Featured Blog: Celebrating Wild Rice, Canceling Out a Happy Meal

"Light or dark?" 

While spending the morning last Saturday at the Wild Rice Festival at the my four-year-old son Henry carefully tasted the two varieties.  With a magic marker, he recorded his vote for the light brown, truly wild version of our state grain, over the darker-colored cultivated variety.  The majority of the other taste testers agreed with him.  

As a relatively new Minnesota resident, I'm still learning about this unique tradition.  What makes it all the more unique is the contrast of the traditional Native American diet with our modern diet. 

Humans have become almost completely disconnected from the natural food web. The carbon in our bodies bears the isotopic signature of the corn that is the raw ingredient for much of the processed food we consume. More than half of the nitrogen in our bodies (roughly three pounds of me) was produced synthetically in a factory using the Haber-Basch process.  

It's a testament to human ingenuity that the Green Revolution has enabled agricultural production to keep up with the burgeoning human population since the mid-20th Century.  But, as reports are coming in of Minnesota's best-in-the-nation, 156 bushels per acre corn harvest this year, it seems appropriate to celebrate a grain that is still harvested by native peoples in canoes, parched over a fire, hulled and winnowed by dancing in a pit.

As Henry picked out a bag of wild rice to take home, along with a bottle of honey harvested from the nature center's own bees, I thought maybe this will cancel out a couple of those Happy Meals.