In Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan describes the “natural history” of four meals and investigates the origins of each meal. What do you eat on a regular basis and where does your food come from? How would you describe your family’s or culture’s food tradition?
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While I enjoy an occasional fast food hit, my depression-era parents always grew a summer garden, visited you-pick and local farms in the Spokane area, and canned and froze food for the winter. That was in the ’50’s. My wife and I continue the gardening and food preservation tradition. So today’s “locavore” movement feels to me like recycling of old concepts of providing food that pre-dated the advent of all the processed and fast food available today. As one of my colleagues once put it “a hundred years ago, all agriculture was organic.”
As a long time fan of Michael Pollan, I am so pleased his book was chosen as the Common Reader for 2009. I also encourage folks to read Gary Nabhan’s “Coming Home to Eat,” “Where Our Food Comes From,” “Renewing America’s Food Traditions: Saving and Savoring the Continent’s Most Endangered Foods,” “Renewing Salmon Nation’s Food Traditions,” “Why Some Like it Hot: Food, Genes and Cultural Diversity.” Many of these books are available at Neill Public Library in Pullman per my request. Nabhan is a nutritional ecologist and ethnobotanist living in New Mexico and working with the O’Odham tribe to renew their natural food resources and stop rampant diabetes from decimating tribal members.
I was raised on a homestead in Alaska. Our food came from my mother’s garden, which was canned–along with a lot of our meat and fish–to sustain us through the winter; wild crafted foods like blueberry, currants, raspberries and lingonberries, moose, caribou and salmon. We were healthy until we moved to town and began eating food from the store and discovered the new McDonalds.
As a medical herbalist who has successfully treated myself for cancer with herbs, nutrition and supplements, I am saddened by the totally dysfunctional nature of our national food supply. Pollan was correct in his address to the President in his column titled “Farmer in Chief” in the Oct 12, 2008 New York Times magazine in which he stated we cannot hope to address our nation’s health care issues without also addressing the nation’s food supply–contaminated by radiation, pesticides and herbicides, monocultured to the max, and adulterated with GM crops, “food product” and unnecessary additives–both synthetic and natural, such as corn syrup. In Safeway last week I was shopping for pistachio nuts. There were two different packaged brands available. One pkg label said: pistachio nuts, salt. The other said: Pistachio nuts, corn syrup, and salt! Americans have got to wake up to the dangers of corporate culture. It is taking over every aspect of our lives including our food system.
In Michael Pollan’s book, he gives all forms of agriculture a bad image. Whether it’s organic production, or conventional ag, he really puts it out there that ag is harmful for the environment, and in addition, has caused Americans to be overweight and unhealthy.
In my family, the tradition of gardening, fruit trees, and raising our own beef, pork, and poultry is alive and well, and has taught me some very useful things. In addition to raising our meat and produce, we process and can the vegetables, and the animals are harvested on our farm. Everything is done in a sanitary and humane way, and it is a very alive family tradition I hope to carry on with my children.
I grew up eating wild game. Deer and elk was the meat in my diet. My dad would kill four deer a year when i was younger to keep the freezer full. Now my mom, sister and myself will kill a deer a year on top of the two or three deer my dad will kill plus his elk. My freezers are always full of meat and that is what we eat. We butcher and cut and wrap it for the freezer ourselves in our shop. So, for the most part my food comes from the wild outdoors. Deer and elk are just the main animals taken for food; we also eat pheasant and fish that we also take from the wild. My grandma was raised by my great grandma in the un-tame Blue Mountains of Oregon and all they ate was the food they brought home from the days hunt. I enjoy the taste of the meat and don’t plan on changing the tradition.
I think of my family as a typical American family who eats a variety of foods. We eat all dinners sitting down around the dining table as a family. It is more than just a time to eat, it is a time for us to share about our day’s and things that are going on in our lives. Our favorite meals tend to be classics like spaghetti, meatloaf and mashed potatoes, or hamburgers and french fries. Our pantry is always overflowing with foods that we purchase at the grocery store. Some summer weeks my mom will go and browse the local farmers market but it isn’t a main source of the foods that we consume. We usually have a drawer full of fresh fruits that vary with the seasons. When I grow up I think that I will feed my family in a similar way but pay a bit more attention to the quality of the food and where it comes from. I didn’t ever put a lot of thought into in but now that I have become more education about food production I think it is something definitely worth thinking about.
When it comes to food, my family is pretty conservative. We would usually eat at home, dining out was hard to do with a Dairy farmer as a father. We never had time to go out to eat unless it was before three o’clock or after nine o’clock. My mother, brother and I would usually eat at six and then when dad got home we would sit with him. We always had fresh fruits and vegetables on hand. In the summers, Mom would buy local fruit, berries, apples, peaches, and in the winter would buy what was availible. Although I agree that tradition has a large effect on what consumers do, I think that the reason the fast food revolution caught on is because of it’s ease and convience. It is easier to go to McDonald’s and get a burger, then make one at home. I think that college is where we learn what we want our traditions to be and have the information to make informed decisions of where we get our food and what to eat. I will probably continue with my family in the way that my parents did. Eating fresh fruits and vegetables daily. However, I may give more thought to locality of food and the importance of buying local.
I grew on a fourth generation traditional farming/ranching family and until recent years we would butcher and hunt our own meat. We raised beef, pigs, chickens and would hunt deer and elk. For one week a year my family, grandparents, great uncles and great aunts with there family would get together and butcher up to three beef, seven gigs, and countless chickens. At least to a certain extent we we locavores before we even knew what it was. This tradition has mostly gone by the way side in the last few years due older members of the family getting to old to help and the younger ones are getting too spread out. We still butcher our own wild game, mostly to keep a little bit of the tradition around. Our meals always revolved around meat of some kind and then a vegetable which during the growing months came from my grandfathers garden. When I start my own family this is how I would like them to grow up also, knowing how food is grown and where it comes from.