Nearly all cultures have healthful and spiritual food traditions. Sometimes you just have to go back a few generations to find it. We need food to survive. Yet in prosperous cultures, food is problematic- it’s often over-processed, sprayed with chemicals, and tampered with genetically. Add to this the fact that modern science has often led us to believe that traditional diets are not good for us, when often, the opposite is true.
It seems that the traditional foods movement (TFM) is on the right track, leading us back to what has been forgotten. Yet the voice of TFM is like a whisper in the crowd of loud carnival barkers. It seems like just a small amount of the population even know about it. Also, it is hard to live by; some of the foods can be quite hard to obtain, the cooking processes slow, some of the tenants a little iffy (raw meat- really!?.. fermented what!?… okay, I’m not eating that.) Yes, there are a few aspects of it that I would take with a grain of salt, so to speak. Maybe I’m not the type of person to follow a “movement” or adhere to anything like this completely. But I totally agree with much of what they’re saying, and I love the fact that- hey, it looks like the old folks were right!- after all.
I’ve read a few books and articles lately that urge us to go back to traditional diets, but when they go on to describe traditional diets of various cultures, my culture is left out! Southern culture, and before that, Celtic cultures, had many nourishing foods and the people evolved with those foods. We have a spiritual connection to the foods of our culture, and I’m not talking about our modern fast food culture, but about the foods our ancestors ate. For many of us, our comfort foods are the foods of a few generations past. Often, it’s the foods we are best adapted to eating. Many of my favorite comfort foods are milk-based. I come from a ancestral/cultural background of lactose-tolerant people. Milk is a gift from the goddess Brigit. One aspect of the holiday of Imbolc is to celebrate the gift of milk. Brigit is also associated with sheep, cattle, and pigs. Pigs or wild boars were very important to the ancient Celts, as a food source and in religion (boars were featured prominently in Celtic myths). It was a mainstay in their diet, and a main ingredient of Irish feasts. If you are from the southern U.S., I need not tell you of the popularity of pork and ham in the southern diet.
I believe that most aspects of traditional southern diet has a deeper spiritual core. Sometimes its not something specific, but rather a feeling- of connectedness, of wholesomeness, of wholeness.
Right now there is the delicious aroma of paw-paws (also called Ozark bananas) filling my kitchen. The taste is a cross between a banana and a mango, and they’re really good for you- a truly nourishing food. Pawpaw trees grow wild in moist soil- they don’t usually grow very tall, and are often more of a bush or shrub. When ripe, paw-paws are yellow with brown spots. My dad used to wait until they were all the way brown to eat them- but by then they are way too ripe in my opinion. Right now, the ripe ones are laying on the ground ready to eat, and some that are not all the way ripe, but loosening from the stem, can be picked and will ripen quickly on the kitchen counter. I’ve read that green paw-paws can be eaten as a vegetable when green, but I haven’t tried that. There’s all kinds of recipes paw-paws, in case you have so many paw-paws that you aren’t able to eat them all before they go bad- they do go bad fast. You can store them a little while in the fridge, but chilling them to below 40 can change their flavor- though the pulp can be frozen with good results, but it’s better to freeze them quickly. You don’t want to heat them too hot either, that destroys the flavor- but cakes and breads are good. Use your recipe for banana bread to make paw-paw bread. 
When I was growing up, every year we went to a family reunion for my dad’s side of the family. We drove way out to this place in the middle of nowhere that was kind of a cave-like picnic area with a natural spring. This is where we had the reunion for years and years, and every year I heard the old men talk on an on about … okra. Yes, okra. “How’s yer okra doin’?” is how it would always start out. Then they would talk about, well, how their okra crop was doing, if they’d canned any, etc. It was very boring conversation yes, but I do love okra. Something I’ve always wondered is why those restaurants that serve “country-style” food, serve the okra individually batter-dipped and deep fried. This is the way my dad made fried okra: rinse and chop up fresh okra into small chunks. Mix up a breading that’s part flour, part cornmeal, and plenty of salt and pepper. Mix up the okra in it and fry in a skillet with hot grease until okra is tender and browned. The okra isn’t completely coated with the breading, but rather, there are lots of crumbs- the breading is loose, so you scoop up your okra to eat it instead of having little individual chunks of okra. That may sound strange, but it is better this way, and I believe, more traditional. 
Last week, me and baby went to the blackberry patch and found a few (mostly) ripe blackberries. We’ve walking over there about every day and we always seem to find a few- he eats them as quick as I can pick them! Yesterday, though, I found a whole handful of ripe blackberries, plus a bunch that were out of my reach. So I guess it’s officially blackberry time! Oh, they are so good!
