Stirring the Cauldron

New Moon Newsletters from Jessica Prentice

New Snow Moon

November moondark kitchen notes
from Jessica Prentice

The Moon is new! We are entering the lunar cycle known as the Snow Moon in Medieval England. The coming of snow in northern climes would have signaled a big shift in the life of agricultural peoples. With snow on the ground, the time for planting and harvesting was over, for the next few months you relied on your stored up reserves to survive.

Here in California, it feels more like the Rain Moon. Our rains came early this year and I for one have been thoroughly appreciating them.

After months of dry season, with yards and gardens bare except where irrigated, the rains seem to bring with them a profound exhale, a sense of great relief.

I grew up on the East Coast, where the coming of snow was an exciting annual event -- there was a feeling of purification that came when the world was periodically blanketed in white. I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area over 12 years ago and it has taken me all this time to adjust to the natural rhythms of a totally different place -- where snow never (or very very rarely) comes, and where really hot summer heat is also quite rare. Instead, the pulse of life here is between wet and dry rather than hot and cold. It is a pulse of life that is shared by many peoples throughout the world where drought and monsoon mark the extremes of the year. It makes me realize how subjective and specific to certain parts of the planet is our popular notion of four seasons.

This is one of the reasons I love the moon names. Looking at the different lunar calendars of indigenous peoples gives an incredibly nuanced sense of the turning of the year in one particular place.

While Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter are considered to be universal seasons, a moon like the Lakota Sioux "Moon When Eyes Are Sore from Bright Snow" or the New Guinean "Tiger Shark Moon" resonate with the experiences of a particular people in a particular place. That kind of cultural specificity is slowly being lost in our increasingly globalized, homogenized world.

I have many friends who recently returned from the Terra Madre gathering in Turin, Italy. This was an historic event that brought together traditional food producers from around the world -- a kind of United Nations of food. There were over 3000 people from over 130 countries. Because so many of these producers still live traditional lives, they came in traditional dress and brought with them their very specific regional foods. One friend told me about tasting reindeer butter and yak milk, and then, later, taking a shot of yak vodka! I was jealous, filled with longing to taste them too. She called these food items 'esoteric,' and I've been turning this word over and over in my head since that conversation. I went and looked it up. My dictionary defines esoteric as meaning "1. understood by or meant for only the select few who have special knowledge or interest; recondite. 2. belonging to the select few..." Certainly, only a select few people got to go to Turin and participate in Terra Madre, and only a few (surely self-selected) Americans will ever have the chance to taste reindeer butter or yak vodka, and yet these foods are not exactly esoteric. They are not intended for or belonging to a select few in their culture -- they are meant for everybody. They are the everyday foods that come from those places. An article about reindeer makes the following observations:

What to us is esoteric was, to the people of these snowy northern places, the everyday, the ubiquitous, the universal. With a name that meant "the animal that pastures" because "it was the only grazing animal known to these people of arctic Europe."

I for one think it is very sad that the foods of modern commerce continue to push these traditional foods to the margins, to make them 'esoteric.' To me, it is a matter of framing. We have an expanding international food system in which foods grown with chemicals and turned into highly-processed, highly-packaged branded products are what is considered 'normal.' Everything that falls outside that category is somehow precious, elite, esoteric, or 'alternative.' People who eat these other things are considered either food snobs or health nuts. We need special labels and special stores for foods that are grown without chemicals ("organic"), come from animals that are not abused ("free-range"), are made by peoples' hands on a community scale rather than in factories ("artisanal") and come from the community where the buyer lives, rather than imported from thousands of miles away ("locally-grown"). Until a century ago, almost everything that everyone ate everywhere on Earth was organic, free-range, artisanal, and locally-grown or locally-produced. That was the norm. It wasn't special, it was just food.

But now these things are considered to be for only the privileged -- at least in America -- and these things are replacing champagne and caviar as the culinary markers of wealth and social status. This is because we have lost touch with our indigenous roots. My dictionary defines indigenous as "1. originating in and characterizing a particular region or country; native 2. innate; inherent; natural." So while reindeer butter is indigenous in Lapland, it is foreign to us. And reindeer butter is as foreign to the yak herding people of the Himalayas who drink yak milk as it is to us and vice versa.

Americans are in many ways a people lacking in indigenous foods. The foods that are truly indigenous to this continent, the foods that were developed, wildcrafted, or supported over millennia and were prepared in traditional ways over a long period of time have been either largely left out of the modern American diet (sassafras, acorns, buffalo) or adopted and adapted into it (corn, tomatoes, chocolate, maple syrup) in ways that are based on European tastes and culinary traditions. In other words, all of our American foods, even our 'old fashioned American foods' such as grits, clam chowder, root beer, and pumpkin pie, are all relatively new culinary developments. We don't have any European-American foods that go back a thousand years because Europeans haven't been in America for a thousand years.

When no food that you have is really traditional, you don't have a strong sense of cultural identity attached to food. Corn flakes can easily take the place at the breakfast table from corn grits. There is not such a sense of loss attached to it. America is all about change and growth, it is all about what is newer and better. It is a country that is full of people who have voluntarily severed their indigenous roots for a variety of historical reasons (most Northern and Southern Europeans, Asian immigrants, immigrants from around the world) and people who have had their indigenous roots involuntarily severed by different historical processes (most African-Americans, Native-Americans, Jewish refugees and refugees from around the world).

In the five-hundred years of post-Columbian American history, our food system and our cuisine has been in a constant state of change and flux, until the past century's rapid consolidation into an industrial culinary monoculture.

So how do we reframe food so that it is not about everyday food (highly processed, factory-made, artificial, branded) for the masses and fancy food (organic, free-range, artisanal, local, homemade) for the elite??

How do we find a way to remember that organic, free-range, artisanal, local, and homemade food can and should be people's everyday real food? I went to a screening last week of the new film "The Future of Food" that was a benefit for Slow Food USA. After the screening there was a panel discussion, and one of the panelists recommended that instead of calling food conventional vs. organic we should call it contaminated vs uncontaminated.

The Slow Food movement, which put on the Terra Madre event in Turin, is seen by some as a bourgeois, first world club of foodies and elites.

But I for one am very glad that there are people who are dedicated to preserving and defending the real foods of the world, the old foods, the indigenous foods, the uncontaminated foods, the foods that are full of memory, the foods that are of a place. The foods that develop out of the snows of Siberia, the mountains of the Himalayas, the plains of Africa, the rainforests of the Amazon, the hills of Piedmont, the monsoons of South Asia, the woodlands of Northeast America and all the other specific and particular geographical, cultural, and spiritual places on Earth are the heritage of not only the diverse peoples who have lived in these places for generations, but of all of us human beings.

Part of what gives Slow Food its aura of elitism is that members have been seen as being primarily patrons of these foods, as consumers, customers, buyers, and connoisseurs. These patrons support indigenous food ways with their money and their appreciation the way that collectors support artists. (And where would artists be in our culture without collectors??) But just as art collectors are sometimes pigeonholed as being wealthy and snobby, while artists are struggling and starving, the same could happen with slow food. We could end up with two distinct sets of 'participants': patrons (farmers market shoppers, restaurant-goers, travelers, gourmands) and artisans (the farmers, cheesemakers, bakers, dairy-herders, fisherpeople, and all the other "makers"). But I think this would be a shame. Traditional societies didn't have these sharp distinctions between consumers and producers -- the food the community made is the the food the community ate. Even during the colonial American period, farmhouses throughout the Eastern part of the country made their own butter, cheese, cider, hams, pickles, sauerkraut and even soap and candles. I don't like the idea that the small-scale production of real foods is the province of only artisans whose products are only available to a few that can afford them. Part of the slow food movement should be a revival of interest in learning the hands-on skills of our ancestors in our own home kitchens. I think it is important for those of us who appreciate slow food to also be doing slow food. This is the only way to keep alive the idea of real food as everyday food, accessible food, common food.

We can do this on a small scale by gardening, cooking from scratch, and baking from scratch. But what if we take it a step further? What if we start to revive the culinary traditions that have been so endangered by the factory food system? What if we begin to practice these traditions in our kitchens and to learn how to process foods in traditional ways? At the same time that the Slow Food movement has been growing and gaining momentum internationally, I have noticed a smaller but related trend among people in my generation. Americans brought up within the confines of the industrialized food model, disconnected from their own culinary and agricultural traditions, are beginning to teach themselves how to do their own traditional food processing. There is Chuck in Pennsylvania, who makes traditional lactofermented sodas such as gingerale and rootbeer. There is Sandy in Tennessee who started with sauerkraut and has now journeyed through a wide world of wild fermentations. There is Adam in Santa Cruz who is growing heirloom grains and baking sourdough bread. There is Brad in upstate New York, who cures his own hams and is growing apples for his own hard cider. And here in the Bay Area there is Sarah who makes jams from scratch, when she isn't making bread or wine. There is Bryon, a beekeeper and honey collector who just put by his first bottles of mead. There is Jolie who smokes her own fish and preserves liver in fat. There is Dev who makes yogurt and ghee. And here I am, trying my hand at everything under the sun in its own turn, as the seasons change: herbal ales, country wines, kombucha, pickles, sauerkraut, kimchi. I am in the midst of preserving cabbages and root vegetables the way my ancestors would have done, harvesting before the Snow Moon to last into the winter. I have four large ceramic crocks, and they rarely, if ever, sit empty.

I find that I don't just want to be a patron of good food, a consumer of good food, I want to be a creator of good food. Just because my culinary heritage has been interrupted and disrupted by the factory food system doesn't mean I can't reclaim it. If there is a silver lining to the complex, painful historical processes that have made America America, that have brought all of these disparate peoples from different lands together in this place and time, it is the cultural creativity that can result from having such a wide variety of influences, of flavors, of traditions. The paints are out of the tubes, as it were -- we are here, we can't and won't 'go back to where we came from.' So let's use all those colors to create something fabulous, something delightful, something that is as new as it is old, as old as it is timeless. Let's get back into our kitchens and discover the magical things that happen when cabbage meets salt, or when honey meets yeast.

Don't get me wrong -- I STILL want to taste that reindeer butter. But I'm not going to hold my breath until I do. I can be almost that real, that esoteric in my own kitchen. And if you don't believe me, you should taste the sweet potato soda, called 'fly', that I made. It's a slow food tradition from New Guinea, but now it's from here too: made by my hands, from a sweet potato called the Diane grown by a farmer named Nigel. Nestled among my bottles of home-made ales and jars of home-made pickles, it is a sweet and tart and slightly spicy elixir for the hungry American soul.

May we remember the foods of cold, snowy places this Snow Moon, and say a prayer that yak milk, reindeer butter, real sauerkraut and authentic kimchi live on forever, not just in memory but as the everyday food of everyday people, somewhere in this vast and varied and wonderful world.