

One of the reasons I want to stay here for a while is the amazing library they have, full of environmental and foodie books!

My (full size!) bed in the main house. The net is not just for mosquitos; they tell me there are snakes, spiders, scorpions and tons of other creepy crawlies. So far, I've had a cockroach the size of my thumb in my toilet tree bag...

The whole wheat bagels I helped make, ready to be baked in the cob oven. Plain and the works (onion, basil and sun dried tomato).