I attended a music festival with some friends a few weeks ago in southern Colorado where a friend offered me a chia squeeze – a small pouch containing fruit juices and chia seeds. While chia seeds are only recently gaining popularity in western markets, humans in central America have prized them for thousands of years for the wealth of health benefits they provide. Derived from a plant native to Mexico and Guatemala, chia seeds were first cultivated by the Maya, who used them extensively for medical and nutritional purposes. I first encountered chia seeds while volunteering at a permaculture institute in Guatemala, when the organization that I was working with paired up with a woman dedicated to promoting the forgotten benefits of chia seeds to the local native population.
While chia seeds were once prized within the region, the westernization of the food system had resulted in their benefits being all but forgotten by most people, and she embarked on a mission to raise awareness of both the cultural heritage inherit in the chia seed, as well as its wealth of benefits in this malnourished part of the world. Packed with micronutrients, antioxidents, omega-3, and fiber, chia seeds are often considered to be a “superfood” – a food that delivers in terms of nutrition even when consumed in small amounts. Chia seeds are experiencing a recent surge in popularity here in the US, where companies are marketing them as a way to boost energy levels, control hunger, and hydrate faster. They are most often consumed in liquids, where the seeds add a gelatinous texture to the drink, with the tiny whitish clear seeds with black centers bobbing visibly in the container.
For some reason, the chia squeeze pouch presented to me at this music festival in Colorado stirred up a wide range of thoughts and emotions in me, as I reflected back on my first encounter with chia seeds and my subsequent exposure to their more commercialized uses in the US. It is easy to overlook the deep connection between agriculture traditions and the evolution of human culture and civilization in the US, where the cultural melting pot has successfully alienated so many of us second, third, and fourth generation descendants from our cultural roots and culinary heritages. While I am no scholar on the arguments over what exactly is US culture and the historical causes as to how it got to where it is, I feel well-equipped to dissect it a bit, given it is the culture in which I have lived my whole life.
When asked about my heritage, I will tell you that I am half Irish, a quarter Sicilian, and a quarter Polish. In other words, I am 100% American mutt. As such, growing up there were no culinary traditions that dominated the family table: breakfast was often cereal or oatmeal, produced and packaged by a major corporation and identified by a name brand; lunch revolved around sandwiches; and dinner was more about including a meat, starch, and vegetable in some way than traditional dishes. In short, the mingling of cultural heritages had resulted in the erosion of culinary traditions to the point of largely being forgotten, leaving a void that was easily and deftly filled by the offerings of increasingly dominant food corporations.
The intimate link between culinary traditions and broader cultural heritage is undeniable, with cultural identity often so closely linked with traditional foods that one defines and gives shape to the other in equal ways. In contrast, the dominant food culture in the US and increasingly the western world is one that revolves not so much around culinary heritages and deeply rooted traditions, but around processed products, brand names, and food trends – all marketed by increasingly powerful multinational food corporations.
The erosion of local food cultures by the popularity of western foods – which are often perceived as a symbol of modernity or status – often leads to malnourishment, as nutritious and balanced local culinary traditions are replaced by foods notoriously linked to obesity. As demand for local food crops is replaced by demand for processed foods, local farmers are either driven out of business or trade out traditional crops for cash-crop monocultures that are destined for processing by major food corporations before reaching the consumer. Traditional foods such as the chia seed only achieve a resurgence in popularity once they are commercialized and converted into finished products to be marketed by profit-driven corporations, completely disconnected from their deeper and more intimate cultural roots.
In the end, I drank quite a few of those little chia packets, and I loved ever last drop. They delivered as promised, leaving me feeling refreshed and energized. Yet while I looked at the packaging design on the little purple pouch, I couldn’t help but regret the hidden implications of the conversion of this culturally-rich food into a commercial product completely divorced from its cultural roots. The silhouette of the svelte woman bore little resemblance to the Mayan descendants I saw in Guatemala, while the packaging’s promise to feed your body as well as your soul mimicked the marketing ploys that are pervasive in the economy-centered value systems of western society, where we are constantly told that it is possible to shop your way into a certain way of life.
Culture becomes not something that is actively created every day through individual practices and beliefs, human social interactions, and the traditions that we treasure within our communities, but rather something that is purchased, through the intermediary of a corporation – large or small – who designs and packages it for us, with all that we need to do to participate is consume the product. This can lead to us forgetting that culture is not something bought and sold, but something that we actively create every day, and that our culinary traditions need not be defined by the processed products we find on supermarket shelves.
Featured image courtesy of eatsuperfoodbar.com