We were sitting around last night during the lightning storm. Our neighbor Tim was playing the banjo while we talked. We were eating bowls of chili verde and gently arguing the merits of what a local food culture means. There were six of us for our monthly discussion, as much a convivial outing as it was a chance to exercise the gray matter.
In an era of global food distribution what is a local cuisine? I remember the awkward first outing by the Knoxville Slow Food chapter when they hosted a kimchi workshop. One can certainly use local ingredients to make kimchi, and we do. But hosting that workshop highlighted the difficulty of defining a local cuisine in this global economy and era of global migration.
When the current epoch declines, as it surely will, and we are left to pick up the pieces, what will our local table look like? All the various peoples will certainly add a mixture to that table. But the table will be influenced by what is producible in the local food shed. Your post-global cooking culture will probably still have access to imported foods. But, if coming from any distance then they will be expensive and used more for special celebratory events.
Waverly Root, in his excellent The Food of France, organizes the culinary regions based on the fat used in cooking. Which I always thought was a marvelous way to view local cooking: butter, lard, goose fat or oil. It made sense to me. All of our cooking begins with the base fat used to add flavor. The fat used in non-global cuisines is a product of your land base. A nice Mediterranean climate and you will use olive oil in your cooking. A more mountainous land or one composed of poorer soils and you are more likely to use lard or goose fat, a land composed of rich pasture land and the cooking will be based on butter. The fat used in cooking seems as convenient a way as any to explore the local table.
But for many regions of this country what could be or what was a local table is now buried beneath so many Costco’s, Trader Jo’s and Walmart’s at the intersection of an interstate commerce. That table, if glimpsed, has a museum like quality. Like a carefully curated exhibit of old cookbooks to remind us what our table may look like again in the future.
I’m fortunate to have come from a cuisine in south Louisiana that is still vibrant and has survived the global march, largely intact. But after thirty years in Tennessee I only catch rare sightings of what an indigenous cooking culture here would look like. But that table, when it does emerge, will consist of what we raise in this, our particular food-shed. My guess is that lard and butter will once again reign supreme and define the table. And olive oil will be a mere Mary Celeste of the imagination, ghosting along the coast in search of a port.
Pinto beans and cornbread will always be home food to me even though we don’t eat it much any more. In the summertime, add a nice thick slice of tomato and some coleslaw.
The fat would be hog jaw or a slab of side meat.
I hear you. But, beans and cornbread don’t really add up to a cuisine. There is no universality of dishes in East Tennessee. We have no harvest festivals of note or number. No one celebrates the bringing in of the corn or bean harvest. And no one is ever going to get into a fight over who makes the best beans and cornbread. The table of our past is shared by too few. The reality is that the East Tennessee table will have to be rediscovered in the years ahead.
Hope you and Paul are well.
Perhaps our various uses of “cuisine” need to be more clearly defined. Jean, my early food memories are somewhat similar to yours: white beans cooked with ham hocks, always served with vinegar; sliced tomatoes and cucumbers from the garden, pickled beets; pork chops, fried chicken; custard or lemon meringue pie; iced tea (what’s called sweet tea here) or milk, for me. I’m from Central and Southern Illinois, and I find similarities in many cooking styles and ingredients between there and East Tennessee. Rather than a cuisine–like Low Country, French, or Italian (but which part of Italy?)–is what we’re describing more “home-style” cooking, not really the style indigenous and recognizable to a particular region or country, but a universal one of simple ingredients and process … whose result, to my palate, is every bit as delicious and memorable as the finest cuisine?
Well, I’d certainly recognize what you are both writing about in spirit as a style of cooking. But the reality is that cooking in Tennessee has become so defuse in tone or style. There is no consistency based on our local food shed. Most people tend to eat a diet based on global food distribution. They eat pizza made with wheat from the Midwest. They eat Thai curry with shrimp from Vietnam. They seldom eat food based on local ingredients. In short there is not brand loyalty to the regional food shed.
Agreed.
Do you have a county fair? Do local churches have summer festivals? Do schools, boy scouts, girl scouts, 4H, FFA, or other local groups (Volunteer Firemen’s Association??) have Pot Luck dinners (or a Pitch In… local names for these events vary)?
I’m not expecting Grandma Brown to get into a brawl with Grandma Wilson over whose meatloaf is better, but I’m guessing there are many who are paying attention.
So it may well be there’s a lack of brand loyalty to the ingredients of the local food shed, but by itself this isn’t a sign of the apocalypse. If there comes a time when olive oil is far too expensive because of food miles (and failure to adapt olive trees to East Tennessee… which I’ll not bet against, BTW)… then prudence will make the ingredients of the local food shed step up and take their place. Survival of the fittest. New traditions may emerge, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
I agree with Cindy – “home-style” may be more important. Home is where the heart is.
Oh, and Central and Southern Illinois?? My home farm was in St Clair County. Was just there a couple weeks ago. The crops look great, and Mom’s mashed potatoes were just as I remembered.
There are a few county fairs and other events of the same ilk. But, those types of events have declined in number and participation. Certainly if there were more of those events they could help reinforce a local food economy and culture. Having a food culture based on the local food-shed is something unfortunately that will not happen unless there are other nasty things going on with our economy due to climate change and peak resources (As I see it).
But, the common ground for those who care about local food and eating is to encourage wider participation in the production and imaginative eating of our food. More conviviality in our modern life and less eating in isolation would be the watchwords on my banner; with a side of your mom’s mashed potatoes, of course.
Cheers
The reality of the “no local food traditions” thing is probably more horrifying than you have imagined. I grew up in a town, in a family that had no garden, and we ate a lot of Kraft Mac & Cheese, canned tuna in combination with canned cream-of-mushroom soup and various other ingredients, and other boxed/packaged foods.
That happened to be in Oklahoma, but it could have been any town in the US (except, maybe, in Louisiana) . For a lot of people in my age group (50s), this is pretty much what they ate growing up, too.
I am not the only one who has moved on to cooking her own with fresh, home-grown ingredients, but other people haven’t. Recipes based on boxed and canned ingredients are old enough now to have become “traditional” and beloved in many families, and the resulting casseroles and desserts can be seen at pot-lucks across the country.
It wouldn’t surprise me if the cultural push-back against re-establishment of local food sheds and local food traditions is as big an opposing force as the economic push-back.
Thanks for the comment. You are right, that a local food culture has to be more broad based than what it currently is to date. And, that a cuisine, which is a food style specific to an area, has some serious obstacles. Although I do think the South is better positioned than most areas. An annual survey of those who say they have a vegetable garden puts our region routinely over 30%. That fresh produce does not equal a food style. But it does give us a leg up.
I checked out your blog. Glad to see we like some of the same sites. I liked the practical nature of your garden writing, much more informative than my little speculations. BTW: The same Fusarium wilt is afflicting my winter squash. What do you do to combat it?
Stay in touch,
Brian
Thank you for stopping by my blog! My writing is, indeed, mostly practical, but reading more speculative texts helps me fit my thinking into a larger framework. Your blog is one that I have found helpful.
The fusarium wilt in my tomatoes is probably a different one than in your squash; there are many versions (“its name is legion”). In tomatoes, growing resistant varieties, rotating crops so the same plant family isn’t growing in the same spot for a bunch of years, and doing as much as possible to boost biodiversity in the soil all are helpful.
The bad news is that I don’t know any resistant variety of squash, but the fusarium that is most commonly in squashes will be drastically reduced with a 4-year crop rotation away from that family. Boosting soil biodiversity increases competition among microorganisms in the soil, and that can slow the fusarium down some.
I am stubbornly continuing to grow tomatoes that are not resistant, trying to work out whether boosting soil organic matter and liveliness are enough to keep the tomatoes coming in. So far, the answer is “no,” but I’m not done with trying.
Thanks for the advice on the squash. I have three types planted this year, c. pepo, c. maxima and c. mouchata. Only the c.maxima is affected by whatever is doing the damage. That c.maxima is a pretty cool squash called Galeux d’eysines. But, I’m hopeful that I still get some out of that harvest in another thirty days or so. The whole squash patch is 16×60 feet. It is a very dense planting and hard to access without causing damage. This is the second year in a row I have planted the squash in this patch. And they have been planted in the same area more often than not. So a rotation schedule is in the works for next year.