Henry David Thoreau said, "He who distinguishes the true savor of his food can never be a glutton; he who does not cannot be otherwise."
Here is why a homesteader can never be a glutton.
You are what you eat. This means that what you put into your stomach becomes your body… but that's not half of it.
What you eat-and how and why you eat it-is part of your body, mind and spirit.
At its most primitive level, food is simply the fuel that keeps body and soul together. It's an animal necessity, a mechanical requirement.
Only when people have enough to eat can they afford to enjoy food. That's when variety, cooking, feasts - and civilization - come into being.
Homesteaders, whether they realize it or not, take food a step further. They go beyond the physical realm.
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In today's hectic world, eating seems to be a necessary evil. Grocery shopping is a chore (and gardening is worse), few people want to cook, most don't want to "waste time" eating, and almost no one thinks about what they eat.
Small wonder, then, that Americans are obsessed by convenience and "fast" food.
This recent development demonstrates the significance of the non-physical aspects of food.
That's because fast food isn't simply quick. Pulling into a drive-in, placing and picking up your order and getting back on the road again in a matter of minutes is part of America's infatuation with speed, convenience, and the automobile. But that's only a small part of the fast food cult. Look at some of the others:
Fast food, at home or on the road, is labor-saving: there is little or no grocery shopping, cooking, or clean-up. And Americans love labor-saving so much they'll work for hours to save a minute!
Industrial-style standardization and mass production of food, as well as almost everything else, is another part of the concept. Many Americans flit off to foreign lands and, instead of experiencing a new culture, stay in Holiday Inns, eat at McDonald's and drink Coke. They think standardization and mass production - which includes widespread use of chemicals, antibiotics, genetic manipulation, irradiation, etc. - are swell.
This leads to corporate "bigness" and power. With 23,346 restaurants in 110 countries, McDonald's is the best-known brand name in the world. ConAgra controls most of America's grain. Only two or three giants control the vast majority of the chicken, beef and poultry industries.
Closely behind is ubiquitous irritating advertising. Then the throwaway mentality, leading to roadsides littered with fast food and drink containers and landfills loaded with packaging.
This is accompanied by competition with local family-owned and operated cafes and diners with individualistic menus and atmosphere, mom-and-pop grocery stores, and the resulting loss of community.
Blandness. Grab-and-go meals, even at home. Poor nutrition. The list goes on.
Taken together, this attitude toward food simply mirrors the society: industrialized, impersonal, dominated by big business, advertising-driven, hectic, anti-environmental, and not very satisfying.
By now you might have noticed a pattern: None of these American "ideals" fit the ideals and principles of homesteading! On the contrary, many are reasons people give for being homesteaders!
The slow, homestead way
The opposite of fast food is slow food, or homestead cooking.
In my book Raising the Homestead Hog (Rodale, 1974) I noted that in order to make a homestead BLT, first you must get a pig. You don't just pop in at the deli on a moment's whim: you have to plan that sandwich more than six months in advance!
The tomatoes must be planted months ahead of time. The lettuce will take several weeks to grow. And if the bread is homemade from homegrown wheat, plan ahead for that, too. (Homemade butter and mayo are extra.)
While this might be an extreme example for most folks today, it provides a good example of some of the basic differences between fast and slow food. And again, it's not only a question of speed. And it's not what you eat. It's why and how.
It takes Tyson Foods (now one of the largest pork producers in the country) just as long to raise a hog as it takes a homesteader. But they do it in confinement buildings -hog concentration camps, some call them. Unlike homestead pigs, huge concentrations of animals cause environmental problems. Unlike the homesteader, who knows what his animals eat and how they are treated, the consumer of Tyson's bacon can never be sure. And the homesteader has watched the pig grow, has scratched it behind the ears and probably chased it after an escape or two. The homesteader knows where bacon comes from and what's involved. The ordinary consumer has no connection with that bacon, and has no clue. It's just "manufactured" in a Tyson factory somewhere far away.
Apply this to the lettuce, tomato, bread, and even the butter and mayo. Or to anything else that appears on your plate. The homesteader is involved, and can understand and appreciate the importance of food within the larger framework of life - its dependence on Nature, and its impact on the Earth.
To the ordinary consumer, food is just a commodity, like a shirt, or gas. To the homesteader, it's more like a sacrament.
The slow food movement
Not all, and perhaps not even very many, slow food advocates are homesteaders, who grow their own food. An alternative is to purchase food from people who do grow it: not from corporations like Tyson or ConAgra, but from local farmers and market gardeners.
This allows consumers to know something about where their food came from, which increases their awareness and involvement. Ideally, it's organically grown. It's likely to be vine-ripened, and bred for flavor and other eating qualities - not developed to be gas-ripened and to withstand shipping and handling and to have a long shelf life. It was grown to enhance the pleasure of the consumer, not to meet the requirements of the food technologists.
Taking this a step further, it might be an heirloom variety that has gone out of favor with the big commercial producers and their chain of middlemen. Instead of a plastic tomato, it might be a Brandywine. Instead of coming from a cull Holstein, the meat might come from a Scotch Highland.
Cooking
Then, the preparation.
Carefully selecting, trimming and cleaning the food. Cutting it, just so. Combining the ingredients according to personal tastes and preferences, with care and intelligence. Watching it cook, hearing it sizzle or bubble, inhaling the mouth-watering aromas. There is creativity, pleasure, and love, in cooking!
You don't get that by tossing something in the microwave.
Eating
Only after all that comes the eating. But this too is different in a slow food home.
The family's appetite has been whetted by delicious smells and the pleasant clinking of dishes. There is no tv or other distraction. When the family sits down together, they can say grace and have something to really be thankful for, because they are connected with their food, and its origins.
There might be memories… of digging the potatoes, or canning the tomatoes, or cleaning the beans. There is pleasant conversation, and hopefully, compliments for the cook.
Afterwards, instead of consigning paper, plastic and Styrofoam to the landfill (or perhaps tossing it out the car window) while family members each rush off to do their own thing (if they even sat down together, which is now rare), cleanup is a community effort. Ideally, togetherness and pleasant conversations continue. If nothing else, washing the dishes is yet another link in the chain of "connectedness" with food, and another reminder that there is no such thing as a free lunch. Or dinner.
Taking table scraps to the chickens or pigs, or the compost bin, completes a cycle.
Such a meal doesn't simply refuel the body. It refuels the soul. It's a celebration of life.
Slow is relative
Now, about the "slow" part.
Yes, homesteaders are as busy, or busier, than other people. How, and why, do they make time to pay so much attention to food?
It obviously doesn't really take six months to make a homestead BLT. Producing that bacon, lettuce and tomato might take just a few minutes a day, and those minutes are also producing hams and chops, tomato sauce and juice, and crispy fresh salads.
But neither does the preparation take as much time as most folks seem to think. Even bread, which many people assume takes hours and hours of work, actually involves only a few minutes. Most of those elapsed hours are devoted to the rising of the dough and baking, when the baker is doing other things.
It's also important to differentiate between the slow cooking of Great-grandma's day and today. Just as the "organic gardening" of the past bears little resemblance to the organic gardening of today-and modern homesteading has almost nothing in common with homesteading of the past - slow cooking has become much more of both an art and a science.
With refrigerators, freezers, and improved canning methods, even homesteaders who produce much of their own food don't have to depend entirely on salt pork, brined vegetables and root crops during the winter. (And contrary to popular opinion, some homesteaders do use microwaves, food processors, and other modern conveniences.)
Modern homesteading involves many choices, from what technologies we use to what we eat. And yes, those choices do include not only preparing meals in advance and freezing them for "homemade fast food" in the future, but also the discriminating use of factory-prepared foods… and even the occasional stop at McDonald's or Burger King. But these are conscious decisions. What's important is attitude, and thinking.
Vegetarians and simple foods
In addition to the true slow food advocates, two other groups think about food with certain attitudes.
Vegetarians take all of this to the nth degree. That brings up other ideals and principles that go beyond this discussion. What's relevant here is that they do think about what they eat, and how that impacts the world.
The other group might be called "simple food" advocates. They're content to live on oatmeal, beans and bread, mostly, for philosophical reasons of their own: tending animals takes too much time; freezers use too much energy; cooking doesn't attract them because they have other, equally creative and satisfying things to do. And they don't mind a diet most of us would find bland, uninteresting and boring. (Most people I know in these groups are single, or childless couples.)
These are certainly homestead staples, and are appreciated as such. But constant living without a good meal -by your own definition- is like going through life without hearing the birds, or smelling a rose, or seeing a sunset.
While homesteaders might borrow from other philosophies on occasion-whether eating vegetarian or grabbing a quick burger and fries-they consider mealtime more of a celebration. Dinnertime is not a chore to be dreaded, but a daily festival that brings together and blesses the work of the day and the bounty of Nature. It's a time of togetherness, relaxation, reflection, and thanksgiving. For those of us who spend so much time with gardens and animals-because we want to-dinner is a rewarding culmination of almost everything we do.
Homesteaders are "different." They're willing (and even eager) to take the time to do things for themselves. They recognize and appreciate subtle differences in flavor and quality-in life, as well as food. And not least of all, they relish doing things the old-fashioned way, even while enjoying the best of both worlds.
Slow food is an important part of homesteading, because in its wider implications, it's a reflection of homesteading itself.
