Warning:  I’ve long been a Colonial history buff, and an especially ardent Jeffersonophile.  Now that I live in a region that affords gloriously unfettered access to such felicities as Monticello, you’ll be seeing similar posts to this one with increasing frequency.  Hooray!

It’s Thomas Jefferson’s birthday tomorrow, and to celebrate, we’re going to Monticello!

Actually, I cheated.  I went the other day, in the beautiful fulfillment of a long-held dream.  It was as magnificent and moving as one might imagine.  (I welled up upon entering the foyer.  Is that odd?)

So, let us visit Monticello virtually, focusing on Jefferson’s diet, as there are lessons for the modern-day inhabitants of the country he helped found…

Here are the first six steps.  The next six come tomorrow.

1) Despite loving classicism and symmetry, make vegetables the overwhelming and disproportionate occupants of your plate.

Jefferson was no vegetarian, but he did eat notably less animal protein than his peers.

“I have lived temperately, eating little animal food, and that not as an aliment, so much as a condiment for the vegetables which constitute my principal diet.”  — TJ (emphasis mine)

“He ate a great many vegetables and little meat, contrary to the custom of his countrymen.”  — his granddaughter, Ellen W. Coolidge

“He enjoys his dinner well, taking with meat a large proportion of vegetables.”  — Daniel Webster

2) Keep those vegetables as local and seasonal as possible.

Jefferson had his slaves build a thousand-foot-long garden of astonishing variety and scope. It’s unlikely that he could have afforded to pay full-time workers to maintain such a vast garden, nor the rest of his 5,000 acre plantation (one replete with a smokehouse, dairy and other stations).  His slaves — several hundred of them, save for a few female domestic workers — would drop everything when it came time to harvest the wheat crop.  Knowledge of the true, prohibitive cost of his lifestyle, historians surmise, greatly contributed to Jefferson’s abysmal practice of slavery.

One consequence of that lifestyle: Jefferson, his family, his guests and his slaves all ate incredibly fresh, largely seasonal foods.  Jefferson therefore undoubtedly owed some of his hale health to the backbreaking work of his garden slaves. And those vegetables didn’t just power his fountain of youth; they whetted his scientific passions as well: Jefferson was constantly tinkering with the garden, cultivating vegetables from all over the civilized world in this, his living laboratory.  (He didn’t always succeed: soon I’ll be posting a chat with Monticello’s current winemaker extraordinaire, pictured with me below, on Jefferson’s epic failures at viticulture.)

If you have the time and the room to support a small vegetable garden, a pot of herbs in your kitchen window, or a log of mushrooms (really!) growing in your closet, go for it.  If not, go here to find your closest farmers’ market(s), and make sure to regularly avail yourself of their bounty.  You could also join a farm share, also known as a CSA (a terribly socialist-sounding acronym), wherein you receive a weekly share of super-fresh local produce.  Many farm shares across the country currently are taking applications for the upcoming season.

3) Come wintertime, make use of traditionally preserved foods.

Jefferson did not make much room in his cellars for vegetables, so he purchased vegetables from his slaves out of season.  (One Jefferson scholar told me that archeologists found root cellars at many of the slave cabins at Monticello.  Taken together with Jefferson’s copious financial records, historians concluded that slaves sold Jefferson beans, apples, sweet potatoes and the like well past harvest.)

Jefferson’s slaves were also experts at preserving foods in traditional ways: salting, curing and fermenting were three frequent modalities.  Cucumbers became pickles; cabbage became sauerkraut and milk became yogurt or cheese.  Oh, and apples became hard cider and corn and wheat (no barley here) became beer.

In future posts, I’ll explore how to make (and find) traditionally fermented foods. Booze, too.

4) When eating meat, make sure it comes from animals that have been raised in the manner in which they’ve evolved to live.

Jefferson would not have ever tasted a grain-fed steak.  For millenia — from the time man started domesticating them up until only about 50 years ago — cows and lambs were entirely grass-fed.  Corn and grain and cereals do indeed make a fattier hunk of meat, but those fats are not ideal.  Meats from pastured animals that have been allowed to graze and forage and roam, and that have not been been commercially force-fed or drugged, are leaner, more prevalent in CLAs (conjugated linoleic acids, good fats), Vitamin K and other vitamins.  They also, once you understand how to cook them, taste better, methinks.

5)  Eat fish regularly.

Jefferson adored fish and even built a few fish ponds on the grounds in the hopes of stocking his own.  (It didn’t work.)  He ordered what was sustainable in his day: salted cod and shad often appeared in his grocery receipts.

Today, we have better access to fresh fish, but since more of us are eating it, and since fish stocks are depleting, and since many companies use nets that destroy marine life, it’s important to consume fish in a sustainable manner.  Check the Monterey Bay Aquarium Guide for an quick and easy guide to what fish to buy, cook, catch and order in restaurants.

6) Be picky and discerning, but try new foods

Jefferson would not have gone for fast food or packaged foods on a regular basis.  His overseer, Edmund Bacon, reported that his master “was never a great eater, but what he did eat he wanted to be very choice.” He bought pastured eggs from his slaves.  He bought fine Virginia hams (which he preferred to the hams of Europe) from Meriwether (“Lewis-and-Clark”) Lewis’s mother (and we’re not talking about Jefferson’s daughter here, despite the fact that she named one of her children Meriwether Lewis).

Upon returning from his French sojourn, Jefferson looked abroad for choice ingredients.  He did not, despite legend and lore, “introduce” tomatoes, macaroni, French fries, ice cream and vanilla in the U.S.  But he did avidly publicize those foods by featuring them at his table.  And despite freshness and theft issues and the logistical difficulties of a pre-UPS, pre-automobile, pre-telephone world, he ordered from Europe regular shipments of virgin olive oil, mustard, pasta (which he called maccaroni), raisins, almonds, anchovies, Parmesan cheese and, of course, barrels and barrels of wine.

Eat the best quality of food you can afford.  You’ll end up eating less of it, savoring it, and adding a deep dimension of pleasure to your dining experience.  See my previous post about weight loss for similar tips.

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The next six tips come in the next installation, including a bonus one: Jefferson’s number one rule for remaining fit and vigorous.

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Tagged as: healthy eating, history/culture, Monticello, Thomas Jefferson, weight loss