Acorns and Empire
A quick note: this information is largely coming from google scholar. There is no question that tremendous Indigenous wisdom has fed into the primary cited sources. Credit is due to the peoples from the land from which plant knowledge was taken without care.
Acorns under an Agrarian Lens
Acorns are a wild food frequently discussed by survivalists and back-to-land idealists. Eating acorns is associated with indigenous foodways but hardly ever adapted back into ‘mainstream’ local cuisine in ‘the west’.
The Western European lens has blindspots in the cultural elevation of grain agriculture. The plodding linear progression through the neolithic revolution is a story we’ve told ourselves for generations (discussed at length in the popular book The Dawn of Everything).
Although the grueling processing requirements of the grain-based foodways which defined much of southern Europe had diminishing returns as one traveled northward (which is why the turnip and beet play such a central role in these cultures), the Latin peoples believed grains were the cornerstone of the civil world. Barbarians did not thresh or winnow.
Balanophagy of Eurasia
The Greeks negatively associated Balanophagy (the eating of acorns) with the Arkadians of the south, claiming them to be a pre-civilized people unable to grow the grains of empire. The Arkadians seemingly did not accept the stigma as they proudly displayed acorns on coinage. For their climate, the acorn provided a nutrient dense shelf-stable food source wi
th less processing effort than wheat. Similarly, acorn eating was common in pre-Roman Iberia. Portuguese folklore traces their cultural ancestry to the powerful acorn-eating Lusitanians.
Around 4,000 years before that in what is now called Denmark people were also eating acorns. They apparently shelled them before cooking, and could have expected a nutritional return similar to grains -
Acorn nutritional content can be compared with that
of cereals, being largely a source of carbohydrate (ca 50-
70 g of carbohydrate per 100 g fresh weight), which pre-
dominantly consists of starch stored in the cotyledon
(Kuhnlein and Turner t99 i). Oak trees usually produce a
plentiful crop of acorns. They were experimentally col-
lected by Perlman (1980, after Rowley-Conwy 1984).
The collection rate yields 960-1900 kg/hour, which pro-
duced about 18000-28000 kcal/hour.
My language skills limit my research much further east, but it’s worth noting that both historically and contemporarily acorns have been a significant ingredient in the foods of the Korean peninsula (it’s still a fixture in some local restaurants).
This region has been wracked by imperial powers and colonialism for centuries. Acorns provide a way to access high-quality food from the landscape without the need to actively protect vulnerable rice fields (which are best grown in the so called ‘rice bowl’ fertile region in the southwest of the peninsula) from the ongoing assault of colonial takeover.
Oaks in the North American Context
In the landmass we now call North America, there was considerable reliance on the acorn by all peoples who lived within the oak’s range (consider the vast number of Quercus species listed in ethnobotanical record). Common Indigenous landscape management practices often involved the use of fire, which in turn favor Oak species in their climb to the canopy.
In the image below, the purple-toned regions typically had several fires each decade from land-stewardship techniques prior to European control. Consider this burn schedule against the Oak ranges. Notice the overlap in what is now called California, New York, and southern Michigan. There is a close kinship between the People, the Fire, and the Oak. (The midwest burned into the prairies instead of oaklands, and similarly had a relational affinity for human tending).
Most of the acorn processing techniques described in this part of the world are similar to those in Europe - grinding and rinsing to produce a flour. Rinsing in the toilet tank is frequently advised, potentially in part due to the shock value) However the tannin contents of many acorn species make an inedible and potentially toxic flour. This seemingly corresponds to the mixed reports of acorn flour either being easy and delicious, or disgustingly bitter.
In the 1960’s a researcher from Indiana published what he believed to be a map of acorn processing techniques throughout North America. Note that pulverization and rinsing are only distinguishing features of the southwest, and small portion of the southern Mississippi. In the deserts of the southwest there was apparently no processing done at all.
Interestingly, the “no processing” region has a nice overlap with the range of the Gambel Oak (Q. gambelii), while other techniques similarly correspond to other oak ranges in the west - notice the north/south divide between Q. garryana and Q. lobata, and the similar shift in preparation strategies.
This is all to say that there is a relationship between humans (fire stewardship practices) oaks (species distribution) and culture (acorn processing techniques). I’m not sure if there is an obvious way to tease apart which began what, but it stands to reason people had good reasons for acting how they did, and oaks had some sort of survival advantage in associating with humans.
The Nixtamlilized Acorn
Zooming in on the eastern woodlands, we can see a sudden influx of lye-based processing techniques. Cooking dense seeds in alkaline solution is an ingenious traditional cooking technique known as nixtamalization, that is incredibly effective at neutrilizing bitter tannins. The Eastern Agriculture Complex (also called the EAC, a set of plants which underwent domestication in this region) also utilized ash nitamalization for seed. Ashes more broadly speaking were a common ingredient in cooking - those of certain high-salt plants such as coltsfoot were used to season dishes.
Some researchers argue that the pre-existing ash-based processing techniques of the east (namely, toasting food in ashes) naturally comingled with the eating of acorns, the eastern agricultural complex, and of the later adoption of corn in to the eastern woodlands. I’ve even seen folks suggest that the nixtamlization of corn in mesoamerica may have been derived from this earlier hardwood-ash process of the eastern woodlands.
Consider these excerpts from An Interpretation of the Two-Climax Model of Illinois Prehistory by Robert L. Hall:
<……..>
Hall’s theorized that ash-nixtamlization predates the adoption of corn into the eastern woodlands, potentially opening the door for its cultural adoption. Steatite Vessel Age and Occurrence in Temperate Eastern North America is an interesting publication which supports this theory. In his paper, James Truncer explores the relationship between ancient soapstone bowls (called steatite vessels) found throughout the eastern woodlands over the past seven thousand years - peaking around 1500 BC - and the quarries where the rock was sourced.
In the above image you can see that the soapstone outcroppings were located throughout the appalachian mountains, but quarries were not found further north than Massachussets.
This map by comparison shows the documented extent of the bowl’s geographic spread. Truncer notes that the northernmost edges are along waterways, while the rest of the range appears to be less geographically bound. This he argues is the result of stone nut-boiling bowls being cherished by the peoples of mixed hardwood range, worth being lugged around despite nomadic lifestyles. The only folks who used them north of the hardwoods lived along the river valleys where nut trees flourish.
Archeologist / Ethnobotanist Natile G Mueller also believes that rich stews were highly characteristic of the eastern woodlands, especially during the height of the Eastern Agriculture Complex.
All of this leads me to this proposition - peoples of the east boiled food in stone bowls. Hardwood leads to hardwood ash, which lead to ash cakes, and the production of lye. Ash-nixtamalization became as central to the traditional foods of eastern north america as it was to meso-america.
The Food of Empire
I believe colonial forces threw away the ash-nixtamlization process as a sign of the ‘uncivil’ ways of living, along with any other non-european cooking techniques. This was to their own harm. Nutrient deficiency disease followed the eating of corn in parts of the southeast where alkaline processing was abandoned. Jerusalem artichokes were consumed undercooked or raw to the great lament of the eater. The indigenous foods were co-opted by the colonists but the cooking techniques to actually eat them did not necessarily follow.
So why do we still have some vestiges of acorn eating - but with the geographically wrong processing techniques? I bet that the tradition lives on because it does work, but mostly for those working acorns which resemble those from southwest - which also has some of the largest blocs of indigenous-held land in the United States. The ground cold-washed techniques are used by the Apache and Navajo nations to this day.
The latin-derived colonial beliefs around the supremacy of grain agriculture labled the peoples who still consumed alternative foods - such as tubers and nuts - uncivilized barbarians. It didn’t matter if these people were in the contiguous landmass of europe, or across the atlantic ocean.
Acorns sit in defiance of that claim. They are rich, nutrituous, and bountiful foods. People who have retained traditional ways of living in despite of colonialism have included acorns in their foodways, often with species and location-specific processing techniques.
How many foods in colonially-dominated lands have been abandoned because of how little they resemble the foods of southern Europe, or how unfamiliar the cooking process is? Maybe bountiful foods too have been abandoned because they cannot be hoarded or used to amass power or money.
Oaks are the keystone species of most of the world’s ecology. Acorns are free. But grain is gold and cereal is power.