Charmingly Unromantic: Measuring Progress in Food

One of the things a food historians should do, it seems to me, is to offer readers some assessment or judgement of the foods of the past.

Yes, yes, I know that’s not a particularly popular view,  particularly if you argue that our foods are better in some way or other than earlier foods.

But unless we compare foods of the past to the present we have no way of understanding them.

And unless we ask whether certain practices led to progress or regress of (say) nutritional quality, gastronomic refinement, equitable distribution, ease of preparation, we risk antiquarian irrelevance. (It would be nice if all these features marched along in common but obviously they don’t.)

Let’s just take one aspect of the development of food: mastery of ways of turning raw materials (carcasses and harvests) into the foods that we put in our mouth.  Viewed from the perspective of mastery of processing (and needless to say it’s not the only perspective) food is part of the history of technology.

So I’d urge anyone working on the history of cooking and food processing to take a look at a recent blog post by Will Thomas, like me a historian of science and technology.

Thomas gives a brief, clear introduction to how some important thinkers have tried to understand and measure technological progress.  Along with contemporary figures such as Paul Krugman, Matthew Yglesias, and Larry Summers, he returns to Karl Marx, to the Marxist, crystallographer, and historian J.D.Bernal, and to the Harvard economist, Joseph Schumpeter (coiner of the phrase “creative destruction”).

Here’s Will Thomas’s key point.

The reason, then, that labor productivity became an important means of measuring the benefits of technology is because it is a reasonable way of measuring whether material benefits are indeed accruing to society through the implementation of various new technologies.These economic measures of technological benefit are actually charmingly unromantic.

Source: The Benefits of Technology: Productivity as a Measure | Ether Wave Propaganda

Egyptian wooden figurine of a woman grinding grain. National Archaeological Museum of Greece, photo Tilemahos Efthimiadis, Wikimedia Commons.

Charmingly unromantic, yes, when compared to much of food history that celebrates, deplores, and explores the contribution of food to identity. But crucial because the labor of cooking has been huge, because reducing it has brought relief to those who did it, new opportunities in life, and better food sometimes, not always, for everyone.

On a modest scale, this is what I was trying to do in Cuisine and Empire when I tried to establish roughly what percentage of the working population had to pound and grind grain at different periods in history. For thousands of years, preparing grain was the most laborious of all food preparation techniques, consuming the products was the basis of the diet.  Improvement in labor productivity were one of the most effective ways to achieve social benefits.

Thompson’s Flour Mill in Boston. Wikimedia

Here we see the creative destruction of thousands of water driven grist mills and before that hundreds of thousands of hand grinders.  It’s a charmingly unromantic measure of how food processing has progressed.

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