Rough Food: The Seasons of Subsistence in Northern Newfoundland

Melvin Baker is an archivist and historian at Memorial University of
Newfoundland, and the co-editor of Dictionary of Newfoundland and
Labrador Biography.

Since the early 1960s, Newfoundland and Labrador have been a veritable
social laboratory for visiting social scientists intent on examining how
local society and cultures have evolved and how they are being affected
by North American cultural and lifestyle influences. Rough Food, the
result of field work conducted between 1980 and 1991 by anthropologist
John Omohundro, continues this tradition. Using the intellectual
framework of the “adaptational perspective of cultural ecology, ...
rural life is seen as constrained and shaped by participating in the
ecosystem, but at the same time, through their culture, Newfoundlanders
define and shape that ecosystem.”

The book is a sensitive yet critical analysis of a way of life that has
survived for the past 75 years in the former logging community of Main
Brook (which boasts about 500 inhabitants) on Newfoundland’s Great
Northern Peninsula. Omohundro shows how on a seasonal basis residents
have lived off the natural resources of the land and sea (through home
gardening, wild-game hunting, and salmon fishing) to sustain themselves,
and the way they have adapted to changing economic circumstances. (His
coverage of the home gardening techniques that have been retained for
the past two centuries among residents is particularly detailed.) The
author also examines how residents have adapted since the 1960s to the
availability of unemployment insurance programs, as well as to game laws
and fishing regulations.

Rough Food provides helpful suggestions on how Main Brookers and
government bureaucrats can strengthen the local economy. Omohundro’s
study demonstrates his mastery of the literature on local society and
culture and makes good use of the abundant research work undergraduate
students at Memorial University have done over the past 25 years in
documenting the histories of their communities. The book is essential
reading for anyone interested in knowing about the informal economy in
rural Newfoundland.