Would you consider breaking the law for the sake of your diet?
A few notes on traditional diets and food justice
Dear Friends,
I missed our newsletter date last week. I’m so sorry. I was flattened by a stomach flu and spent the week offline. As per my first newsletter… when the workforce of one is out of action, no work is done! But I’m back writing, so let’s get into it.
In the last newsletter, I wrote about traditional diets (something I’ve been curious about since eating at Wahpepah’s Kitchen in Oakland), and I want to go back to that topic because it came up recently in a webinar that featured a bunch of farmers, cooks and growers interested in regenerative stuff (farming and growing systems, change scenarios, principles etc). I bought a ticket for the online event because I wanted to hear from one speaker in particular, a US-based cook and author who writes about ‘traditional diets’ (this time in inverted commas, ‘cause her approach to cooking is so different to the tradition of food gathering, cooking and eating that Chef Crystal Wahpepah introduced me too).
Crystal explains that traditional, or indigenous, diets aren’t generic, there are regional variations that reflect the landscape. But an obvious trait of the dishes she cooks at her restaurant is that they’re gluten free: game meat, seafood, berries, squash, corn and beans feature heavily on the menu at Wahpepah’s Kitchen, which is located in the Lisjan territory. And there are other common foundations to a traditional diet that underpin regional variation: no refined or processed foods, some sort of animal-derived food, raw stuff, fermented stuff, lots of seeds, nutrient-dense vegetables and fruits, and… a tradition of cooking specific things to cater for the unique needs of pregnant women and children. That’s what that piqued my interest, initially.
If you want to find out more, you can listen to an in-depth interview with Crystal on First Eat.
Deer skewers at Wahpepah’s Kitchen.
But is it possible for a family to eat an indigenous or traditional diet in 2023 if they don’t have access to land?
This question drew me to the regenerative webinar. I listened while the traditional diet cook and author presented her views on the “toxicity” of pasteurised milk. And I tried to appreciate her passion for raw milk, but my enthusiasm waned when she advised befriending a local dairy farmer to source milk directly from their tanks if no raw milk provider was present in one’s district.
Who has that kind of access to local dairy farms? And why would a dairy farmer risk their own business to sell raw milk illegally? Why not advocate to just not drink milk? Hardly a controversial position considering the majority of the world’s population aren’t physically designed to digest diary milk, raw or not. That said, I thought about how I might action this woman’s advice. I live on a farm next to a big corporate dairy. But I couldn’t ask them, someone would surely get fired if they were found syphoning off litres of milk to cater for the neighbour’s niche food needs. I have friends who run an intergenerational family dairy twenty minutes away. But I wouldn’t ask them. What right do I have to ask someone to cross a regulatory line in order to sate the needs of my individual body?
Around the time the traditional diet author declared climate change a global conspiracy to keep rural communities impoverished, I logged off. My gut was back with Crystal. She was a strong sense that it is a human right – a collective not individual right – for people to have easy, ready ACCESS to traditional foods that tie them to their lands and culture.
Crystal takes the responsibility of providing for her community seriously, she says: “I am a firm believer it is our human right to have places like this [her restaurant], it's a human right to know that we have these choices, it is human right to know that our foods come from this land, urban or not.”
Located next to a busy train station in Oakland, Wahpepah’s Kitchen is accessible to those who need the meals she serves. Crystal has done the work of sourcing and preparing food for her community. She considers this work a true vocation; the girl who once “talked to the berries” is healing her community one meal at a time. This, I imagine, is what it means to be a tohunga o te manaaki – the title Dr McKerchar introduced to describe someone who cares for others through food. [Apologies again if I’m getting the spelling of this phrase wrong!]
Leaving the webinar uninspired, I returned to the work of Dr McKerchar for some practical advice on the feasibility of eating a traditional diet in Aotearoa New Zealand, because knocking on a dairy farmer’s door pleading for raw milk isn’t it.
Here’s a carrot that I grew. It’s not big but it was tasty.
Dr McKerchar, who is a Senior Lecturer in Māori Health at the University of Otago, is broadly supportive of eating habits that avoid ultra-processed high sugar, high salt foods but she’s also a pragmatist and suggests eating like our ancestors may prove difficult given the irreversible changes that have been made to land once used for food gathering. Her summary of the impacts of colonialisation on precolonial food systems is precise and evocative: “Forests were chopped down so that farms could happen, so people didn't have ACCESS to the foods from the bush anymore”.
“We can look back on the world of our ancestors and go, that is the ideal […] it’s a lot of different plant sources, a lot of fish and eels and things like that. Very, little sugar. And, you know, no alcohol, no cigarettes, no vaping and a lot of exercise, but is it realistic in 2023 in urban centres?”
Short answer: no, not easily. Not unless you’re willing to ignore a few food-related regulations.
“For us Māori, trying to access some of the foods our ancestors ate is now quite illegal,” explains Dr McKerchar. “You know, you can't get some of the native foods because they're protected.”
Again, that question appears: would you consider breaking the law for the sake of your diet? Hunger is a clear motivator, but is the pursuit of raw or clean traditional foods a just cause?
I don’t have an answer, but I am increasingly interested in the decisions people make in pursuit of individual or collective wellbeing.
Dr McKerchar left me with some sage advice, or rather a direction. Rather than ponder what constitutes a good traditional diet, perhaps I should be looking more at the simple premise of food justice. “So that everybody can have ACCESS to local beautiful kia (food) rather than just people who can afford it,” explains Dr McKerchar. “I think strategies that enable ACCESS for everybody are really important.”
So that’s where I’m heading in next week’s newsletter… into the realm of Food Justice and Access: who gets to eat tasty healthy food in 2023?
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