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!

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!

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