Coffee, Cardamom, and Honey: Tracing Food to Its Source in Guatemala

View on the three-hour drive up to the Caquihá community.

After three hours of bouncing up dirt roads, we reached the top of the mountain, opening the doors of our trucks as fireworks popped off. Soon, we were circled three times by women swinging incense. No common language was needed to understand the welcome ceremony this Q'eqchi Mayan community gave us. They said hello via shallow cups filled with a cacao drink. The meaning of the blessing they chanted was easily grasped when accompanied by the pieces of tamale and chicken that they pressed into our hands.

Making tortillas in a community on the shore of Lake Izabal.

In the course of the weeklong road trip across Guatemala, our group—staff and volunteers at the nonprofit Heifer International—could count the days in chicken soups. Between meals punctuated by thick, hand-formed tortillas, we toured projects funded by the organization. In service of its mission to end poverty and hunger while caring for the earth, the 70-year-old nonprofit has helped more than 25 million families (that's 115 million people) work their way out of poverty. Its goal is to help 4 million families achieve living incomes by 2020.

In Guatemala, Heifer works on food security by empowering women and youth, and on environmental preservation by providing livestock, agricultural training, tools, and education to small-scale farmers. If you drink coffee in the morning or use chocolate, honey, or cardamom in your kitchen, the food you eat might come from the farmers Heifer International helps in Guatemala. We were there to see how it happens, and learn what needs to be done next.

Click here to find out how you can help Heifer International break the cycle of poverty.

Kak'ik.

We left Guatemala City on Monday morning to see the cocoa and reforestation projects in Pancajche, the cardamom and honey in Caquihá, and the stove replacements in Semuy II. On the way, we ate meals in each village: caldo de gallina (chicken soup), cooked by Carmelina; a guisado (stew) with noodles and chicken, made by Aura; and pork soup on the shore of Lake Izabal. But first, we pulled into a hotel and restaurant for kak'ik, a turkey soup that's definitely worth stopping for.

The deep brick-red color and the spice (the ik in the name means "spice") in what is for all practical purposes Guatemala's national dish both come from the smoky Cobanero chili. Named for the town of Cobán, our first destination, it is small and seasonal, but the smoke-dried version is savored throughout the year—in oil as a sauce, or in rich simmered turkey broth as part of a kak'ik. The broth burbled maroon in the traditional clay bowl, accompanied by a gargantuan portion of turkey on the side. Rice, banana-leaf tamales, and tortillas formed a carb-heavy supporting cast that would keep us full well into the afternoon.

Aura's handmade tortillas.

By the time we reached Cobán, right around dusk, it was time for dinner at Kardamomuss, and our first lesson in cardamom. I wouldn't meet Aura until two days later, but she is one of 375,000 Guatemalans growing this spice. Though it isn't traditionally found in Guatemalan cuisine, Guatemala is the world's biggest exporter of cardamom; however, little has been done locally to protect the crop from pests or its growers from poverty.

Aura, showing off a beekeeping bonnet.

Aura usually walks three hours each way every month to her plot of approximately 1.75 acres (a unit of measurement called a manzana, or "apple"); in the harvest season, she makes the trek daily. Working with Heifer, Aura explained, she has learned ways to deter tiny insects called thrips—a troublesome pest for cardamom—without using pesticides, which would kill the bees that pollinate the plants.

She also leads a Heifer International group of 25 women in her community. Part of the "Promesa Cardamiel" project (cardamiel is a portmanteau of the words for "cardamom" and "honey" in Spanish), the group keeps bees and produces honey. The project works to diversify the participants' income sources—a vital service, since a fungus has wiped out their coffee harvest in the last two years—and to cut down on the middlemen who make money off of the community, in part through helping the women create value-added products.

Cardamom liquor at Kardamomuss.

That night in Cobán, we feasted on cardamom-laced yucca fritters and sipped cardamom iced tea. Kardamomuss owner Pablo Moreno comes from a cardamom-growing family, and his passion for the spice led to his role as its promoter. He helps support the Heifer projects, and, in turn, many of us on the trip supported him by emptying his store of cardamom, cardamom marmalades, and a wonderfully fragrant cardamom-spiced liqueur.

A woman who opened her home to us in Pancajche.

But Aura's family doesn't feast on the cardamom they grow. They farm for the cash income, which they use to buy food from the market in a town two hours away by truck--a ride that costs a hefty 40 quetzales (about $5) round trip. For lunch, Aura cooked us a guisado with thick, hearty tortillas. Guatemalan tortillas are like the hockey-player version of Mexican tortillas' soccer player: bigger, thicker, and definitely more likely to win in a fight. The noodles incorporated a light tomato sauce with a hint of fruit, and we washed it all down with a sweet horchata, citrus-scented and served hot. Her daily diet, she said, includes this type of guisado, as well as her favorite food, one that hits tables all over Guatemala every day for lunch: chicken soup.

Carmelina's caldo de gallina.

We had first been introduced to that chicken soup the previous day, while meeting the community where another Heifer International project was taking place. In Pancajche, Carmelina cooked the soup for us and a group of local men after we'd helped them unload 900 cedar trees, which they'll plant for shade and reforestation among their cocoa trees. Later, Carmelina explained that her family can't afford to eat this simple food daily, as most in Guatemala do--it's a once-a-week treat for them. Instead, she lives mostly on beans and some of the local plants. Her favorite food, she said, is rice and beans.

Lime, salt, and hot sauce for Carmelina's caldo de gallina.

In both communities, we accepted invitations to tour houses, and were hit by the smoke immediately upon entering. Traditional cooking is done over a big square platform, with an open fire turning into piles of coals. On the third day, we crossed Lake Izabal by boat to Semuy II, where we learned more about the problems these stoves can cause.

Palm stumps in front of a home in Semuy II.

Semuy II is unique in its area: It is the only community that doesn't work with the local palm company, which maintains almost 20,000 acres of palm trees for producing oil. Semuy II had been pushed up into the nearby steep hills, where farming is difficult and mudslides are an ever-present risk, before the residents decided to reclaim their land. The members of the community came down to the flats and chopped down the palm trees in the area they considered their own. They live there now while they fight a legal battle to take official possession of the land. In the meantime, Heifer International works with a local organization, Defensores de la Naturaleza, to help the community. In addition to establishing a beekeeping school and a tilapia farm, the organizations are working to replace traditional open-style stoves, which can lead to lung problems for the women who cook with them and the children strapped to their backs. The stove model that Heifer and Defensores provide is more efficient, meaning that women have to gather far less wood to feed it, and it pipes smoke out through a chimney.

A traditional stove.

But it's not as simple as just bringing in new stoves: They require dry wood, which often means time spent waiting for damp wood to dry out; the pipes for the chimneys aren't always long enough to extend out of the house; and the efficiency of the new stoves means that they don't dry out the roof as quickly after the epic local rainstorms. For each solution, it seems, there are even more problems.

The women of Aura's group pose for a cellphone photo.

That's why, for each project, we found Heifer employees based in the community, explaining the problems and potential solutions. Coffee fungus, climate change, and middlemen eat into the harvest and the profits of the communities. As a result of those factors, it had been two years since Aura and her group of women could harvest coffee, so they showed off their beekeeping skills instead. Aura's house serves as the makeshift Heifer project headquarters; the big room where we ate lunch also hosts trainings for women and youth to help build their decision-making power and participation in leadership roles. In a world where 795 million people don't have enough to eat—a number that could be reduced by 150 million if women farmers had access to the same resources as men—Heifer International's self-help groups, like Aura's, help to raise the status of women. Educated women have healthier children, can educate more of their children, and are more likely to work, increasing household incomes.

A beekeeper smokes the bees to calm them in Semuy II.

Just up the hill from Aura's house, where beekeeping bonnets hang on the walls and a shiny honey extractor sits in the corner, we met Dolores, who also keeps bees. For cocoa, coffee, and cardamom farmers, raising bees for honey diversifies income and reduces dependence on a single (often risky) commodity crop for their entire livelihood. Dolores explained that she had not been part of the original Heifer project. Instead, her participation began through the "Passing on the Gift" portion of the Heifer project structure: As each family's animal (or, in this case, beehive) produces offspring, they pass them on to another family, doubling the impact of the original gift, making full participants of the original recipients, and strengthening bonds in the community.

The packaged products (coffee and honey) from the Cardamiel project.

As Aura told us about how Heifer helped her to keep thrips off her cardamom, and Dolores showed us her hives, both of these women who had benefited from the Promesa Cardamiel project beamed with pride—they were showing off skills they had learned, work they had done. When Aura told us about her dream to make enough money to buy her own house and move out of her in-laws' place, she said it with a glimmer of hope; the knowledge that, with time and work, it was actually possible.

Carmelina.

Each of us left our conversations with these inspiring women asking the same question: How can we help? How can we get all the Auras of Guatemala enough money for their own houses, help Carmelina to get chicken soup more than once a week, and help the people of Semuy II resist the encroachment of the palm oil companies? Aura's story was compelling; there were volunteers on the trip who were prepared to open their wallets on the spot after hearing it. But there's a better way: Heifer International's new crowd-funding program supports the Promesa Cardamiel project, allowing sustainable, ongoing support for the communities.

Those of us whose eyes don't really open until those first delicious drops of coffee cross our lips, who squirrel away squares of dark chocolate to help get us through long afternoon meetings, or who delight in filling our kitchens with the smells of sweet honey and warm spice—we all benefit from the work done by women like these. Donations to Heifer International help put more bowls of chicken soup on the tables of farmers like Carmelina, and help more Auras make living wages to buy their own houses.

Donate now and help farmers in Guatemala overcome hunger and poverty.