Category: Indigenous knowledge systems

Surprise! Today is Lammas Day, traditionally marked (at least in some traditions) with a celebration of the first harvest and the baking of Lammas loaves from the newly-milled flour of the year. I was doing a bit of reading around the subject for another blog post somewhere else, and came across the video above, shot in Tenerife. It’s clearly a fine celebration of agricultural biodiversity, and you don’t need much Spanish to understand that, as one blogger put it, “it looked more like an excuse to have a frolic in the hay to us than the most efficient way for threshing wheat”. ((In a spirit of charity, let’s ignore the fact that he doesn’t know what hay is.))

These celebrations are, I think, as much about sustaining today’s communities as celebrating yesterday’s, and it is interesting how fascinating people find them. When was the last time you thought about travelling to have a big knees-up and watch a giant combine rumbling across the prairies?

Do they have the same “first loaf” tradition in Tenerife and elsewhere? Nobody seems to care enough to pint it out. And why does a simple search for Lammas turn up such woo-woo goofiness wherever one looks? People just don’t seem able to accept a harvest festival for what it is. A focus for a campaign!