Rachel Laudan

Out of the thirty thousand types of edible plants thought to exist on Earth, just eleven – corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, cassava, sorghum, millet, beans, barley, rye, and oats – account for 93 percent of all that humans eat, and every one of them was first cultivated by our Neolithic ancestors. Exactly the same is true of husbandry. The animals we raise for food today are eaten not because they are notably delectable or nutritious or a pleasure to be around, but because they were the ones first domesticated in the Stone Age. (Bill Bryson, At Home (Doubleday 2010), 37-38   Courtesy http://delanceyplace.com

I have to admit I don’t find this fact (which Bryson simply takes from scholars) particularly shocking or surprising.  There are good reasons it is so.  Our ancestors spent a million years plus surveying the earth’s edible resources.  They discovered how to detoxify poisonous cassava, turn the bark of a tropical tree into sago, grind hard grains into flour, eat algae from the surface of lakes, and preserve perishable meat and fish for a year or more.  In short, they were champions at finding and preparing almost anything that could be eaten.

Many of these edibles were always marginal. Barrel cactus just grows too slowly to be a major food. Moles and blue flies tasted awful as the Buckland family discovered in the nineteenth century when looking for alternative sources of protein.  Lettuce provides micronutrients but isn’t ever going to be a major source of calories.  It’s just too hard to eat enough.

In short, we do our ancestors a disservice to suggest that they simply stuck with the first things that they ran across in the Neolithic.  Quite the reverse.  They were always looking out for new sources of food, sugar cane being a prime example, coming in around the 2nd century B.C. (and shouldn’t it be on that list above)?  They have always leapt on new foods from old plants (sugar and oil from maize).

That’s not to say that we shouldn’t try to eat as wide a range of plants as possible or that with modern science and technology we couldn’t exploit more plants by breeding and processing (andean tubers for example).  It is to say that to find plants (and animals) that provide palatable calories without huge costs of chewing, digestion, cooking, processing, transport, storage, farming, and environmental impact is the devil of a job.

Candidates anyone? Lot of people would love to know.

Edit:  Continue the rant. 93% of all humans eat? By value, by weight, by calories, by trade?  Hopelessly vague.

And what would happen if you aggregated fruits or vegetables, especially in the advanced world?

Anyway isn’t it a good thing, if we want to have diverse diets, that lots of local plants don’t make it into the top ten or eleven?

How many other bitches do you want with this kind of sloppy rhetoric (which I don’t blame on the amiable Bryson by the way but on the people he is quoting)?

What’s old is new again.  Physicians and philosophers in Ancient Greece and Rome (and the rest of the Ancient World) believed that what you ate and how you digested it affected, or even determined, how smart you were and what your character was.

An interesting article in the Wall Street Journal sums up some recent research.

New research indicates problems in the gut may cause problems in the brain, just as a mental ailment, such as anxiety, can upset the stomach.

via A Gut Check for Many Ailments – WSJ.com.

No, says the Economist, talking about Brazilian (and by extension) many other traditional cuisines.

Ready meals will become more popular: Brazilians still cook most meals from scratch, even though the country has some of the world’s biggest food-processing companies, which export their tins and sachets to America and Europe. Fine dining at home will largely disappear. “For the 4,000 reais a month a really good cook now costs, you could eat out ten times in São Paulo’s fanciest restaurants,” says Ms Leite. Many Brazilian mansions have no hot water in the kitchen, and there are paulistanos who time-share helicopters but do not own a dishwasher. That will change when getting congealed fat off pans stops being someone else’s job.

This from an interesting article on the parallels between the disappearance of servants in Britain (and I would add the US) in the early twentieth century and from Brazil (and I would add Mexico) in the early twenty-first century in The Economist.

Put another way, lots of the laborious “traditional” cuisines created for the well-to-do are going to vanish if the world keeps getting wealthier.

Domestic Servants Waiting for Street Car, Atlanta 1939. Farm Sevice Administration. Courtesy NYPL.

As if in response, the New York Times had an article on 27th December called Southern Farmers Vanquish the Clichés – NYTimes.com.  The subhead for the piece went “A thriving movement of food producers wants to reclaim the agrarian roots of Southern cooking, restore its lost traditions, and redefine American cuisine for a global audience.”

Hmm, still a few clichés I’d say.  But that’s editors for you.  I wish all those enthusiasts trying to raise great farm products the very best of luck. I’d love their pork and their fruit.

The article does, though, raise yet again the whole question of just who is going to do the work.  One of the growers talks about the  great days of Carolina rice.

The flavor of Carolina rice made it world famous; the finest grains were hand-pounded, barrel-aged and scented with bay leaves. From African slaves, white farmers learned to rotate crops of peas with rice, to replenish the soil; they learned that the two foods, eaten together, could sustain life over many months of winter or hardship.

Hand pounded rice?  Certainly there seems to be evidence that hand pounded white rice tastes better. The Thai royal family, who knew good food, insisted that their rice be hand pounded even when rice mills had come to Thailand.

But is anyone seriously thinking of returning to this, except as an experiment?  Surely not.  Not with slave labor, to be sure.    So by whom? And at what price?

Afterward.  The Economist is on a roll about servants. The psychology of service: Why have servants?  talks about servants as necessary to status as they certainly were through much of history. I know of families who could barely pay their bills but felt that if they “let the servant go” they were themselves on the downward path.

And a link to a roundup of my earlier posts on servants and cooking. Will there be a return to servants? (Open the page completely and the links work).