Tre Qua Organic Culinary Community was surprisingly busy on a very hot Saturday morning just after 9am. Group after group of paying customers, following tour guides with flags and wearing matching tour tshirts, trekked in. Expecting to see this:
and this
before their Vietnamese cooking class.
But instead the reality was this:
My friend, Kate, and I had walked up from our digs at An Bang Beach, just near Hoi An here in Central Vietnam. We had no intention of paying and had somehow imagined an idyllic, quiet walk through the rows and fields of Vietnamese mint and traditional herbs and greens.
People actually paid money to dig in the soil a bit, to hold a watering can and yes, to take "that" selfie-photo or whatever. Water buffaloes were conveniently tethered nearby on the river flat in case you wanted to fork out some Vietnamese Dong and pay for a photo. I saw a big group of Germans, a Korean group, a Japanese group and the rest was basically Vietnamese kids on a school excursion and Chinese groups.
Physically overwhelmed by the noise, the hustle of the tours operators and the soft sad song I could hear from some of the plants, I backed out slowly and left Kate to it. I found a shady cooking school with no customers yet and coaxed the owner to make me a Vietnamese coffee - thick and murky, delightful flavours and with a hint of vanilla aroma.
Brilliant coffee! It gave me time to ponder. For many of these people, the farm to table experience is totally new. Tonight, as they eat their spicy mango salad they will have a new appreciation - perhaps for the first time - of the greens on their plate and where they come from. They may not have noticed the old uncles in the fish farms across the street - riverside - feeding what will become next week's seafood tourist meal at some hotel.
I had so many feelings about this "organic" farm experience!
- It's not really organic by western standards - they fertilize with a liquid seaweed (as opposed to chemicals) but ultimately use river water that is none too clean and they grow their crops incredibly densely; I doubt that even one cooking class would have taken the time to explain the importance of organic or soil depletion through mass cultivation;
- Are we really come to that place where natural food production is so unusual that it becomes a tourist experience?
- Is even the tiniest bit of education and exposure better than none, even if it's staged and fake? Or will this just be categorized as a fun morning with no meaning attached?
- Where were the compost heaps given all the buffalo poop?
- Are there seriously people in the world who have never used a hoe or a shovel, or schlepped heavy watering cans?
- Will this country which has been heavily poisoned by defoliant chemicals in my generation EVER be clean enough to be able to claim the "organic" status?
- Is this a first steps towards teaching permaculture, more sustainable agriculture and pushing back against western Big Corporate Farming, or is it just a "oncer" turned on for the UNESCO tourist-culture show?
It was a morning which left me with questions (and a bit of a headache from all the noise and the people!). But it also left me with a renewed taste for real organic and for food which is fairly and sustainably farmed. And suddenly hungry for a Spicy Mango Salad with Vietnamese Greens!
I didn't pay for any photos, although Kate exceeded her one free photo limit in the tourist zone and was asked to pay. The irony was not lost on me when we took our own selfie to mark the morning, that I was wearing a Vietnamese Army cap - seen all over the country on propaganda posts selling and promoting the proletariat agricultural dream.
Loving the ironies. Living the moments.
Contributing to the @earthtribe. Cos it MATTERS.
