I have learned to do a lot of things in my many years in Venezuela, including tossing out bunches of perfectly round arepas in a flash.  Three kids who had the habit of getting hungry three times a day will do that to you.

But these days my arepas are looking a bit wobbly:  less perfectly smooth and rounded. But then, so are Jenny’s and Chichila’s and everyone else’s.  But maybe -  just maybe - these wobbly arepas are one step in the direction of turning our food crisis on its head.

Walk down the street of almost any Venezuelan barrio or village these days in the early evening and you will hear the same sound:  a smooth metallic spinning that means only one thing: the hand grinding of a corn mill. Look up at front porch or balcony and you will see a child or mom or father or grandparent - or all of the above - taking turns to grind the corn for the evening arepas.  It’s a simple action, but packed with meaning.

Arepas are those a hot corn cakes filled with anything (or nothing) that are our ultimate comfort/soul food in Venezuela. But also our ultimate energy food that keep us walking, working, dancing, dreaming.  Arepas are the sun of our food universe here, around which everything else spins.   Without them, well, there is sadness. And – sometimes – there is hunger.

For Venezuelans of recent decades, arepas came from a bag of pre-cooked, dried, refined corn flour, to which you just added some water, salt , performed some minor league kneading and voila: a dozen arepas placed on the grill.  

My kids, like all barrio kids of the past several generations, had the task of going to the corner store to buy a bag of corn flour at our beck and call (for which they usually earned a lollipop). It was cheap, always available and literally omnipresent in all of our lives.  The LAST thing we ever imagined was that it would go missing.

Until it did.  The story of the Disappearing Bags of Arepa Corn Flour offers clues to decipher Venezuela’s food crisis, and for overcoming it as well.

The story goes like this: Venezuela has lots of oil.   That brings in lots of dollars.  Which makes it cheaper to import food (like corn) than to produce it.

Companies that market corn flour import the corn (or much of it),  take all the nutritious stuff out and put what remains  into a plastic bag.  Because corn flour was deemed a basic necessity, the government “sold” dollars to these corn flour companies  to import corn at about 20 cents for a dollar (or less). The one condition was that the company had to sell the product at a very cheap regulated price to the public.

Take two: oil prices drop, dollars become scarce, companies decide (illegally) to use their reduced dollar allotment to import  items more lucrative than corn.  Or, they take the dollars and run (to the nearest foreign bank).  All of which emptied our little corner stores of those omnipresent bags of corn flour. Add to this scene a whole cast of unscrupulous characters who grab up the remaining corn flour and sell it from their back door, for a fortune.

This same corn flour tale can be applied to the other staple items gone missing here in Venezuela: oil, sugar, rice, beans, etc. Except that remember: arepas are the sun of our food universe.

But, like a page out of  Garcia Marquez’ 100 Years of Solitude, we suddenly experienced a collective memory here in Venezuela: arepas are made from corn!  Let me tell you, there is nothing to spur a gardening revolution like hunger.

So, corn started sprouting up, literally, in the most unimaginable places (like in my own backyard!) Then people started digging out their grandparents’ corn grinders that were rusting away in patios as plant holders or bird feeders or door stoppers.

Soon, corn sellers began to appear on the streets, selling bags and bags of it (at reasonable prices) and big pots of corn were set to boil along with the morning coffee (which these days has become the morning lemongrass tea).  And neighbors who didn’t have corn grinders were borrowing corn grinders of neighbors who did.  And suddenly, everyone was growing corn, boiling corn, grinding corn, kneading corn and eating pure corn arepas.  Which come out a bit warped and wobbly since all that rough good stuff is still intact.

Not all of this arepas-from-scratch tale is a cake walk. This takes time and effort and produces sore muscles (as I discovered last week trying to grind the 6 kilos of corn to accompany our weekly gardening kids’ soup). But, it also brings folks together, and it delights the heart and palate and pocketbook.

AND, it undermines the core problem that has been driving this food crisis that is trying to be taken advantage of by so many different interest groups (and governments) that are using Venezuelans hunger for their economic and political advantage .

I recently read a quote posted by a beloved Earlham professor Howard Richards:

The key solution is to make our physical existence less dependent on capital accumulation strengthening other ways to meet the needs of life

As our corn grinders spin, we are strengthening those “other ways”. The road is a long one, but this is one giant step. Eating REAL food that comes from our backyard, or neighbor’s yard, or neighboring community plot, or somewhere in … VENEZUELA!  Maybe this is the real revolution we were hoping for, and thought we were building a few years ago.

Hunger, anger, lines, disappearing kilos and unscrupulous characters still are hanging around in a nagging way, but maybe - just maybe – their grip is loosening.  Stay tuned!