Communist Regime Enforced Local Food
OCTOBER 14, 2007 - At a 100-Mile potluck last weekend, held by Shirlene to mark the delicious end of her five-week Eat Local Challenge, I had a chance to learn about local foods behind the old Iron Curtain. I was reminded, too, of the great lengths that those who have experienced fresh local food will go to to maintain it — because it tastes great, but more importantly, because local food is culture.
On the 100-mile menu was Bulgarian herbed potatoes and yoghurt soup. B., who had left Bulgarian at age 15 after the fall of the Berlin wall opened the border, said that there is a special culture, Lactobacterium bulgaricum, that makes Bulgarian yoghurt different from all others. In fact, it’s believed that yoghurt was invented in this country more than 2,000 years ago when it was known as Thracia; and that its continued daily consumption is the reason why Bulgaria has more 100-year-old citizens per capita than anywhere else on earth.
B.’s grandmother cannot be parted from her yoghurt, across decades or nations. B.’s family lived in Libya for a time in the 1970s, as it was one of the few countries outside the Communist bloc they were allowed to go to. Her grandmother secreted a blob of yoghurt the size of a marble into the African nation. That was all she needed to start creating her daily batches, recreating the taste of home in new latitudes.
And the food in Canada? Terrible! Every time B.’s grandmother travels to Bulgaria she tries to smuggle back feta cheese or some such thing. “It’s rather different these days, bringing food into Canada compared to Libya in the 1970s. Much more strict!” says B. Most treats are confiscated but sometimes she gets a few things through. B. picked her up at the airport recently and asked, “Grandmother, why are you using a cane? You don’t need a cane,” and her grandmother shushed her. “Just keep on walking,” she hissed. She had been playing the “I’m just a helpless old lady” card with customs.
B. agrees with her grandmother’s assessment of North American food, but the trouble is not the farmers or the farmland, but the global supermarket. It has infected Bulgaria now as well. “When I was a girl, the tomatoes, oh! They were so delicious. Now? Cardboard! They come from Greece or anywhere,” says B. Bulgaria used to be agriculturally self-sufficient, though the government was awfully heavy-handed about it. “When I was in high school, we were forced to pick onions. I hated it.”
Now, she says, people are free not to pick onions, not to live on the farms — and in the first rush of liberty, they have left the farms and often the country entirely. “Young people now don’t know the food I did,” says B. “They don’t know what they’re missing.”
But here in east Vancouver, she could revisit the foods of her childhood, made with fresh local ingredients grown in the soil of her new homeland, along with the 100-mile experiments of other guests: wine-steamed clams, bread made with hand-ground yellow corn, a nectarine tart. Uniting us all across decades and nations. -ADS
