Back in the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s when my dad was a kid, most of the people he knew were subsistence farmers, like his own family. Milk, eggs, and meat were available because they raised the livestock themselves, and as my dad remembers, after butchering a cow or pig in the fall, they’d hang the carcasses in the smoke house where they’d stay all winter. When the family needed meat for supper, Papaw would go out and saw off a piece to be roasted with vegetables.
Vegetables and fruits grew plentifully, with lots of hands needed to harvest it each summer and fall. But harvesting wasn’t the only work involved. They also preserved everything they could through drying, canning, and eventually freezing so the family could eat in the winter and early spring when nothing else was growing.
What they didn’t grow or raise themselves, they found in the woods, ponds, and fields near their home, hunting for squirrels and rabbits, fishing for catfish and trout, and foraging for morels, berries, and nuts.
When I was a child, my brother and I occasionally spent the night at my Mamaw’s and Papaw’s house, the same house (both drafty and without air conditioning) my dad spent all of his growing up years in. As if I were there right now, I can still see Mamaw in her housecoat and slippers rocking on the front porch swing, and I can smell the mingling of hard well water and lavender soap in their one full bath. But the memories that have endured most poignantly are the ones involving food.
For breakfasts, Mamaw would fry eggs over easy in an iron skillet coated with bacon grease and toast slices of white bread, which we’d slather with butter and honey that always sat out on the table. Only Papaw could mix the butter and honey just right, using his fingers and his pocket knife to measure, stir, and spread. For lunches, we’d have fried baloney or toasted cheese sandwiches, often with a can of tomato or chicken noodle soup.
A block of moldy cheese usually sat out on the table next to the butter. When I’d point out that the cheese was bad, Papaw would just smile.
“It’s still good, honey,” he’d say. “I’ll just cut off the bad spots ‘fore we eat it.”
I don’t remember all the meals we had, but I do remember there were plenty of vegetables from the garden: fried cabbage, sliced tomatoes, and boiled green beans and new potatoes with a slice of bacon floating in them. During the early summer, we’d come in from picking strawberries to eat bowls full of the fruit sprinkled with sugar, usually the bruised or misshapen ones Papaw couldn’t sell from his patch. During the fall there were always apples and peaches to pick, and chestnuts to gather and shell.
This is the indigenous diet of many people in my region, especially those in rural areas, established, as physician, professor, and author Daphne Miller explains, “when a group of people use their traditional knowledge to make a complete diet using local foods.” As I’ve thought about the principles of indigenous diets in Miller’s book, The Jungle Effect: The Healthiest Diets from around the World—Why They Work and How to Make Them Work for You, it was helpful for me to start with my own family’s food roots. True, there are specific disease cold spots around the world today where an unusually low number of people are afflicted with many of our modern chronic diseases. And as Director of the Center for Indigenous People’s Nutrition and Environment at McGill University, Harriet Kuhnlein, says, we have a lot to learn about the ingredients, nutrients, and food preparation techniques from those places.
But Kuhnlein also says that all indigenous diets are “nourishing because they rely on fresh, in-season ingredients. All foods in an indigenous diet are either produced locally or purchased (traded) within a limited geographic area.” Which sounds exactly like the food story of my own family just a generation ago.
As farming and manufacturing have advanced and as food distribution has become more mobilized, very few families in my neck of the woods live subsistently anymore. While a good many people garden, most of them also regularly shop at chain supermarkets, buying processed food and ingredients made all over the world. While this shift likely happened over time, it appears to have taken place mostly between my grandparents’ and my parents’ generation, as evidenced by a quick cookbook perusal.
When my mom downsized into a skilled nursing facility last year, I kept several of her cookbooks, including two “contribution” cookbooks. One was my grandmother’s copy of The Farmer’s Guide Cook Book: Tested Recipes Contributed by Readers of the Home and Family Department of the Farmer’s Guide. Published in 1927, it predates many of the convenience foods we now take for granted. While it does assume readers will have access to boxes of lemon jello and canned salmon, it also offers recipes for making mayonnaise and boiling dandelion greens, one of my Mamaw’s favorites. And most of the recipes called for fresh cuts of meat, fresh vegetables, dried beans, and other foods you might grow or raise yourself.
The other cookbook is my mom’s copy of “Redin’ Ritin’ Recipes,” a fundraising cookbook for Belle Union School from 1976, where my brother and I attended elementary school. In this book published just 50 years later, many of the recipes call for canned vegetables and meats, canned cream of mushroom soup, and for my mom’s contribution, “7-Up Party Salad,” a bottle of 7-Up, a bag of mini marshmallows, and canned pineapple, among other things.
But local and fresh are not the only components of an indigenous diet. Miller lists eight other characteristics:
- Food cultivation techniques and recipes passed down through the ages
- Food traditions, like eating together and observing food rituals
- Sugar from whole foods such as honey, fruits, vegetables, and grains
- Salt from unprocessed sources such as fish, sea greens, and vegetables
- Naturally raised meat and dairy as a precious commodity
- Non-meat fats from whole nuts, seeds, grains, and fatty fruits
- Fermented and pickled foods
- Healing spices
As I think back on my dad’s growing up diet, I find evidence of each of these components, from the large family meals I remember to the honey on our toast; from the dandelion greens wilted with vinegar to the ginseng my Papaw foraged for, eventually raised himself, and always chewed to keep himself healthy. Even as I work toward a healthier diet myself, I can start with what worked for my ancestors and learn from their both their tastes and techniques.
Of course, there also were signs in my family story that food production was changing and my own family’s indigenous diet was being transformed. For instance, Dad says they always had hotdogs on hand, and if he or his brothers needed a snack, they’d grab raw hotdogs out of the refrigerator. As my grandparents aged and were less able to grow what they ate, more and more of their food came in boxes and cans and was purchased at the store.
Such is the fate of most indigenous diets, though not the five Miller discusses. Next week, we’ll look at some of the specifics of these five disease cold spots.
For Your Consideration
Take some time to think about the indigenous diet of your own family or area. What family members or local elders could you talk to? What are some examples from that diet for each of the nine categories above? Tell us about one of them in the comments.
Want to join us? Here’s a schedule for upcoming reading and discussing:
Week 2 (January 29): Chapters 5-9: Specific Indigenous Diets and What They Have in Common
Week 3 (February 5): Chapter 10 through Appendice G: How to Find an Indigenous Diet that Works for You
Make Plans for Other Upcoming Winter Book Clubs at Tweetspeak
In 2020 we embark on our Year of Wisdom journey at Tweetspeak, and just as we approach everything we do here in a multi-faceted way, looking at any question from myriad angles—from the serious to the mischievous, from the forthright to the nuanced, from the erudite to the whimsical—our broad range of book clubs will help guide us in that journey from a variety of vantage points.
February will take us to the magical land of Narnia where we will be reminded that what we put to heart can rescue us when what we know is put to the test during the darkest days. Read The Silver Chair by C.S. Lewis with us beginning February 12.
And in March, the poetry of Ilya Kaminsky in Deaf Republic will guide us in a reimagining of what it means to be a hero, of disability, of the movements that compel us to survive. Join us starting March 11.
____
Photo by Jeff Turner, Creative Commons license via Flickr. Post by Charity Singleton Craig.
- Grammar for a Full Life Book Club: On Becoming Less Possessive - June 16, 2021
- Grammar for a Full Life Book Club: Chilling Out on the Grammar Rules - June 9, 2021
- Grammar for a Full Life Book Club: A Passive Voice - June 2, 2021
Sandra Heska King says
My copy of this book has been in transit for days. Sigh…
My grandfather raised chickens, and they slaughtered two every Sunday. My dad said that was his job. Grandpa also planted a big garden every summer. I remember going out with a cup of sugar to pick and dip fresh rhubarb. I don’t remember ever washing it first. When the garden was going full well, my grandparents would pack up and go camping in Alpena, MI for a couple months. They caught and ate a lot of fish there, and the neighbors at home had full access to the garden. We also ate a lot of processed foods, though, and gallons of Kool-Aid.
My parents moved “up north,” and I grew up on a lake. There was lots of fresh (fried) fish–bluegills, sunfish, bass, etc. Always served with white bread on the side to chew and swallow sans butter in case of any stray bones caught in the throat.
Charity Singleton Craig says
Sorry you haven’t been able to get the book yet, Sandy. But I think you’ll really enjoy it once it does arrive.
I think the stories of food from your growing up years reflects the shifts that have happened in the last generation or two … away from fresh, local, and home-grown toward processed, boxed, and canned. You’ve experienced that shift yourself. And now, it’s actually so easy to eat an entirely processed diet. When I go to the store, I am shocked by how little produce, fresh meats, and other basic ingredients are in people’s carts.
I’ve done the white bread trick to sweep away fish bones, too! Fish that my family or someone we know caught is the only fish I had growing up, other than the occasional fish sticks.
Thanks for joining in this discussion!
Will Willingham says
Oh wow, while I grew up on fresh fish in the summer (we’d go stay at the lake in northern Minnesota every summer with my grandparents), I’ve never heard the white bread trick.
My mom had a garden when I was growing up as well, but I didn’t have the appreciation I’d have for it today. Then, it just felt like work (weeding, picking green tomatoes before the frost, etc.) I didn’t wish to do. I had a raised bed for a few years of my own, and now that I’m an urban apartment dweller, it’s one of few things I still miss about being a homeowner in a small town. I loved going out and picking my lunch off the vines and plants every afternoon.
Laura Lynn Brown says
I remember poets on sticks spending time in that garden.
Will Willingham says
They miss it. 🙂
Charity Singleton Craig says
I love “picking” lunch, too. Favorite part of gardening … though I also live in a small city and have a postage stamp yard. I garden in the landscape!
L.L. Barkat says
I loved the story of your food upbringing. Such character! 🙂
Mine is all about margarine, canned peas and corn, deer and potatoes. And the real treat, when we could afford it, was frozen orange juice out of those cardboard twirly cylinder things that you could unroll after removing the tin ring from the top edge. I was sick almost all of the time. A lot of terrible colds and bronchial issues that did not resolve until I finally started eating more healthily (in my early 30s, after I got pregnant with my first child and was told to eat green things, which I thought meant lettuce but was told firmly meant broccoli or kale. Egads! I did not know what to do with those things).
By now, I am happily a 20+ year vegetarian. 🙂 Who knew.
There is a lot I know about nutrition, but I was surprised to learn about the whole wheat flour not really being whole wheat. !!!!! And, also, about the varying nutritional profiles of olive oil.
You’ve inspired me to start making my own vegetable stock again, after I’d let that slide for the past few years: extra nutrition and less food waste, as I get to use up all the veggie peelings for a purpose, instead of sending them straight to the compost pile. (And, tonight, I’ve got onion focaccia bread rising, made mostly from *actual whole wheat flour* that I know is whole wheat because I ground it myself in the blender.)
Thanks for leading this fascinating and important book club, Charity. 🙂
Will Willingham says
Fresh baked onion focaccia bread.
Sigh.
Charity Singleton Craig says
I think the hidden meanings behind foods with “whole” in the name really speak to the confusion we carry with us into attempts at eating healthy. Processed food manufacturers understand trends toward healthfulness, and all too often it seems foods are packaged and named in an attempt to make things seem healthier than the are. I think your decision to grind your wheat yourself is one reason that I cook from scratch, with as many raw ingredients in their natural form as possible. Though I’ll admit I don’t grind my own wheat. Your idea to make your own veggie stock seems like a great idea … one I might have to borrow myself.
Mary Van Denend says
So interesting to hear our food stories. My family heritage is Swedish on both sides so we ate things like pickled herring on Ry-krisp crackers, Swedish meatballs, and specialties like fruit soup my mother made at Christmas time. We also moved a lot so our diet wasn’t tied to a particular region of the country. Convenience often trumped nutrition as we got older, and both parents were working full-time to pay college tuition. I remember lots of Chef Boyardee spaghetti, Chun King, Oscar Meyer wieners, and Lipton’s chicken noodle soup. My mom was a decent cook– she could make a great pot roast and lovely potato salad– but cooking was never her first domestic love, like it is for many women. She’d much rather be left alone with a great book! Her mother, on the other hand, was a master baker and made everything from scratch. Apple pies to die for and the most wonderful Swedish coffee breads. So we had some of that same generational dynamic going on in my family too. The rise of super markets was a huge game changer for most American diets, I think. I grew up in the 50’s and 60’s and the fast food phenomenon was just beginning when I was in high school. We kids thought McDonald’s hamburgers & fries were fabulous, as much for their novelty as anything else. But then along came the 70’s and a thrilling new interest in ethnic and more “natural” foods sprang up: tortillas and beans, Indian curries, whole grain bread, granola, brown rice, quiches, stir fries with tamari, spinach salads with chopped egg & bacon. All kinds of new ways to eat and cook. This is when my own food habits and a real desire to learn to cook really diverged from the way I was raised. When I got married in 1977 I discovered the original More With Less (Mennonite) cookbook. Lots of simple, healthy recipes that weren’t too complicated and could feed a growing family. I still love that cookbook. But I also love the delicious reminders of my Scandinavian forebears–lots of butter on everything and coffee, coffee, coffee!!
Will Willingham says
Love these memories, Mary. 🙂
And now I’m wishing for fresh made Lefse. 🙂
Charity Singleton Craig says
I’ve heard many people talk about those More with Less cookbooks over the years. I think efforts like that speak to this desire to move backward toward more indigenous foods and techniques. I do think some of our tastes and preferences linger with us like memories … as many of your tastes for Swedish foods has.
Thanks for sharing your family’s food story!
Laura Lynn Brown says
My family hardly grew any of our own food. Dad’s parents did. When I was small they still lived on a farm and had cows and chickens, so probably I drank their milk and ate their eggs. Later, they moved and just had a garden; I remember fresh corn on the cob and big beefsteak tomato slices for summer suppers. In our house it was typical cuisine of the ’60s and ’70s, meat and potatoes and cooked vegetables, some convenience foods, hot dogs and sloppy joes. For a while mom bought eggs from “the egg lady,” who drove a huge station wagon and I think had other foods from her farm — cheese, maybe. We sometimes got apples and cider from an orchard’s farmstand, located right next to a cafeteria we liked. Mom discovered a grocery market in Wheeling that had some locally grown produce. Rhubarb grew wild in the backyard but nobody ever made anything of it. When I was older, Dad had a garden and I remember gargantuan zucchini.
So we ate a few indigenous things. In previous generations, I know mom had an uncle with a garden, and I think she sometimes sold his produce. My great-grandparents had a big garden and my great-aunt peddled some of it to neighbors; they also supplied a hotel in their town, and her dad competed to grow the earliest spring peas.
Who could I ask about this? A few aunts and uncles. As far as local elders, I don’t know which of them are native-local and which are, like me, transplants. I also wonder what some local youngers would have to say about this — the organic farmer I buy things from at my neighborhood farmers market, or the organizers of the local growers’ alliance where I have in the past signed up for CSA (community-supported agriculture) boxes, which brought the opportunity to learn to cook some things I’d never heard of before.
That makes me think about the sentence in Chapter 1, “Now there is the problem of comparing carrots to carrots.” Locally grown carrots are presumably better than supermarket carrots. But is everything these local farmers grow “indigenous”? In the sense of “grown here,” yes. In the sense of “native to Western Pennsylvania,” probably not. I’m not sure it’s even possible to still have that kind of diet, this far removed from the jungle.
Will Willingham says
Once upon a time, before I had any interest in tending my own garden, we moved into a house where the prior owners had retired from the farm. They moved in and tried to recreate their farm place, with an abundance of flowering plants and I assume a vegetable garden at some point (they’d moved to a nursing facility a couple of years before and the house had been vacant, so only the perennials remained). There were even a few rows of trees that resembled a shelter belt in the back yard. I gave most of the plants away to folks that wanted to transplant them, and dug out the rest. But the rhubarb kept coming. And despite its usual death-defying tenacity, I finally mowed it down enough times that it gave up.
I regretted such foolishness for years. Who willingly gives away the chance to go out and pull fresh rhubarb to dip in sugar?
Interesting question you raise, about the difference between indigenous and locally sourced.
Charity Singleton Craig says
I love your thinking about this, Laura. I think Dr. Miller isn’t suggesting that we can all truly achieve our indigenous diet again. In fact, in later chapters where she includes recipes and food cooking techniques and other resources, you’ll see that every thing is adapted to our modern lives. But I think there are things we can learn … and in fact, Dr. Miller suggests we not necessarily return to our own indigenous diet but to one that best satisfies our own tastes and preferences (I’ll talk more about that in week 3).
Thanks for sharing your family’s food story.
Mary Van Denend says
Rhubarb keeps popping up here– another strong childhood memory. In Sweden root vegetables would keep when things like lettuce and fresh tomatoes were hard to come by. So carrots, turnips, parsnips and potatoes dominate in early 20th c. Scandinavian cookbooks, along with hardy rhubarb. Since it’s virtually un-killable, as Will pointed out. I remember eating lots of it in fruit cobblers or cooked down over ice cream.
Laura Lynn Brown says
I think I was at least in college, or maybe grown and gone, when I learned that it was rhubarb. No one ever called it that, or referred to it at all; I just thought of it as that weird red weed by the back steps. To think of all that unfulfilled potential …
Charity Singleton Craig says
My family always ate a lot of rhubarb, too. Especially when the strawberries were ripe. We foraged a lot, too, for raspberries, morels, nuts, and maybe other things. I think there was more of a connection to where food comes from, even in my own childhood, then there is now.