I arrived early to a job interview on Friday (yes, it's been six months since I've returned from Honduras and I'm still job searching) and while the trees were bursting with oranges and reds, the weather spoke more of summer. The place where I was interviewing was located on the outskirts of Humboldt Park, a 207 acre park in West Chicago. I've ridden my bike through it before and driven through on my way to Logan Square but never spent much time sitting in its grasses, walking through the pathways.

I have lived in Chicago for four years and am not well versed in urban planning but I have seen the city develop and transform since I first came. Logan Square, an area where I spent plenty of time during college, went from being largely Hispanic to now, not as much. It's now the site for Chicago's version of the High Line, also Chicago's first urban orchard. An old market and bazaar selling cheap goods was recently sold and is now part of a $100 million dollar development plan for apartments and grocery stores. Neighborhoods change quickly in a city; not always for the better but not always for the worse either and yes, grocery stores do seem like a good idea.

I can see that Humboldt Park, on the outskirts of Logan Square, is on the cusp, beginning to develop in the same way. The large park that sits in the middle of the neighborhood is filled with flower gardens, a lagoon, soccer fields, domino tables, an art gallery, prairies and food trucks (selling nothing artisanal; just fried chicken under heat lamps). Realistically this makes the neighborhood ripe and appealing for the young, urban dwelling upper class. But it's also impressive as it is now, especially after reading Jane Jacobs this summer and realizing just how hard it is to make successful, diversified parks in lower income neighborhoods; parks that act as an asset to a community rather than an empty spot that depresses and further emphasizes danger (example, here). 

I like the idea of urban orchards but I also want cultural diversity too so I have no hard stance on the matter. I just find hope in the steel structures on the Paseo Boricua, the two Puerto Rican flags that were erected on both ends of the neighborhood's main street meant to showcase the neighborhood's pride and cement it into the ground. 

This is not a food blog. I'm not sure what it is. The most I can decipher is that it's a blog of my thoughts interjected with quotes from authors who say it better than I. But I read a lot about the subject of local food and follow food blogs and also eat, you know, three times a day so I guess it's inevitable that the subject of food comes up every now and then.

Before moving to Honduras, I was of the ilk that tried to clear their life best they could of environmentally harmful practices. I nannied for a family who did the same. They fed their son out of glass containers. His toys were stuffed or wooden because the idea of a child exposed to plastic seemed unhealthy. I have no problem with this. As Barbara Kingsolver says in the book that spurred this post, "It is the worst of bad manners ... to ridicule the small gesture."

But then I went to Honduras, where the orphanage I worked at fed 450 mouths out of plastic bowls, plates and cups everyday. It hit me suddenly. There are more harmful things than a plastic bowl. These kids were exposed to a myriad of other dangers, and what can kill you faster than phthalates or BPA is having no food to fill the plastic plate in the first place.  

The two worlds have different dilemmas and different decisions to face obviously but I realized that a dose of reality -- rather a year of reality -- was good for a little perspective.

As part of my job last year, I took photos of the organization's services so that fundraisers could use the images for various marketing materials. I received a nutrition request asking for photos of the children when they were eating a meal. One of my favorite photos of the bunch was of a girl named Escarlet when she was taking a bite from her lunch. While editing, I began to focus on the plate she was eating from and realized that fundraisers would see something they might not like: that lunch for the day was just rice, broth and a lime.

That's eating local for you. All of the organization's produce and meat were raised onsite. Milk and cheese came from the ranch's cows, bread and tortillas were made daily. It wasn't certified organic but the farm never overutilized antibiotics or pesticides, which is not the case for most of Honduras' unregulated produce. But due to the sheer amount of mouths the organization needed to feed and lack of international funding, sometimes eating from the farm's bounty meant eating sopa (at times, just another name for rice and broth). Veggies would float around there if you were lucky.

On very special celebrations like Easter, we had beans, platanos, avocado, cheese, eggs, tortillas. A bit oily but still, a feast for the eyes and stomach. The organization was doing everything they could to improve the diet but even that came with unforeseen difficulties. Some of the children went up to Guatemala for a soccer tournament and came home complaining about how gross the black beans were (in Honduras, pinto beans were the norm) so you can see how western suggestions like salads for lunch were never too popular.

Cooking is extremely personal to a culture so I never really fought that. I ended up learning a lot from cooking down there that I never expected. One learns most from frugality, and I learned that pancakes, crepes, tortillas, bread, pizza dough, cakes all were accessible to me as a cook because there was never a shortage of flour. I also realized how much eating locally makes sense in terms of climatology. Up north, tomatoes are wonderful in the summer as are greens in the spring and hearty kale and winter squash in the winter. On the other hand, pineapple, bananas, mangoes, papayas tasted heavenly in that Central American heat. 

I'm fortunate that I have enough food on my plate to worry about where it comes from. I'm also glad that before all of that preoccupied me fully, I was taken away from western food concerns and learned how wonderful it is just to have beans alongside your rice.

Pictured above: the rice and broth soup; an Easter feast

From an early age, probably due to too much Wendell Berry and a hippie of a brother, I have wanted to get my hands in the soil. It's a commonplace, romanticized notion these days but then again, when hasn't it been?

At sixteen, I spent a month on a trail crew, where I weeded, stripped logs and cleaned up roadside trash in the same national park where an isolated Kerouac once lived on a 6,000 foot peak. After studying in Spain, I went to Nazano, Italy for three weeks to work on an organic farm and after college, the itch still tingled underneath the skin so I headed away from the city, down to Honduras. Although not my first country of choice, I was convinced to go after hearing that the place where I would be working was situated on 2,000 acres of property with a self-sustaining farm and garden.

In all of my well-intentioned but futile attempts at country living, I've come away with very little knowledge on how to actually grow anything. I tried growing herbs (herbs!) from seed last year that never yielded anything that I could use in a kitchen. In Italy, I harvested zucchinis but mostly worked busing tables on the weekend when the farm's restaurant needed extra hands (and mostly just indulged in the house's expresso machine and the homemade tiramasu in the fridge). It took me a year in Honduras before my friend and I finally hunted down one of the farm hands and told him we wanted to milk a cow before we left for the States. The 22-year-old who helped us couldn't help but chuckle when I talked of my dreams of one day being a granjera.

I do, however, feel plenty confident in my ability to climb mango and guayaba trees and come away with a shirt full of fresh fruit. There's an art to it, I swear.

I'm now about to move into an apartment that doesn't have a yard or even a balcony. I have some succulents and a purple heart for greenery and a dream that next summer, I can spend Sundays at an urban garden learning how its done. I mean, I was never one to learn Spanish from textbooks. The concepts clear on the page were never fully digested until I actually had to speak Spanish everyday for a year. And the same goes for vegetable gardening; a seemingly simple endeavor, I just don't think I'll ever learn until I get my hands in that soil.