Sandra Bullock Grew Up Sneaking Cheetos. Then She Bought an Organic Avocado Farm.

In the Bullock house, Coca-Cola, Oreos and fried chicken were off limits, and only turned up on visits to the Southern side of the family. Sandra Bullock's younger sister, Gesine Bullock-Prado, told Texas Monthly the girls grew up vegetarian and macrobiotic, with their mother at the centre of everything the family ate.

That mother was Helga, a German-born opera singer. Sandra has said Helga taught her daughters to be wary of chemicals and pesticides, which she hated as a kid, so she went to the neighbours' for Cheetos.

The health nut who baked

On NPR in 2010, Gesine's interviewer described Helga as a macrobiotic health nut who drank wheatgrass and made sandwiches with tofu and fake bologna. Gesine agreed her mother contradicted herself, because she was also an extraordinary baker who turned out tortes and tarts for every holiday and special occasion. Trips back to Germany, she told Texas Monthly, were "all-out craziness with pastries and foods."

The family cake was a Bavarian plum cake, made with late-summer prune plums and a buttery crust. When Gesine left for college, her mother baked a whole tray of it and ate the lot out of grief. Before she died, Helga wrote down her recipes for Gesine, who still treasures them.

Helga died in 2000. Gesine later left Hollywood to bake professionally in Vermont.

What stuck with Sandra

Sandra kept more of her mother's habits than she might have expected. She told Oprah.com she reads labels before anything comes into the house and keeps everything at home organic, right down to the cleaners. Her rule: "If you can't pronounce it, you probably shouldn't be putting it in your body." When she opened her Austin restaurant, Bess Bistro, she carried the same thinking into the business, with takeout containers made from sugar cane.

She isn't a saint about it, either. HELLO! reports that in 2009 she told InStyle she kept a weekly cheat day, from Friday night to Saturday night, when dark chocolate with bacon, raw cookie dough and doughnuts were all fair game. The rest of the time it was dinners like brown rice, black beans and steamed vegetables. Restraint most of the week and a blowout at the end of it: her mother ran much the same system with plum cake.

Then she bought a farm

In 2007 she paid US$2.725 million for a 91-acre ranch, about 37 hectares, in Valley Center, north of San Diego. It was the one home of hers that the paparazzi never found out about.

The land came with commercial avocado and citrus groves, which she converted to organic, adding imported ancient olive trees and paths down to a pond built for water conservation and irrigation. By the time she sold there were about 1,200 avocado trees on the property, along with a chicken coop and a beehive. One real estate write-up described the orchard as certified organic, though I couldn't find which certifier, so that's the listing's word rather than mine.

It wasn't the easy option. A 2011 University of California cost study put organic avocado yields in that part of California about 15% below conventional, for a premium of around 20 US cents a pound. Its model orchard, planted from scratch, didn't break even in San Diego County at 2011 prices, organic or conventional.

The sale

She listed the ranch at US$6 million in September 2022, looking for a farm closer to her sister on the East Coast. It sold on 9 November for US$5.6 million.

So the kid who went next door for Cheetos didn't give up on farming. She went looking for another farm, nearer the sister who kept their mother's recipes.

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