What Are Ancestral Superfoods?
by Lisa Masé, BCHN RHNC
www.harmonized-living.com
What does it mean to eat our ancestral superfoods?
Healing foodways from Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), Ayurveda, Macrobiotics, African Functional Foods, and the Mediterranean Diet can be therapeutically appropriate for a period of convalescence. Once you are well, though, the best way to eat is the way your great-great grandparents ate while living on their indigenous lands. What does it look like to take back control of your food and stop letting corporate food culture choose what you eat?
What do you know about your ancestors? What was the ethnicity of your great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents. If you have time, do some research about the traditional foods consumed by those ethnic groups. These foods are programmed into your DNA to be the most nutritious and digestible choices for you.
The more we eat in accordance with our ancestors, the better we feel and the more we learn to appreciate and respect the wisdom of traditional cultures.
Food sovereignty is the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems. It puts the aspirations and needs of those who produce, distribute, and consume food at the heart of food systems and policies rather than the demands of markets and corporations (Food Sovereignty Alliance). In Vermont, for example, the Abenaki indigenous community has created the Seeds of Renewal project, which is a seed bank for and by native peoples.
The more you know about the origins of your food and the roots of your food culture, the more you can care for yourself and your community and an act of tolerance and respect. What does it look like for you to take charge of your food? Can you connect with a local farmer and get your food from them? Do you want to join a community garden or expand your own garden? Can you set up a seasonal food swap with friends and neighbors?
Food sovereignty is an affirmation of who we are as indigenous peoples and a way, one of the most surefooted ways, to restore our relationship with the world around us. – Winona LaDuke
Winona LaDuke is an Anishinaabe writer and economist from the White Earth lands (colonized name Minnesota). For her, food sovereignty is about the freedom to choose, both what foods to eat and how they were grown. Food sovereignty has been an implicit understanding for people across the globe who have lived in their indigenous foodshed for centuries. In the northern Italian region where my family lives, both Austrian and Italian traditions exist. Austrians call it Südtirol and Italians call it Trentino Alto Adige. It is one of Italy’s independent provinces because, before World War I, this area was part of the Hapsburg Empire. Despite it becoming part of Italy over 100 years ago, it remains ethnically majority Austrian even today and upholds those centuries-old food traditions. Because the alpine geography only offers small valleys that the glacier left behind for habitation, towns are small and center around churches and farms.
Most local people have a working relationship with a few farmers in their area. A favorite autumnal pilgrimage involves visiting these expansive hay barns with attached stone houses, which hold massive masonry stoves and long wooden tables adorned with red and white checkered tablecloths. This is such a popular tradition that the name itself, torgellen, has become a verb, which literally means ‘to cook and eat together with neighboring farmers’. Instead of paying for a meal that the farmers have prepared, families and friends in Alto Adige work with local farmers to prepare a harvest feast.
When neighbors arrive at the farm in the afternoon, everyone starts cooking. They may be set to work over an open fire, stirring cornmeal, salt, and water in a copper pot with a wooden stick until it thickens into polenta. A farmer might ask for help with slicing thick blocks of speck, a salted and smoked sausage, and displaying them for all to enjoy as appetizers. Some might like to try their hand at rolling out discs of buckwheat flour dough, filling it with steamed spinach and sauerkraut, and folding it into a half-moon shape to make tirtlen, large dumplings that are fried and served with plenty of freshly churned butter and fontina cheese.
Children are running outside, chasing chickens, or collecting fallen walnuts to feed to the pigs. Someone in the household hands out blue aprons with edelweiss flowers embroidery or checkered aprons embroidered with hearts. Guests and farmers alike tie one on and contribute, tasting wine, roasted chestnuts, speck, and the trademark schüttelbrot, hard rye bread with fennel, fenugreek, and caraway, as they work.
By the time the feast is ready, the farmhouse is warm with conversation and the smells of delicious food. From goulash souppe to a winter salad of pickled beets and braised green cabbage to pears poached in red wine, the colors on the table are phenomenal. By the end of the meal, it is dark. Children are asked to wash a dish or two before all depart, full and satisfied. I always look forward to a hearty bowl of this traditional Hungarian-Austrian style soup that carries a story of nomadic Roma people with it.
The more we can connect with the foods of our heritage and learn to prepare them, the more we center the importance of caring for the earth and appreciating its gifts. If you would like to learn more about ancestral eating, please visit my website at harmonized-living.com
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