Eating outside of your culture and making it yours
Posted on Thursday, March 19th, 2009 at 9:18 am by KimRecently, MIchael Pollan asked his readers for advice that their culture and family taught them about food. That’s a really great idea; one of the concepts important to Cater to the Earth is that culture needs to be embraced rather than ignored if we are to become holistically better eaters.
The other day, New Dreamer Mary Jo blogged about sharing food traditions with others. This is also an interesting idea, especially since cultures are permeable: what healthy traditions has someone (not necessarily of your culture or lineage) passed on to you? (Or vice versa)?
In my case, a friend once introduced me to foraging. I don’t think I’d ever eaten anything off the lawn since I was about 3, but living in the mountains near tons of natural goodies like wild strawberries, fiddlehead ferns, and dandelion greens, “Stalking the Wild Asparagus“, the forager’s classic book, in hand, there were good meals and some inedible meals. It taught me, though, that the grocery store is not really the source of food. And that meals could actually contain more adventure than drinking slightly out of date milk.
Today, while I don’t go out foraging as much as I used to, I do eat wild strawberries and other berries that I know to be non-poisonous when I see them.
New Dream will be looking for more examples of food traditions being seasoned by other influences. Or share yours.
Posted in Cater to the Earth, Culture, Health |
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About the Author
I am fascinated to learn about food in other cultures. Growing up I always assumed that the food I saw at the grocery store was the norm. I have since learned that people around the world often have more variety, nutrition, and color in their food than I had been accustomed to eating a typical American diet. It has been fun learning about the variety of flavors and colors that some of my favorite vegetables come in. At the Carrot Museum website: http://www.carrotmuseum.co.uk.html, you can see carrots from various colors and varieties. The first carrots were probably purple and can still be found in India, Afghanistan, and other countries. Dutch farmers were probably first to breed the orange carrot to go with the “House of Orange.” Amazing! I just assumed carrots had always been orange. When I have workshops using colors and vegetables, I show the purple carrot. Most people are very surprised, but when I met someone from India she had pleasant memories of eating purple carrots.
posted on March 19th, 2009 at 5:53 pm[...] off the vegetation, how the seeds are distributed and even what plants might be safe to eat. Foraging can make for some uniquely satisfying meals, if you know what you’re [...]
posted on June 22nd, 2009 at 9:05 amFor folks in New England and upstate NY that are interested in learning how to connect to the outdoors via your taste buds and nibble on the wild landscape in a safe and environmentally-responsible way, I offer over three dozen foraging programs each year. I also wrote a book on this topic (entitled “Wild Plants I Have Known…and Eaten, published by and available from the Essex County Greenbelt Association, http://www.ecga.org), which you might also enjoy.
– Russ Cohen
posted on July 2nd, 2009 at 10:56 amhttp://users.rcn.com/eatwild/sched.htm