Traditional Foods
In recent years, a fad has hit American dieters. It’s the caveman diet or the ancestral diet, the Origins diet, Paleo diet or whatever you call it. It is based on the theory that what our ancestors ate has shaped our physiology and therefore will be the best diet for us. Through genetics and Darwinian evolution we have developed evolutionary feedback loops that exist between us and the plants which provide our food.
According to Gary Paul Nabhan, an award winning author at the forefront of ethnobiology and nutritional ecology,
“Statistically speaking, most of us are mutts rather than blue bloods, so that it is getting ever harder to select one ethnic diet that may speak most directly to our genes, the diet to which our metabolism is hardwired. This dilemma is especially evident for the 7 million Americans who identify themselves with more than one “races” – whatever a race is considered to be today.
Accordingly, it may be more comforting for most of us to eat our way farther back in time, loading our plates with the very same foods that our great-great-great-great ect. Grandmother Lucy once served in her camp near the Olduvai Gorge thousands of generations ago. Hundreds of thousands of dieters have chosen to do just this, pledging to spend their budgets on calories, cures, luncheons, and literature that pursue a Paleolithic prescription, one that ignores ethnicity in exchange for a sense of antiquity.” – Why Some Like it Hot, page 39.
Nabhan goes on in his book to demonstrate how our relationships with our ethnic foods really have shaped us. The DNA of Lucy and of Java Man within each of us has itself been shaped by generations after. Some ethnicities have long backgrounds of agriculture, farming, animal milking, and vegetable breeding. Other ethnic backgrounds include mostly foraging, wild cultivation and hunting. These different pasts shape drastically different genetic relationships with our food. Nabhan speaks to how central food is to cultural identity. When a culture is removed from the place where its food comes from, the people of that culture suffer both psychologically and physically. In contrast, when a people maintains its food culture, it also maintains traditional knowledge of growing, gathering and cooking it, and a healthy lifestyle seems to emerge. He uses the island of Crete as an example,
“Residents have not simply kept many traditional foods in their gardens and on their plates. They have somehow retained the traditional knowledge of how to seasonally seek out and prepare the wonderful range of wild and managed foods placed before us on the tables of the tabernas and ouzeris of Spili...As nearly everything we ate in Spili that week: delicious and dowsed with olive oil…by the third day, my gut microbes asked for disaster relief because my GI tract had been hit by an oil spill—I was suffering from stomach cramps simply because my fat consumption had tripled in a matter of days…After their faith in Jesus, Mary and the menagerie of Orthodox saints, Cretans believed in olive oil.” – Why Some Like it Hot Page 101.
Nabhan himself is Lebanese and not so accustomed to the high-fat consumption of a Greek diet. When the average elderly Greeks’ consumption of 50 grams (or more) of virgin olive oil per day was proven to improve their HDL/LDL and lower triglyceride levels, olive oil became the new fad. However, when the same olive oil drenched meals were served to northern Europeans during studies, the results were not the same. It seemed that for Cretans, blood lipid levels after meals showed rapid returns to fasting concentrations of triglycerides and apolipoprotein B, thereby reducing their risk of heart disease. Though no scientist was willing to say yet that ethnicity shapes how we react to food, it turned out that carriers of different lipoprotein alleles have markedly different responses to high-fat diets. Meaning that there is a direct connection between our genes and how our bodies process certain compounds within foods.
Overall I think the Paleo diet has helped people because it gets them off of a diet based on processed foods. If you're eating only whole foods and whole grains, without any additives or treatments (because that's how Java Man would have had it), then you are eating healthier than most other Americans. The subtle message is: paying attention to your cultural background and incorporating traditional foods into your diet may improve health.
But, it wasn’t just the physical effects of the diet that were interesting. He is giving an example of a group of humans who have developed an interactive relationship with their place and to the food of that place; in the world of plants we might say they’re ‘well adapted.’
“In the Squaxin Indian Tribe of the Medicine Creek Nation it was common for our people to live beyond 100 years old. Tribal elders attribute this longevity to knowledge about traditional foods and medicines that was passed down from generation to generation. Their powerful traditional science included techniques for gathering, knowing when plant was most potent for harvest, how food was processed for everyday use and how plants were used for ceremonial purposes. This knowledge was highly regarded as a sacred gift that contributed to living a long and fulfilling life.” – Our Food, Our Right, Page 40.
As we think about land, place, culture and belonging it’s useful to back up this intuition with some physical manifestation of it. Through investigators like Nabhan and the knowledge of indigenous people, we are uncovering a complex interconnection between ourselves and the Earth. This point of view abolishes some colonial assumptions:
a. That people living ancient traditional lifestyles didn’t live as long as we do today.
b. That a lack of infrastructure in agricultural traditions means a lack of knowledge about nature, plants, growing and propagation.
c. That there is a fix-all perfect diet for every human.
d. That a people can thrive just as well on any land as they can on the land from which they came.
The longhouse at the Evergreen State College with our Ethnobotanical Garden in front.
What does this mean for me, an unknown old-world mutt, and a vegan farming a piece of Pacific Northwest Land? I’m not entirely sure yet but it makes me very aware of what I plant here, what I eat here and what is already here on the land.
Does veganism threaten ethnicity based or traditional diets? I think there are a few things to consider here, but the short answer is no. Most ancient people around the world ate far less meat and animal products than we do today. In fact, the longest living cultures, including the Squaxin who’s meat came primarily from the sea, ate very little animal flesh. The Okinawans got most of their calories from sweet potatoes and vegetables, with fish being eaten about 3 times a week. the Abkhasia of Southern Russia, the Vicalbamba Indians of the Ecuadorian Andes and the Hunza of North Pakistan were all long living and ate a mostly plant based diet, with meat or fish consumption totaling about %10 of food intake. Does this mean that I should run out and adopt an Okinawan diet being a European? No. It does mean, though, that some of the sentimentality we assign to meat and meat based dishes is actually quite a young tradition, and doesn’t necessarily reflect what was eaten commonly prior to the industrial revolution and mass animal farming.
Veganism is not new. In fact, all of the greek philosophers of old wrote extensively against meat
consumption. Pythagoras, Plato, Socrates, Voltaire, and more. Buddha spoke out against slaughtering animals, even though his wishes haven’t quite been upheld in modern Buddhist tradition. Darwin, H.D. Throeau, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison, Mark Twain, H.G. Wells, Mahatma Ghandi, Albert Einstein…the list goes on and on and all of these people upheld the tradition of abstaining from animal products for the animals. That is why we do it, because we are compassionate toward other sentient beings. If something that you do unnecessarily causes someone else harm and you continue to do it, that is insanity and sociopathy. I think the golden rule triumphs over any appeal to tradition in this scenario, but the greatest thing is…there’s no need to give up traditional foods as a vegan! On the contrary, everything that you love to eat…everything that your grandmother cooked, you can still have in a vegan version. My own grandmother was a traditional farmers wife. Casseroles, corn, sweet breads, and roasts were commonly on the table at her house. I have taken many of her recipes and make vegan versions that have fooled my father and myself. Vegan foodies and vegan chefs are where it’s at today! They work to create substitutes that allow us all the flavors and sensations of our traditional foods, and modern foods, without the suffering. Burgers, pizza, burritos, casseroles, mac n cheese, bacon, roast, are all things you can eat as a vegan, in delicious vegan versions.
One amazing thing that happened since going vegetarian and then vegan was that my world of food opened up wide. Suddenly I was eager to cook these vegetables and herbs and grains in ways that I had never attempted before. I have gotten to know these foods so much better after allowing them to really become the highlights of my meals. So here we are, a vegan homestead in Cascadia and feeling more rooted than ever.
The spirit of Grandfather Cedar reminds me each time I catch the aroma. I was born in Washington State and my heart, if not my genes, tell stories of these rivers and these forests. If I respect all of the spirits of this place, they might teach me how to live here, and I think they are.
