Journal Entry 5

FORGOTTEN TREES

THE EXCITING LIFE AND UNNOTICED DEATH OF INDIGENOUS FOODS

©2018  Kajsa Alger

Journal 5

I am of concrete and urban sprawl.  The city.  But I am also of fallen leaves and forest bathing, shinrin-yoku.  I am from a supportive, loving household and yet I still fell to addiction and destructiveness at a young age.   It took me many years to come through the rebirth of myself, the riddance of guilt, the acceptance of being both dark and light.

I am from a long, healthy, wonderful marriage, that became unhealthy, broken, and ended ...and then was also reborn into a wonderful different relationship, not marriage, again.  I am tough and strong, like my mother.  I am gentle and self aware, like my father.  I am embracing of childhood and rawness, like my son.  I am loving and sexual and self giving like the woman I'm in love with.  I am guarded and quiet and people are often quick to mislabel me "mysterious", when I am simply feeling alone or sensitive of my surroundings.

I don't want to lose my ethnic sense of being, my being born of city and culture and people.  Of being both un-white and white.  Yet, I want to embrace my wild as well.  Relish in slowness and appreciation of dirt in my hands and between my toes.  Eat wild grasses and soak up the knowledge of the living things around me.  I am a horrible dancer, with no rhythm, but I want to dance by firelight.  Or not-to-dance, as in a singular verb. To be without self-consciousness and simply feel comfort in the beat of the music and electricity in the air.  I want to connect with land and people and tell the stories that I live.

I am hard to know and I am also open and vulnerable.  I am both things, all things, unbranded. 

When I first set out to transcribe my journals and write this story, it was meant to be of others.  Of an indigenous people that I felt a sense of connection to, through food and cooking.  What I realize now, is that it is really a self-realization story.  One of me and the discovery of my own true nature, told through the people and life that I have met along the way.

Journal Entry 4

FORGOTTEN TREES

THE EXCITING LIFE AND UNNOTICED DEATH OF INDIGENOUS FOODS

©2019  Kajsa Alger

Journal 4, butter

Bhimsen has sent me a video.  It's of his sister-in-law, Boimo, churning butter.  In the video, she sits on the floor with an aluminum pot held between her feet, which are outstretched in front of her.  There is a wooden base that holds a wooden churn inside the pot.  Wrapped around the churn is a cord with two handles (similar to a jump rope, if the handles were perpendicular to the rope).  The buffalo milk is first heated and then left for a few days until it ferments to a yogurt.  Then it is cooled and put in the pot.  As Boimo sits, she pulls each handle, alternating sides, so that the churn spins one way and then the other.  In the end, she will have a small amount of butter to use for cooking sauces and curries.  The whey will be kept in the pot and used for drinking.

There is something intrinsically important that I must say as I write this story.  As a Chef, I am driven to dive deeper into these forgotten cultures and unfamiliar foods.  To me, there is a magic and almost spiritual connection to the charm of cooking and using my hands in this way to recreate these foods.  A nostalgia for something that hasn't yet passed, but where I can almost see the passing take place.  I already miss it and it's right in front of me.  It's because I know, as we all know, that all things will eventually modernize and become mechanized in some way.

I've written about it before.  Even in the small villages of Tibet and Nepal, the butter churn has started to be replaced by common household blenders.  There is a part of me that screams and pulls at my insides to not let this happen.  I write the stories and document the recipes because I want to fight to preserve what is so beautiful, the craft handed down, with each shift in generation losing a tiny bit of its essence.  But herein is the underlying problem of this mindset.  I ask Bhimsen, rather ignorantly,  "is it that the young  people aren't interested in the old ways any more, or that it simply isn't taught?  Have they moved away? Do they have other things they'd rather be doing? Are they caught up in computers or technology?"  My questions are many.  He listens and then says to me, "Dearest Kajsa.  Have you ever made butter?  It's fucking hard work."

Of course I have, in fact, made butter.  In posh restaurants where we prided ourselves on the purity of our methods, although used machines.  In my home kitchen where I craved a sense of connection to my ingredients, although made one small jar.  I have never made butter, by hand, in a primitive churn, as a way of my everyday life.  I have never milked a buffalo as a chore and then cultured the cream and churned it and separated the whey so that I can have something to drink later.  For that matter, I have never harvested and carried on my back the grasses or the water that will care for the buffalo.  I may have made butter and prided myself in the time it took me and the care I put into it.  However, I have never woken and thought that it is something I need to do or there will be no butter.  I can go to the store and buy butter.  In that one single moment, Bhim has blown my mind and all blinders are off.

Through my eyes, in this place of comfort and privilege, I have no place mourning the "old ways" that are so magically charming.  The methods, as well as the ingredients, are part of that ever-changing story.  It is hard for me to do it, but from this point forward I realize that I must merely watch and record the changes.  I commit myself to both take note of the beauty in the way that things have been done for centuries,  as well as the relief on someone's face when their life struggles are made tenfold easier.

In our world of factory farming and mass production, it is hard to fathom that someone might embrace modern technology overtaking an age old tradition.  If I think though of how the water pipes saved hours of hard labor and walking each day, or how a blender can transform a difficult task into a quick moments work, for someone who has so much hard work in their life, then it becomes easier to celebrate in the joy of it.  Today I'll make butter.