Latest news with #Xochimilco
The Guardian
13-06-2025
- General
- The Guardian
‘It really is possible to be zero waste': the restaurant with no bin
Hunched over the pass in the open restaurant kitchen, a team of chefs are dusting ceviche with a powder made from lime skins that would, in most cases, have been thrown away. The Mexico City restaurant where they work looks like most restaurant kitchens but it lacks one key element: there is no bin. Baldío was co-founded by brothers Lucio and Pablo Usobiaga and chef Doug McMaster, best known for his groundbreaking zero-waste spot Silo London. 'In my eyes, bins are coffins for things that have been badly designed,' says McMaster. 'If there was a trophy for negligence, it would be bin-shaped.' The food, which recently earned a Michelin green star, is creative but still quintessentially Mexican: squash tostada with guaca-broccoli, maguey flower, maguey worm, chinampa flower, or grassfed pork from Veracruz with tamarind mole, served with chinampa greens and house-made kimchi. Significant planning is needed from sourcing to preparation, and the founders are also behind Arca Tierra, a regenerative agriculture project that includes a network of 50 farmers in central Mexico as well as the organisation's own farm in the pre-Aztec canal system at Xochimilco, an ancient neighbourhood in the south of Mexico City. 'Restaurants can have a big environmental impact but they also have a big reach,' says Lucio Usobiaga. 'We want Baldío to be a model that shows it's possible to be both zero waste and to rely on farmers rather than supermarkets.' Although the food is finished off in the restaurant's open kitchen, most preparation happens at La Baldega, a workshop where the team operates a fermentation programme that helps preserve ingredients as well as upcycle byproducts such as peel and gristle. This includes pre-Hispanic Mexican drinks such as tepache and pulque, as well as koji fermentation – popular in Japan and China for thousands of years – to transform fish guts into sauce. Globally, one-fifth of food is lost or wasted, according to the UN, equivalent to 1bn meals a day, at a time when one in every nine people is malnourished. When food decomposes in landfill it releases methane, which has 25-times higher global warming potential than carbon dioxide. Silo, when it opened in 2014, became the first restaurant in the world not to have a bin, raising the bar on what zero waste means. Less than 1% of food is composted and no single-use materials are used. A dedicated pottery transforms glass into porcelain that is used for tableware, light fixtures and tiles. Baldío is part of a new wave of restaurants that are moving beyond vague claims of sustainability to embrace a regenerative ethos. In Lisbon, SEM, from the Silo alumni Lara Santo and George McLeod, serves invasive freshwater fish such as the zander, which was introduced to Portugal in the 1980s for sport. Flores, a family-run restaurant in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, dries offal in koji before shaving it over meat dishes. Helsinki's Nolla (meaning 'zero' in Finnish) gives compost to its suppliers and guests – a doggy bag with a difference. Baldío goes one step further through its symbiotic relationship with Xochimilco, the last remnant of the network of blue-green waterways that dazzled Spanish invaders when they arrived 500 years ago. The Unesco heritage site is a key stopover for migratory birds and the only place where axolotls still live in the wild. Although the unique ecosystem is severely threatened by urban sprawl, many Indigenous residents still farm chinampas (a pre-Aztec technique consisting of islands formed from willow trees, lilies and mud), gliding through the blue-green canals on wobbly canoes laden with lettuce, radish and verdolagas (Mexican parsley). 'In agriculture, how you go about production really determines how much carbon you emit,' says Melanie Kolb, a researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. As well as buying from five local families, Arca Tierra farms 18 chinampas using a three-row agroforestry system. The farming team led by Sonia Tapia Garcés combines ancestral techniques such as chapines – rich sediment cut into squares used for germinating seeds – with compost from Baldío's kitchen and a hi-tech wood shedder that allows them to create mulch, which contributes to the soil's potential for carbon sequestration. Sign up to Down to Earth The planet's most important stories. Get all the week's environment news - the good, the bad and the essential after newsletter promotion The result is a crop that is irrigated with bio-filtered canal water and can be harvested 365 days a year without depleting the soil's nutrients. It is enough to supply 50% of Baldío's needs. The restaurant's chefs, who visit every Monday to plan that week's menus, have a continuing dialogue with the growers and often help with harvesting. Ingredients are carried by boat to downtown Xochimilco and driven 8km to La Baldega. Reducing distance travelled and the need for refrigeration on longer journeys results in a fraction of the carbon emissions associated with typical restaurant supply chains. For 74-year-old Noy Coquis Saldedo, who rents land to Arca Tierra, the project offers an opportunity to preserve his identity at a time when just 2.5% of the chinampas are still used for traditional agriculture. 'It's very sad that young people don't want to farm any more,' he says. 'But now we are delivering food to the great city like my ancestors did.' A pod of young pelicans surf a warm gust between the verdant banks, practising for the journey they will soon make to California. For Lucio Usobiaga, closing the loop between the chinampas and Baldío could be a blueprint for the future. 'Ultimately, I hope the project shows people that a more just and better food system is possible.' And the food? When the Guardian tasted it, it was delicious: flame-licked, spiked with salsas and texturally balanced, it is distinctly Mexican – yet also something entirely its own.
New York Times
08-05-2025
- General
- New York Times
At the Biennale in Venice, a Fantasy Island Imported from Mexico
Mexico City's small urban farms — known locally as chinampas — practice a sort of agriculture in reverse: instead of bringing water to land as most farms do, chinampas bring land to water. The chinampas in use today go back about a thousand years, to when Aztec farmers began building rectangular fields on top of vast lakes and growing food for what was then the city of Tenochtitlan. There were tens of thousands of chinampas at one point, arranged in strict grids with narrow canals between them, though many were destroyed or abandoned (along with the rest of the Mesoamerican metropolis) after Hernán Cortés and his invading Spanish soldiers rearranged the civic order in 1521. But working chinampas continue to exist in the southern Mexico City neighborhood of Xochimilco — despite continuing encroachment by developers and competition from factory farms — operating mostly as family businesses that produce heirloom lettuce, radishes, dahlias and other crops. Lately, the farms' irrigation-friendly ways are getting fresh attention in a world rocked by climate change and suffering from widespread droughts. Could other places around the globe borrow the idea of creating 'floating islands,' as the fields are sometimes called, which are engulfed by water? A team of Mexican designers, landscapers and farmers believes the ancient technology may be widely adaptable, enough that they will recreate a chinampa for their country's pavilion at this year's Architecture Biennale in Venice. 'Chinampas have a simple and intelligent design, created in a collective way that benefits not only people but all of the surrounding living beings, too,' said Lucio Usobiaga, a team member who has spent the last 15 years defending the remaining chinampas through a nonprofit he founded called Arca Tierra. Mexico's pavilion is a neat fit for the biennial's main exhibition, 'Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective,' which is intended to show design projects that address climate change in creative ways. The chinampas are at once man-made and organic and can succeed only if there is cooperation among farmers, policymakers and the growing number of tourists who float through on popular canoe tours, gazing at fields of corn and flocks of egrets and pelicans. Promoting the chinampa as an inspiration for eco-friendly design was an obvious choice for the biennale, team members said. 'Venice is also built on water and has the same kind of vulnerabilities that Xochimilco has,' noted Ana Paula Ruiz Galindo, a founder of the design firm Pedro y Juana. They pointed out that Venice and Xochimilco were added to the list of UNESCO World Heritage sites in the same year, 1987, and both places are island communities navigable by boats and working to balance the positive and negative aspects of tourism. Venice has its iconic gondolas, while Xochimilco has its trajineras, flat-bottomed vessels, decorated in bright colors and fake flowers that take visitors on party-themed excursions. Both boats are operated by pilots who push them along channels using long poles. As for how to recreate a chinampa on-site, that took some imagination. And compromise. The Aztecs constructed their islands over time, using reeds and branches to make fences in the mucky lake bottom. These formed boundaries for multiple layers of sediment and decaying vegetation (and sometimes human sewerage) until the islands rose far enough above water to be farmed. In addition to growing crops like corn, beans and squash — using the traditional milpa agricultural method that naturally preserves nutrients in soil — they planted trees on the corners of the islands to stabilize the land. Mexico's pavilion, inside the biennale's Arsenale complex, will feature a stripped-down version, much smaller than the 500 square meters (0.12 acres) of a typical chinampa. The exhibition will be enhanced by videos produced in Mexico City featuring real chinamperos, as the farmers are called, and bleachers will be installed along the walls. Artificial lighting will replace sunshine. In the center will be a working garden planted with vegetables, flowers and medicinal herbs. (The crops were started in an Italian nursery and transferred to the Arsenale by boat in mid-April.) They will mature during the biennale, which continues through Nov. 23. 'By the end of the biennale, we will be able to harvest corn and make tortillas,' said Mr. Usobiaga. 'Before that, we can harvest beans, squash, tomatoes and chiles.' Visitors will learn about special seed cultivation techniques that are unique to chinampas and will have the chance to plant seedlings themselves. In a nod to local agriculture, the chinampa will also employ a version of vite maritata, a practice established in ancient Etruscan agriculture that calls for planting grapes around trees, which serve as a natural trellis system for the vines. The exhibition team sees a link between the two forms of agro-forestry, combining trees and crops into one ecosystem. 'We are going to see this dialogue between two ancient cultures that both have a lot to say about how we can move forward,' Mr. Usobiaga said. The exhibition team members said they wanted to be careful not to overly romanticize chinampas because they are not easy to duplicate on a scale that could feed a large population today. The farms work in Mexico City because they sit on a lake that lacks an outlet to another body of water, making water levels relatively easy to control. The opposite is true, of course, in Venice, which is on a lagoon close to the sea and always under threat from flooding. Also, the economics of small farms — high production costs, low yields because of their size — make it difficult to turn a profit. Farmworker wages are generally too low to support people in urban areas, and the backbreaking work of planting and harvesting has lost prestige. 'This is a big problem here, that people, especially young people, don't want to work the soil on chinampas anymore,' said María Marín de Buen, the team's graphic designer. Even in Xochimilco, many chinampas lie fallow because their owners cannot make a living. Some have been turned into soccer fields, which are rented out to the community; others are event venues where people celebrate weddings or birthday parties. Officially, the land is restricted from development, as well as from cattle grazing and the hunting of endangered animal species, though these things happen with alarming frequency. Still, the team sees something inspirational at play: a connection between nature and the built environment, between existing water resources and the need to construct houses and schools. Architects who visit the biennale may not go on to design large swaths of farmland, but they can replicate the idea on a smaller scale using whatever conditions exist, said Jachen Schleich, a team member who is a principal of the Mexico City architectural firm Dellekamp + Schleich. 'Even if somebody does this in his backyard, he can at least feed his family, or the people on the four floors of his building, Mr. Schleich said. 'It could be like a micro-intervention in the landscape or a public space.'
