Excerpt
Introduction
A Manifesto for Renewing Place-Based Food Traditions through Biocultural Conservation
When the Renewing America’s Food Traditions collaborative first came together, its founding organizations sought to find synergies and overlaps among their missions, as a means to broaden the “eater-based” conservation constituencies engaged in such work. Gradually, through discussion, debate, and the planning of on-ground pilot projects, these organizations articulated these synergies and began to model certain shared principles to guide their collective actions. The elucidation of those principles is still evolving, but one attempt at their expression is as follows:
Personal, familial, and community engagements with plants and animals, edible or otherwise, may be the surest means to keep us appreciative of their value, and to keep us alert to their vulnerabilities. When such engagement atrophies, the biological loss of species, varieties, stocks, seeds, or breeds traditionally used as food on this continent may accelerate, resulting in immeasurable cultural and culinary losses as well.
To reverse the trend toward ever-accelerating losses of diverse foods that are unique to this continent, we must simultaneously deal with root causes and effectively model collaborative conservation actions on the ground that engage food producers, resource managers, chefs, and eaters in achieving the following goals:
- Recognizing which place-based foods are most at risk
- Recovering their species, varieties, or populations
- Restoring their habitats, in both wild and (agri-) cultural landscapes
- Rescuing and passing on local, traditional knowledge about their stewardship and their culinary uses
- Recuperating markets and local infrastructures to support their production and use
- Rewarding the original stewards of these resources with market-based incentives, recognition of their “farmers’ rights,” and (cross-) cultural reinforcement
- Reducing or altogether eliminating contamination, both chemical and genetic
This book is but one of many means we have used for identifying and publicizing the uniquely American foods most at risk of extinction and cultural loss. We have also collaborated with Bon Appetít Management Company in sponsoring a competition among its chefs to incorporate rare heirloom vegetables, heritage meats, and their stories into menus offered at restaurants based at colleges, museums, zoos, and botanical gardens. We have sponsored a series of American Traditions Picnics in great American places, from Puget Sound near Seattle to Shelburne Farms on the edge of Lake Champlain, near Burlington, Vermont. We have gathered food stories from folks like you, as they attend the Smithsonian Folklife Festival on the Mall in Washington, D.C., the Seed Savers Exchange Campout in Decorah, Iowa, and the Sitka Conservation Society’s Saturday gathering of fishermen and hunters on Baranof Island in Alaska. We have engaged hundreds of the best market gardeners in America in growing heirloom vegetables for local chefs and have gifted thousands of packets of heirloom seeds to Louisiana farmers who lost their own seed stores in the floods of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
Underlying much of this work is our community-based field research to discern which traditional foods may be at risk in each ecoregion or “food nation” across the continent. To give this “red list” a framework—to create a culinary geography—we have roughed out a map that circumscribes the various ecocultural regions as we recognize them at this point in time. We have named each ecocultural region or food nation for an iconic food species that may have functioned as a cultural and ecological keystone there over the centuries. In a similar effort to define the food geography of North America in prehistoric times, ethnobotanist Richard Ford first defined and circumscribed certain “agricultural complexes” with regional integrity in this manner:
The concept of a prehistoric agricultural or crop complex implies a group of species with an apparent common geographic origin and mutual association within particular environmental parameters in which the complex is developed.
We have extended his concept of food crops shared within a particular region to cover wild plants, game, fish, shellfish, and livestock that form a shared nutritional base among the resident cultures found within an environmentally cohesive region. We have chosen the iconic food for each region out of several possible ecological and cultural keystone species, emphasizing those that have suffered historic or recent declines in use.
We have then selected a particular variety, population, or cultural tradition to emphasize the particular stories of certain charismatic elements of these keystone foods—sassafras leaves for gumbo filé, the American chestnuts of Alabama, range-fed bison, quahog clams of Great South Bay, blue crabs of Chesapeake Bay, sugar maples, Southern dent hominy corns, hand-harvested wild rice, El Guique chiles, the fall run of Chinook salmon, Minnesota moose, Nevada single-leafed pinyons, acorns of Englemann’s oak. None of these thirteen iconic foods is as threatened as the other eighty species or varieties featured in the following stories, but they have suffered dramatic declines in their once unfathomable abundance. Of course, not every species or variety that has reached extinction was historically rare, of limited range, or few in population numbers. The extinction of the passenger pigeon and the decline of the American chestnut remind us that formerly abundant, even ubiquitous species can sometimes be quickly lost due to combinations of overharvesting, disease, and loss of habitat.
With regard to the other eighty species and varieties featured here, we have used rather consistent criteria to select them on the basis of their truly endangered status. In a general sense, we have followed criteria first articulated by Deborah Rabinowitz for plants and then quantitatively applied Georgina Mace’s research on behalf of the World Conservation Union (IUCN) to take into account the narrow geographic range of a species or variety, the scarcity of viable populations capable of regeneration in the face of a changing environment, and the paucity of reproductive individuals within each population.
For wild plants and animals, we generally followed the NatureServe rankings of risk on the North American continent, paying closest attention to those species, subspecies, or stocks (such as salmon runs) that are found at fewer than fifteen sites or in a restricted geographic range, with small populations at each site. In a few cases, we have also included broader-ranging species that are now suffering widespread declines due to insect infestations, introduced diseases, catastrophic wildfires, floods, or droughts.
For cultivated fruits, vegetables, and cereals, we considered those most at risk to have a geographically or culturally restricted area of cultivation, where farming traditions appear to be disappearing and where few farmers remain in each community. This follows Karl Hammer’s adoption of the IUCN criteria to accommodate domesticated plant species. However, we have also pioneered the use of seed bank and nursery catalogs to assess the rarity of cultivated plants. For this book, we have focused on those varieties that are available on a regular basis from no more than three commercial nurseries or seed catalogs.
For livestock breeds, we adapted the rankings formulated by the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy, focusing on critically endangered breeds represented by few herds or flocks and by small herd or flock sizes. Of course, such parameters used to assess rarity shift through time, so we will use the Slow Food USA website to periodically update the larger RAFT list.
Two last notes about the map in which these patterns of endangerment can be nested: As noted earlier, the regions with the most endangered foods include Gumbo and Chile Pepper Nations, which have the highest rates of in-migration and out-migration of humans. And yet we also see the loss of farmed foods in Maple Syrup and Clambake Nations, where there has been the gradual breakdown of place-based food traditions since World War II. Aside from offering us these preliminary insights, we see this map as an imaginative, dynamic participatory exercise in which you can help assess the vulnerability of the links between your community and its cultures, habitats, and traditional dietary mainstays. We do not wish to set definitive boundaries in space and time, as if such relationships were static. The map is not meant to pigeonhole any dietary tradition nor essentialize any culture; rather, it might help you visualize patterns that answer the following questions about the place in which you live and eat:
- What food fragrances, textures, and tastes have pervaded your place of residence for the longest amount of time?
- How does your contemporary community relate to the plants and animals that formerly offered themselves as such signature foods, in terms of knowing the character and consuming their calories (if at all) in this day and age?
- How do you imagine your community’s future in relation to those historic foods or others that have come to define the nature and culture(s) of your place?
- What flavors do you want to ensure your grandchildren have a chance to experience?
- How can you go about safeguarding that culinary opportunity on their behalf?
If the stories are like seeds set out for you to plant, let them grow into a garden that allows you to imagine a richer, tastier world, where the plants and animals that coexist with us have a safer, healthier home.
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