“You eat what the boat brought,” my grandmother would tell us when, upon arriving home from school, the five o’clock meal was the same as what we ate for lunch in the school cafeteria: rice and beans¹. That phrase that she and many people in Puerto Rico repeated over and over again reflects something common to the islands: our dependence on imports. Today, in this Caribbean island where I live, around 85% of the food is imported² which is consumed by its residents who are born with an American citizenship, since we are not an incorporated territory of the United States of America. Like eleven other islands in our region, we do not appear on the United Nations list of island states. The rice and beans that my grandmother used to make (and what I am eating today) is made with rice from China and canned beans from other places. You eat what the boat brought, yes, but not necessarily.

When I was little, I remember eating that dish somewhat disappointed. I wanted something fried, something like fast food: fries and nuggets. But there were special confections that my grandmother made from time to time, like sweet-savoury corn guanimos, which are cooked in boiling water and wrapped in banana leaves. And coming home from school and finding that was nice. I ate them with pleasure; never disappointed. Although in the years to come, that state of dispiritedness increased. I no longer wanted to eat guanimos or funche — another dish made of corn, coconut milk and spices — nor did I want rice with beans, or many other things that we could call Puerto Rican or Afro-Caribbean. Much of our cuisine has African roots, techniques and ingredients that were mixed with those from other countries as well as Spanish colonisation. I wanted to eat dishes that didn’t make me feel poor. Food that didn’t make me feel like I grew up in a farming community in southern Puerto Rico, in the home of a grandmother who raised piglets to sell at Christmas. My head was filled with thoughts and feelings that promoted the detriment of what was mine.

I hug that child who grew up in the nineties, in a Puerto Rico that seemed to be soaring. Buildings, coliseums, trains, foreign chains that arrived, dollars here and there: they were building the idea that we were the best of Latin America. And some of those ideas encouraged the notion that what was American was better than what was Puerto Rican. But the foundations of those constructions were made of lies and bad decisions that led us to a national bankruptcy that persists today and that has ended in displacement and precariousness. A corruption conceived in San Juan, in which American laws, regulations and decisions have been complicit. In the nineties (and even before), I think it was normal for a child from the countryside to want to 'be more' to get out of 'poverty'. The government of Puerto Rico at the time avoided talking about or working to resolve that state, a reflection of the vulnerabilities, injustices and structural inequities that had little to do with individual actions. But what would a child who played amongst banana plants and flew chiringas³ on a cattle farm know about that?

It was one afternoon at school (I think I was in third grade, it must have been 1998 or 1999), when we had to take some departmental tests, that I started to question whether or not we were poor in my house. The teacher mentioned a list of names, including mine, and said something like: “You guys mark ‘below poverty level’.” That is the category that has to do with the annual income of the household. If it is or isn’t below the average, the government determines what qualifies if a family is poor or not. I remember doubting that; I didn’t feel poor. But it did sink in, and so I started to question and compare myself. I also started to look with disgust at what my grandmother cooked. Well, my friends who weren’t ‘poor’ didn’t eat what she cooked with so much love. I go back: I hug that child — I feel a little ashamed when I remember that, a little guilty for insolent things I might have said, for refusing to eat the dish made by someone who is no longer physically with me today.

I think about that, as I sort through the recipes my grandmother wrote for me. I have about twenty of them, written in her own handwriting. They include her recipe for guanimos and funche, for pasteles⁴ and sancocho and domplines, and of course, for her rice with beans. They are in a little notebook that I gave her many years after that afternoon in elementary school. I gave it to her in 2017, a year that is present in the memory — I dare say — of all the people who are Puerto Rican, who have lived in Puerto Rico or who have some connection to these Caribbean islands. It was the year that the powerful hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico. There were sustained winds of around 249 km/h and it blew the roof off the house where we grew up. My grandmother could no longer cook there.

I was away from Puerto Rico, studying, when that happened. I arrived at the San Juan airport on a November afternoon. The sky looked as if it were still recovering from the lash of the strongest hurricane to hit land in eighty years. My sister picked me up and we drove through grey areas; the green characteristic of the tropics became a rarity in those months. Many cars, including my sister’s, had a Puerto Rican flag sticking out of the window. We arrived at my aunt’s house where my grandmother was; it was the only one of the three houses on the family land that did not lose its roof. That land was a farm in the previous century, but like many others it was converted into a plot of land for construction in the fifties. At that time, the formulation of the 'Free Associated State of Puerto Rico or Commonwealth' took place, an ‘agreement’ between the United States and Puerto Rico to promote autonomism. Industrialisation and the transition from an agricultural economy to one of services and manufacturing to another mode of plantation, were encouraged. So there, in the marquee, feeling the fresh air that was beginning to arrive that month was my grandmother, studying her history, missing the pet she had lost and the house where she had lived for more than sixty years.

I can still hear her say “Oh, my little house,” as we hugged each other. I had left Puerto Rico for the first time in August, a month before Maria. It seemed like I had been away from this archipelago for a long time. After shedding a few tears, she asked me if I was hungry. I told her yes, even though I wasn’t. She loved to cook for others. She didn’t make rice and beans but she did make yams that my uncle had just picked, with fried pork that a neighbour had given her, who herself had received from a farmer in the neighbourhood. Stories like that spread around our islands. Yes, the hurricane’s winds made visible the persistent inequalities and injustices that influence the vulnerability people can experience because disasters are never natural. Some 2,975 people died in the weeks after the hurricane⁵. I lost people close to me. I repeat: disasters are never natural. But also, in part, and I speak for myself, they made visible how productive and abundant our islands are. We don’t necessarily have to eat what the boat brought.

Of course, food insecurity skyrocketed after the hurricane. And before it hit, about a third of our population lived in that state. That is something that in Puerto Rico and in many places does not happen due to production issues or the amount of food available. There are many aspects to it, and the amount of food available is one of them. The point is that it is possible to sustain our food supply with more products from Puerto Rico and our Caribbean region⁶. Also, if because of some hurricane or other shock, the few ships that anchor in our ports do not arrive, there is food that is produced here. Not long ago in the eighties, Puerto Rico produced almost half of its food.

The child I was would have looked with disappointment at that plate of boiled yams with fried meat that my grandmother served me. She cooked it on a stove, since there was no longer an oven. As the years went by during my youth and adolescence, I gradually got rid of those prejudices or preconceived ideas that were planted in me at a time when we did not call ourselves a 'colony'. Understanding and reading about our past and present, thanks to the education and teachers I had in the public school system, made me value our dishes and preparations. It made me challenge the idea of ‘poor people’s food’, which is sometimes even served on a table during Puerto Rican Week as a typical dish, as an object that is no longer common. Before returning to school, motivated by her and her family, I see the notebook that I gave my grandmother. I look at the recipes she left behind. I prepare them for myself, for friends and family; I treasure them. Today, through my work, I investigate the social dimensions of agriculture and fishing. And I believe that this interest was cultivated in me by my grandmother.

It is worth noting that the ‘Free Associated State’ of Puerto Rico does not have much say in deciding its supply routes, in achieving treaties or ways to protect local production, which has to compete with highly subsidised imported products. That is why it is appropriate to talk about ‘food sovereignty’ instead of ‘food security’. So today, to a large extent, I continue to eat what the ship brought. Yes, I continue to eat imported rice and beans, although not every day. It is clear to me that it is necessary to have a sustainable and productive agri-food system that will allow for local sustenance. And there is the possibility of safeguarding it, even within the sociopolitical reality in which we live in currently. It is enough that, as a society, we begin to get rid of those ideas that make us ignore and overlook the environment in which we are immersed. An environment that has the capacity to be abundant. The truth is there is not much interference — but there is some. And that has to be used in favour of local production.

Deciding what to eat in these islands has many dimensions. Many people do not have the privilege or the opportunity to decide. I was fortunate that in my childhood there was never a lack of a plate of food, even if it could be categorised (or I did at that time) as ‘poor people’s food’. And a plate of sancocho or rice with beans is not ‘poor’, it is Puerto Rican, Boricua, Caribbean, or Afro-descendant. But as my grandmother also used to say, whoever is given rice with beans every day also gets tired. To the best of my ability, I try to expand the recipes she left me and add more. With a plantain you can do so much, beyond tostones, arañitas or mofongo. And little by little we are getting to know recipes, ingredients and products that are and have been part of our islands but that have been denied representation. Every time I discover something, I ask my beloved Güela for her blessing. There is a lot to cook here, a lot to do, and a lot that doesn’t come on a boat. 🐟