Fresh frozen

This time of year, Americans celebrate a holiday to give thanks for food and family (no news to any readers I’m sure, but hang with me…) The way this is expressed, strangely enough, is by eating huge volumes of food. Of course the origins of an autumn feast are logical enough, but at some point the celebration of abundant local food became a holiday with standardized fare, for many families involving food shipped from distant farms and factories. Sharp minds like Michael Pollen (The Omnivore’s Dilemma) and Thomas Friedman (The World is Flat) explain the range and effects of globalized food markets much better than I could here, but I find food stocks and diets in outport Newfoundland interesting and possibly indicative just how far out of hand these markets have gotten.

Newfoundlanders traditionally leaned on salt cod for export and income, but also as a staple of their diet. On any sunny summer day, split and salted cod would line the rocky coast; in later months the dried cod would be stacked like cordwood out of the weather and whittled away through the long winter. One American friend, who had visited the island decades ago, told me that I’d be impressed by the “rounders”- small codfish brined and dried whole- atop nearly every roof in the outports.

In Fortune, I haven’t seen a single rounder on the roof. I’m told that salt cod is now sold as a delicacy, and few islanders eat it much. Although Mansfield, my friend and host, is in the process of drying out some salt fish (mostly pollock and haddock, and a few very small cod which probably deserved to be rounders), his are the only fish I’ve seen drying in all of Fortune. Did the scarcity of cod in recent decades force rural Newfoundlanders to shift toward processed, imported food, or is this apparent shift away from local seafood mainly due to a preference for beef, pork, chicken, and Little Debbie snacks when given the choice?

My first walk through the meat section at Fortune’s small supermarket really surprised me. The big three- beef, pork, and chicken- commanded nearly all of the cold space on two walls. A discerning palate could choose from dozens of different cuts from each land animal. But where was the fish? I finally found the dusty nook that made up the whole of the store’s seafood menu. The choices: farmed Atlantic salmon, cod tongues, salt cod, and, advertised as a “new product: fresh-frozen cod fillets”. A product of China, read the label. Cod, probably caught in the north Atlantic (although perhaps Pacific cod caught in Alaskan waters), frozen and shipped to China, and there thawed, processed, re-frozen, packaged, and distributed around the globe (and marketed as fresh). I doubt I’m the only person who finds the extensive post-mortem travels of this cod, now resting in a town famed for its truly fresh cod, outrageous and somewhat tragic. Does this surprise anyone else?

If locals aren’t getting their fish at the store, they must be getting it themselves, direct from fishermen, or from the processing plant in town, I thought when leaving the store. But after being in town for a while, I see no easy options for getting fish. Everybody tells me that Mary Brown’s, a local fast-food chain, has the best (chicken) legs in town, but nobody can tell me where to find fresh fish. Mansfield tells me that fishing for cod or haddock in a skiff near the harbor is not worthwhile. His freezer and pantry is a nice contrast to that of the town’s store: salt cod and pollock (his own work), cloudberries, partridgeberries, bags of whole frozen brook trout (known as mud trout in these parts), frozen Dolly Varden, frozen cod fillets (a product of Newfoundland), moose, blueberries, cranberries, whole skinned rabbit, salmon, canned rabbit, canned trout, canned moose. One small and lonely box of chicken nuggets sits alone, intimidated by all the local wild food surrounding it.

Yet Mansfield tells me that his freezer and diet is the rare exception in outport Newfoundland these days, and my freezer sleuthing in other homes backs that up. Although pizza seems less common than in the US, fried chicken and red meat is the norm, seafood is rarely put on a plate, and an onlooker like myself has a tough time telling the difference between American and Newfoundland cuisine. I’m not out to paint globalized food marketing in any particular light, but I do think that mainstream diets in North America are often detached from fresh and local foods, and that there’s more to a meal than just its taste. I once saw a picture of Michael Pollan wearing a shirt once that read, “Vote with your fork.” Something to chew on.