Renewing Food Traditions

Kanin Rouston teaching apple grafting. Photo by Mark Dohm

Renewing America's Food Traditions (RAFT) alliance is a network of people and organizations dedicated to identifying and restoring food and food traditions that are in danger of being lost...

From a nutrition professional's perspective, this loss of food traditions in inseparable from the decline in our collective health: the rise in type 2 diabetes, heart disease, obesity, and certain cancers can be traced to our change in food ways.  Not only have the foods we eat changed, but the way we go about procuring food and eating food has changed dramatically in the past several decades.  RAFT initiatives help restore some of our important traditional foodways to our landscapes and our plates.  

RAFT has become a true force for good under the watch of author, ethno-botanist, and advocate Gary Nabhan.  Founding members of the RAFT alliance include the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy, the Center for Sustainable Environments, Chefs Collaborative,Cultural Convervancy, Native Seeds/SEARCH, Seeds Savers Exchange, and Slow Food USA.  Each organization contributes in their own area of expertise.  An example of this synergistic work is the Ark of Taste: Slow Food USA's catalogue of delicious foods in danger of extinction.  Slow Food facilitates the Ark of Taste program, Seeds Savers Exchange offers Ark of Taste heirloom seeds to their customers, and Chefs Collaborative encourages chefs to use Ark of Taste foods on their menus.

Recently, I was privelaged to attend several RAFT events in Madison, WI, focusing on heritage apples.  What follows is my excerpt from the Slow Food Wisconsin Southeast spring newsletter.

While perhaps the most beloved of American fruits, our dear apple’s diversity is in decline.

“The diversity of heirloom apples historically found in American orchards, backyards and hedgerows—upwards of 16,000 distinct named varieties—is greater than the diversity found in any other crop domesticated here or introduced to this continent. Now, the bad news: the number of apple varieties considered to be at risk of being lost from American landscapes and tables is also greater than that for any other kind of food— fruit, vegetable, livestock breed, fish or game.”

- From the Renewing America’s Food Tradition Forgotten Fruits Manual & Manifesto

But recently, apple advocates gathered at the UW-Arboretum in Madison to collaborate on ways to restore biodiversity to our orchards, markets, and plates. The Renewing America’s Food Traditions (RAFT) alliance, Slow Food USA, and Slow Food Madison coordinated a series of events dedicated to this fair pomme. A Forgotten Fruits Summit, a Heritage Orchard Restoration Workshop, an artisanal cider tasting, and a Great Lakes Food at Risk Workshop all took place in late March.

Of the Forgotten Fruits Summit, Slow Food Madison’s Heidi Busse said, “It was a truly historic event and the first (and possibly only) time that this group of fruit experts come together. Had it not been for the gathering that Dr. Gary Nabhan organized, this fruit knowledge may have been entirely lost and forgotten. This was a national gathering of apple growers, historians, authors and advocates who came together to talk about threatened apple varieties and discuss strategies for restoring apples in the landscape (and how to train a new generation of orchardists).”

At the Heritage Orchard Restoration Workshop, beginning growers learned from apple experts. A visit to Dan Bussey’s orchard (with over 200 varieties of apple trees) and an abandoned homestead orchard gave participants some field experience in grafting and tending trees.

The cider tasting featured delightful cider and cheese pairings, including an artisan cider made by Aeppeltreow, a winery located within Brightenwoods Orchard here in SE Wisconsin. http://www.aeppeltreow.com/ The tasting was preceded by inspirational readings by RAFT’s Gary Nabhan, Ark of Taste co-chair Ben Watson, and Aldo Leopold land conservationist Curt Meine.

The Great Lakes Region’s Food at risk workshop brought together wild food experts, fisherman, farmers, orchardists, health professionals, educators, and chefs to review, edit, and add to a list of all foods at risk in the region. A draft version of the list can be found on Slow Food USA’s website.  A publication of Renewing the Food Traditions of the Great Lakes is due to come out later this year.

To learn more about RAFT and the Ark of Taste, visit Slow Food USA’s program pages at slowfoodusa.org.