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Did you ever think a video game would inspire a local, nourishing mentality? I love to play on our family’s Wii. I have a couple games I enjoy, although time is usually too tight to play for long. One game I am particularly fond of is Harvest Moon: Tree of Tranquility. It’s the ten-year-anniversary game in a series of farming and ranching simulation games. Now, I don’t like all the games in the series, but this one is near and dear to my heart.
With my physical challenges, I have resigned myself to the idea that I’ll probably never be a farmer. Oh, but I would love to grow enough plants to provide food for our family. Of course, we’d need a cow for some good raw milk. And a chicken or two, to clean up after the cows (an idea I got from The Omnivore’s Dilemma in a section on Polyface Farms.) And if I had a sheep to shear for yarn, I could make sweaters…
Oh yes, back to the game. Sorry, I love dreaming like that. Anyway, in the game, your character is a young woman (or young man) getting started on their own farm. The work is hard and you run out of energy quickly at first. Weeds must be cleared, rocks broken, trees chopped down, fields cultivated, planted and watered and eventually you get a tiny little harvest. Nothing is free. You have to save up for a pot and a skillet to put in your house, seeds to plant and animals. But the area is blessed with forageable herbs both for cooking and dyeing thread and yarn, a river and ocean well stocked with fish yours for the catching, and trees that will drop fruit from time to time. Food just doesn’t get more local than that.
That's a lot of tomatoes!
The “recipes” in the game use your harvested crops and foraged food to create dishes to restore your energy (and woo a mate, if you seek one.) The recipes all use whole, raw dairy in the forms of milk, butter and cheese; fish and shellfish and fresh fruits and vegetables. There are a few grains: breadfruit grown in spring becomes flour, rice and buckwheat for noodles. If you want something sweet, you’d better be sure you have flowers planted in your field to bring the bees that will occasionally leave you a pot of honey. There is no store from which to buy processed foods, although you can purchase a cooked fish from the tackle store, or a bit of stew at the hotel. You can purchase medicine at the doctor’s office, but it’s made with (can you guess?) raw milk, foraged herbs and honey.
The kitchen item I didn’t understand until just recently was the “aging pot.” Foods would go in and come out…different. For example, an egg, turnip or eggplant would go in raw and come out pickled! Rice, buckwheat or a blueberry would go in and come out as a cocktail. Until I read Nourishing Traditions, I was truly mystified. Now I understand: this aging pot is where you put foods to ferment! There are some silly elements like “makers” where you drop the milk into the machine and cheese or butter magically pops out, but it’s nice to see real, whole raw milk somewhere other than my own fridge.
When my daughters play this game, it opens a door for us to discuss food origins, natural preparation methods and ideas for our own meals! It was nice to point to the Halibut Meuniere that Christy wasn’t particularly interested in eating and remind her that’s a dish her Harvest Moon character eats all the time!
Real Food Wednesday today asks, “How has learning about, finding, budgeting and shopping for, preparing, serving and eating Nourishing, Traditional Food affected our family?”
We are still at the start of our journey with nourishing, traditional food, so many of the effects are yet to be seen. But this journey is already beginning to change us.
We are more connected to the community. From going out into the farmer’s fields and talking to him about his growing practices, and meeting “my” chickens, to getting to know the source of our raw milk and grassfed meats, we have been making friends and meeting neighbors other than the checker at the grocery store. I’ve always been a loner, and this experience is getting me out of my home and connecting me with those that produce the foods my family eats.
My grocery trips are more frequent. Those locally grown, organic fresh fruits and veggies don’t last as long as the super-processed frozen “nukeable” foods we used to survive on. I am going to the store once a week for a large trip, twice a week for fresh produce, and then making a couple mini-trips for raw milk, fresh eggs, and other items we don’t get at a regular store.
My grocery list is shorter. I’ve noticed my grocery list contains fewer items. The recipes I use to cook our meals contain fewer ingredients as well. These fewer ingredients cost about the same as the larger list I used to carry, because the individual ingredients tend to cost more.
Cooking is a continuous activity. Instead of an hour of cooking followed by a half hour of eating, I find my food prep tends to go for days. The sprouts for Wednesday’s salad have to be soaked by Sunday night or they won’t be ready in time. There’s a continual preparation for the next few days’ meals. I don’t mind this because most of the advance work can be accomplished in four or five minutes between other activities. It also cuts down on the temptation to call for pizza. One evening I might be a little low energy, but if the beans are ready now, we will eat them. If the beans weren’t ready, we’d probably take a short cut to the drive thru.
Budgeting is in flux. In these early days, I’m relying on the availability of higher-priced foods at the grocery store as I transition to locally available sources. Paying $10 a pound for coconut oil is painful. But it is an item high on my priority list and I am highly motivated to find alternative sources.
I am running out of room in the fridge! We only have one refrigerator and freezer, and it is full to the brim with quart jars of raw milk products, lacto-fermented veggies, homemade salad dressings and all the other necessities. It’s time to watch Freecycle for some used appliances for the garage.
The Dark Side of Fat Loss
