“Nut”-thing to It: How to Eat Acorns and Enjoy It

February 26, 2016February 28, 20161 Comment

“I worked my hands down through the sleek, cool nuts until my arms were in up to my elbows, and laid my cheek against the acorns in a kind of embrace. I smelled their faint dust, thought of all the rain and darkness and hunger they would forestall, and felt fiercely proud.”
– Jean Hegland, Into the Forest (193)

There are some things you should know about me before we get started: I have never been a proponent of natural, organic, vegetarian, or vegan eating. I have never fallen into any health food fads because I have never given a second thought to health food. I come from three generations of farmers, and the only farming I have done has been weeding my mother’s flower garden. Continue reading →

Into the Orchard: Apple-Carrot Leather

February 22, 2016February 28, 20161 Comment

“Tomorrow we will can plums, and the next day we’ll start on the peaches. We’ve only got eighty-three lids left, so all too soon this sweltering work will be over, and everything we can’t cram under a lid will be left to rot in the summer sun.”

–Jean Hegland, Into the Forest

Jean Hegland’s Into the Forest, a book about survival and family and youth, is also at times a book about food. In the midst of an indefinitely long power outage and miles from even the nearest neighbor, sisters Nell and Eva must struggle to live. At first, they merely ration the food they have in the house, assuming the power will return. Their diet is limited: beans, rice, flour, eggs retrieved from the family chickens, and vegetables canned by their father. Protagonist Nell savors cups of tea made from a fraction of a teabag and craves hot dogs, waiting for the lifestyle she knows to return.

It doesn’t. Continue reading →

Living By Sweet Potatoes Alone

February 18, 2016April 14, 20161 Comment

“If the human being is viewed merely as a physiological object, it is impossible to produce a coherent understanding of diet. When bits and pieces of information are collected and brought together in confusion, the result is an imperfect diet which draws away from nature.” -Masanobu Fukuoka, “Living By Bread Alone”

In an excerpt from his book The One-Straw Revolution titled “Living By Bread Alone”, Masanobu Fukuoka describes the nutritious fare of farmers past in the Japan area: rice, barley, miso, and pickled vegetables. “This diet gave long life, a strong constitution, and good health,” Fukuoka exalts (139). But a diet with four staple ingredients is very different from the Western relationship with food today, when we walk down grocery aisles that have not only a million options, but a million options for the same product. But while we have been raised on the values of full, varied grocery carts and eating a “well-balanced diet,” Fukuoka rejects this logic on the basis of two claims (140). Continue reading →

“Hearty Soul Food:” Healthy Pan-Fried Grit-Cakes

February 16, 2016March 7, 20163 Comments

“Rather than portray the complexity of this cuisine and its changes throughout the late 19th and 20th centuries, many writers played up its more exotic aspects (i.e., animal entrails) and simply famed the cuisine as a remnant of poverty-driven antebellum survival food.”

—Bryant Terry

In Bryant Terry’s article “Reclaiming True Grits,” he claims that, in the past several decades, soul food has become synonymous with comfort food—fried chicken glistening with grease; starchy, creamy macaroni and cheese; and, of course, grits, typically instant—and many in the African American community are suffering for it. However, this soul food, the sort romanticized by food writers, is not the soul food of tradition, but what Terry calls “instant soul food” and “a dishonest representation of African American cuisine.” It’s the food you find on a Cracker Barrel plate, not a traditional Southern meal. Continue reading →