Food with History and Slow Foods

I've been reading The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan lately.  If you haven't read it yet, it's a great read -- fascinating, gripping and informative but not burdened by ideological zealotry.  I'd like to talk more about that in another post, but for now, I just want to mention a particular kind of experience I'm having with the book, one that happens frequently with me.

I remember when I first became interested in health and whole foods and health, and I remember the form my interest took.  What I don't remember exactly is what caused me to engage in particular activities or directed me to particular books.  I never have been much of a joiner, so I know it wasn't participation in any kind of group or group activity that stimulated or directed me.  Undoubtedly I was subconsciously absorbing cultural trends at the time.  I was probably at the early end of that because the ideas so resonated with my own worldview.

Certainly in reading Pollan's book, I am struck by how I was on a parallel, if individual, path alongside some of the early "hippie" pioneers in the whole foods movement.  I first became vegetarian in the late sixties.  I was married in 1970, and within a year as I took on the responsibility for preparing family meals was reading everything I could put my hands on related to health and whole foods.  By 1972, I was pregnant with my first child, and we bought a farm near Galena, Illinois.  I hoped to live on it fulltime.  Among other things, I wanted to complete the whole food circle, that is, I wanted to grow what I then turned into food, and I wanted my (yet unborn) children to experience where their food came from.  I wanted to have what we now call a "small footprint," even live "off-the-grid."

Along with my whole food and health reading, which included my bible, Frances Moore Lappe's Diet for a Small Planet, I was a subscriber to Organic Gardening.  I looked for solutions to my gardening problems in its pages and tried them out in my large garden and orchard.  I picked up books on solar power and windmills.  I fell heir to an authentic log cabin on the farm, which we restored.  It was built of whole oak logs with chinking.  The windows were small and the ceilings low.  I put a concealed heatilator in the restored stone fireplace -- a new idea at the time and something I had to argue forcefully for with my friend/contractor, who eventually put one into the nearby home he built for himself as well.  I also put in an energy efficient wood-burning stove.  The home was deliciously cool in summer without air-conditioning and toasty warm in winter. 

While I guess I knew at some level that what I was exploring personally constituted a "back-to-the-earth" movement in the country at large, I was only peripherally aware of all that.  Mostly I was on a mission to do the best things for my growing family that I knew how to do, and my instincts directed me to the earth, to what was natural, and to participating in nourishing life -- my own and that of my family -- not delegating that task.  Having my hands and my imagination involved in planting and harvesting (without toxins) and in preparing wholesome and delicious food was deeply spiritual, meaningful and rewarding.

In Dilemma, Michael Pollan refers to the work of historian Warren J. Belasco, who writes that the 1969 events in People's Park in Berkeley marked the greening of the counterculture that developed in the sixties, a counterculture that ultimately changed the way we eat.  Among other activities, these hippies, calling themselves "agrarian reformers," planted a garden and announced their intention to eat "uncontaminated" food.  1969, the greening of the counterculture year, was the year I first became vegetarian and just two years before I started tilling my own soil and preparing my own uncontaminated food.

Now I find myself again part of a movement that is taking shape.  I didn't plan that.  I just continued doing what I have always done but in a new environment, beyond the context of my family.  As the owner of a small vegetarian cafe, my deepest commitment to my customers is that their food will all be prepared on-site, from fresh and real ingredients.  I like to do the cooking myself or in cooperation with my associate, Jame Thompson -- that is, I like to involve my own hands and tastebuds in the food as well as my philosophy of food preparation and eating.  I serve to my customers foods that I would have served -- and do serve -- to my family, using the same ingredients, that is, fresh, whole foods.  I no longer have the joy of my garden and orchard, but I started in the food service business as part of the Woodstock Farmers Market, which operates across the street from my new permanent location six months of the year. 

When I expressed dismay about wait times customers sometimes had to endure when I first opened, someone mentioned to me that my food isn't Fast Food -- it's Slow Food, and that there is a movement for it.  I looked it up -- yes, it's true.  The Slow Food Movement, an international movement that started in Italy, where one purpose was to stress the joy of eating good food over the economy or speed of it.  Slow Food, according to Pollan, "seeks to defend traditional food cultures against the global tide of homogenization."  On the internet, Slow Food bills itself as "Food with Meaning."

Closely related to Slow Food is the movement to restate the value of traditional diets, represented in the Weston Price Foundation and in Sally Fallon's book, Nourishing Traditions.  Dr. Weston Price was a dentist who noticed that isolated tribes had better teeth and generally better health than people from industrialized countries and set out to explore why.  His dietary observations are provided with scientific underpinning by Sally Fallon, a nutrition expert who now runs the Foundation.

Portions of the diet promoted by Fallon don't work well for me personally since they involve meat, which I don't eat -- and more fats than I can well tolerate.  The concept of food with history being healthier and more sustainable, though, resonates deeply with me.  Food with history is whole food, comfort food, at least used to be uncontaminated food and can be again -- and has stood the test of time for providing wholesome nourishment.  Food with history and Slow Food is food that involves hands-on and that implies personal engagement, not delegation.

So my third Rx for healthy eating -- is make your food yourself or get it from someone you trust who makes it themself.  Use whole and fresh ingredients, or make certain that the place where you get your food uses whole and fresh ingredients.  As an overall diet plan, find a traditional diet that you like and that works for you, and browse those cookbooks or find friends who can show you how they prepare foods from their native cuisines.  Of course, variety is the spice of life, but jumping from cuisine to cuisine without understanding nutrition can result in some significant nutritional gaps.  The easy way to cover those bases without becoming a nutrition professor is to stay, much of the time, within an ethnic cuisine with history.  These are ethnic diets that have stood the test of time and tend to intuitively provide complete nutrition.  This caveat requires a disclaimer -- ethnic cuisines are part of a surrounding climate, geography and lifestyle so may not work well for someone in a very different environment.  In other words, an Eskimo diet might not work well for someone at a desk job in Missouri.

And read The Omnivore's Dilemma.  It's a great read and so informative!