Eating your identity
What should I be eating at this point in my life? A story about kawakawa tea, pumpkin seed mole and nutrition for "skinny white women" (like me).
In Western secular culture, we’re taught about the journey of man coming up through the ages as a hunter-gatherer who turns into a farmer. Early on, protein and micronutrients, like iron, were sourced from the hunt, and it helped us to flourish physically and cognitively. But what if that’s just a story we tell ourselves – the bit about needing to hunt to be healthy? What if the bulk of our protein and nutrient intake came from the activities of early woman, not man? Did gathered plants, roots, seeds, and grubs provide for the majority of the family’s needs? Was the hunt just a rare feast, not the staple?
I stopped eating red meat recently on the advice of my family doctor who suggested I cut back after I returned a blood test showing elevated iron levels. It was unusual given my history of anaemia. But motherhood has wreaked havoc on my body so I shouldn’t be surprised my iron levels are on a pendulum.
When I mentioned this on Instagram a farmer friend messaged to say she appreciates that I can separate my health and food choices from my vocation – which in the context of the conversation was Cattle Farmer. I’ve adopted the ID of “farmer” in the past, but it’s not an identity I’m wedded to. Just because I farm cattle doesn’t mean I need to eat meat. And yet, eating through an ideological lens is how many of us form dietary choices today, perhaps at the expense of physical wellbeing. And that’s what I want to get into today. What should I be eating now and why?
But before I go on, please note that I AM NOT A TRAINED PHYSICIAN, DIETICIAN, NUTRITIONIST, or any other health professional. In this post I am writing about dietary choices in relation to me, my body, my environment, and lifestyle. If this post raises any questions for you, please consult your own health care provider.
Okay, let’s get into it.
Here’s a standard beef dinner in my household: seared steak, stir-fried broccolini and lettuce with a classic Vietnamese dressing on a bed of rice.
No such thing as vitamin beef
A few years ago, I interviewed Dr Anne-Louise Heath, who is a professor of nutrition at the University of Otago New Zealand. In response to questions about whether beef was essential to my diet during pregnancy she had a neat response: “there’s no such thing as vitamin beef”. But iron is important and that’s the focus of Dr Heath’s research. Towards the end of my pregnancy, I was consuming three iron-supplements each day just to keep my reserves at a level considered satisfactory to my midwife. In the months that followed the birth of my daughter I was eating pâté and red meat with abandon despite Dr Heath’s pithy saying. I had a deep craving that I satisfied, because I could. We had a freezer of meat sourced from the farm.
Dr Heath has researched the effects of iron deficiency for decades, but she told me that it’s hard to quantify how prevalent the condition is among Australian and New Zealand women in any given year. Our systems are always in flux, with menstruation, pregnancy, stress, perimenopause etcetera. And dietary changes also contribute to the collective tidal effect. One month we will be low, the next high. But iron is important because it’s part of haemoglobin which is the molecule that carries oxygen from your lungs out to your tissues where it’s needed.
We humans absorb iron via food or supplements, mostly. And people absorb it differently. Some can satisfy their body’s needs via a plant-based diet using the non-heme iron in plants, but others, like me, find red meat to be a more efficient carrier of the essential element heme iron. But, as I discovered recently, it is not what I need now, so without a second thought I stopped eating it. I’m not wedded to a certain diet as a projection of my identity or ideology.
I came to this position after many years of worry and research about how my food choices were impacting the planet. I wrote about it in my book Farm: The Making of a Climate activist, in which I investigated how a range of diets (vegan, flexitarian, local-only etcetera) might impact the environment around me if I ate with the intention to help curb climate change. And this is where I landed:
Food has the power to transport and nurture if you give it the room to do so. If it’s reduced to an equation, a sum of footprints, methane and carbon dioxide equivalents, then we will fail at our task because that process removes all trace of culture, care and joy – the very things we need most to get us through. If it’s used to shun, to label, to accuse someone else of inaction, we will fail. For that is a puny act that ruptures community, the very thing we need to rebuild.
What I should have added to the list of “culture, care, and joy” was physical wellbeing. Crippling lethargy was how my body alerted me to the fact I was running low on iron five years ago. Now, my nutritional needs are different and yet I’ve been eating like I’m still pregnant because I didn’t know better. Back then, Dr Heath provided me with few tips to increase iron consumption via my diet:
1. Consume lots of legumes and include a source of vitamin C in the same meal
2. Avoid caffeine at mealtimes
3. Cook with cast iron
I did all that, and ate red meat. Too much, too much.
I realise now my food knowledge is incredibly shallow when it comes to nutritional care. My food culture is a mishmash of recipes from Food Savers, Six Seasons and Falastin that ensures I use every inch of vegetable delivered in our weekly reject vegetable box. No Food Waste with a side of beef sums up my diet. So it’s hardly surprising that my body is sending up alerts.
Above: Chef Wahpepah’s Chipaeesiihooni Aapikooni - wild native mushroom pumpkin seed mole.
Kawakawa tea and pumpkin seed mole
When I was in California in February making First Eat, I met a chef named Crystal Wahpepah. She runs a restaurant in Oakland called Wahpepah’s Kitchen. There I had one of the best meals of my life – a three sisters salad with maple dressing, deer kebabs with a chokecherry sauce, blue corn bread, and… a bowl of pumpkin seed mole with tortilla and wild mushrooms. Crystal, who is a Native American woman from the Kickapoo nation, nonchalantly mentioned during our chat that the pumpkin seed mole was great for pregnant women (it’s rich in iron). But then she went on to elaborate the meals she knows to cook for other occasions: like dried corn soup during tribal gatherings. Certain dishes are for certain times. So, what is the meal for this time in my life?
Soon after I returned from Oakland I arranged to speak with Dr Christina McKerchar, a Senior Lecturer in Māori Health whose research looks specifically at Māori nutrition in the age of home delivery services like Uber eats. I wanted to chat about traditional diets and endemic cuisine (and what constitutes Indigenous food in 2023 Aotearoa) but in the end we talked about the foods and meals she reaches for when she’s feeling a bit low.
“If I’m feeling depleted, I’ll get myself some kawakawa leaves and make some kawakawa tea”, she told me after a joyful description of her other favourite get-well meal: Boil Up – a slow cooked pot of trimmed bacon bones covered with water, and bulked out with chunks of root vegetables and puha, which is a leafy green like dandelion or chicory.
Dr McKerchar, who is of Ngāti Kahungunu, Tūhoe and Ngāti Porou descent, is focused on widening nutritional discourse so it is less about “high income skinny white woman” and more relevant to families living in food swamps — a term she uses to describe urban areas where it’s cheaper to buy processed, packaged foods than whole foods. In this space, one doesn’t need to aspire to buy expensive organic vegetables, Dr McKerchar reasons. Frozen veg is just fine. Supplement that with meat hunted by family members, or seafood gathered by friends, and families start inching towards a culturally relevant whole foods diet reflective of a specific place.
But where does that leave me? I’ve long been the target of the mainstream nutrition and wellness industry – just another high income skinny white woman – but I have little notion of what my body needs today living in the middle of the north island of Aotearoa New Zealand. A midwife told me to eat meat and I did, until my doctor told me to stop. Hardly a rich food culture!
There are kawakawa bushes on the track where I run, but I’ve left them alone. It was Dr McKerchar’s mum who showed her how and when to brew kawakawa. She comes from a line of women who use food to care for others, the knowledge pool is deep. Towards the end of our conversation, Dr McKerchar reflected on her nana’s influence, and described her as a tohunga o te manaaki. “She was a specialist at looking after people,” explained Dr McKerchar as way of translation. “She made sure people were fed and showed her care for them through the kinds of foods she provided for people.”
Without a tohunga o te manaaki in my life I have blood test results and my gut to guide me. And it’s telling me to cook cabbage. Go figure. Who needs red meat when you can eat sautéed cabbage, yams and parsnip with garlic, fennel seeds, and lots of salt and pepper. Delicious, joyful and… just what I need today. Who knows what it’ll be tomorrow.
In next week’s edition of First, We Eat… What happens when Western diet fads bang up against Indigenous food traditions?
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