Eliot Coleman: We’re Working Against the Grain of Life
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Eliot Coleman has over 30 years experience in all aspects of organic farming, including field vegetables, greenhouse vegetables, rotational grazing of cattle and sheep, and range poultry. He is the author of The New Organic Grower, Four Season Harvest, and The Winter Harvest Manual. In this foreword to Preserving Food Without Freezing or Canning: Traditional Techniques Using Salt, Oil, Sugar, Alcohol, Vinegar, Drying, Cold Storage, and Lactic Fermentation by the Gardeners & Farmers of Terre Vivant, Eliot reminds us all about the health—and cultural—benefits of “real food.”
The following is the foreword to Preserving Food Without Freezing or Canning:
In the opening paragraphs of his classic Soil and Civilization, Edward Hyams decries how modern misapplication of science has caused humans to “begin working across or against the grain of life.” Hyams notes how science, when it becomes master rather than servant, displaces the age-old natural wisdom that has maintained the “integrity of life.” Without that integrity, humans begin to lose contact with the “poet,” which Hyams describes as the instinctive understanding of wholeness that has nurtured their well-being through the centuries.
Such change is abundantly evident in our modern American diet. The business of food science is in conflict with the poetry of human nourishment. Store shelves are filled with products that keep seemingly forever, such as canned or frozen food, ultra-pasteurized dairy products, devitalized flour. Irradiated food now lurks on the horizon. I prefer to live a different reality. On a recent trip to France, while shopping in small village stores, I was inspired to see other people favoring the artisanal over the industrial. The baskets of shoppers ahead of me at the counter contained fresh seasonal vegetables, fresh bread, fresh fruits, and fresh chestnuts. Not a single canned or frozen item. The preserved foods I did see people buying were similarly traditional: wine, cheese, dried fruits, and sauerkraut and pickles, sold fresh from large crocks.
Food preservation techniques can be divided into two categories: the modern scientific methods that remove the life from food, and the natural “poetic” methods that maintain or enhance the life in food. The poetic techniques produce live foods like those chosen by the French shoppers— foods that have been celebrated for centuries and are considered gourmet delights today. The scientific techniques produce dead foods and literally seal them in coffins. My instincts tell me that long-dead foods cannot properly nourish long-lived people.
If we want to be well nourished, we need to eat what I call “real food.” We all know what it is. During the summer, real food is fresh from the garden or the organic farmers’ market. It is grown locally and is free of all the post-harvest treatments used for foods shipped from far away. During the rest of the year, real food is fresh from cold frames and greenhouses, or is preserved by techniques that maintain and enhance its ease of digestion, nutritional status, and pleasing flavor. These are qualities that not even the most deceptive Madison Avenue advertiser could try to claim for canned or frozen foods. When we eat real food, we again work with rather than against “the grain of life.”
Years ago, I sponsored and led a number of organic farming study tours to Europe. I wanted to share with American farmers the techniques and also the inspiration I had learned from the best European farmers. While we were there, enjoying meals of local products at farms and in restaurants, I imagined similar tours to study the traditional foods we were eating. After returning to the States, I was too busy with farming to ever carry out this idea, but the concept stuck with me. These were foods we needed to know more about.
I could not be more pleased to present this book as a substitute for visiting the artisans of food preservation in person. This is real food.
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