New England boiled dinners

Unfortunately, my husband has an ongoing complaint with my meat soups. Chicken, beef or lamb, they contain very little actual meat. My chicken soup, for example, is made from the remains of a roasted chicken that has already been picked as clean as I can make it. I use eggs to thicken the soup to a rich shade of yellow, but chunky chicken soup it isn’t. And rough cut carrots are not, apparently, a substitute for chicken chunks.

I’m endlessly fascinated to discover the roots of my recipes lurking in the pages of an 18th-century cookbook. A few months ago, I was given a copy of Mrs. McLintock’s Recipes for Cookery and Pastry-work, published in Scotland in 1734.

Mrs. McLintock also made her soups with virtually no meat. The meat is used to flavor the broth, but is removed before serving. She doesn’t specify if the meat is served on the side or reserved for another meal, but the soup is served by pouring the broth over pieces of toasted bread and a marrowbone. The end of the recipe is clear: “keep out the collops and ferve it up” (a “collop” is a slice of meat, and early printers used “f” and “s” interchangeably).

Physicians in the 18th century were beginning to notice the effects of a rich diet and a large girth on overall health, and indulging in the rich puddings in the back of this little cookbook will certainly pack on a few pounds. The recipe for lemon pudding is what we today would call “lemon curd,” an impossibly rich butter and egg yolk combination we use sparingly to top scones or muffins. But body mass index was not something the lower classes had to worry about.

Not until governments developed farm subsidies following World War II. If my recipes for soups, scant as they are on meat, can be traced back to the 18th century, my husband’s expectation of soup chunky with cubes of chicken can be traced to farm policies put in place in the late 1940s.

Farm subsidies started out with the best of intentions: to keep food prices stable, keep farmers in business and prevent food shortages, come what may in the form of weather or political upheaval. The lessons of WWII were not lost on the people who wrote these policies. Grain provides more calories per acre than fruit or produce, so subsidies were put in place to support the sowing of grain crops: corn, wheat and soy. Children need milk, so policies were put in place to support the dairy industry.

These policies were successful beyond anyone’s wildest imagination. In short order, the issue became not one of underproduction, but of massive overproduction, which led to all sorts of creative ways of using up these farm products. Most of which have little to do with nutrition and much to do with fat, calories and effective marketing.

Critics argue it is these very (well intended) subsidies that led directly to the proliferation of junk food on store shelves and the protein-heavy diets Americans in particular enjoy. Meat, grown with subsidized and cheap grain, is no longer a luxury item to be used to flavor a soup and then set aside for another meal. Now it is the main ingredient of the soup or meal.

In 2011, the United Nations Agricultural Organization launched the “Save Food” campaign. Designed first to measure and then to reduce the loss of global food production that doesn’t actually feed people, the undertaking involved over 150 partners, including farmers, processors, major food companies, and retailers.

Even the most pessimistic projections were blown away by the staggering waste discovered lurking in developed countries. “Loss” is the tonnage that doesn’t make it from the field to processing. “Waste” is what is lost during processing, retail sale and at home.

Up to 50 percent of fruits, vegetables and root crops are lost before they ever get into the marketing channels. Contrast this with grain and oilseed crops with only a 20 percent loss.

Shopping habits, aesthetic sensibilities and the willingness to discard food (instead of turning it into soup) accounts for 22 pounds of food lost per person per month in developed countries. Consumers in sub-Saharan African and southern Asia don’t achieve waste levels like that in an entire year.

If, argues the report, even a quarter of the 1.3 billion tons of food lost and wasted every year were diverted to the 870 million people around the globe who live in food poverty, it would solve the issue of global hunger.

Which is about as ridiculous as my mother telling me to clean my plate because there are children starving in Biafra. The loss and waste of fruits and vegetables is an issue not of will but of preservation, transportation and handling. If only 50 percent of the California-grown carrots make it from field to processor, and another 20 percent of them are wasted before I ever pick up the plastic bag, those carrots don’t have a prayer of getting to Biafra.

We can’t entirely blame subsidies for the disconnect between the crops, grocery stocks and the USDA Dietary Guidelines for Americans. The problem is in how we transport and store fruit and vegetable crops. And much of that problem might well be eliminated if we bought locally grown produce, in season.

New England boiled dinners and skimpy soup. From mother to daughter to granddaughter, thrift became a recipe, the recipe became a style, the style became a tradition, until 250 years later we are still skimping on the meat and filling the pot up with vegetables.

The irony is, today the meat is cheap, and the vegetables, traveling not up from cellars but miles by truck, come dear.

But we are New Englanders, and no amount of cheap meat is going to inspire us to alter a recipe two and a half centuries in the making.

Tamara Burke lives in Stowe.