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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

Mr Keys* and his Spanish friends located in the United States dedicated themselves to promoting the benefits of a [Mediterranean] diet that was only strictly followed in Crete and that . . . with the passage of time . . . became transformed into the Mediterranean “style of life.”

In the first half of the twentieth century, what quality did the famous olive oil, the basis of our dietetic panacea, really have?  What quality of red wines from the jug were the ordinary people consuming in that Mediterranean? Kilograms of vegetables, yes, but surrounded by huge hunks of anti-dietetic bread and hefty portions of bacon . . . succored the insatiable stomachs of the Spanish. . . .

Dietary evolution  . . . in the second half of the century diverges absolutely from the Mediterranean diet . . . However such divergence and perhaps the noted increase in the ingestion of proteins, parallel an increase in life expectancy, in height,  . . .  and also . . . in gastronomic enjoyment.  This poses a serious problem for Mr. Keys and his mariachis.

*Ancel Keys, the American nutritionist who studied starvation, publicised cholesterol, developed the K ration, and promoted the Mediterranean diet in the 1950s.

From Líneas maestras de la gastronomía y la culinaria españolas (siglo xx) (Outlines of Spanish Gastronomy and Cooking in the Twentieth Century) by Francisco Abad Alegría and a number of associates. Abad Alegría, when not writing on food history, is Head of the Neurophysiology Clinic of the University Hospital of Zaragoza in Spain.  Here’s an interview with the author (in Spanish).

Title page

Among the other topics he tackles.

• The major cookbooks of the twentieth century, the professions and aims of their authors. This includes an analysis of the relation between the Sección Femenina del Movimiento Nacional and Franquismo.

• Analysis of menus of different social classes at the beginning, middle and end of the century (including home cooking, restaurants and fast food).

• Changes in kitchen technology, particularly the sources of heat, refrigeration, and the pressure cooker.

From Líneas maestras. Title page of A. Simmons. 6th edn. Buenos Aires. 1951

• Changes in foodstuffs, particularly the increase in the use of chicken, frozen foods, and stock cubes (for a separate post).

• Spanish cooking in the last third of the century.

I appreciate the tables, surveys, and numbers.  Invaluable if you want to understand the evolution of Spanish cuisine in the twentieth century, especially if you want to get behind the restaurant hype.

Answer One. Whole grains are hard on the system.

Today we don’t eat many grains or grain dishes. They are just one element in the diet along with fats, sugars, vegetables, fruits, meats and fish. The recommended amount in the US is six ounces for a 2000 calorie a day diet.

In the past people ate huge amounts of grains.  Wheat bread provided 40% of the calories of Americans, almost certainly the most lavishly fed population ever in the history of the world, as late as World War II.  Through most of history, farm laborers and their wives (and that’s what most of us would have been) probably consumed between  70% and 90% of  their calories in the form of bread, porridge, or other grain dishes.

That means between one and two pounds of bread a day, or one to two average loaves of sliced white bread, between three and six times as much as we eat.

One pound of white bread

Except that these were whole grains. Only half the British could afford white bread in 1800.  It was 1900 before the whole population could afford it. And Britain was the earliest European country to go over to white bread.  They were chewing or swallowing their way through one to two pounds of oatmeal, oatcakes, barley bannocks, rye bread, or some mixture of grains and beans every day.

Without a bit of butter, jam, olive oil, or lard to lubricate the grains, chewing and swallowing are laborious.

Worse, digesting such a lot of whole grains is a difficult, energy-consuming business ( we spend about 10% of our energy intake on digesting).  Because of this whole grains  pass through the system quickly.  The laxative effect of a small serving of whole grains is great for us sedentary modern urbanites. For manual workers the laxative effect of a couple of pounds of whole grains was a pain.

Those who could afford them, therefore preferred processed grains with more of the bran removed. It’s even possible that they yielded more calories, perhaps even more nutrition, per unit weight because they were easier to digest.

Answer Two: Our Ancestors Thought Processed Food was More Natural and More Healthful

We tend to think of cooking as messing up.  We want fresh, natural foods that taste of themselves.  We like lightly cooked green beans, rare steaks, and the US government tells us whole grains are better for us than white bread, cakes, and pie crusts.

For most of history, the majority view was the exact opposite.  Raw meat, vegetables, whole grains were just the raw materials.  they had to be processed and cooked to get at their natural, healthful essence.

It’s not a perfect analogy, but eating whole grains was regarded a bit as we might regard eating oysters, shell and all.  We just don’t do that. We process the oyster (shell it) to get at its real briny oysteriness inside. Our ancestors thought about grains the same way.  They had to be processed to get rid of the husks, hulls, and bran and get at the pure white inside part.  The outside parts, like oyster shells, were impossible to chew, caught in the throat, and were thus not natural (in the sense of being the grain itself) and not healthful either.  And of course we still don’t eat the husks either. Or put another way. There is not a sharp distinction between processed and whole grain. It’s a question of where you stop taking off the inedible layers or the germ.

In short, in the past most people thought of processing and cooking as perfecting the rough and contaminated raw materials that were harvested or slaughtered.  Only in the past century have we done a complete about-face, coming to believe that processed grains (or sugar, for example) are neither natural nor healthful.

___________

Thanks to Maria Speck for the question that prompted this post. There are still things about grains that Maria can’t figure out.  A couple of weeks ago she sent me an email.  “What about the ‘white food’ preference of earlier humans?  After years of researching whole grains, that’s the  one question that I can only partially answer to this day,” adding that she didn’t think it could be just status or the power of big corporations.  What’s above is my answer to her question.

The first time I met Maria Speck she was already on a whole grain mission. “They’re delicious,” she said, waving her cup perilously to emphasize her point. “It’s just a lucky coincidence that they’re healthy as well.”

Now several years after our chat in the coffee shop in the cavernous atrium of a New Orleans hotel, she’s published her Ancient Grains for Modern Meals to great acclaim, as you will see if you follow the link.  I’ve been reading it, thoroughly enjoying Maria’s essays about her appealing philosophy of cooking and eating, and thoroughly frustrated that so few whole grains are available in Mexico.  Roll on January and a trip to the States so that I can get my hands on some grains.

Beef head tacos/Tacos de cabeza

Delicious beef head tacos from El Torito (the little bull).

On right.

Macisa.  Solid meat

Trompa.  Muzzle

Cachete. The meaty bits below the eyes and between the ears and mouth.

Ojo. Eye

Lengua. Tongue

Surtida.  A mixture

On left.

Suadero.  Smooth, soft meat from above the udder or penis

Longaniza.  Spicy sausage (of distant Roman origin)

Campechanos. Mixed (not, as it sometimes means, a sweet bread)

Every small town I know in Central Mexico and every neighborhood in Mexico City has someone who specializes in tacos de cabeza.  The meat is chopped finely, a small taco is dipped briefly in hot fat to warm and soften it, and the meat is spooned on).  $4 pesos (30 US cents) a taco except for tongue which comes in at 8 pesos.

The drawing of the bull is standard, though the one below does not have a ring in his nose.

Another torito with chopped onion, salsa roja, limes, and cilantro to add to the taco.

Why hasn’t rising inequality resulted in in the much-predicted oligarchy?  Or to put it as he does: with so many unemployed, and income increasing faster among the affluent, why aren’t people hiring more servants?

Or to put it more personally, would you hire a servant?  Would you go out to work as a servant?

McArdle suggests that neither the rich nor the poor are enthusiastic about these options.

1. The cost is greater.  The poor are wealthier than they used to be. Hard as times may be, they don’t want to work for as little money (even inflation adjusted) as 100 years ago.  The rich don’t want to pay the higher prices. Plus taxes, regulation and liability make servants less appealing to the rich.

2.  The hassle is unappealing.  For the poor, they have more independence in regular service sector jobs.  For the rich (or middle class) servants have to be managed, including training.  And the rich value their privacy more, they don’t want servants in the house. And McArdle does not mention that it is socially taboo to have servants now in the United States.

As someone who feels that living in Mexico, as a rich gringa, I really should employ people, I would add that it’s not just a matter of managing. Servants are part of your life, other very real human beings. They have their own problems, usually much greater than yours. Taking these seriously (their child’s persistent eye infection, their jerk of a husband, the murder of their father) is something no one with any decency would avoid. Equally there’s no denying that it takes time and money.

3.  The alternatives are greater: cleaning services, take out, dry cleaners, and washing machines, for example.

I don’t think Americans will go back to working as or employing servants until things get a lot worse.  And that’s another reason to hope they don’t get worse. I would dearly love to live a servantless life.

Understanding food history, however, means you have to take the presence of servants into account.  This seems a good moment to repost a summing up of several of my posts about servants in the kitchen.

1. Lest We Forget: Servants in Culinary History

Why we tend to forget servants and who servants were

2 Mistress and Servant Go to Cooking Class

How the mistress learned to supervise the cook and how the cook learned to cook

3. Servants who Steal

What did and didn’t count as stealing, a response to readers’ questions

4. Servants: The Missing Link in Culinary Change

How an Indian servant learned to cook Indian food from a cookbook for British housewives

5. Servants and Ethnic Cuisines

The shadowy role of servants in “ethnic” cookbooks designed for an American market

6. Servants and Julia Child

The shadowy role of servants in Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

Now they are honored.  But which farmers?  Here’s the incredulous response from Food, Mommy, from a farming family in Kentucky (I love to follow blogs from working farmers).

Apparently to many of the visitors to the Incredible Food Show in Lexington, Ky. this past weekend [a farmer] is someone who is growing their own food in their backyard or selling at a “Farmer’s” market.

it really shocked me that every time I mentioned to someone that we were there on behalf of farmers to encourage conversation about how food is produced, the instant response was, “Oh, I love that. I visit the Farmer’s Market all the time.” Or, “My sister has a garden. That’s great.”

Food, Mommy is saddened and puzzled that productive large farmers are dismissed as practising industrial agriculture.

The produce farmer in Ohio, or even California, who is large enough to service several grocery stores in our state now has a big “X” on his/her face. Some folks are just convinced that since the farm is not “local” and is producing food on several hundred acres instead of two, that the product is bad, industrial food. At what point does a farmer or farm become “industrial?” And when did “success” become a bad word in agriculture?

I’m with her.  How did farmer become a word only for tiny, unmechanized startups?

Steve Jobs creates cool technological devices, has them produced in China, and is a candidate for sainthood.  American (market or truck) farmers create cool ways of delivering asparagus and lettuce year round, employ people in the United States (Mexicans if Americans don’t want the jobs), and are relegated to the outer circles of  politically unacceptable hell.

Isn’t there an inconsistency here?  How is it possible to wait breathlessly for Steve to improve on the tablets of Moses while shunning farmers who move beyond Cain’s farm and Abel’s pasture.  And even Cain and Abel needed more than the 3000 square feet now often described as a “farm.”  3000 square feet is, after all, only 7/100ths of an acre, neither enough to feed a person nor to make a living, valuable as it may be in teaching children about growing plants.

Edit.  This quote from Russ Parsons of the LA Times puts it well:

Agriculture is a business. Farming without a financial motive is gardening. I use that line a lot when I’m giving talks, and it always gets a laugh. But it’s deadly serious. Not only do farmers have expenses to meet just like any other business, but they also need to be rewarded when they do good work. Any plan that places further demands on farmers without an offsetting profit incentive is doomed to fail.