Andy Hoffman“What do people in Brazil eat for breakfast?” I asked Deb as we prepared for our trip to her homeland. I’m always asking Deb questions about Brazil. I always get a good answer from her, though sometimes her information is a bit out of date. She hasn’t lived there since the mid-1980s and has returned sporadically since. In my minimal visits there, a couple of months in total, I have learned one important thing about Brazil and Brazilians: they embrace change. New foods, new words, new ideas, they seem to love all of it until the next new thing comes along. Many of these changes make Brazil a better place, like the commitment to make São Paulo a global leader in city management. Some, not so much. On my recent trip I found out that some shops sell a mixture of coffee and orange juice. I haven’t tried it myself, but I understand it’s as disgusting as it sounds.
But breakfast in general doesn’t change much. I saw breakfast cereal in the supermarket, with Tony the Tiger trying to make his Frosted Flakes a thing in Brazil, but at 59 reais a box, about 10 dollars, he isn’t making much impact. Deb told me, “Coffee, bread, and fruit.” I’ve eaten that breakfast most days for twenty years now, with the addition of a bit of protein, so I just figured I’d fit in. Deb sometimes credits me with a Brazilian sensibility – usually when I cross streets wherever I like. No car has ever struck me.
We encountered no danger of that wandering through the feira one Saturday morning. We’d probably call them farmer’s markets in the states, though no farmers come near the vendors at the feira. Instead, the vendors buy their goods at the big fruit-and-vegetable market north of São Paulo – not sure where the meat and fish mongers get their products – and sell to the local foot traffic. Different days they show up in different corners of the city, usually bookended by stalls selling pasteis, deep-friend pastries stuffed with a variety of cheese, meat, and vegetables, and their neighbors making fresh drinks from sugar cane or corn.
I don’t think anyone can claim to have visited Brazil if they didn’t include a feira on their itinerary. Part of that is the cultural essence of the experience, deeply embedded in city life there. Some people attended the same market every week, buying high quality fresh food at about half the cost of the nearby supermarkets, others sporadically, but it seems everyone shops there occasionally, and the feirantes know both their customers and their trade. We favored Gilberto at our feira, who showered us with so much mango, melon, goiaba (guava), maracuja (passionfruit), jaboticaba (no translation, but these native fruit sprout directly from the trunk of a species of myrtle), carambola (starfruit), abacaxi (pineapple), mangosteen, and papaya. We walked away with more fruit than we could ever consume.
And we had our breakfast there at the feira, with the free fruit we sampled standing in the street, the pastel stuffed with endive and cheese, and fresh cane juice. Combined with the coffee Deb made for me at home, we had the perfect Brazilian breakfast. And so did the thousands of other people who walked through the market that day. I can’t wait to return and have another one. There must be dozens of other fruits I have yet to try, like the sour cupuaçu, a national signature, and caju (cashew apple), the fruit that also provides the world with delicious nuts. No reservation needed.