Buses and food

Food I've Seen Growing Along The Side Of The Road As I Travel By Bus:

Along the Sierra
corn
broccoli
lettuce
potatoes
beans
strawberries
chochos (lupine beans)

Along the Coast
banana
pineapple
papaya
cocoa
sugar cane
corn
coconut
yucca
avocado
coffee
african palm (it's an oil- that counts, right?)
passion fruit
oranges, lemons
rice

(chicken, pork, steak)

As I have excessively discussed, I love looking out the window while nodding along with Neil Conan on my podcast as I bus around. I've mentioned that I like watching the flora change as we change altitudes, but I what I really like is looking at the food that's growing around. Driving from Vancouver to Everett/Mukilteo (the most common road trip we made when I was a kid), you don't really see many crops, despite the fact that Washington is an agricultural state (although lots of the ag is on the eastern side that we rarely drove through), so I never got to see major food systems while driving as a kid, save for the occasional trip to a u-pick berry farm or pumpkin patch. Especially because my research deals with the commodity chain for cocoa, I think I'm even more interested in learning how and where other commodities and food grow.

I've learned lots on the bus too. Embarrassingly enough for me, as someone who is interested in food production, I wasn't even positive about how pineapples grew until moving to Ecuador! Now, thanks to my bus rides, I know that they grow in bushes with leaves similar in shape and length to aloe, and in the middle of the plant, the pineapple grows. I've seen pineapples growing on cocoa farmers' fincas (small farms), but busing back from Esmeraldas, I saw workers harvesting pineapples from a plantation as well, which was a cool sight.

Along the coast there is much more variety of the plants planted along the side of the road, and in the sierra, lots of the plots are isolated or further from the road. While the sierra produces much more produce than the ones I mentioned, I have a harder time identifying the plants as we rush by. I've seen lots of integrated fincas along the coast though, so I can easily recognize banana, cocoa, and coffee trees, for example. Rice grows in usually marshy, swampy areas, and yucca is a twiggy bush that's recognizable if you know what to look for. Now if we drive by an obviously agricultural area and I can't recognize what they're growing, I get frustrated! I want to know what they're growing!

I promise that the next post won't be about buses!