Sometimes less really is more.

In her book Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A memoir of Food, Family and Longing, Anya Von Bremzen recounts a visit she and her mother made to an old White Russian countess ‘with a name too grand to even pronounce’. The old lady, who was cooking them a particular Russian dish, told them ‘how hard she cried, back in 1914, when she received a diamond necklace as a birthday gift from her father’ because ‘she had really wanted a puppy’. Poor child of entitled parents who simply expected her to share their desire for objects like a diamond necklace, it seems that what she really wanted was a living, more-than-human, companion. Perhaps one she hoped to have a loving relationship with and that she could take care of, who knows? What I do know is that this simple story had me on the verge of tears, because it speaks to an ongoing failure, both of values and care – not only for children but for their relationship to the more than human world.

That I should have found this story in a book about a family’s relationship to Russia through food may seem irrelevant to the concerns I’ve tried to articulate in the first two posts in this series. Why I don’t see it that way can be suggested by a quotation from the Choctaw historian and writer Devon Mihesuah, Cora Lee Beers Price Professor in the Humanities Program at the University of Kansas. In the context of colonialism and its entanglement with socio environmental degradation, she writes: “The recovery of the people is tied to the recovery of food, since food itself is medicine, not only for the body, but for the soul, and for the spiritual connection to history, ancestors and the land’. A quotation I learned yesterday during a wonderful talk by the Dakota writer and environmental activist Diane Wilson, who also introduced us to the mission of an organisation called Dream of Wild Health, which aims ‘to restore health and well-being in the Native community by recovering knowledge of and access to healthy Indigenous foods, medicines and lifeways’.