Celebrating Traditional Foods & Stories

Before french fries, pizza, ice cream and soda became mainstays of the American Diet (with an average of 29 pounds fries, 23 pounds pizza, 24 pounds ice cream and 53 gallons soda consumed annually per person,) before even apples or honeybees were brought by early colonists, there was widely diverse cuisine enjoyed by Native people across the Americas.  Foods like wild rice, corn, beans, squash, wild greens, roots, herbs, seeds, berries, fish and game just begin to tell the story of this land and its people.  Now the relative rarity of these foods, overshadowed by heavily processed commodities, bespeaks of drastic changes in a remarkably short period of time.   Interested in exploring the stories of Native food and people and how they might lead us on a path to wellness, I helped to create a compilation of Milwaukee area Native elders’ stories along with seasonal, healthy recipes to celebrate the traditional foodways of this region in book form.

Years in the making, this project was born of a long-time relationship between my health center, the Gerald L Ignace Indian Health Center (GLIIHC), and the Indian Council of the Elderly through the WOLFE group—a weekly fitness and food group for elders.  The project grew with the help of Milwaukee Public Theatre, Native Punx, Southeastern Oneida Tribal Services, and with funding from the Forest County Potawatomi Foundation.  At its root, the Mino Ayaa Project supports knowledge sharing of traditional foodways that promote wellness in the Milwaukee area Native community.  The e-version of the book can be downloaded for free here.  A spiral bound version is available at GLIIHC, where donations are appreciated and go to WOLFE group programming. 

As I frequently contend, all cultures have their healthy traditions. But the vast majority if the world’s cultural traditions have given way to the consumer culture and its modern monotonous landscape of sedentary activities and heavily processed, corporate foods.   Culture naturally changes over time, but I wonder how we might embrace these changes without losing the core traditions that keep people and places healthy.  Of relevance, is The Cultural Wellness Center’s People's Theory that says, “Individualism and loss of community and culture make us sick.”  Using this as a premise for understanding how to overcome our challenges, we could then say that reconnection with key aspects of culture (such as food) and building community (such as through foodways) can heal much of what ails us. 

We all live in a very different world than our ancestors just a few generations past.  The way we communicate, sleep, purchase, move goods, entertain ourselves, travel and commute, feed ourselves, stay warm or cool, work, think, move, seek information has changed.  With these changes has come the ability to do some very brilliant things—finding long lost relatives on Facebook, purchasing olive oil at the corner grocer, eating Korean barbeque squid one night and Ethiopian injera with lentils the next, taking women’s literature and nutritional genomics courses in a single college education, build grassroots movements through the internet, view images of people and places from around the world… And with these changes have come some real horrors—global warming, epidemics of diabetes and obesity, patenting of seeds and resulting loss of seed sovereignty, species extinction, rampant pollution, worldwide economic calamity…  It’s a brilliant, scary world we live in, in need of balance in so many ways.  I think the key in restoring balance lies in shedding the reigns of the consumer-corporate culture and re-embracing traditions that have served people very well for centuries—with a necessary modern twist because we and the world are always changing.   In our global society, we have access to a wide berth of cultural wisdom from a wide range of cultures.  We can look to these cultures for suggestions on how to live well.   And eat well.  With good food, the basic sustenance of life, we have an entry point for growing community, understanding, prosperity, and wellness.

What I Did this Summer

I saw a flock of Canada geese heading south on my morning walk.  With kids back in school, apples ripening on the trees, and the fall equinox quickly approaching, I find myself reflecting on the ways in which I spent the long days and warm nights of summer.

In an effort to find some balance during the fleeting, precious months of summer, I tried to limit my time on the computer (as evidenced by a longer lapse than usual between posts.) Instead, I chose to spend as much time out of doors as possible; hiking the woods and prairies, biking on paths and on streets, picnicking in city parks to the sounds of live music, camping in state parks to the sounds of bird song and night creaks, enjoying long meals on the porch or in the backyard with family and friends, swimming in a few of the many thousand freshwater lakes in the region, visiting new and old friends' farms and markets, tending home and work gardens, and taking long, long walks along Lake Michigan. 

This seems, to me, a sustainable way to enjoy life; to create more opportunities to make food, grow food, seek out real food, share food with loved ones, listen to the sounds of your neighborhood, meet your neighbors be they people, plants, or wildlife, feel sunshine on your skin,  and celebrate each and every moment of peace.  Not to stray to far from the usual format of this blog to wax poetic about the summertime....but it seems to me that I reclaimed a precious, wholesome peace by unplugging from my various e-connections and plugging into my visceral surroundings.

I also found time to read.  Fiction and nonfiction alike inspired. Among the several food books whose pages I burrowed into, including books about salmon, cod, chef-fing, and food rebels, I found one of the most enjoyable tommes to celebrate America's fine fare: American Terroir.  Through these pages, I gained a deeper appreciation for the likes of oysters, chocolate, and coffee, and remembered my fondness for wild edibles, raw milk cheese, apples, maple syrup, and honey.  Rowan Jacobsen takes North American terroir--the taste of place is the way I like to think about the term--to a new level.  I highly recommend this book for anyone who cares deeply about place based foods, farming, pleasure, and soil.

Speaking of terroir and books, my work at Milwaukee's urban Indian health center this summer involved celebrating regional food traditions through the editing and publishing of a new traditional food recipe and storybook; Mino Ayaa.  More on this soon, but in brief, the book promotes wellness through sharing seasonal wild and cultivated food recipes as well as stories from American Indian elders.  We unveiled the book this past weekend at Indian Summer Festival during our elder group's Three Sisters Stew cooking demo.   The 25th year celebration of Indian Summer, the countires largest American Indian cultural fest, included a new Tribal farmers' Market, several cooking demos, pow wows, and some really great traditionl food (wild rice cakes, bison chili and corn soup, among my favorites.) Our health center was on hand raising awareness on the ways to prevent and control diabetes.

And now its time to make the most of the harvest by canning, freezing, pickling, and drying summer's bounty and toil...to enjoy a bit of sunshine during the long, cold nights of winter.