It’s a conference I’ve been looking forward to.  I have wanted to meet the Social and Cultural Studies of Food group led by Peter Scholliers for some time.  My correspondence with the  organizers, Anneke Geyzen and Olivier de Maret has been stimulating. And there are old friends and new people to meet among the participants and attendees.

My Cornish Pasty in Mexico

I shall tell two stories about a taste I associate with home, the Cornish pasty, awarded a Geographic Indication just about a year ago on 22nd February 2011 by the European Commisssion.  The two stories depend on opposed memories about where home is, how taste is created, and who owns that taste.  As the debate about the Geographic Indication shows, these differences have very real consequences for  economic and cultural policies.

I shall do a trial run for the Food Studies Group at the University of Texas at Austin on Wednesday 1st February. Benedict 1. 126. 6 p.m. Do come if you are interested.

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)?

Published figures suggest that, in Australia, producing wheat and other grains results in:

• at least 25 times more sentient animals being killed per kilogram of useable protein
• more environmental damage, and
• a great deal more animal cruelty than does farming red meat.

How is this possible?

Mike Archer, Professor of Evolution of Earth and Life Systems Research at the University of New South Wales goes on to explain.  Its an interesting perspective on the often stale vegetarian-meat eater debate.

Here’s a canasta (basket).  US $275

Canasta bulging with liquor, coffee, chocolates

Here’s a despensa (larder).

Despensa with cereal, rice, dried milk, and cooking oil

And then there’s this cubeta (bucket) for $11.

That would really make your heart rise on Christmas morning, right?

Using NPD’s National Eating Trends®(NET®) research, which has continually tracked the eating and drinking habits of U.S. consumers for over 30 years, MyPlate days were calculated based on consumers who, on the same day, achieved at least 70 percent of the daily recommended intake for dairy, fruit, grains, proteins and vegetables. For the average consumer, two percent of their days (about 7 days a year) come close to the USDA dietary guidelines; and when a MyPlate day is achieved, consumers are very likely to consume more than three meals a day.

I’ve often wondered about the actual effects of the USDA dietary guidelines on eating habits.  Today I came across this.  NPD is a company that provides consumer and retail information to 1,800 companies in many different branches of business, not just food, around the globe.  I don’t see that they have a particular ax to grind.

I think most people want to eat well. It’s also clear that most people eat well enough to live active lives, avoid deficiency diseases, and survive longer than their ancestors.

Is it really bright policy in these circumstances to set up goals for eating that are so utopian that most well-intentioned people can’t achieve them?

An aside.  The press release from NPD is just about as irritatingly vague as the USDA guidelines themeselves. When it says average, is this the median or the mean?  What is the distribution of eating patterns?  Hard to find out because you have to pay to get more info.

I’ve just been reading E.A. Wrigley‘s Energy and the English Industrial Revolution which I highly recommend if you are interested in the transformation wrought by fossil fuels.

In passing, he gives these figures for the labor involved in growing maize in Mexico ca 1940. A hectare is roughly the area inside an athletic track.

Cultivating a hectare of maize by hand.   1,140 man hours

Cultivating a hectare of maize with an ox. 380 man hours (plus 200 ox hours)

His figures come from Cornell entomologist turned agricultural economist, David Pimentel “Energy Flow in the Food System,” in Pimental and C.W. Hall, eds.,  Food and Energy Resources (London, 1984).

They reminded me that I have always been frustrated that the “food system” so often ignores what happens after the harvest.  So here’s my effort to get an order of magnitude figure of the relative work expended by men and women in putting tortillas on the table prior to oxen, mules, tractors and mills.

In 1970, maize yield per hectare was 1,194 kg ( INEGI, 1999 cited in “El maíz en México,” by Massieu Trigo and Lechuga Montenegro).  Assume that you needed 1 kg of maize per adult per day when it was providing 65% of the calories, allowing for seed corn and wastage in storage.  Assume a family of two adults and four others, say three children and an old person (probably low), with the four others needing 1/2 kg of maize a day.  Multiplying 4 kg by 365 days and dividing by 1,194 you find that a plot of 1.2 hectares was needed.  And that means 1,368 man hours to grow maize for the family.

Now what about turning all that maize into sometime you could put in your mouth.  Assume that it took about 5 hours a day to grind the maize for a family of six.  Add in time to collect firewood, de-grain the maize, haul the water to nixtamalize it, and shape and cook the tortillas.  Say another hour a day for this (a low estimate I think).

That means 2190 woman hours to turn maize into tortillas for the family.

That is to say, processing maize took more time than growing it even prior to animal power. Once the man had the help of an ox or a mule, the woman spent four to five times as much time processing and cooking as the man spent farming.

Given what hard work grinding is, I would guess the woman spent at least four times as much energy processing and cooking as the man spent farming.

These are just back of the envelope calculations. Does anyone have any corrections or modifications to make?  Or any pointers to studies on the  relative energy involved in farming versus processing and cooking?

Slow Food, say its advocates, takes gastronomy to another and higher level. Somewhere between a latter-day religion and a political program, this version of gastronomy will save us from the widely-recognized problems associated with modernity. Slow Food is founded on the purported revelation that pursuing pleasure protects the environment, creates a sustainable agriculture, preserves culinary patrimonies, increases the good, the true and the beautiful, and has the potential to save us from ourselves.

Corby Kummer, one of America’s leading food commentators, tells us that signing of for Slow Food is a win/wine move: by eating well we can do good. Albert Sonnenfeld, professor of French at Columbia University and editor of a distinguished series of books on culinary history, explains that the table is an “altar” that offers “the template for the preservation of human rights and the environment.” Alice Waters, revered founder of the restaurant Chez Panisse, say that Slow Food teaches us “compassion, beauty, community, and sensuality.” Mario Batali, of the famed Babbo restaurant in New York, praises it as “far more spiritual, nay religious, than any club (or religion, for that matter) I have been asked to join.”

And Carlo Petrini, the entrepreneur who founded Slow Food and whose book under review here lays out the history and agenda of the organization, leads the chorus. “Faced with the excesses of modernization, we are not trying to change the world anymore, just to save it.”

In the half-dozen years since I published this excerpt as part of an essay review of Petrini’s Slow Food a lot of the shine has gone off the movement.  In recent days, though, I have had several requests for a pdf of my review “Slow Food: The French Terroir Strategy, and Culinary Modernism,” so here it is.

And here is the full reference. Rachel Laudan. “Slow Food: The French Terroir Strategy, and Culinary Modernism.  An Essay Review of Carlos Petrini, trans. William McCuaig.”  Slow Food: The Case for Taste (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).  Food Culture and Society: An International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research, 7. 2. (2004), 133-144.

“Difficulty between the United States and Great Britain about Wild Pigs.”

How can anyone not love a title like that? It’s from the New York Times, May 23, 1854, p. 4. The story explains that American whalemen had killed a few wild pigs on one of the Falkland Islands and that England and America were at a diplomatic breaking point over the incident.

This from a nice blog post over at The Historical Society by Heather Cox Richardson.  It’s framed as a plea for maritime history but it’s equally relevant to food history.  She continues.

The crisis over the pigs illuminates an ongoing contest between the claims of landholders and fishermen to resources, a contest that stretched throughout the nineteenth century and that was key both to the construction of nations and to their interactions with other countries.

If you’ve ever wondered how all those eighteenth and nineteenth century navigators and whalers were able to keep going in the deep oceans, particularly the south Atlantic and the Pacific, one of the keys is that they took with them European domestic animals, dropping them off whenever they made landfall.  Here’s my description in The Food of Paradise: Exploring Hawaii’s Culinary Heritage of the process.  Pigs had been brought to Hawaii centuries before by the orginal settlers. Cattle, horses, sheep and goats had not.

Taking a steer ( Hereford not longhorn) out to ship to be sent to Honolulu for slaughter, 1930. Courtesy Hawaii State Archives

In 1793, Captain George Vancouver sailed H.M.S Discovery into Kawaihae harbor on the Big Island and altered forever the diet of the Hawaiians, for with him he brought six cows, a bull, four ewes, and two rams. It was a tense time. Just 14 years earlier, Vancouver had been with Captain Cook when he was clubbed to death under the cliffs at Kealakekua Bay a few miles to the south. . .

The animals were in sorry shape, having had little water for days and no green forage for weeks as the little vessel plowed its way across the vast Pacific Ocean.   . . . Kamehameha [the chief who using British firearms had captured all the islands except Kauai] oversaw landing the animals. Vanouver’s account does not elaborate, but hoisting cattle, ewes and rams, even in weakened condition, into canoes lined with paddlers must have been quite a game.  The cattle, after all, were longhorns.

Vancouver made Kamehameha promise that the animals woud be taboo (except for the king’s table) for a decade so that they could multiply. He made him promise that women as well as men would then be able to eat the meat as long as it was not from the same animal (a big concession as women were subject to a fierce set of taboos and most appealing food was off limits).

The animals multiplied.

Mexican cowboys (paniolos from espanoles) and their horses  were imported to manage them from California, then still part of Mexico. Native Hawaiians also became fine cowboys.  Hawaiian cowboys compete on equal or more than equal terms with mainland cowboys in rodeos.

On horseback in front of Hawaii's Iolani Palace, 1980s. Rachel Laudan

Whalers over-wintered in the islands. Beef appealed more than fish and taro.

The biggest cattle ranch in the US in the twentieth century was on the Big Island of Hawaii, founded by one of those  New England whalers, John Parker Palmer, who jumped ship in the islands in 1809 at the age of 19.

Winching steer into ship to be sent to Honolulu for slaughter, 1930s. Courtesy Hawaii State Archives

Hawaiians became aficionados of cecina (jerky), called pipikaula (pipi apparently their pronunciation of beef). Chinese and Japanese indentured laborers who stayed in the islands became enthusiastic beef eaters, enjoying Chinese oxtail soup and Japanese sukiyaki (and I believe in the latter case encouraging its popularity in Japan via back migration).

In short, I concur with Heather Cox Richardson about the importance of maritime history.  And there’s always a food story to accompany it.

The succulent [literally juicy from the Latin succus] food of the West, rich and full of flavour, is eaten with a closed mouth, while appreciative lips, palate, and tongue relieve the teeth from hard labour.

But the Indian peasant’s dry thick cake of millet or wheaten meal must be steadily chewed, completely milled and masticated before it can be swallowed, and it is only when it is touched with ghi or dipped in stewed vegetables or pulse that the lips close on a morsel with any semblance of gourmandise. 

Beast and Man in India, first published in 1891, 137.

I think it is easy to forget how much chewing had to be done with traditional whole meal dishes and, if they were baked, how dry they were. Most societies have something to help it down, in this case ghee, or to soften it, soup in the case of French peasant breads.  And what Kipling does not mention is that this unpalatability was true of many European breads until pretty shortly before he wrote.  Sheila Hamilton (thanks) sent along this comment about The Long Affray, a history of poaching in Britain by Harry Hopkins.

It includes this note on the diet in Berkshire in 1795 (the information was gathered by a local vicar who was concerned about the poverty of his parishioners):

“Bread and potatoes – ‘tatters and shake’ (ie salt) – was now the basic diet, and in some areas that bread was heavy barley bread, bannocks, baked over the fire. Meat, butter and cheese, which the labourer had enjoyed earlier in the century, before he had been banished from the farmer’s board, had all but disappeared. Even milk could be hard to come by now that farmers were sending it in bulk into the towns. Tea – an extravagance much reprobated by the labourers’ mentors- was all too often boiling water poured on burned bread crusts.”

For a perspective on maize in South Africa here is an extract from White Food by the interesting blogger Tangerine and Cinnamon.  Worth clicking on the link to read the whole thing.

A recent article published by the magnificent Mail and Guardian explores South Africa’s taste for whiter, finer maize meal:

“In the poorest communities a bag of maize meal is often the only way of satisfying a family’s hunger, and the cost factor plays a role too. An 80kg bag of maize meal is about R400: on a 500g portion a person a day, an extended family of 10 people would consume an 80kg bag in about 16 days. The daily total consumption of maize meal in South Africa is about 10 000 tonnes.

But these maize-meal consumers demand a product that is white – stripped of roughage and nutrients – and manufacturers have remodelled their businesses to serve this demand.

South Africa’s best-selling brand of maize meal is White Star, produced by Pioneer Foods. White Star is whiter and finer than other brands. Premier Foods and Tiger Brands, the country’s other two big producers of maize meal, have also invested in technology which produces this whiter maize meal.”

For me the bottom line is this.

Either you assume that those who lived largely on grains were deluded or driven by an irrational desire for status to prefer white.  This seems an act of enormous condescension since neither I nor, I suspect, the readers of this blog have ever lived largely on grains.

Or you assume that they had good reasons.

Edit.  I did not intend to suggest that Tangerine and Cinnamon was being condescending.  Apologies to her for phrasing the last three sentences poorly.   I have now changed the wording.

Quick and dirty.  Classifications are made for human purposes.  All classifications are made up. By us. For us. All are cultural. And all are fuzzy around the edges.  But that doesn’t mean they are not useful.

And it does not mean that the Linnean classification is primary.  Any object can be classified in various different ways.  Chalk for example can be classified as the chemical calcium carbonate, the geological formation in the upper Cretaceous, or the writing instrument for blackboards.  All capture some important aspect of chalk.  All are useful for different purposes.

Linnean categories are not the be-all and end-all for food.  For food, we want classifications that divide things up by  how they behave in the kitchen (culinary classifications). Or by how they taste (gastronomic classifications). Or by how they affect our bodies (nutritional classifications).

These do not map on to biological families.

Oils have common culinary properties. They come from lots of different biological families: cabbages, palms, legumes and so on.  Same is true of starches.

Cane sugar and beet sugar have the same culinary, gastronomic and nutritional properties.  They come from different biological families.

Proteins have common nutritional properties.  They come from lots of different biological families: fish, bovines, legumes and so on.

Every society has had several overlapping classifications for food.  In terms of the long history of nutritional classifications,  vegetables usually did not matter much. They did not supply much energy (what we would call calories) and since that was the major concern,  they were thus usually supplementary to the important foods: the meats, starches and oils that sustained a hard day’s labor. They ranged from delicious luxuries or the last resort for the poor.

Then in the early twentieth century vitamins were discovered. Protective foods, that is anything with lots of vitamins and minerals, zoomed in importance (while calories became all too easy to get).  Hence the glorification of vegetables. And probably rightly.   This is why vegetables dominate the latest food advice from the USDA.

So vegetables. Made up. Yes. Of course.  Not a biological category. No, of course not.

So the question for school lunch legislators and all the others who promote eating more vegetables should be: What are you trying to promote by putting things in the vegetable category?

If it is vitamins (and perhaps fibre), well then anything with lots of vitamins (including pills) counts as a vegetable. Perhaps including pizza.

Don’t get me wrong.  American school lunches sound pretty grim.  But invoking the lack of a Linnean classificatory basis to critique them just misses the point completely.