More food for thought

My mother's excellent (of course) comment on the previous post has prompted me to write something more than just a quick reply. She wonders whether Brazil doesn't have its own locally-made equivalent food products, and priced accordingly ?

If only, Mum, if only. But let me provide the quintessential example of Brazil's dire domestic market: furniture.

What do you need to make furniture ? You need trees, a degree of skill and a manufacturing plant. Brazil has had no problem allowing vast swathes of its rainforest to be denuded for the sake of crop or animal farming. So surely it wouldn't be a problem to use some of those easily felled trees to make furniture ?

Brazil exports just under $1bn of furniture per year, sizable but not very significant for the overall economy. That is the finished product as opposed to raw material. I remember reading somewhere that far too many of its endangered mahogany trees still get transformed into desks and chairs.

What I do know for certain is that furniture in this country is prohibitively, outrageously expensive.

We spent weeks and months looking for second-hand furniture in Sao Paulo that wouldn't break the bank and only found some in the end thanks to a small miracle. The "charity" shop opposite our apartment sells the most disgusting, mangy, rotten old furniture for a small fortune. You couldn't give it away in London !

So that's how Brazil makes good use (not) of its God-given forrests. Blame it on the legacy  - and, according to many Brazilians, the ongoing reality - of evil colonialism, but this country is rotten with a kind of rape and pillage capitalism. (This may apply to South America in general, which explains why, for example, it's so hard to find a decent cup of coffee inside Colombia ).

The rest of the world wants Brazil's resources and Brazil is happy to oblige, at the expense of its masses. The elites here can go to Miami, London or Paris to do their shopping, or they can pay crazy high prices because they are feeding off the "colonial" exploitation. Ditto the Brazilian government and its politicians on their £120,000 a year (plus generous expenses) salaries.

Cheap local food ? Sure, I can get some decent fruit and veg from the guy round the corner for probably less than the UK. But Nature made that product, all Brazil had to do was not mess it up. And sadly, my favourite fruit - tomatoes - are usually horribly messed up to the point where I sometimes have to abandon my purchase altogether. When we had the heavy rains and flooding a few months ago, the sudden absence of even half-decent fruit and veg was very noticeable.

The products pictured in the previous post were mostly things I had not bought in the five months I've been here. It was a big adventure to go to the "posh" shop in the "posh" area to seek them out. In answer to your question, Mum, no, where I live, in central but non-bubble Sao Paulo, there is no local pesto, brie or sea salt. There's basically one local cheese, boring beyond belief and the other two types are mozzarella that tastes more like processed yellow cheese and ... processed yellow cheese.

I once bought a Kraft Philadelphia, obviously made at a Brazilian franchise. It tasted so salty and, well, weird, that I vowed never again. I'll write more about food in another post, suffice it to say that it's hard to find unrefined salt and sugar, impossible to find fresh milk, expensive to find anything with non-white flour or wholegrains ... and watch out if you don't like toxic levels of salt and sugar added to almost all processed food.

I'm no food snob and have lived in other countries where there was decent, good-value local produce. But sadly that is not something I've experienced here in Sao Paulo.

So, to conclude, Brazil is the land of exploitation, which sells its birthright to Johnny "Colonialist" Foreigner, aided and abetted by its so-called leaders and the "Kapo" elites, in their fortress-like ghettoes. Then Johnny Foreigner uses a modicum of creativity to turn Brazil's raw materials into something with a bit of added-value, only to flog it back to Brazil at vast profit.

Until  Brazil stops allowing itself to be raped for its raw materials and starts using its own creativity to turn them into added-value, there will be nothing very interesting marketing-wise in Brazil. The marketing that exists today is that of the Camp Commandant selling to the inmate.