The Currency of a Grandmother's Tear

Eco Beach City · 2026-05-10 · 14 min read

In the upper reaches of the Talamanca mountains, where the world dissolves into a cool, perpetual mist, the mud has a particular kind of claim on your boots. It’s a rich, volcanic black, clinging with the insistence of something that knows it gives more than it takes. I was standing in a patch of it beside Elias Garcia, a man whose eighty years were etched not in his face, which was surprisingly smooth, but in his hands. They were maps of a life lived by the soil—calloused, stained, but moving with a practiced gentleness over the earth he was turning.

He grunted, his trowel hit something, and he worked it free. What he held up was not a potato, not a yam, not anything I could readily name. It was a gnarled, oblong tuber, the colour of a deep bruise, with a skin so thin it seemed almost translucent. “La lágrima de la abuela,” he said, his voice a low rumble. The grandmother’s tear.

Across from him, shifting his weight in a pair of conspicuously clean hiking boots, was Liam Byrne. At thirty-two, with the kind of sun-bleached hair and intense blue eyes that seem factory-issued to Australians in the tropics, Liam looked less like a farmer and more like a man who’d taken a wrong turn on his way to a surf competition. He was, in fact, one of the most talked-about chefs in the Americas. He reached out and took the tuber from Elias, cradling it with a reverence usually reserved for black truffles or rare pearls. Tonight, this 'tear'—a root Elias’s own father used to call pig food—would be the star of a nine-course, $150-per-person tasting menu at Liam’s restaurant, Raíz. It would be shaved into paper-thin ribbons and draped, blushing violet, over line-caught tuna seared on a block of volcanic rock. The waiting list to eat at Raíz is three months long.

The Chef and the Grandmother's Tear

To get to Elias’s farm, you drive an hour up a road from the nearest town that slowly sheds its asphalt skin, devolving into a gravel track and finally, a muddy suggestion of a path better suited to mules. It’s a journey back in time, past tin-roofed homes with laundry lines dancing in the wind and vistas that open up suddenly, revealing cloud-forested valleys. Down in the valley, Raíz occupies a repurposed coffee processing shed. It is a temple of minimalist design: polished concrete floors, soaring ceilings of local teak, and a single, dramatic lighting fixture that illuminates thirty seats. The contrast is jarring. Up here, mud and memory. Down there, money and modernism.

Liam arrived five years ago, another casualty of Michelin-star burnout, seeking something more tangible than tweezered microgreens and foams. He didn't come to Costa Rica with a grand plan to save heirloom agriculture. He came with $90,000—a sum that wouldn't cover the architect's fees for a similar venture in Copenhagen—and a vague notion of cooking with whatever he could find. He went looking for flavour, for novelty, for an edge in a global culinary scene obsessed with authenticity. He found it in the things the locals had been taught to be ashamed of.

“I didn’t come here to teach; I came here to learn,” Liam told me, wiping mud from the purple tuber onto his trousers. “I’d ask people, ‘What did your grandparents eat when there was no money?’ And they’d get this look. A bit of embarrassment. They’d talk about weird roots, sour leaves, flowers from jungle vines. They saw it as poverty. I saw a pantry nobody had opened for fifty years.” He found farmers like Elias, men and women in their seventies and eighties who were the last living libraries of this knowledge. They were amused at first, this strange foreigner wanting their ‘maleza,’ their weeds. Then he started offering to pay for them. Handsomely. “The best ingredients,” Liam insists, “were the ones they were ashamed of.” The grandmother's tear, named for a local legend about a goddess who wept purple tears that grew into food for her people, was the ultimate prize. It was a flavour profile he’d never encountered—earthy like a beet, but with a bright, peppery finish and a starchy texture that held its shape when cooked. It was a story on a plate.

The Supermarket's Shadow

The shame Liam encountered wasn't an accident; it was the product of a half-century of deliberate cultural programming. After the second World War, and accelerating through the 80s and 90s, ‘progress’ in this part of the world looked like a brightly lit supermarket aisle. It looked like white bread in a plastic bag, canned sausages from a foreign country, and powdered soup mixes. These weren't just foods; they were symbols of aspiration, of having escaped the drudgery and uncertainty of the soil.

I spoke to Elias’s grandson, Mateo, a sharp twenty-two-year-old with a smartphone that seemed permanently attached to his hand. We sat on the porch of the family home, the same porch where his grandfather had likely learned about the very plants he now discounted. “When I was a kid, working on the farm was a punishment,” Mateo admitted, not looking up from a flurry of texts. “My dad would say, ‘If you don’t do your homework, you’ll end up digging potatoes like your grandfather.’ All my friends, we wanted to go to San José. Get a job in a call center, wear a tie, you know? Be modern.”

This sentiment became a self-fulfilling prophecy. As an entire generation turned its back on the farm, a vast repository of agricultural knowledge began to atrophy. Why learn the painstaking, season-dependent process of cultivating fifteen different varieties of beans and roots when a truck delivered a single, reliable, and—critically—high-status type of potato and rice to the village shop every week? The data bears this out. In Costa Rica, consumption of ultra-processed foods skyrocketed by 145% between 1990 and 2013. During the same period, the cultivation and consumption of traditional staples, the very building blocks of the local diet for centuries, went into a steep decline. The supermarket’s shadow had fallen over the fields, and in its shade, centuries of wisdom began to wither.

To the younger generation, the farm wasn't a legacy; it was a life sentence. The supermarket wasn't just a place to buy food; it was a way out.

Many of the 'ancient' grains and 'superfoods' now championed by Western wellness gurus, like fonio in West Africa or certain varieties of amaranth in the Andes, share a similar history. They were often 'famine foods,' eaten only when primary crops failed, carrying a deep cultural stigma of poverty. The irony is potent: the very things a generation tried desperately to leave behind are now being sought out and rebranded as luxury goods by the outside world.

The Expat as Accidental Archivist

It’s tempting to cast Liam as the white savior, the enlightened Westerner bestowing value upon that which the natives had foolishly discarded. But that’s a lazy and inaccurate narrative. Liam is not an altruist; he’s an ambitious chef. He is, however, a catalyst—the foreign element in a chemical reaction that has precipitated an unexpected cultural re-evaluation. His role is less that of a savior and more of an accidental archivist.

On his days off, Liam doesn't head to the beach. He heads back up the mountain, often with one of Elias’s old field guides, a man who knows the forest paths by feel. I watched him one Tuesday, notebook and iPad in hand. He’d point to a vine, and the guide would give him its local BriBri name. Liam would photograph the leaves, the flower, sketch the root system, and type phonetic notes into a database he’s building. He records its use—food, medicine, poison, dye—and then cross-references it with online botanical archives later that night. He is creating, entirely for his own culinary purposes, one of the most comprehensive modern records of the region’s ethnobotany.

This dynamic is not unique. A 2023 survey of fifty high-end 'destination dining' establishments in tropical zones revealed a telling statistic: over 70% were founded or head-cheffed by non-locals. These chefs, driven by the relentless global demand for new flavors, are inadvertently performing the work of anthropologists and botanists. They are documenting, photographing, and, most importantly, creating a powerful economic incentive to preserve biodiversity. More than 90 percent of crop varieties have vanished from farmers’ fields worldwide in the last century. Chefs like Liam, in their selfish quest for the unique, are becoming an unlikely frontline defense against this 'genetic erosion.'

There's a historical parallel here. Think of the Japonisme craze that swept late 19th-century Europe. Western artists like Van Gogh and Monet became obsessed with Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints. At the time, in Japan, these prints were considered disposable, low-brow popular art. It was only after seeing them celebrated and valued so highly in Paris and London that the Japanese elite began to re-evaluate their own domestic art form, leading to its preservation and elevation. The foreign gaze, for all its potential to exoticize, can sometimes act as a mirror, reflecting a value that was previously unseen at home. Liam, with his tasting menus and international clientele, is holding up that mirror to the 'grandmother's tear.'

The Economics of a Forgotten Root

For Elias, this re-evaluation is less philosophical and far more practical. It can be measured in colones and kilograms. Before Liam, Elias was at the mercy of the commodities market. He grew common potatoes and yuca, selling them to a middleman who would show up in a rickety truck whenever he felt like it. The price was volatile, the negotiation always tilted against him. Some weeks, he’d earn less than $0.20 per kilogram for potatoes that took him months to cultivate.

Then Liam showed up, pointed at the gnarled purple thing Elias kept in a small patch for personal use, and asked how much he wanted for it. Elias, thinking it was a joke, threw out a high number. Liam didn't haggle. He now pays Elias the equivalent of $5 per kilogram for the 'lágrima de la abuela.' Raíz goes through about 20 kilograms a week. A quick calculation on my phone revealed the startling new reality: this single, once-worthless crop now brings Elias an extra $400 a month. It represents 40% of his total income.

This has created a new micro-economy, a direct and transparent pipeline from this muddy field to a high-end dining table. There is no middleman, no opaque market forces. There is only a relationship. But this new model isn't without its own perils.

“We call it ‘boutique crop dependency,’” explained a local agricultural economist I spoke with. “It’s fantastic for the farmer as long as the boutique stays open. But what happens if the chef leaves? What if the trend for purple tubers fades? You’ve created a new, highly profitable dependency on a single, fickle buyer. It’s a wonderful story, but it’s a fragile one.”

The table below illustrates the dramatic value shift, but also the concentration of that value:

This new prosperity is real, but it hangs by the single thread of culinary fashion. The global superfood market is projected to top $200 billion by 2026, a staggering figure that rarely reflects the fortunes of the smallholders who cultivate these miracle crops. For every story like Elias's, there are thousands of quinoa farmers in Bolivia who watched export prices soar while their own ability to afford their traditional staple food diminished. The line between empowerment and exploitation is precariously thin.

When Terroir Turns Tyrant

To understand that thin line, you need to leave the misty Costa Rican highlands and travel north to the sun-baked valleys of Oaxaca, Mexico. Here, a similar story of an expat-fueled culinary boom has played out over the past fifteen years, but with a far more complicated and often darker conclusion. The 'grandmother's tear' of Oaxaca is agave, the spiky succulent that becomes mezcal.

For centuries, Zapotec farmers practiced milpa agriculture, a sophisticated intercropping system where corn, beans, and squash grow together in a symbiotic relationship that enriches the soil and provides a balanced diet. But as the world’s cocktail bars discovered the smoky allure of artisanal mezcal, the economics of the valley were irrevocably warped. The demand for agave, particularly the wild varieties that impart the most complex flavors, exploded.

I met Isidro, a farmer in his late sixties whose family has worked the same plot of land for generations. He gestured not at a diverse field of green stalks and sprawling vines, but at a monotonous, blue-green sea of agave plants, marching in perfect rows up the hillsides. “This is all anyone wants now,” he said, his voice flat. “I used to grow seven kinds of corn. Red, blue, yellow. Each for a different kind of tortilla, a different mole. My wife and I, we knew how to grow food. My sons… they know how to harvest agave.”

This is where terroir, the celebrated ‘taste of a place,’ can turn tyrant. The soaring demand for a single, high-value crop has created a devastating monoculture. In key mezcal-producing valleys, the price of agricultural land has shot up by over 500% in the last decade. A plot of land that could once be bought for the price of a few goats now costs more than a city apartment, pushing it far beyond the reach of local families who simply want to grow food. Water resources, already scarce, are being diverted to the thirsty agave fields. The milpa, the very foundation of local food security and culture, is being priced out of existence. Isidro had to stop growing his family’s heirloom corn. He couldn’t compete for land and water against the cash-crop colossus that mezcal has become. The success of one plant led to the suppression of all others, a cautionary tale of what happens when global appetite outstrips local ecology.

A Story in Every Seed

Back in Costa Rica, Liam and Elias seem instinctively aware of this danger. The project, perhaps because it began on a smaller, more intimate scale, has started to branch out from the purely economic to the deeply cultural. The newfound money was the hook, but the revival of pride has become the story.

Elias, a man who describes himself as 'shy,' is now a local celebrity. Five years ago, his encyclopedic knowledge of the forest’s secrets was a private affair, shared only with family, if they even bothered to listen. Now, the local elementary school invites him twice a month to take the children on 'ethnobotanical walks.' He’s bridging the very generational gap that had so worried him.

I tagged along for one of these walks. A gaggle of nine-year-olds, Mateo’s generation in miniature, followed him with a mix of awe and fidgety energy. He stopped and pointed to an unassuming green leaf. “This is ‘hoja del susto,’” he explained. The leaf of fright. “If a child has a bad dream, a susto, you boil three of these leaves in water and wash their face with it before bed.” According to the school’s principal, the local name for this herb was known by only five elders in the village five years ago. Now, thanks to a school project inspired by Elias, they have documented over thirty such near-extinct plant names and their traditional uses.

Later, sitting in a circle, Elias held up the famous purple tuber. He didn’t talk about market prices or chefs. He told them the story. He told them about a goddess of the mountain who fell in love with a mortal. When he died, she sat on the highest peak and wept, and her tears fell into the earth. But because she was a goddess, her grief was not barren. Her tears were full of life, and where they landed, these purple roots grew, a food that would forever carry the beautiful sorrow of the mountain. The children were silent, captivated. They were not just learning about a plant; they were inheriting a mythology. The tuber was no longer just a root. It was a relic, a story made edible.

From Souvenir to Seed Bank

The most promising sign that this revival might avoid the pitfalls of Oaxacan mezcal is what happened next. Recognizing the fragility of their one-to-one relationship, Liam and Elias spearheaded the creation of a farmers' co-operative. They call it ‘Guardianes de Semillas’—the Guardians of the Seeds.

It began with three of Elias’s neighbors, who saw the money he was making and sheepishly admitted they also had patches of ‘abuela’s tears’ or other forgotten plants. It has now grown to twelve member families. The co-op model diversifies the risk. Raíz is still the primary buyer, but they're not the only one. The co-op now supplies two other restaurants in the capital and has launched a direct-to-consumer 'heirloom vegetable box' for subscribers in San José.

I attended a co-op meeting held in a half-finished community hall. It was chaotic, democratic, and vibrant. They argued about pricing for a rare, citrusy flower called 'flor de itabo.' They debated which seeds to prioritize for planting next season. And most hearteningly, in the back, were three young men in their early twenties—including Mateo’s cousin—who had been working construction in the city and had recently decided to come home. They were drawn back not by a sense of duty, but by a genuine business opportunity. They were the ones pulling out their phones, figuring out logistics for the city deliveries.

The co-op’s proudest achievement is not its balance sheet, but its seed bank. Housed in a temperature-controlled room funded by a percentage of the co-op's sales, it’s a living library of genetic diversity. Two years ago, they had documented seeds for just five native plant varieties. Today, the Guardianes de Semillas holds carefully cataloged and preserved seeds for forty-five different native edibles. In a world where agricultural biodiversity is collapsing, this small, humidity-controlled room feels less like a pantry and more like an ark.

Tasting the Past, Planting the Future

My journey ends where it began: at Raíz. The lights are low, the atmosphere hushed with the anticipation that precedes a truly great meal. The fifth course arrives. On a stark, black slate plate sits a glistening piece of seared tuna. Draped over it are the impossibly thin, vibrant purple ribbons of the grandmother’s tear, lightly pickled. It’s beautiful.

But the dish is incomplete without its story. The menu card doesn't just list 'heirloom tuber.' It reads, 'Lágrima de Abuela from the farm of Don Elias Garcia, Chirripó.' Next to it is a small QR code. A woman from a German couple at the next table scans it with her phone. I watch her screen. A two-minute video, shot beautifully but simply, flickers to life. It’s Elias, standing in his misty field, holding the tuber, explaining in Spanish (with English subtitles) what it is and what it means. The diner is no longer just a consumer; she is a witness.

When I asked Liam about the QR code, he just shrugged. “People pay for a story. I’m just making sure they get the right one.”

I caught up with Mateo one last time before I left the valley. He was, as usual, on his phone, but this time he was framing a photo of a crate of multi-colored carrots destined for the city. He’d postponed his move to San José indefinitely. He now runs the 'Guardianes de Semillas' Instagram account and manages their online orders.

“I used to think progress was a smartphone and a job in an office,” he said, tapping out a caption. “Now I see it’s having a story to tell that people want to buy. And our story is better than anyone else's.”

There’s a strange and hopeful circularity to it all. A root, dismissed as pig food in the march toward modernity, becomes a luxury ingredient for global elites, and in doing so, becomes valuable enough to be reclaimed by the very culture that was on the verge of abandoning it. The most potent ingredient being cultivated in these hills isn't a rare tuber or an edible flower. It's a fragile, profitable, and newfound pride in the wisdom they were so close to forgetting.

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