Top photo a selection of Mazatec special foods, Huautla de Jiménez, Oaxaca, Mexico from 1999 Society of Ethnobiology field trip
bottom photo Spring (Chinook) salmon hanging in the smokehouse, Moricetown, BC 1984 (AS Gottesfeld photo)
Ultimately, trophic relations (who eats whom/what) are fundamental in ecology, and in human relationships to other organisms. Unless we are able to photosynthesize, we must consume something. Some human groups raise food plants and animals. Some gather, hunt or fish. For most peoples, taking the life of animals to use their flesh as sustenance require some kind of spiritual recognition (prayer, offering, thanks, appropriate practices) for the ultimate sacrifice of the life of one creature to sustain another. Indigenous North American cultures are noted for the elaboration of respectful practices in hunting and fishing. Mexican and Central American cultures (among many world-wide) create and plant
milpa, and harvest crops, with ceremony and prayer. Contemporary urban Europeans and North Americans are largely insulated from these trophic relations, and pondering carefully the ethical aspects of where our food (both plant and animal) comes from. It comes, as it were, from the store.....and where before that is largely both invisible and out of mind.
Some remnants of the cultural significance of the harvest remain in North American Thanksgiving holidays, which I’ve written about before in this blog. This weekend we celebrate the Canadian version, and I will roast a turkey, and make cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie and apple pie from my own apples. Foodways are fundamental to cultures, deeply imbued with meaning. And the ultimate necessity to take in sufficient calories and nutrients, whatever the source(s) is literally vital, necessary to individual human survival. For those of us who have enough (or too much) to eat from the industrial global food system, the notion that one must derive one's food from the local environment is entirely alien. Today I was speaking with a colleague who lamented that in her rural area of northeastern British Columbia, it was impossible to find even fruits and vegetables from western Canada in the local supermarkets; most things come from the United States or South America. I am fortunate that, although I live in one of Canada’s larger cities, it has a large local food movement, and a number of farmer’s markets. In our highly seasonal environment, we are lucky that we have several Farmer’s Markets that run year round, enabling at least regional produce throughout the year (by regional I include Alberta and British Columbia). Really only the fruit comes from as far as southern British Columbia; most of the meat, poultry, grain, potatoes and root vegetables, and the greens and tomatoes come from a radius of a couple of hundred kilometres.
Although the food supply is being increasingly globalized, for many people, especially those who live a subsistence lifestyle, the local environment must still supply almost all needs for food, medicines, and material culture. Many of these people live in the tropical and subtropical regions of the world. Being able to conceive of the fauna and flora of these exotic and distant environments in completely non-utilitarian terms (as objects of beauty, pure and unsullied spirits, as vulnerable others we must protect, etc.) is a luxury only possible because these places are not our home, and we are not dependent on these ecosystems for our personal survival. The construction of distant iconic rainforests as pristine reserves of biodiversity, and the lungs of the planet, while erasing the previous history and present reality of human occupance, in a way colonizes these spaces for "our" benefit and enjoyment, and denies the rights, needs and sovereignty of their human inhabitants.
While conservation of biodiversity and avoidance of catastrophic anthropogenic climate change are vital global priorities, social justice and creation of sustainable solutions to global problems demand that we attend to the needs of local peoples while seeking to preserve global ecologies, and that we do not sweep aside local systems to serve “structural readjustment” and “debt servicing” of the nation states in which they dwell.
