Dieting Will Always Fail in a Toxic Food Culture. Here’s How to Fix It.
I often think about my grandmothers and grandfathers.
Not the immediate ones that I knew or that reside in the living memory of my family, but rather the ones from a very, very long time ago. The grandmother that spoke a dialect of Lenape, the grandfather that couldn’t conceive of a money economy any more than we can conceive of anything else. I think of the people, specifically, who never met Europeans, who were never touched by existential upheaval. These are Indigenous people that we, as Americans, don’t spend a lot of time thinking about.
My thoughts don’t dwell on significant events of their lives, or conflicts and diplomacy with neighboring people, or even their personalities. Instead, my thoughts are consumed with the mundane, pedestrian details of their day to day lives. Waking up groggy in the smoky interior of a longhouse on a mid-autumn morning, quietly stoking the fire before the kids wake up and offering thanks to any number of spirits and manetuwak, walking outside to the reaches of the town to check on maturing crops as the world wakes up around them. Maybe there’s a few dozen men setting off in the distance preparing for a coordinated hunt, or to check for last runs of fish in the river weirs before the fish nations move on to deeper waters. Women are prepping their cradles to bring…
