Have you ever thought about why we call potatoes “organic”? What makes oats “old-fashioned”?, cereal “whole-grain”?, flour “whole-wheat”?, or strawberries “pesticide-free”? And what about “wild salmon,” “free-range chicken,” “pastured lamb,” or “hormone-free milk”? 

Our food supply has undergone any number of unprecedented changes in the past 100 or so years, and one of them is the precise words we use to describe that food. The basic truth is that words that once meant food staples have been coopted to refer to corresponding inventions of the 20th century. So that means we have had to come up with new ones to describe the things those words once meant.

The technical term for this phenomenon is 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 prior meaning, no longer sufficient by itself. 

Here are some more examples. Consider the rotary phone, the analog watch, black-and-white televisions, cloth diapers, or even biological parents. Now ask yourself this: If retronyms generally reflect a century or so of explosive technological change, what are they doing in our food supply?

The word “wheat” once referred to the entire grain, including its bran, endosperm [starch], and germ. In current common usage, however, “wheat” has evolved to mean the endosperm alone. If you are talking about the entire, intact grain, you must add the preface “whole-grain.” Whole-grain wheat. This explains the need for terms like organic, whole-grain, pastured, and, yes, wild. 

My great-grandfather earned his living as a butcher in New York City. He had no need to describe his beef as “grass fed.” All beef was grass-fed. That’s what people ate. His family, which included his eldest son, my paternal grandfather, ate a diet consisting almost entirely of meats, poultry, fish, eggs, milk, butter, cheese, fruit, vegetables, legumes, nuts, seeds, 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.