Stirring the Cauldron

New Moon Newsletters from Jessica Prentice

New Wolf Moon

January moondark kitchen notes
from Jessica Prentice

Happy New Wolf Moon! The moon is new today, and the year is new as well -- it's a time of new beginnings, so if you didn't make any New Years Resolutions yesterday, you can make New Moon Wishes today (wishes are said to be strongest in the first eight hours after the moon is new). Those of you who have been receiving this newsletter since the first one will notice that we are back at the Wolf Moon, the first Stirring the Cauldron newsletter I ever wrote (click to read it). Another turn of the year, another trip around the sun on our planet, back at the beginning again.

This is the time of year when our ancestors would take refuge in their homes, staying close to the fire as the winds and the wolves howled outside. It is the time of year when families lived off of the food they had put up in the fall, at the time of the harvest moon, and it was these rations that kept the 'wolf from the door.'

The use of the word "wolf" to refer to hunger, appetite, or famine dates back to at least the 15th Century, and the image of the wolf being at the door representing the threat of starvation is just as old. In this day and age, it is hard for many of us to even imagine the sense of the wolf at the door, the worry of not knowing where the next meal will come from, the gnawing of hunger in the belly. We don't have to fret about how many beans, potatoes, or corn we have stored up in the cellar, or how much salt pork is in the barrel. Food is everywhere in our land of plenty, and though there is hunger in 21st century America, there is relatively little starvation.

MFK Fisher, the great American food essayist, wrote her classic collection How to Cook a Wolf in 1942. This was at the height of wartime food rations, and her book was all about how to live and eat well during this time of shortages. She begins one chapter, "How to Keep Alive," with:

She goes on to explain how you can make a week's worth of food for fifty cents, which she recommends borrowing from a friend. (How, exactly, the reader who is this close to hunger happens to have the cash to purchase Fisher's book, I have never been able to figure out. Maybe the library?) Fisher wrote this wonderful and witty treatise at what was essentially the last time in American history when there was a widespread shortage of food, and a large percentage of Americans had to be very resourceful in order to keep food on the table. Since that time, our food supply has become increasingly abundant -- to the point where the food industry spends billions of dollars each year on advertising -- trying to get us (as well as potential consumers in other countries) to buy ever larger quantities of their pre-packaged and processed products. And excess grain sits rotting in silos.

Certainly there is still hunger and starvation in the world, but the problem is not lack of supply. Humanity currently produces enough food to feed every woman, man and child 2,800 calories a day, which is more than enough. Most of us already know that the causes of world hunger are political, economic & social, and have more to do with distribution than production.

In the U.S., the problem with our food supply right now is the opposite of shortage: it is excess. And as we have steadily driven the metaphorical wolf from our door over the past 60 years, we have also steadily driven the actual wolf from our countryside and our wilderness.

Wolves were once the most populous large mammal in North America, but by the mid-1970s they were an endangered species. This was due in large part to the development throughout the West of large tracks of ranch-land and range-land for cattle and sheep, and the widespread practice on the part of ranchers of shooting whatever predators they saw. Not to mention the steady erosion of large, uninterrupted areas of wilderness. Mountain lions and coyotes have seen a similar decline during the period of Western expansion and development.

By the late seventies, a federally-funded effort had begun to protect wolves and reintroduce them into the wild. By the nineties, this effort had been quite successful, and federally-funded animal control forces were being called in by ranchers in some states, such as Montana, to kill the wolves that other federal funds were protecting. Wolf-lovers, conservationists and environmentalists launched a protest against this policy, pointing out that the numbers of livestock lost to predators is minimal compared to diseases and other factors. Not to mention that the loss of a limited number of livestock might be a price we are willing to pay for the protection of a magnificent wild animal -- one considered to be an "umbrella" species -- meaning that when we protect habitat for wolves, we protect whole ecosystems and countless other species within that ecosystem. Meanwhile, ranchers defended their right to defend their herds.

One novel 'innovation' to come out of this controversy was the development and revival of an alternative way of ranching and a new label to go along with it: "predator-friendly." Certain ranchers began to use other methods for protecting their sheep and cows from wolves and other predators, including using shepherding dogs, llamas, and humans as chaperones (so to speak) for their herds. These escorts helped minimize the number of livestock taken by predators in certain areas. A certain number would be eaten by predators nonetheless -- but 'predator-friendly' ranchers agreed not to kill the perpetrators, accepting loss as part of the business. A certification for 'predator-friendly' products was developed, and you can now purchase predator-friendly wool, lamb and beef (for an increased price) and support these ranchers.

If you're like me, you bristle a bit about all these labels. You might wonder: what will they think of next? We already have songbird-safe coffee, now predator-friendly beef -- why does everything have to be so complicated? I for one find myself wishing at times that the foods I believe in could just be regular, everyday, food; and that labels would be applied to those foods that reflected dangerous or questionable practices, like: "sprayed with pesticides"; "grown where rainforest was clear-cut"; "these strawberries modified with salmon genes"; "from chickens kept in cramped cages with their beaks burned off"; "shipped from the other side of the planet"; or "ten wolves killed in order to protect this cow". Or we could just cut to the chase with labels like: "potentially toxic to you and your family," "cruel to animals," "un-natural," and even "earth-unfriendly."

Any such efforts are always toppled by the notion that agribusiness and its devastating practices are responsible for the amazing abundance of food in this country, and a level of food-security that is unprecedented on the planet.

But mono-cropped fields grown on infertile soil, antibiotic-resistant poultry, self-terminating seed stock, pesticide-resistant pests, genetically-manipulated organisms, and the extinction of keystone species doesn't sound like food security to me. We may have driven the wolf from our door, but remember that coyote is the trickster, and nature may have something else up its sleeve.

I'd much rather see us develop local foodsystems based on fertile soil, biodiversity, and plants and animals that are healthy, resilient, and hardy. I'd much rather see a world where there are wild things that howl at the moon.

May the wolf be far from my door, but may it still be out there, somewhere.

Recommended websites:

• Predator Conservation Alliance: Saving a Place for America's Predators
  predatorconservation.org
• Wolf Howl: Lupine Defense League
  wolfhowl.org
• Wolf Haven International: sanctuary and public education
  wolfhaven.org
• Predator Friendly: "Green" Wool: article by John Clayton
  gallatin.org/pub/GI.RW96.Clayton4.html