Food History

Today Kate (of the Mountain Creek Farm photos) took me to the EPIC Farmers’ market. I love it that they are at EPIC – it makes a simple farmers’ market sound like a three part trilogy, full of love and death and despair followed by hope and success and more love. Instead of love and death and despair followed by hope and success and more love, what the EPIC markets give on Saturday mornings are two big sheds full of stalls and a flutter of stalls trailing outside.

I collected leaflets assiduously while I was there, because I meant to do a follow-up to the slow food posts and to talk about other sorts of biodynamic meat production in the region. I still have those leaflets and one day I might do that post, but life diverted me with interesting thoughts and I can’t resist sharing them.

When I teach history and when I teach world-building, two things I keep coming back to are shapes of communities and shapes of trade. They’re quite difficult concepts for some people to grasp when applied to food history, as a lot of modern city lives are shaped by educational institutions, recreational facilities and shopping centres.

Today, though, Kate and I had a series of encounters that demonstrated local trade and local communities totally brilliantly.

First of all, Kate kept running into people she knew. I only saw one person from a distance, but she couldn’t walk five metres without falling into a conversation. The shape of foodways in Canberra means that the people who visit EPIC regularly on A Saturday have other interests in common – it’s as good a place to meet like-minded folk as a sporting ground is.

The shapes of trade are subtler. The food was by no means all local. We bought sugar bananas from northern NSW, for instance. Most of it was reasonably local,, however, and quite a few of the stallholders were the same people as those who frequent the other farmers’ markets in the town. Local trade means familiar faces.

Local trade also means shared experiences. We don’t just share an interest in bread baked in wood-fired ovens, or in delectable cakes or organic salt-bush lamb. The stall owners and their customers go to the same schools, vote for or against the same politicians and listen to the same radio stations.

This was brought forcibly home to me when I was talking to a lady at one of the meat stalls. She knew me from an interview I had given about the Middle Ages on local radio, a while ago. I rather believe this was the interview I told listeners where to find toilets in Medieval Winchester (I need to find the same data for York for next year).

What I spoke about wasn’t relevant. What’s important is that in a city of 300,000, communities and interest groups overlap and this has vast importance for foodways. If I had been interviewed on Medieval cooking then she might have made one of my recipes with her meat and shared it with friends, for instance. Instead, I’m thinking about her lamb and how low in fat we cook it compared with the preferred techniques of the early nineteenth century.

This is shared knowledge and understanding, this community stuff. The more communication there is between different groups, the richer the culture and the more interesting foodways are likely to be from my point of view. That’s the big lesson. The small lesson is to be careful what you say on public radio – it gets remembered.