Feast of the Seven Fishes

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December 16, 2025

The Christmas Eve tradition in my family stems from the canon law of meatless meals on Fridays and on the eve of high holidays.

Over the years in the U.S., for Italian-Americans, this custom developed into a celebration called the Feast of the Seven Fishes.

My mother lives with me. She is 90 years old, of Italian descent, strong-willed, and excellent company. We “eat local”. In the Mediterranean, local includes copious quantities of fish. Out here on a farm in the Shenandoah Valley, local foods tend to be predominantly land dwellers.

Nonetheless, we rise to the challenge, and celebrate we shall. Here are the fishes we’ve decided to use, and their non-local (but sustainable) sources:

First Course -

Endive leaf topped with a slice of hard-boiled egg and a single anchovy, dressed with olive oil and vinegar.
(Anchovies from Vital Choice Seafoods)

Second Course -

Pickled herring on a slice of potato, topped with sour cream and onion (Herring from VitaFoods)

Third Course -

Oyster stew made with butter and fresh cream (Oysters from Circle C Oyster Ranch -Chesapeake Bay)

Fourth Course -

Sautéed shrimp with garlic butter and lemon (Shrimp from Vital Choice Seafood)

Fifth Course -

Poached salmon on a bed of kale, dressed with a chutney of ground pecans, chopped olives, minced dried fruits (dates, pineapple, figs), dressed with balsamic vinegar (Salmon from Wild Salmon Co.)

Sixth Course -

Fish and sauce (black cod with a thin tomato sauce, onion, garlic, basil, and oregano) (Black Cod from Wild Salmon Co.)

Seventh Course -

Sautéed scallops with garlic, liquid aminos, coconut oil, butter, and rhubarb sauce. (Scallops from Vital Choice Seafood)

Side dishes will be breaded eggplant, sweet potato gnocchi, and a homemade panettone for dessert round out the meal.

While shopping for ingredients for our menu, I enjoy seeing the diversity of vendors at my local farmers' market.

A family from Ukraine sells piroshki. A Venezuelan vendor offers arepas. These are just two examples of the variety of ethnic foods available there.

Sampling these new-to-me foods enriches my experience of the holidays. It reminds me that there are many ways to celebrate this glorious season.

My siblings and I grew up among many, many cousins. Our celebrations were HUGE, full of family activity, filled with devastatingly irresistible aromas wafting from the kitchen, included a prominent display of the Christmas Nativity and a pine tree (emitting a fragrance of its own) trimmed with decorations that I have to this very day, all wrapped up with love that spanned three generations.

Now it’s just Mom and me and a couple of close friends, gathering to bring meaning to our favorite of holidays. It is a calmer, quieter time of sharing these memories at the dining room table, and talking over old times on the phone with loved ones far away.

On Christmas day we return to the land with beef bresaola (traditionally made with lean cuts like eye of round to break the fast.

I wish you a blessed holiday, whatever your tradition

Susan

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Duplication

"How does this scale?" Whenever someone asks me that question, the underlying assumption is that production volume requires consolidation, concentration, and centralization. In other words, the only way to feed the world is to make bigger chicken houses in one place, bigger canneries in one place, bigger machines and bigger warehouses. I remember well being vilified by a Smithsonian historian at a food conference where he and I were both on a panel. When I dared to suggest bigger is not always better, he interrupted me and ranted for 10 minutes on why bigger is always better. "A bigger fort was always bigger than a smaller one. A bigger gun was always better than a smaller one." He went on and on about how historical accuracy and authenticity demands addiction to bigger. But biology is not forts and guns. It's not mechanical. Critters have an optimal size. As animal behaviorist guru Temple Grandin says, living things demand energy for three things: reproduction, growth, and immunological function. All three must be in balance. When anyone selects for only one of those traits, the other two suffer. That's why American dairy cows only have two lactations on average. When they milk as heavily as our one-trait genetic selection asks, they don't breed and have all sorts of sickness problems. Nature does not scale through concentration; it scales with duplication. If nature wants more oak, it doesn't make one big tree; it makes acorns. If nature wants more milk, it doesn't make a great big cow; it makes calves. If nature wants more tomatoes, it doesn't make a monster tomato plant; it makes a bunch of seeds that make more tomato plants. Nature scales with duplication. At Polyface, rather than having a chicken house big enough for 15,000 chickens, we have 170 little 120 square foot portable shelters holding 75 birds apiece and giving us cumulative capacity for 15,000. But they're spread out in modules, duplicated, to give us the production volume. We run pigs in groupings of 35-50. A Smithfield confinement facility might house 5,000 hogs in a bigger-than-football-field-sized facility. The stench is unbearable. By spreading these pigs out across the landscape in small groups we get the same scale without any of the ecological, immunological, or animal welfare dysfunction. This could even be said of farming in general. People see the massive corn, soybean, and alfalfa farms in the mid-west and wonder how we would possibly survive without those massive, single-species outfits. The fact is they aren't even producing food. Half the soybeans are exported to other countries; those markets are drying up rapidly with competition from other countries like Uruguay, Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil. Nearly half the corn goes to taxpayer-subsidized ethanol. The alfalfa goes to Japan and Saudi Arabia to feed racehorses. By and large, all that production isn't even food. The fact is we don't need to produce all those commodities and even if we needed it all for food, we could do it in a more spread out, diversified platform. America has 35 million acres in lawns. We have 36 million acres housing and feeding recreational horses. All of this could be turned into duplicative production, like acorns for oak trees. My point is this: scale as commonly understood in modern American lexicon is completely anti-ecological. The real mechanism for scale is duplication. A more democratized production creating volume through multiplicative nodes is the way nature works. This is why farms like Polyface, with spread out infrastructure in repeated modules offers multiple advantages. Polyface can't feed the world by itself, and we have no desire to build an empire trying to. But thousands of Polyfaces can feed the world. Indeed, they're the only way to do it for the next 500 years. This is one reason why we invest heavily in germinating new young farmers. Our stewardship and apprenticeship programs are all about this kind of duplication. In fact, Aug. 21-22 we're hosting the Stockman Grass Farmer's Launching Young Farmers conference where we'll feature 8 of our graduates who were 20 years old, no money, no land, and at 40 are full-time farming without government subsidies. If you ever dreamed of bootstrapping a farming career, you should come. We still have room. It will be the most profound agricultural conference in America this year. Information is on our website on the education tab. For most of you, the fact that you keep us in business to duplicate production and the farmers who will carry these principles forward, indicates your heart investing in an authentic food and farming model. Thank you for making it all possible.

Feast of the Seven Fishes

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