Author
Mateus Habib
Synopsis
Nilzete Habib, a white middle-class woman and housewife born in Belmonte, in the southernmost part of the state of Bahia, in northeastern Brazil, fed her children and grandchildren bean stew. She always did. First, with my father and his brothers, her children; then with me, my brother, and my cousins, her grandchildren. According to her, the name capitão (captain) was explained by what I now suspect was a strategy: we had to eat all the army ranks until we reached capitão, one of the highest. It was a sign that we had eaten well. It was an affectionate, tactile, multisensory way of feeding her descendants. This memory makes me who I am; it shapes my identity. Throughout my life, I have seen other families, always headed by women from the Northeast, like her, cultivate a similar eating practice. The ritual, the feelings and sensations involved in it, which ranged from affection to pleasure and shame, began to intrigue me more and more. This research is based on this experience.
Throughout its course, this work examines the practice of eating with one's hands as a daily practice of resistance, investigating, in Brazilian food culture, one of the ways in which it takes shape and is best known: through bean and flour dumplings called, in some parts of the country, ‘capitão’.
IGOR DE GARINE AWARD 2024
Publication Date
December 28, 2025