Literature supports traditional foods!

I love when something in classic literature hits the mark with traditional foods. I suppose it naturally happened way back when, as the time was just closer to when we ate from the fat of the land. Like in Heidi, when her dear friend was healed by raw goats milk, cod liver oil, and the fresh mountain air!

Tyler and Tate are reading My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George. It is a book Tyler remembers from his childhood and was excited to read it to Tate. They are both enjoying it very much. Tyler, being an expert in anything Jen, read me a portion of the book last night.

Just to preface, the story is about a boy who runs away from his family. His family is quite poor, in New York City, and has too many children to care for. So, although we don’t want to promote running away from home, he seemed reasonably justified. The boy, Sam Gribley, finds his great-grandfather’s land in the Catskills and lives on it, setting up his home, finding food, and just surviving. He spent much time in the library prior to leaving home, making notes to make his way. It is a neat story actually. It is written as his journal entries through his experience.

Here is the quote, page 142 to 144

January was a fierce month. After the ice storm came more snow. The mountaintop was never free of it, the gorge was blocked; only on the warmest days could I hear, deep under the ice, the trickle of water sweeping over the falls. It still had food, but it was getting low. All the fresh-frozen venison was gone, and most of the bulbs and tubers. I longed for just a simple dandelion green.

Toward the end of January I began to feel tired, and my elbows and knees were a little stiff. This worried me. I figured it was due to some vitamin I wasn’t getting, but I couldn’t remember which vitamin it was or even where I would find it if I could remember it.

One morning my nose bled. It frightened me a bit, and I wondered if I shouldn't hike to the library and reread the material on vitamins. It didn’t last long, however, so I figured it wasn’t too serious. I decided I would live until the greens came to the land, for I was of the opinion that since I had had nothing green for months, that was probably the trouble.

One that same day Frightful [Sam’s falcon] caught a rabbit in the meadow. As I cleaned it, the liver suddenly looked so tempting that I could hardly wait to prepare it. For the next week, I craved liver and ate all I could get. The tiredness ended, the bones stopped aching and I had no more nosebleeds. Hunger is a funny thing. It has a kind of intelligence all its own. I ate liver almost every day until the first plants emerged, and I never had any more trouble. I have looked up vitamins since. I am not surprised to find that liver is rich in vitamin C. So are citrus fruits and green vegetables, the foods I lacked. Wild plants like sorrel and dock are rich in this vitamin> even if I had known this at the time, it would have done me no good, for they were but roots in the earth. As it turned out, live was the only available source of vitamin C – and on liver I stuffed, without knowing why.

So much for health. I wonder now why I didn’t have more trouble than I did, except that my mother worked in a children’s hospital during the war, helping to prepare food, and she was conscious of what made up a balanced meal. We heard a lot about it as kids, so I was not unaware that my winter diet was off balance.

After that experience, I noticed things in the forest that I hadn’t paid any attention to before. A squirrel had stripped the bark off a sapling at the food of the meadow, leaving it gleaning and white. I pondered why I saw it, wondering if he had lacked a vitamin or two and sought them in the bark. I must admit I tried a little of the bark myself, but decided that even if it was loaded with vitamins, I preferred liver.

I also noticed that the birds would sit in the sun when it favored our mountain with its light, and I, being awfully vitamin minded at the time, wondered if they were gathering vitamin D. To be on the safe side, in view of this, I sat in the sun too when it was out. So did Frightful.