ISBN: 9781933392899 Year Added to Catalog: 2008 Book Format: Paperback Book Art: Color photos Number of Pages: 350 Book Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing Old ISBN: 1933392894 Release Date: May 31, 2008
Also in Food & Health
Renewing America's Food Traditions
Saving and Savoring the Continent's Most Endangered Foods
What food passport do you carry? What landscape do you see in your mind when you close your eyes while eating a mouthful of food that makes you feel immediately at home?
Our sense of place and our sense of taste are intimately related. From a small barrier island off the coast of South Carolina to the pink sandstone canyons of Utah, the landscape of the United States is as varied as its cultures. The farmers’ markets, fishmongers, and fruit vendors of each region across North America have their own distinctive calls, colors, and flavors. Our sense of place is determined as much by the food we see and taste as we walk the streets or drive the backroads of our home ground as it is by our postal address.
As we began the RAFT project to document the unique foods of this country, we wondered how we should structure our inquiries into the traditional foods unique to American landscapes and seascapes. Should we inventory them time period by time period or consult with culture after culture across the entire continent? What would our organizing principle be?
Of course, we realized that ecological regions, agricultural production zones, and culinary conventions cut across state and national boundaries. So do our organizations’ concentrations of membership. But is there such a thing as an ecogastronomic region? Could those regions be mapped?
One morning a cartoonlike map appeared on a napkin while two of us were merely doodling before launching into our day’s work. What if that hypothetical map of ecogastronomic regions was, as National Book Award–winning poet William Safford once said, “a story that could be true”?
Once the first draft had seen the light of day, we went out to test whether our hypothesis regarding the existence of “food nations” was true, false, or debatable. To our amazement, we found that several individuals and organizations had already pushed past conventional political boundaries to imagine a fresh geographic framework that had food and food traditions at its base.
We quickly realized that we were not at all the first Americans who had used the convention of calling various ecoregions of North America “food nations.” For roughly a decade, Ecotrust and other organizations in the Pacific Northwest of the United States and Canada have referred to “Salmon Nation,” a binational region of the watersheds in which various species of salmon have been ecologically, culturally, and spiritually significant. In fact, the imagining of a Salmon Nation had brought together previously unlikely partners who subsequently forged effective alliances to restore salmon streams, forests, and foodsheds in their region. Indigenous communities or “First Nations” of this ecoregion have referred to themselves as Salmon People in meetings and in their own publications for many decades. On reading their anthology, First Fish, First Peoples: Salmon Tales from the Pacific North Rim, former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass exclaimed that such re-visioning “re-teaches us our own geography, leaps silver and fresh like the salmon, which is its subject.”
Across the continent to the southeast of Salmon Nation, the Southern Foodways Alliance has hosted a series of food conferences and workshops in which African-, European-, and Native American historians and writers have explored their shared culinary traditions. Under the leadership of John T. Edge, they have published a series of books on their regional foodways titled Cornbread Nation. If only Ivory Tower scholars had embraced this label it would be one thing, but chefs like Hoppin’ John Martin Taylor, humorists like Roy Blount Jr., and bluegrass artists like Tim O’Brien have also pledged allegiance to Cornbread Nation. O’Brien even penned a brilliant song named “Cornbread Nation,” which became the title cut on one of his recent CDs.
There are other, similar examples of this ecoregional thinking, as well. Jane and Michael Stern authored a book titled Chili Nation, although it was a national survey of chile-based traditions rather than one focused more generally on all foods of the U.S. Southwest. Nevertheless, by using food nations as a framework for our projects, we are giving a knowing nod to some grassroots initiatives already taken by foodies, bioregionalists, and culinary folklorists.
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