When you think about it, the only thing really different about
wandering into a supermarket looking for fruit, nuts, berries and
meat, and looking for the same thing ten thousand years ago, would
be the clothes on one’s back and the plastic on the food.
And, of course, ten thousand years ago everything in Nature’s
smorgasbord was organic and alfresco, which, at some remove, is
what the modern farmer’s market, or upscale eatery, seeks to
be.
Our physical needs, it seems, haven’t really changed in terms of
food, only how and where we can find it. It took, and takes, skill
to wrest food from the natural world, and it takes skill and work,
unless one is born with a silver spoon, to earn the wherewithal to
buy food from a store.
Our spiritual needs regarding food really haven’t changed all
that much either, although the distractions of modern life,
including the growing phenomena of virtual reality, have taken many
of us away from even thinking about our spiritual connection with
the stuff we eat.
This, despite the efforts of authors like Michael Pollan and
others, to remind us of the spiritual connection in not only eating
food, but in obtaining it as well.
Natural Food
Many of us, often under the glare of naïve or polemic criticism,
still like to get as much food, including meat, from nature as we
possibly can, despite the diminishing natural world due to
pressures from growing human populations including, agriculture,
industry and the very homes in which we live.
And for a very long time that lifestyle was the very definition
of human culture; moving in groups, or tribes, following the
roaming herds that provided most, if not all of our ancestors at
some point, with the means of survival in the world that demands
the sacrifice of a life, including plants, in order that another
might live.
For those ancient as well as modern hunting and gathering
humans, eating and reflecting in the power and magic of nature not
only provides a necessary link between people and their food
sources, but also imbues life with a dimension of greatness and
beauty found even in the bloody work of food butchery.
Not that long ago North America was a virtual meat
locker.
Millions of bison ranged from the eastern seaboard to Oregon and
California, and from northern Canada to Mexico before the herds
were hunted to near extinction by the end of the 19th Century.
The slaughter was sanctioned by the powers that be to clear the
plains of the buffalo tribes and the buffalo themselves to make way
for land-hungry settlers, their cattle and their fences.
The tribes, meanwhile, had lived for many generations from the
resources the bison offered those who hunted them, at first by
running them off cliffs, or buffalo jumps, and later the horse
after the tribes obtained them, primarily from the Spanish.
Because the herds were important to the existence of the buffalo
hunting tribes, and those who traded with them, many of the Plains
tribes, including the Lakota, the Comanche, the Blackfoot, Kiowa
and Tonkawa, made the bison the center of their spirituality.
John Fire Lame Deer, a Lakota holy man born on the Rosebud
Reservation around 1900 and who died in the 1970’s, gained
international recognition after relating his life to author Richard
Erdoes in the book, “Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions” published in
1972.
“The buffalo gave us everything we needed,” he is quoted as
saying. “Without it we were nothing. Our tipis were made of his
skin. His hide was our bed, our blanket, our winter coat. It was
our drum, throbbing through the night, alive, holy. Out of his skin
we made our water bags. His flesh strengthened us, became flesh of
our flesh. Not the smallest part of it was wasted. His stomach, a
red-hot stone dropped into it, became our soup kettle. His horns
were our spoons, the bones our knives, our women’s awls and
needles. Out of his sinew we made our bowstrings and thread. His
ribs were fashioned into sleds for our children, his hoofs became
rattles. His mighty skull, with the pipe leaning against it, was
our sacred altar. The greatest of all Sioux was Tantanka
Iyotake—Sitting Bull.”
Now that’s connecting with one’s food.
My own connection with food from nature, particularly meat, came
at an early age.
Meat Memories
Perhaps because of my heritage, I remember as a child drawing in
crayon a wounded buffalo, arrows sticking from its ribs, on my
bedroom wall along with the four directions, an inspiration that
seemed to come from some memory in the very center of me.
Unsettling as it may sound, I also wandered through zoos visited
as a child, wondering what the various ungulates might taste like.
Meat on the brain, I was told.
Later, after my family had moved into the country, I spent much
of my time either helping in the large garden we always grew as
well as trout fishing in nearby Paint Creek, or hunting rabbits and
pheasants in local corn fields.
The fish and game that I took from the world, my mother cooked
for the family.
Hunting the fields and woods near my home, in addition to
stoking a relationship with the natural world through food, also
helped address what in my mind is an indigenous craving for
timelessness and an emotional place in nature.
From the earliest memories, the act of sitting quietly in the
woods waiting for game and listening to the birdcalls and footfalls
of skittering animals always brought with it a sense of
completeness.
Even later, horseback among my small herd of white-faced cattle,
the breath of spring green grass and the sight of raptors – hawks
and buzzards – looking either for victims or road kill likewise
provided a connection between food and nature.
The cattle were slaughtered, the grass-fed beef sold, traded or
eaten, all of it part of a process that somehow seemed richer for
the whole of it.
