Stirring the Cauldron

New Moon Newsletters from Jessica Prentice

New Snow Moon

November moondark kitchen notes
from Jessica Prentice

The moon is new! We have entered the lunar phase known as the Snow Moon in 16th century England because it was the time of year when villagers of the British Isles would expect to see their first snowfall of the winter.

I have been lucky enough to see snow fall already. I say lucky because since I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area thirteen years ago, I rarely see snow and I miss it. Traveling to Burlington, Vermont for the first national conference for Women in Sustainable Agriculture, I found myself hoping I'd be fortunate enough to see not only the multicolored leaves of autumn but a few early snowflakes falling. As it turned out, not only did I see snow, I got stuck in it. A car I was riding in one evening slid on the slushy ice and right off the road. A gentle reminder to be careful what I wish for.

I have been able to retain a youthful romanticism about snow because I have never lived in a place where the consequences of ice and snow were much more serious than stranded vehicles or closed schools. At the same time that I was fantasizing about glimpsing pine trees frosted with white, I was reading a novel set in a place and a time when snow was not a rare treat, but rather a persistent and dangerous reality. The novel, The Greenlanders, by Jane Smiley, is set during the five hundred year period from the 10th Century to the 15th Century when Norse settlers occupied parts of Greenland.

I know that historical fiction is not a very reliable way to learn about history; but it is a pleasurable one. Many books use a colorful and nostalgic historical backdrop to tell a compelling story full of romance and adventure -- and that backdrop is almost as fanciful as the story itself. But the best historical fiction is both rich in well-researched and fascinating details that make a particular place and time come alive; and also in great story telling. Cold Mountain is a prime example of this, as are the thoroughly addictive novels of Dorothy Dunnett. But I had a hard time getting into The Greenlanders. I found it a bit long on the well-researched historical details and a bit short on the great storytelling.

By the end it had come alive. I found myself immersed in a world that was short-lived and a culture I knew was doomed. Jared Diamond profiled the Greenland Norse in his book Collapse, because after five centuries of survival in the one of the coldest and harshest landscapes on planet Earth, their civilization disappeared. This is, I believe, one of the points of Smiley's novel -- the attempt to capture a lost world. It makes for poignant and thought-provoking reading.

Why did their civilization collapse? As you might expect, a lot of it came down to food.

The Vikings who settled Greenland brought with them dairy cattle, sheep, goats, horses, and a few pigs. They built their steadings around fjords that sheltered them somewhat from the frigid North Atlantic winds. They grew hay and fenced off pastures for their animals. They supplemented what they were able to produce by hunting for seals, reindeer, and bears; snaring birds such as ptarmigan; gathering wild herbs and berries; and hoping for the occasional beached whale.

The diet of the Greenland Norse will strike the modern American as woefully limited. They had no grain or produce. In the book, their staple food was "sourmilk" -- a simple cultured dairy product. The women spent the better part of each summer making many kinds of cheese using all the different milks available to them -- ewes', goats', and cows'. The Greenlanders also had butter and meat -- mostly from seals and reindeer but also some mutton and rarely beef. They ate some of it fresh but most of it they dried for the long winter. Broth was made from whatever was available. Strengthening teas were steeped from herbs. On the rare occasion when a ship arrived from Norway or Iceland, they tasted a bit of honey or had a swig of mead. But mostly they were lucky to have food of any kind on the table. Hunger was a constant threat.

The long winters were, of course, the most challenging times to survive, and if you made it through until summer you felt the renewal of bounty. But winter always loomed, and some summers were colder and less bountiful than others. Smiley writes of one year after many people died of hunger:

This last sentence refers to one critical problem the Greenland Norse faced that Jared Diamond focuses on in Collapse: the fact that the soils of the country are very fragile and easily damaged. What looked like wonderful pastureland when the Vikings first arrived turned out to be very delicate topsoil that a few centuries of grazing nearly destroyed. Cattle proved to be poorly suited to the conditions on Greenland. There were only about three months of summer when they could graze outdoors, and then the Greenlanders had to move them to indoor byres and feed them stored hay. When the hay ran out, they gave the cows seaweed, branches, and other emergency rations, to hold them until there was fresh grass available. But each year, by the time the fields could support cattle again in early summer, the cows were so weak that they had to be carried by hand from the byre out to the fields.

Over the centuries of Norse Greenland life, cattle ranching dwindled and sheep and goat flocks became increasingly important. These smaller foraging animals could dig in the snow for food and were able to eat a more diverse diet than cattle. Hunting made up a larger part of the diet than it had when the Vikings first settled there. The true survival food of Greenland was seal, and the people were dependent upon that quarry for sustenance. Each year was a gamble of survival. Smiley again:

The word skraelings is a denigrating word used to refer to the Inuit who also occupied Greenland at that time. These expert hunters were able to fare better than the Norse during the harsh winters. The book makes frequent reference to the fact that when the Norse were starving, the Inuit were well-fed and healthy. This was at least partly due to having mastered the ability to hunt ringed seals, a species that survives and thrives through the coldest winters, fishing under the ice and only coming up occasionally for air. The Inuit learned to stand stock-still at the ringed-seals' air holes for many hours on end and then react with lightening speed when the seal finally came up for air-harpooning it sight unseen through a cone of snow the seal put on top of the hole to disguise its existence. They also developed technologies and techniques to hunt for whales, which the Norse never did. The Inuit have survived in the unforgiving climate of Greenland until the present day.

Those of us who are interested in native nutrition and the work of Weston Price will identify the diets of both the Greenland Norse and the Inuit as being nourishing traditional ones. And yet in the book, the Norse struggled with a variety of health problems. They suffered from a disease called "the joint ill" -- perhaps a severe form of arthritis or osteoporosis? They also often came down with something called the "vomiting ill," which usually ended their lives in a matter of days. Both women and children frequently died in childbirth. Some people were strong and vigorous but others were weak and sickly.

I wonder why this is so. Is it a fictional invention? If not, is it due to repeated years of not having enough to eat? Or does it have to do with the lack of nutrients in the topsoil, which yielded grasses that insufficiently nourished the animals, and left their milk lacking in the vitamins and minerals necessary for people to thrive? I find it curious.

The fate of the Greenland Norse provokes fascinating questions about what constitutes a diet that is both sustainable and sustaining in any particular landscape. Although pastoralism has proved sustainable in many regions on earth (such as the Alps, the Himalayas, Eastern and Southern Africa, much of Europe, Siberia, Mongolia, Scandinavia, and other North Atlantic islands) it was not so on Greenland. And though diets made up largely of dairy have nourished people for millennia in all the places where pastoralism was sustainable over long periods of time, it seems to have been less so on Greenland.

Meanwhile, a diet made up almost entirely of wild marine and land animals has proved both sustaining and sustainable throughout the Arctic, including Greenland. That is, until the present day, when environmental toxins are beginning to concentrate in the fat of the animals traditionally eaten by Inuit peoples. Although the Arctic landscape seems pristine, journalist Marla Cone asserts in her article, Dozens of Words for Snow, None for Pollution, that it has been turned into "the planet's chemical trash can, the final destination for toxic waste that originates thousands of miles away." The breast milk of Inuit mothers now has the largest concentrations of industrial toxins of people anywhere. Will their traditional diet, which has supported the Inuit in marvelous health for millennia, continue to do so in our contaminated world?

These are sobering and important questions as we contemplate the future of the planet and her peoples. We must ask about any diet both "Is it ecologically sustainable?" and "Is it sustaining to the people who eat it?" Ignoring the lessons of native nutrition, people passionate about the planet too often ask only the first question. Ignoring the lessons of environmental destruction, people passionate about indigenous dietary wisdom sometimes naively ask only the second. But to me, a diet is not sustainable unless it sustains the people who eat it, and it can never sustain the people if the environment cannot support it.

On the Snow Moon, may we all be grateful for food on our tables and for the knowledge that we are very likely to be well-fed throughout the winter. May we envision a world in which people of every landscape are able to learn both the potential and the limitations of the place where they live, and to find a way to eat that supports their health without depleting the natural resources. May we keep alive in our memories those who have learned Earth's lessons the hard way.