A story from a restaurateur

Sometimes I focus so much on farmers growing things I lose sight of the bigger picture, which is that all that food ends up on someone's plate.  As such, I have taken to chatting with (willing) restaurateurs about the food they serve in their restaurant.

The first conversation I had was with the Stupa View Restaurant operator.  I was asking about another restaurant, The Saturday Cafe, that I read about in the Lonely Planet (aka the Lonely Liar) but I couldn’t find anywhere.  He explained that they finally had to shut down last year after years of struggling.  Since the 1990 insurgency, a lack of tourists and general political turmoil as well as violence in the rural areas has led to a lot of businesses having to close their doors.  The owners of both restaurants happened to be German and perhaps because it was foreigners running the business, the political scene simply became too intense for them to operate any longer. Fortunately the Stupa View managed to hang in there and the man I was talking to, Rinjing made sure the doors stayed open. He was a little vague on the details as to how.

Corn drying. It's used for household and livestock consumption.  

The interesting thing however was that he comes from a very remote village near where Mustang is on the far northern border of China.  His mother is a farmer and recently benefitted from a project that provided greenhouses to people suffering from food insecurity and under-nutrition. He says his mother has really become quite the grower and has expanded her crops from mainly grains and fibres such as barley, sisal, and jute and a few livestock (and Mustang apples when they move to the lower regions in the off season of their farm) to a wide variety of seasonal vegetables.  He says she embraced the change and the new way of doing things very easily.

Because of his background, Rinjing follows the agriculture development scene with interest, and has begun to see an exciting change over the last 4 or 5 years.  There is renewed interest in agriculture development and increasing the GDP of Nepal, however continued political instability has been a real holdup.  A new constitution is in the works and nearly one year since elections, it has yet to be ratified.

Mushrooms just beginning to grow. If the seed quality was good, these
ladies said they could harvest for about 6 months. If it was bad, they got
around 1 month worth of crop.

Since he made it clear that he buys all Nepali vegetables on principle, I asked him if the restaurants in the area ever get together to create a working group to make it easier to access locally grown products rather than the cheap Indian imports which Rinjing says come in great quantity.  He feels that because of competition of the restaurants as well as the reticence to become political or active in forming groups that make change, most restaurateurs are not interested. In fact, while there are probably more than 30 restaurants in the 1 block radius of the stupa, Rinjing says he knows only one personally.  His comment was that everything is peaceful right now and no one really wants to stir the pot.  My Peace and Conflict Studies learning kicked in a recognized this as ‘negative peace’, a state when something negative has been removed but hasn’t had something positive fill its place.

This story is somewhat corroborated by another conversation I had with a really interesting young guy who helps his father run Nir’s Garden Restaurant.  Nir’s operates as a non-profit (making a living but sending excess profits to build and run schools in the far east) and happens to have really amazing food.  Nir’s son (who’s name I didn’t get) is in grade 11 but had to take some time off last year to help with the business.  For being so young, he really knows his stuff.   He was sharing quite willingly the monthly costs for vegetables and the difficulty he has in going direct to growers thereby bypassing one or two middlemen and increased pricing along the way as well.  He says things are in the works to make a new connection, but so far he has to deal with a trader that delivers but certainly charges a lot more than dealing directly with the growers or a cooperative.

A tomato greenhouse that allowed the farmers to diversify their income.
The costs to actually put one of these up is significant to the farmer which
is why micro loan programs are so crucial to them.

Anyway, he and I had a really good chat about things and I will more than likely be eating there again (and so will Nathan!) and I hope I can learn more about this important part of the value chain.