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Renewing America's Food Traditions

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Pictured Recipe: Blueberry Tart with Walnut Crust

The good news is this: in the past, we may have depleted the diversity of our continent, but today we can also “vote” with our pocket books and bellies for a healthier, more diverse and secure food system. My friend, food historian Poppy Tooker from New Orleans, learned this adage from her grandmother: “Honey, if you want to save it, you gotta eat it.”

The converse is also true: if there is no market for these rarities, they will be plowed under or culled out by farmers who must make a living off their lands. By providing new markets for heirloom flavors, we are enabling biodiversity to be maintained through what we might call culinary conservation.

Over three decades of working as an agricultural historian and conservationist, I have witnessed dozens of foods rescued from extinction. Take the Plains bison: Once hunted to near depletion in the wild, bison are now being bred and released onto large prairie landscapes where they are recreating the buffalo wallows that are necessary for many wildflowers, amphibians and prairie chickens to survive. The bison are matched so well to living in particular habitats and eating native grasses and wildflowers that I can literally taste the terroir in their flesh just as I can in certain wines. They broaden my sense of what it means to be truly nourished by the American earth.

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