Sustainability

Farm fresh, organic, natural, locally grown… All the words we wish to find in our food, except if you are in Puerto Rico. As you enter any well-known supermarket, you see stacks of produce, shelves filled with snacks, and packaged meats, most of them labeled with one of these elusive words. Most customers would be drawn by these words and grab any of these products carelessly, but if you examine closely you realize that locally grown is apparently in Washington, USA.

Finding fresh local food is a laborious task for most Puerto Ricans. Around seventy percent of our foods come from the continental United States. This proves detrimental to both our health and budgets. Our food is, of course, not fresh and many times packed with preservatives that can affect our well-being. Also, shipping all of these products from such faraway places increases their cost by a significant amount.  It seems ironic how a place so fertile as Puerto Rico would not be one of the top agricultural producing countries in the world. Mother nature has given us all the tools necessary to be sustainable, but we rely solemnly on another country.

Millennials are trying to change that. Thanks to the arduous quest of finding the perfect avocado, my friends and I came across a family that owns a small farm in the mountains. They sell anything from tomatoes and cilantro to mango and pineapple. In an effort to bring their produce to the hungry market of the metropolitan area of Puerto Rico, aka the capital, they have designed a food bus. You text them your grocery list, and they will deliver it to your doorstep every week. This initiative portrays what sustainability is all about; this is our “criollo” version of a contemporary farmer's market.