by Carl Uzarski
Two days ago (Friday) we went to a small family farm near Earth University. The lady who lives there and runs the farm is named Doña Ana. She showed us around the diverse plants she grows and explained the uses for some of the medicinal plants. We got to try cacao beans (cocoa beans) - well not actually the beans, but the slimey substance around the beans. It's sort of sour and sweet, a little like lemonade. What you do is grab a cacao bean out of the pod and just suck on the gel sticking to bean. You don't chew on or eat the cacao bean itself. Then we each got a pretty substancial chunk of sugarcane to chew on. You just chew on the sugarcane to squeeze the juice out - the cane itself is too hard and chewy to eat. It's not an intense sweetness like what I think I had subconsciously assumed it would be, but, instead, it was watery with a gentle sweetness. If I remember the Blandford days correctly, fresh (un-boiled-down) maple sap tastes a lot like what the sugarcane juice tasted like. I think I heard that we get most of our sugar in the United States from beets, whereas Costa Rica gets most of its sugar from sugarcane.
I wasn't really thinking about it while we were at the farm, but afterwards I remembered that when I was younger I really wanted to try pure sugercane. I had imagined that the sugarcane was just a woody straw filled with intensely sweet liquid. It's actually not like that, but it's still pretty cool to think that I've tried raw sugarcane, freshly chopped from its roots with a machete. So that's another childhood goal I've meet now (growing a beard as soon as I could was another of my childhood goals). So we'll be heading back to the USA early tomorrow morning. It's definitely been a worthwhile trip for me.
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