Spade & Spoon: Localizing the Way Westerners Eat
Greening Yellowstone: Local Food in National Parks
By Kisha Lewellyn Schlegel, 7-24-07
From the National Park Service
In 1995 a privately owned company out of Colorado called Xanterra Parks & Resorts took over ownership and management of hotels and restaurants in many state and national parks in the United States. From the Everglades to Yellowstone, the company prides itself on following a tradition of hostelry established by Fred Harvey who made it easier for 1870s travelers to eat well and travel comfortably in the raucous west. But these days, Xanterra also believes that such comfort and tourism should not come at the expense of the environment.
By 2015, Xanterra plans to reduce its fossil fuel use and gas emissions in the 25 parks, resorts and conference centers it is affiliated with by thirty percent while diverting fifty percent of all solid waste away from the landfill. They also plan to increase ”sustainable cuisine” purchases to fifty percent of all “companywide food expenditures.” In their 2005 Sustainability Report, the company states that it made $1.4 million in sustainable cuisine purchases in 2004, up from $22,765 in 2001. While most of this money was spent on dairy products, about $52,000 went to purchasing bison and elk.
Xanterra’s Sustainability program began in 2000 with a sustainable seafood policy based on the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch program and the Audubon’s Living Oceans Seafood Guide. Xanterra has extended these principles each year and now uses Oregon Country Natural Beef and buys organic fair trade certified coffee. They also joined the Chefs Collaborative, which works with chefs to promote sustainable food by cooking fresh and scrumptious meals with it.
This weekend I visited Yellowstone for the first time with my Mom, and we ate in the Mammoth Hot Springs Hotel Dining Room. While other Yellowstone park menus are not so devoted to the idea of sustainable cuisine, and primarily include information about fish, the Mammoth Menu detailed the origin of food:
Rocky Mountain Bison Bangers and Mashers
“Two farm-raised bison brats boiled in beer and finished on the grill. Served with colcannon, an Irish dish of mashed potatoes and cooked cabbage and grilled onion gravy. $12.25”
Wild Montana Whitefish
“Rod and reel caught in Flathead Lake, this whitefish is pan-fried with Japanese bread crumbs and served with fried leeks, saffron aioli, vegetable and a blend of wild rice. $18.25”
The Mammoth menu also described the fusion of comfort and sustainability that seems so essential to the national park experience:
“BECAUSE THE WORLD IS CHANGING
We serve domestic beef only • We offer both real butter and a non-cholesterol spread • We use 100% vegetable oil • Salad dressings are available on the side • And of course...substitutions are our pleasure.”
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As Mom and I toured the park, snacking on the Montana grown raspberries and cheese I had brought from home, we were living out the comfort envisioned by Xanterra’s forefather, Fred Harvey, who would telegraph restaurants to let them know when train passengers would arrive to ensure that food would be warm and ready upon their arrival. Like most visitors to the park, we chose to drive rather than pay $60 for a partial day tour on one of the refurbished Old Yellow Buses. When it got too hot, we turned on the air conditioning. When it got too quiet we turned up music from Arcade Fire. But as their song Keep the Car Running played...as we drove...as we saw prismatic geysers and paint pots with visitors from Paris, Akron and Bangalore...I could not help but view the kodachrome scenery in a frame of irony. While we ate fresh bison from Montana the night before, we sat in traffic the next day to stare at them.
In the Hayden Valley on Saturday, the traffic built up along with the exhaust fumes. Kids ran to the edge of the road as parents rolled the car to a stop, stepped out with cameras and lined up along the road to get a better view of the bison wallowing in the dirt. A woman with a lilting British accent asked the Park Ranger how to tell the male and female bison apart. “It’s hard to tell,” he pointed. “They both have horns so your best option is to look under their bellies.”
“I see,” she replied and bent lower to take a look. As I leaned with her and stared at the underbelly of a decidedly male bison, I began to wonder what we were really looking for. I began to wonder if people connected this bison with the one served at Xanterra’s restaurants, or if they knew how well its physiology fits within the ecosystem, or if they knew of the United States’s policy in the 1830s to eradicate the bison in order to starve Indian tribes and eventually make way for the railroads that would bring tourists west.
Whether viewing the landscape or eating from it, how much can we learn from such brief visitations?
Tasting a bit of “farmed” bison certainly gives Yellowstone visitors the important opportunity to eat differently, if only for a meal or two. And perhaps this experience will be enough to get people to consider their food. But even as Xanterra strives to provide more eco-amenities, and visitors eat the eco-friendly food, visitor comfort takes precedence. Unlike Denali where you leave your car behind and walk, bike or ride a bus, Yellowstone and most other national parks allow enjoyment of the wilderness in seemingly endless comfort.
On Saturday, just before the dinner hour, a mere handful of Yellowstone’s two million annual visitors created a traffic jam in the Hayden Valley. We took horrible pictures. We got too close and were asked to step away from the valley. We honked car horns. We sighed. We waited for something meaningful to happen. All the while, the young calf below watched the cars thrum by.
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Of course, true sustainability means eating lower on the food chain. Take into account the amount of fossil fuel, water, transportation, etc. required to produce and deliver meat, and the sustainability factor plummets.
As for eating bison one day and viewing them in the park the next, the irony isn't so great when you understand the difference between the two. The meal was from domesticated bison--fenced, fed, and for all you know, a blend of bison and cattle genes. The bison in the park are wild, free-roaming (insofar as they are allowed to be), and genetically-diverse within their herds. Yellowstone is the only place on earth where wild bison have lived continuously since prehistoric times, so when you're marveling at bison in Yellowstone and its greater ecosystem, you're witnessing something very special and precious, indeed.
Unfortunately, you don't need to go back to the 19th century to make note of the greed and stupidity that nearly exterminated the largest terrestrial mammal in North America. The livestock industry today continues to call the shots that slaughter wild bison--our American wildlife heritage--when bison attempt to access their rightful winter range on public land in Montana. Gov. Schweitzer, whose campaign promise was for "greater tolerance" for wild bison in Montana, has done nothing to provide the fix--designated bison habitat on public land surrounding Yellowstone in Montana.
So don't confuse that "sustainable" farmed bison burger on your plate with the real, wild thing in your viewfinder. They are worlds and ages apart.
And I need to say this: I spent two summers living and working up there while in college and they were the two best summers of my life. I GREATLY encourage parents of work-age teens to get their kids up there for a summer. It is the most unique land in the world and there is unlimited nature experiences up there to enjoy on the time off. For urbanites it is a wonderful escape from the city, and the entire region, from Bozeman and Three Forks in the north to Jackson Hole in the south to Cody and Thermopolis in the east is beautiful and wonderful territory. It's not about the money, it's about the life experience.
Now, the fact that the herd was decimated is fact. The fact that the Indians relied on the Buffalo for food is fact. Intention is something much different, and you folks are better than those kind of false, or undocumented attributions.
It states:
"In 1874, Secretary of the Interior Delano testified before Congress, ‘The buffalo are disappearing rapidly, but not faster than I desire. I regard the destruction of such game as Indians subsist upon as facilitating the policy of the Government, of destroying their hunting habits, coercing them on reservations, and compelling them to begin to adopt the habits of civilization.'"
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