Caracas

Daily bread

Scarcity comes out of the oven

ON A fresh, cool morning, the short walk to the panadería and, if I’m feeling energetic, up the hill to Roberto’s newspaper kiosk, is a pleasure to be savoured. A pair of boat-billed flycatchers, exchanging loud, rasping calls, perch on a lamp-post. An even louder screeching announces the arrival of half-a-dozen blue-and-yellow macaws.

They’re a long way from their home in the forests of Amazonas or the Orinoco delta, but like more than a dozen other species of parrot, these former cagebirds are now happily established as a wild flock in the capital.

Caracas, as Gabriel García Márquez once wrote, never lost its vocation as a jungle.

The dictionary translates “panadería” as a bakery, but that doesn’t begin to describe the function of this indispensable Venezuelan institution. Indeed, these days it is often something of a misnomer, for reasons I will come to shortly.

It's a jungle out there

Traditionally run by Portuguese immigrants, it is a corner-store and coffee shop as well as a bakery. A place where you can buy your morning paper, grab a chair and catch up with the news while you sip the best coffee in Latin America.

There are, I will grant you, nearby countries with fine coffee-producing traditions; Colombia and Brazil, to name but two. And then there is Argentina, with its Italians and their espresso machines. But only Venezuela has good coffee beans and enough European immigrants. And having endured for years the tasteless concoction that passes for a cappuccino in Mexico, I say viva! Venezuelan coffee. (The beer’s awful, but that’s another story.)

I could buy a couple of papers at the panadería and head back home. But Roberto keeps my copy of The Economist, whose arrival is always unpredictable and usually at least ten days late. His kiosk commands a splendid view eastwards down the valley, with the 3,000-metre Avila mountain on its northern side. And he’s always ready with a sardonic quip about the government’s latest lunacy, delivered in competent, Brazilian-accented English.

Today, unusually, it’s not politics but music that’s on his mind. “Not Sir Winston Churchill,” he announces. “Not Shakespeare. The greatest Englishmen were these guys.” And he holds up a CD of Beatles music.

Furnished with the morning papers—though not The Economist, which has still not arrived—I head back down the hill with breakfast on my mind. Nothing fancy, just a cup of British tea with fresh milk and a sandwich made with warm bread from the panadería.

But it’s six months since I last saw a carton of pasteurised milk. And the panadería’s French loaves, when there are any, are skinny and tasteless, made with a dough I suspect contains something other than wheat flour.

The government imposed price controls on basic foods and medicines several years ago, and failed to adjust them in line with cost increases. With inflation running at more than 20%, the predictable result is that the cheaper cuts of meat, along with chicken, milk, flour, cooking oil, black beans, eggs and a dozen other items are now in such short supply that fights sometimes break out when they are finally delivered.

Today is a no-fresh-bread day, again. So breakfast will be sliced whole-wheat toast, and a cup of tea made with UHT or powdered milk. Minor irritants to a relatively well-off foreigner. But it’s not much fun hunting for milk if you’re on a low income and have small kids or elderly relatives to feed. Welcome to Venezuela.