With passage of the 2002 farm bill, billions of dollars will be spent on conventional agriculture. Yet when it comes to food security, Great Lakes Radio Consortium commentator Tom Springer believes that native species hold untapped potential as a healthy and natural commercial food source:
Transcript
With passage of the 2002 farm bill, billions of dollars will be spent on conventional agriculture. Yet when it comes to food security, Great Lakes Radio Consortium commentator Tom Springer believes that native species hold untapped potential as a healthy and natural commercial food source:
If you live in rural America long enough, you will eventually meet a back-to-nature zealot like my old scoutmaster. On camping trips, he’d wait till we were really hungry, and then offer a hot helping of cleverly disguised food. After you wolfed it down, he would inevitably ask: “Hey! You wanna know what that was? Heh, heh, heh.” What it usually turned out to be was filet of carp, brisket of snapping turtle, or boiled cattail stalks. To this day, I’m suspicious of anything that’s wrapped in bacon strips.
I thought of my old scoutmaster the other day when I was wandering the produce aisle of a mega-supermarket. The coolers were filled with bizarre fruit, whose continent of origin – much less country – I could barely guess. There were star fruit, blood oranges and finger-sized bananas, and a type of citrus that was appropriately named Ugli fruit. Yet business was good. There must be plenty of people who like to sneak this stuff into salads and then announce, “Hey! You wanna know what that was?”
This exotic produce may be affordable, yet it comes to us at a considerable environmental cost. Imagine how much fossil fuel it takes to transport a mango from Indonesia to Chicago. And even though commercial produce is sprayed with pesticides, every load of fruit and vegetables we import could be host to an exotic insect or microbe that could wreak havoc on our environment. Foreign pests such as the Mediterranean fruit fly, Japanese beetle and zebra mussel were all brought to America by ships and cargo planes.
But for me, the larger truth is this: we don’t have to import strange fruits and vegetables from faraway jungles and rainforests. As any naturalist knows, the wilds of North America contain an abundance of interesting and edible native species. Consider the Juneberry. It’s a native fruit that tastes like a blueberry, only sweeter, and with a lovely hint of almond. Or how about the paw paw? It has a custardy flavor that’s a cross between strawberry and banana. Then there’s the chinkapin oak, whose sweet acorns can be roasted and eaten like almonds.
What we need, however, is more research to develop higher yielding varieties of native species. In the 1950s, it was crop experimentation that helped to create the blueberry industry. Before that, blueberries grew mainly in the wild. Since the mid 1990s, there’s been a boom in the commercial harvest of wild morel mushrooms, which are now sold internationally. So somewhere in the new $190 billion-dollar farm bill, we should make a serious investment to cultivate other wild crops that grow nowhere else but North America, and require little in the way of agrochemicals and irrigation. That’s what I call real food security.
I know there are skeptics who say that elderberries and prickly pear cactus leaves will never sell in mainstream grocery stores. But I think they’re wrong – it’s mainly a matter of marketing. A few decades ago, shoppers were introduced to a fuzzy, brown fruit known as the Chinese gooseberry. It didn’t become popular until it was reintroduced as the kiwi. We might have the same success if we come up with new names for the Saskatoon, chokecherry and other poorly branded native edibles. And if that doesn’t work? Well, we can always wrap them in bacon strips.
Tom Springer is a freelance writer from Three Rivers, Michigan.