Playing With Our Food

Diet as Nutrition, Heritage, Community, and Sense of Place

I’ve been sharing music videos on Substack as a reminder that, as Jack Gilbert says, “We must admit there will be music despite everything.” It enriches our lives and communities, and fortifies us for the fight and for the rest of life, too. For the fight, and for the dance.

I’m sharing the Afro-Caribbean cooking video below for a similar purpose.

I love the Mediterranean Diet. I’ve lost 15 pounds in the last couple of months, and have begun to enjoy cooking. But as Roxanne Swentzell has reminded us with her book on Pueblo cooking, eating indigenously is appropriate for those whose ancestors grew up on indigenous diets. After all, food feeds us not only nutrition, but culture, heritage, and a sense of place. Remembering all the functions served by food helps us remember that we’re not just fueling an engine efficiently: that’s such a simplistic, mechanistic view of our relationship with the planet of which we are a part. It strikes me as being Puritan in its severity and lack of joie de vivre. That may be the biggest drawback to a culture focused on diet just for health and wellness. Dr. Steven Masley, in his book, The Mediterranean Method, touches on this when he names as part of his method the practice of sharing every meal possible with others, to help forge those communal bonds.

A friend back in Santa Fe is a forager, and author of many beautiful, useful, delightfully-written books on foraging. There is no more immediate way to put us in touch with food as a living experience of a sense of place. In a society that is as disruptively mobile as ours, the idea of knowing which plants in our home town are edible, when they appear and where, and sustaining a culture of taking no more than needed so our neighbors can also harvest, is utterly foreign to us, but essential to life in other parts of the world. Read A Sand County Almanac, and you may be gobsmacked by how thoroughly Aldo Leopold knew his community, including its plants. You can be sure our indigenous predecessors on this land knew what grew where and when. Many of their stories assume that their plant neighbors (e.g., the Corn Maiden, the Three Sisters) are as much a part of the story of their place as the humans – of which they are simply the most recent link in a long chain. Even our grandparents and great-grandparents grew their own food, knew what worked in their soils, and swapped seeds with neighbors.

So when I saw this video about an Afro-Caribbean interpretation of the Mediterranean Diet, all of this clicked. One size never has fit all, and never will. Centering European versions of diet, music, economics, or anything else leads to an impoverished view of those parts of life, flattening our sense of the richness of lived experience on this planet. Such a diet may best serve the imposed efficiencies of our planetary food system, but it doesn’t necessarily serve our health, our communities, or the environment of which we are a part.

It’s not that the European version is singularly bad; monoculture is singularly bad. The Irish discovered this when they relied on one species of potato; it made the entire nation vulnerable to a disease that spread like wildfire. Even just within the American diet, how many different kinds of tomatoes do you tend to see in grocery stores? Go to farmers’ markets and you will see more than in the supermarkets. But if you get into heirloom seeds, with Native Seed Search or Seed Savers Exchange, for example, or a local seed exchange, you may be overwhelmed by the variety. Our food system is a wonder in many ways, but diversity does not appear to be as highly valued as uniformity and predictability, which serve the system’s need for efficiency. “The hammer shapes the hand.”

The charming videographer and narrator strikes a perfect balance: she articulates the principles of the Mediterranean Diet, and what foods – olive oil, fatty fish, avocados, fresh seasonal veggies, etc. – embody those principles in Mediterranean nations. Then she describes how the same benefits can be, and have long been, enjoyed using foods indigenous to African and Caribbean cultures and cuisines. This must come as a relief to any who were raised on these cuisines but have been hearing that the most healthy diet in the world diverges from their comfort foods. Monocultures kill creativity. This video’s gift is that it reintroduces not only the familiar (and familial), but invites cooks and eaters to play with their food, with their diets.

Food is about relationships. It connects us with our great-great grandmother’s cookie or pasta recipe from the old country. It connects us with our friends and neighbors, with whom we share the food, its preparation, and the good health that results. It connects us with the seasons, the sense of anticipation for the first tomatoes of the year, the yearning for citrus season. It connects us with our local biome, where the celery is SO much more flavorful, the corn so aromatic, the veggies so particular to that town or even that part of town.

Politics. It can take over our lives like kudzu, like a monoculture that smothers everything else. We must resist, not only bad politics, but a monoculture in which all we read or concern ourselves with is politics, and especially the cruel and unjust national and international politics about which most of us can do little. Returning to Jack Gilbert, he says in the same poem,

If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.

We must have music. Unfamiliar music will remind us that we have options, and that we are surrounded by a gift of magnificent diversity that thrives even as the systems imposed on us try to make us uniform and efficient. Go to the produce section in your grocery store. (Yes, diversity sometimes intrudes even there.) Find an unfamiliar vegetable, herb or fruit. Try it. Try it again next week, until you know it well enough to share it. Build community like Robin Wall Kimmerer describes in The Serviceberry (I just planted two Serviceberry trees in my backyard this Spring). Doing so, and refusing the deny the joy of it; that, too, is resistance. Remember, while everything we grieve over is going on – someone, somewhere in the world, is dancing, singing, and eating with friends and strangers. That’s good.