One of the factors we sometimes forget when we think about eating locally is the influence of culture - particularly our birth culture, and the cultural heritage of our parents and grandparents.
I can easily live without bananas, not so easily without mangoes, but God forbid I should have to live without cranberries. My ancestors learned of this little berry from the heath family which grows in the wetlands of eastern North America from the peoples they met when they landed almost 400 years ago. Within a few miles of my childhood home there were many bogs, and cranberries, a good keeper, found their way into many winter meals. For me there is nothing quite like them - and that includes Oregon and Washington cranberries, which just aren't the same. And so on my list of non-local essentials, somewhere between chocolate and tea, are cranberries.
What got me thinking about this? Yesterday I read an article from the New York Times about a man in search of his family's spaghetti sauce. You can read "A grandchild of Italy cracks the spaghetti code" here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/21/dining/21sauce.html?ex=1329714000&en=b3386b5fecd9bfbf&ei=5089&partner=rssyahoo&emc=rss
It seems a recurrent pattern that immigrants and children of immigrants adapt the recipes of the old country to the new locale's ingredients, but the grandchildren seek to recover authenticity. Why had it never occurred to me, for example, that the reason we find tomato paste in so many American spaghetti sauce recipes is that until recent years most readily available tomatoes here were more juicy than meaty? But I do think the author of the article could consider buying plum tomatoes at a farmer's market in season and canning his own, rather than buying canned tomatoes from Italy. But then I'd have to confess that I am fascinated by the food section at IKEA! That's the other side of my family's eating traditions.
And then today I remembered the article when I needed something for a potluck, not the main course, and decided to work with what was in the house. I used my maternal grandmother's recipe for an applesauce cake, one she made during WWII because it worked within financial and rationing restraints, and was sturdy enough to ship well in boxes to her nephews serving in the armed forces. What struck me about the recipe was that some of the ingredients - walnuts, raisins - were more local to me than they were to her. And I used applesauce made from my friend's backyard golden delicious.
The challenge here in California if one is sourcing locally is the flour. The grain we grow is rice, not wheat. I used the same brand of flour as my grandmother, King Arthur. I don't want to think about the environmental cost of grain moving from the prairies to New England and then back to California in its floury form.
Thinking about how mobile many of my friends have been in the course of their lives, I wonder what some of the interplays of culture and locale are for others in their cooking and eating... How about some comments?
2 comments:
You got me to thinking about something that happened to me years ago. Even though I grew up in the midwest, I've lived most of my adult life in the west. Early on I became addicted to Tex-Mex cuisine. When I move to North Carolina for a couple of years back in the 70's, I had to bribe the local Taco Bell to sell me tortillas, and salsa was brought by the case every time I returned to Texas. Returning to the west made my life -- and eating -- much easier.
Your flour vs. rice conundrum is a great example of what happens regularly in our current food supply system. We order our wheat from a local organic supplier—whose main supplier is located in the midwest. We have finally located a more local supplier (in Vermont, as I remember), but not only is the cost high and the shipping expensive, but they don't make unbleached white, which helps organic whole wheat bread rise better. (We'll try spelt before complaining further!)
And though apples are grown locally, our larger suppliers find organic growing practices unsuccessful, given the pests that thrive in the east. Fortunately we have apple trees of our own; but the time it takes to find the "good parts" of apples that suffer every kind of infestation and blight is prohibitive.
We DO need to mobilize on many levels, or factory farming and industrially controlled marketing practices may damage Earth's ability to sustain us all. From the consumer standpoint, understanding the real cost of food will help us make wiser decisions.
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