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Middle-class foodies are
paying a fortune to eat what peasants once lived on.
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17 SEPTEMBER 2014
In her
discussion of the recently published cookbooks of super chefs René Redzepi of
NOMA (Copenhagen) and Daniel Patterson of Coi (San Francisco), science
journalist Emma Marris describes how they, and a few other jet-setting local foragers,
have taken SOLE (Sustainable, Organic, Local and Ethical) food to a ‘wilder,
weirder and more tech-savvy’ level.
As she points
out, Redzepi and Patterson have not only built their oeuvre on such delicacies
as sea buckthorn, lichen and live ants, harvested ‘straight from the forest or
high-tide line’; they have also amplified their ‘wild essences’ through the use
of pacojets (which blends frozen food stuffs), thermomixes (which heats and
purees food simultaneously), commercial-grade food dehydrators and other modern
marvels.
Sticking to
their recipes, however, also requires a little planning. For instance, to
prepare Patterson’s lichen powder, one needs ‘to venture into the woods, find
the best-tasting lichen, and scrape it off trees’. Once this is done, the
sophisticated foodie must then ‘clean it, rinse it several times, boil it for
one to three hours, dehydrate it overnight, and grind it’.
Marris
describes most of Redzepi’s recipes as similarly ‘exotic, oceanic, deep-woodsy,
and uncookable’. Serving something as simple as ‘silken fresh cheese and crispy
beech leaves’ requires pickling beech leaves in a vacuum pack with apple
balsamic vinegar for at least a month.
Needless to
say, Redzepi
and Patterson are nothing short of ‘heroes’ to (usually highly educated and affluent)
activists and writers who advocate a carbon-fuel and processed-food
detoxification diet, along with the development of self-reliant communities
that will break the industrial ‘food chains’ which shackle the consumer.
Yet one wonders
what our remote ancestors would think of this culinary fad. Of course, like
most of us, they wouldn’t be able to afford what Marris describes as the
‘stratospheric prices’ charged by the likes of Redzepi and Patterson. Although
wild ingredients might be free, the attendant foraging and preparation costs
are significant. What they would probably find most amazing, however, is that
what they typically knew as ‘famine foods’ are now commanding a significant
premium over plentiful and convenient things that actually taste good rather
than ‘wild’.
Unfortunately,
for many of our remote ancestors, the absence of effective transportation, such
as railroads and container ships, meant that they had no choice but to survive
on a local diet and, in the process, put all their agricultural eggs into one
geographical basket. This was always a recipe for disaster. The Roman poet
Virgil in his Georgics described how, in bad years, weeds
invaded the land, voles and mice spoiled the threshing floor, cranes and geese
attacked the crops, goats ate the young vines, and moles, toads and ants each
feasted on or undermined the farmer’s work. (Virgil could also have discussed
fungus, insect pests and other problems.) Of course, whatever survived these
pests could be damaged or wiped out by summer droughts and winter windstorms,
as well as snow, hail or heavy rain. Even in good years, Virgil
observed, a field might
be accidentally set on fire.
No matter the
location or agricultural system, local food for local people not only meant
that most people struggled with famine and malnutrition – it also meant many
were well aware of the undomesticated local plants they could use as either
supplementary or emergency food sources. In the words of economic historian
Peter Garnsey: ‘Peasants have always been systematic foragers on uncultivated
land [including fallow fields], in woods, marshes and rivers.’ Indeed, for the
average European peasant, with the exception of poisonous or very bitter
plants, ‘anything that grew went into the pot, even primrose and strawberry
leaves’ (2). According toa
recent survey, despite their absence from official statistics and the ‘routine
underestimation’ of their importance, many ‘wild foods’ are still ‘actively
managed’ by nearly one billion people whose annual income would probably not
pay for one evening’s dining at NOMA or Coi.
As the
‘visionary’ haute cuisine of Redzepi and Patterson reminds us, wild foods
typically display one or a combination of flaws when compared to cultivated
ones, be it lower yields or nutritional value, less interesting taste or
greater difficulty to harvest, store, process and preserve the produce. ‘Famine
foods’ traditionally included various grasses, leaves, bark, clay and dirt
that, because pacojets and thermomixes had yet to be invented, were typically
consumed in the form of cake, paste, soup or ashes. (Of course, one could add
leather belts and human flesh to this list, but it is doubtful they will soon
find their way to Michelin-star caliber restaurants.) For instance, in Ireland,
traditional famine foods included fungi, seaweed, nettles, frogs and rats; in
Hawaii, weeds, ferns and roots; and in Sweden, the inner bark of birch and
straw (3).
Not
surprisingly, as soon as they could do it, our ancestors tried to supplement
their local fare with imports from distant places. In time, non-perishable commodities
like wheat, wine, olive oil, cod, sugar, coffee, coffee, cocoa, tea, spices,
frozen meat and canned vegetables, produced in the most suitable agricultural
locations rather than in close vicinity to final consumers, became increasingly
plentiful and affordable. More recently, ‘dry-good’ stores gave way to the
‘permanent-summertime’ produce sections of ever larger supermarkets.
The fact that
food snobs now need to revert back to the famine foods of old should not be
viewed as an indictment of our modern food production system, but rather as
astounding proof that, today, that system feeds middle-class consumers better
than most kings in history. Far from wearing sustainable adornments, all the
emperors of SOLE food really offer us in the end is an unaffordable witch brew
that caters to the palates of people with too much time and money on their
hands.
Pierre
Desrochers is
associate professor of geography at the University of Toronto Mississauga. He
is the author of The Locovore’s Dilemma.
Footnotes:
(1) Famine
and Food Supply in the Graeco-Roman World: Responses to Risk and Crisis, by
Peter Garnsey, Cambridge University Press, 1988, p53
(2) Life
in a Medieval Village, by Frances and Joseph Gies, Harper & Row, 1990,
p96
(3) The premier
online resource on the topic is the anthropologist Robert Freedman’s Famine
Foods website,
which lists nearly 1,400 species of plants which could be fallen back on during
hard times.
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