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Winter 2014

Volume 19

Number 1

▪ About This Issue
▪ The Chocolate Hunters: Farmers journey deep into the Bolivian Amazon to harvest rare and delicious wild cacao
▪ A Food Forest Paradise Lost and Found on the Island of Ometepe
▪ Crossing the Border for a Better Life
▪ FRESH New London: Doesn’t Just Grow Vegetables
▪ Kids Can Make a Difference: Happy 20th Anniversary

Larry and Jane Levine

If you love chocolate (especially dark chocolate) as much as we do, this is the article for you. Austin Bailey of Heifer introduces us to the food of the ancients in Bolivia. We learn how chocolate became the backbone of the local economy in the Brazilian Amazon while making our mouths water.

Austin Bailey

It’s early when Abraham Noza goes to work, but the jungle is already singing. Leaves baked through by the heat crunch underfoot, and from all around comes the buzzing. Noza slaps a couple of the mosquitoes off his thigh with the broad side of a machete. It doesn’t much matter. The hungry hordes keep after him, landing on his ears and tangling in his hair. Soon, dabs of blood dot his shirt.

Mosquitoes thrive in the shady, balmy understory of Bolivia’s Amazon River basin. The land around Noza’s stick-and-thatch house undulates in subtle mounds, the work of a long-forgotten civilization that found a way to keep flooding in check. The prehistoric engineering still functions today, but a lacework of rivers and a plenty of afternoon rainstorms make a perfect climate for mosquitoes nonetheless.

Alison Cohen

It’s the apex of the dry season on the Isla de Ometepe – a land mass of approximately 165 square miles which rises majestically out of Lake Nicaragua not too far from the border with Costa Rica. Until recently Ometepe was one of Nicaragua’s best kept secrets – an island paradise as prophesied, according to some historians, by indigenous tribes who traveled from the north to this Eden-like utopia that came to them in a vision. But despite the fact that tourists from around the world have begun to make the 4-hour trek from Managua to sun on the sea-like shores of Lake Nicaragua and climb through the cloud forests to the rim of the island’s active volcanos, Ometepe is suffering economically and ecologically – no longer the prophesied paradise marked by insatiable abundance.
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Andrianna Natsoulas

Every year, thousands of people cross the border from Mexico into the United States to work in fields that stretch from Maine to Michigan to California to Florida. Each individual story is different, yet they all come with a dream of a better life.

In 2011, I visited the Farmworker Association of Florida, which celebrated their 30th anniversary in 2013. They run a center in Apopka that offers health care, legal advice, trainings and advocacy to thousands of farmworkers. They warmly welcomed me and one of the organizers, Ana Luisa Trevino, gave me a tour of the area. We passed blueberry fields and cucumber farms. We saw farm workers picking vegetables by the side of the road, next to signs that read, “NO PHOTOGRAPHY ALLOWED.”

Alison Shea

While FRESH New London is known best for its community garden in the center of one of Connecticut’s smallest, poorest cities, it doesn’t just grow vegetables.

It grows dreams. It grows young leaders. It grows a community. And it does so in much the same way it grows vegetables: with plenty of water, sunshine, hard work and care.

FRESH, which stands for “Food: Resources, Education, Security, Health,” focuses on youth empowerment and community education, with a message of food justice through the growth and distribution of local, organic produce. An urban community garden and a five-acre farm on the outskirts of the city allow young people to try their hand at growing organic, heirloom vegetables. Workshops teach them about nutrition, food systems, health and sustainability. They take some vegetables home to share with their families, and the rest go into the community.

Bill Ayres

I first met Jane and Larry Levine more than twenty five years ago. Jane was in the process of earning her doctorate in Nutrition Education from Columbia University. For one of her courses, Jane was required to interview a person involved with a nutrition organization. Jane was interested in working on the problem of hunger and selected World Hunger Year (WHY) to be the subject of her interview.

During the interview, we discussed the broad field of hunger and poverty and what WHY is doing to help alleviate hunger in this country and worldwide. Jane was very interested in finding out more about our work and how I felt she could make a contribution to our effort. I explained that we could use some help in marketing our magazine and the organization in general. Jane’s eyes lit up, and she suggested that husband, Larry, might be in a position to provide the marketing assistance we needed.