Rio de Janeiro is the city that worships health and
beauty and where the healthy and the beautiful drink Acai.
Pronounced ah-sah-yee, Acai is more of a lifestyle option than a
foodstuff; a magic fruit potion that fuels the hedonistic energy
of Brazilian beach life.
Shortly after I moved to Rio, I was told about
the acai berry's amazing nutritional properties: Brazilians
believe it gives you strength, energy and is great for sex. A
friend told me that when he was having difficulty in fathering a
child, the first thing his doctor recommended was 'drink lots of
acai'. And it worked!'
I took
my first sip at one of the juice bars that line the blocks by the
beach. The berry juice is served half-frozen and its thick
gloopiness means that you slurp it up with a spoon. This seems to
accentuate its carnal, brutish aspect. As does the fact that the
people who drink it are invariably nearly naked, in Speedo trunks
or bikinis.
The way it looks is integral to its appeal. It
is made from dark violet berries about the size of a raspberry; a
deep, dense colour that seems weighted down by its nutritional
secrets. It reflects no light and has the texture of mud. I wasn't
immediately sure about the taste, which was very sweet and
medicinal. But by the end of the cup I was hooked. It is fruity
with a chocolatey kick.
The nutritional breakdown of acai is prodigious.
It has high levels of iron, calcium, carbohydrates, fibre and
antioxidants. And energy. A small 100g cup has almost 300
calories. Combined with the mystique of its Amazonian origins,
Acai's contents have made it the beverage of choice for Rio's
sporty elite.
Acai is indigenous to the flood plains of the
Amazon estuary. The acai palm regenerates with ease and in areas
where human development has destroyed natural vegetation the first
tree that grows in its place is acai. (Acai palms cover an area
equivalent to half the size of Switzerland.) In this region, its
abundance and role as primary nutritional resource cannot be
over-estimated: it is literally the fruit that has saved many poor
families from starvation.
'Acai is the main food staple of river
communities in the Amazon estuary,' says the agronomist Oscar
Nogueira. It is drunk for every meal - in much the same way as
bread or rice is eaten in other cultures.
Having become an acai fan in Rio I was keen to
visit Belém, the main city in the Amazon estuary and world centre
of acai. If ever a city was so strongly defined by a single fruit,
it's Belém. There is a local saying: 'Who arrives here and stops,
drinks acai and stays.' In Belém more of the fruit is drunk than
milk. An estimated 200,000 litres of the purple liquid is consumed
per day among a population of 1.3 million.
Acai is highly perishable and the only way it
gets to Rio is in frozen packages. In Belém, the fruit is always
consumed fresh. Since it goes off within 24 hours, in order to
service the population with fresh acai on a daily basis an
enormous infrastructure has grown in Belém that employs an
estimated 30,000 people.
The cycle starts in the rainforest. The acai
palm has a long thin trunk up to 25m high and a clutch of branches
at the top from which hang ribbon-like leaves. Hundreds of acai
fruits dangle from branches in clusters that look like nests of
bluebottles.
The fruit picking is done by hand. In the
afternoons, river-dwellers scramble up the trees, cut off the
branches and climb back down again exactly as they have done for
hundreds of years. In the evening, boats containing baskets of
acai leave the rainforest heading for Belém's market, where they
arrive in the middle of the night.
The acai market is a dockside next to the city
market. By the early hours small boats have started arriving with
baskets of the fruit which quickly fill the quay. By 3am men like
Armando Ribeiro arrive.
Armando owns the Casa do Acai, one of Belém's
3,000 acai points, where the fruit is pulped, into juice. Armando
buys several baskets of the best acai and takes it back to his
premises, a small patio in a backstreet. When I arrive, shortly
after 11am, Armando has been pulping the fruit for an hour.
Customer demand for acai is at lunchtime, and they prepare it
fresh. He pours the fruit into the pulping machine and keeps on
re-pouring the discharge until the blend is perfect. He sells
three versions; thick (£1), medium (60p) and dilute (40p).
In Belém, you are never more than a block away
from an acai point. Wherever you look, your eye always finds a red
açaí sign. I find a bar and order a bowl. It is served like soup.
The taste is almost unrecognisable from what I have become used to
in Rio. The exotic sharpness and zesty kick is not there. The
sensation is of a simple, neutered, bitter freshness. Acai is not
a versatile fruit since it can only be stored frozen and cannot be
cooked, so for the most part, it continues to be drunk just as the
Indians have drunk it for centuries.
For acai to catch on outside the Amazon, it
needed a pioneer. That man was Carlos Gracie, the great-grandson
of Scottish immigrants from Dumfries, who was born in Belém in
1902. In his early teens, a chance meeting with a Japanese
immigrant led to his obsession with the martial art jujitsu. In
1922 the Gracies moved to Rio and Carlos opened Brazil's first
jujitsu academy.
When a shop near his Copacabana home
specialising in obscure foods started to import frozen acai, he
began to incorporate it into his diet and also to encourage all
his jujitsu students to drink it. The jujitsu boys were pin-ups
with the best bodies: everyone wanted to know what 'miracle'
potion they were drinking. Soon Rio's surfers became fans, and
gradually the drink crossed over to become part of beach culture.
By the early 1990s, no juice bar could exist without selling it.
The boom in acai over the last decade has had
more effects than changing the eating habits of Rio's
body-obsessed men (and women).
Scientists have discovered
that acai is rich in anthocyanins, the group of chemicals in red
wine that are believed to lower the risk of heart disease.
Swig per swig, acai
contains over 10 times more of them than red wine.
It is also rich in essential fatty acids,
calcium and vitamins. Acai's recent success is also changing the
nature of agriculture in the Amazon estuary. Agronomists have been
successful in developing ways of cultivating acai sustainably with
high yield. In the last five years acai production has tripled and
brought work to poor rural areas. Belém, now has more than 60
factories that export. 'Acai is the most promising product we have
here for development,' says de Jesus.
Acai was an Amazonian secret that conquered
Brazil. Whenever friends visit Rio they fall in love with the
taste. I have lost count of the number of excited conversations
about how we could export it around the world. I discovered
recently that I've been beaten to it. A company in California now
imports it to the US and next month Selfridges will introduce it
to British palates. It may not be the same as sipping it fresh in
Rio, but make no mistake, one day acai will conquer the globe.
Alex Bellos was the Guardian's South American
correspondent
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