Who eats Whom, Sustainability, and Environments

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.

Reflections on local food self sufficiency-

Processing local apples today for apple butter and applesauce. I prefer to use the fruit of local trees…besides being pesticide free, they often represent old varieties, or the unique qualities of fruit trees grown from seed. The flavours are distinct, more interesting, less bland, than applesauce made from commercial fruit. When I lived on the Skeena, I used to harvest the fruit of a motley assortment of apple trees, each one distinct, that had been planted 50 years or more before by an early homesteader, and apple trees from seed “planted” by birds sitting on the fence post, or by the scat of a passing bear. I used to pick the fruit green to try to get it before the bears broke the trees down, harvesting the fruit the same way they would the berries of a tall saskatoon bush. The flavours were unsurpassed, and the fruit was tangy, sour, bitter. My daughter and I would sit on a low stool and run the cooked pulp through a hand cranked Foley foodmill in the kitchen of our cabin cum new-old-farmhouse. The pectin from the green apples made the sauce thick before it was reheated with sugar to can.
Today I am processing the fruit from three old Edmonton apple trees. Apple trees planted by homeowners decades before are often neglected by contemporary supermarket-oriented residents, the fruit a nuisance rotting on the ground. Fruit trees are an investment that take decades to reach their prime, and stability over decades is a rare thing in today’s urban areas. The mentality to put food by, the skills and equipment to can or make jelly, are no longer universal, especially in urban areas where even home cooking from “scratch” is increasingly rare. I went to the market to buy apple juice needed for the cooking liquid to make apple butter…the closest source I could find was organic apple juice processed in Chilliwack near Vancouver. The sugar I will add is organic fair-trade demerara- hopefully ethically produced and both socially and environmentally “OK”….but certainly not within my 100 mile radius for “local”. I would have to search out a local honey producer for that, and I would find, in our climate, that the overwintering bees must be fed on sugar syrup, most likely tropical cane sugar, and neither environmentally nor ethically produced…so the honey I eat is local, but the bees are sustained by the global food system. We cannot escape the connections.
In urban North America our social system no longer supports food self-sufficiency either; we have jobs and time commitments. There is neither time to harvest food nor time to process it around our work obligations and our family and other social relationships. Today is a work day, and I have a nagging sense of guilt as I process the apples rather than marking papers, reading student web posts, working on my new course. We don’t get time off for harvest…but the apples need to be processed now. They have their own seasonal imperative.
Yesterday I also nibbled some high-bush cranberries on a walk and collected some mushrooms in the ravine by my house, an urban greenspace used mostly for urban dog-walkers, joggers, and mountain bike enthusiasts along with occasional pram-pushing parents taking babies out for a walk. The mushrooms are a gourmet treat- wild relatives of portobellos. The trick is to find them before they are too old, riddled with the larval excavations of mycetophylid flies. And of course to wash them well. I manage to find enough for a couple of skillets full that are still good, and now have a couple of freezer packs of “wildcrafted” mushrooms in the freezer. Mushroom harvest requires experience, local knowledge, and detailed ethnobiological knowledge of how to recognize edible kinds and distinguish them from unknowns or poisonous varieties. Some of my fellow harvesters come from mycophllic cultures like Italy or Poland. Most of my Euro-Canadian neighbours lack the skills necessary (and the inclination) to add local edible fungi to their diets.
I found it poignant when we were in Regina a couple of weeks ago after my partner’s mother’s death to go out into her tiny backyard to pick some things for my sister in law to add to the family lunch and find a neatly tended and highly productive vegetable garden, with chard, carrots, potatoes and onions ready for harvest. Few yards in my Edmonton neighbourhood have a ready source of fresh vegetables outside the back door, though it was common a generation ago. Jean came from a farm family, and valued growing her own.