Have you ever thought about why we might call potatoes “organic,” oats “old-fashioned,” cereal “whole-grain,” flour “whole-wheat,” or strawberries “pesticide-free”? What about “wild salmon,” “free-range chicken,” “pastured lamb,” and “hormone-free milk”? Our food supply has undergone any number of unprecedented changes in the past 100 years, and one of them is the words we use to describe that food. Basically since words that once meant food staples now refer to corresponding inventions of the 20th century, we’ve had to come up with new ones to describe the things those words once meant.

The correct term for this phenomenon is a retronym. Retronyms emphasize the original meaning of a word as distinct from its newly evolved meaning. To create a retronym, you add a word or two to the beginning of the original word. The new word-phrase then indicates the single word’s former meaning, once sufficient by itself. Need some examples? Think of rotary phone, analog watch, black-and-white TV, cloth diaper, or biological parent. Now ask yourself this: If retronyms generally reflect a century or so of explosive technological change, what are they doing in our food?

The word “wheat” once referred to the entire grain, including its bran, starch endosperm, and germ. In current common usage, “wheat” has come to mean the endosperm alone. To indicate the entire grain, you must add the preface “whole-grain,” thus explaining the need for terms like organic, whole-grain, pastured, and so on. My great-grandpa, a butcher in New York City, had no need to describe his beef as “grass fed.” All beef was grass-fed. That’s what they ate. He and his son, my grandpa, ate a diet consisting of meats, poultry, fish, eggs, milk, butter, cheese, fruit, vegetables, legumes, nuts and grains. And that’s about it.

My great-grandmothers used these foodstuffs, along with salt, pepper, sugar or honey, oil, and vinegar (made from apples), to make a variety of meals for their families. Their ability to serve a particular dish was limited only by their ability to imagine and then create it with ingredients that were at hand or in season. It’s still a worthy goal.