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.

Primitive tools do not need to imply primitive results.  exquisitely carved objects and elegant painting by societies tens of thousands of years before the invention of grain agriculture attest to the essentially unlimited possibilities for bread making in the context of the earliest gatherers of grains.

This from William Rubel’s new little book, Bread: A Global History.  Hear, hear.  From an aficionado of the simple grindstone, I can attest that nothing surpasses tortillas from that simple tool.  I wouldn’t want to prepare the dough that way except as an experiment, nor would I wish it on anyone else.  That doesn’t mean I can’t recognize the quality.  And the same quality, I suspect, could be achieved grinding wheat and other bread grains.

Bread has yet to have a general historian, excellent as certain histories of French or British baking are.  William knows his stuff and this short book is a trial run for a much bigger book that I am eagerly awaiting.  Both books deal with raised breads, not flat breads, and global is a bit of an overstatement on the publisher’s part.  Don’t let that deter you.  This is well worth reading.

It covers the early history of bread to the end of the Roman Empire, bread as a marker of status, bread and fashion, a tour of the contemporary breads of six countries, and a limited but eye-opening selection of historical bread recipes. One of these is the bread fed to privileged horses in seventeenth-century England.  As he says

Even in a society more used than ours to the idea of a fixed social hierarchy, it must have felt terrible to be able to see by the bread on one’s table that one’s food wasn’t worth the trouble the master put into that of his horse.

You might also look up William’s earlier book, The Magic of Fire. It’s a lyrical and practical introduction to the variety and sophistication of hearth cookery.

Edit. Here’s a favorable review of William’s book by Steven Kaplan of Cornell, one of the the experts on both contemporary bread and on the history of bread.   Thanks to Dan Strehl for the link.

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.

Mexican peasant walking to town with a donkeyload of firewood for sale

The New York Times a couple of days ago had a long and well researched article on the slowing of Mexican migration to the United States. Yeah.

Mexican is getting wealthier.  In fact Mexico is now 80% urban, something that has a lot to do with this.  Peasants eking out a living on the land are disappearing. Instead they are taking jobs in towns. Just this morning the newspaper Reforma reported that in the last eighteen months, Mazda, Volkswagen, Pirelli, and Proctor and Gamble are opening huge new plants in Guanajuato, the state in the center of the country where I used to live.

Many might think this sad.  But life as a peasant is not a bundle of fun.

So I thought it might be worth linking to earlier blog posts about Mexican peasants, maize, farming, and migration to the United States.

Why it’s not worthwhile for Mexican peasants to go north.

How Mexican peasants are escaping rural poverty.

Why Mexican peasants don’t want to grow maize.

Mexico’s maize production and importation (2008).

How Mexican peasants came to be growing maize in the twentieth century.

Of course, the great unknown in all this is how much drug money is contributing to prosperity.

Wikipedia has a short and clear article on agribusiness, contrasting two ways in which it is used. The first is neutral.

Within the agriculture industry, agribusiness is widely used simply as a convenient portmanteau of agriculture and business, referring to the range of activities and disciplines encompassed by modern food production.

The second is not.

Among critics of large-scale, industrialized, vertically integrated food production, the term agribusiness is used negatively, synonymous with corporate farming. As such, it is often contrasted with smaller family-owned farms.

Whether you use the neutral or the negative meaning of agribusiness, the fact is that British farming has been agribusiness for a long time, at least since the enclosures of the eighteenth century and in many cases back beyond that.

1% of the population owned 80% of British land in 1900, according to the fine historian Chris Bayly, I don’t know the current figures but my strong suspicion is that this hasn’t changed much. Maybe you could find out here.

This 1% did not actually farm, of course, nor did they manage their farms.  Their “home farm” of perhaps a thousand acres was run by a salaried manager and used for keeping their horses, developing specialty breeds, and providing nice vistas to be seen from their country house.

The estate agent managed the rest of the estate. His job was to collect rents that maintained the owner’s lifestyle. These estate agents played a key role in the industrial revolution which was largely funded (as it had to be) by the large landowners. Men like Thomas Davis, agent to the Marquess of Bath at Longleat, was up to his neck in schemes to find exploitable mineral resources (coal), build canals, put in hydraulic schemes  (water meadows, land drainage) to improve land productivity, use steam engines for agricultural tasks, etc etc.

The large tenant farmers worked large farms (1000 acres or more) and (until after World War II) employed large numbers of farm workers. I know a bit about this because my father’s family have been tenants on the Pembroke estate for a hundred years (perhaps longer but things get murky around World War I). They negotiated their leases every five, ten or twenty years with the estate agent.  Provided they paid their rent, these farmers chose how they farmed.  And need I say that the farming was a business.

Now I am quite happy to see farming as a business.  I am quite happy to see corporations running farms (though not so happy when these are royal or aristocratic corporations) if it ensures the long term commitment necessary to good land management.

But what of all those who take a dim view of agribusiness, who want to get rid of corporations, who want small farms farmed by the owner, who see this as a way to social justice, who proudly call lots of one acre a farm, who want artisanal foodstuffs?

Surely they cannot contemplate the long tradition of agribusiness in Britain with equanimity? It’s quite at odds with the small family farm tradition (real or not) so cherished in American political thought. And surely they should be wary of one of the largest magnates of all, Prince Charles.

Prince Charles inherited 135,000 acres, much of it excellent land in the south and west of England.   His manager farms the Home Farm, the organic bit, 1000 acres where he in time-honored tradition raises rare breeds.

His tenants are not required to farm organically, without doubt use as much of the latest agricultural technology as they can afford, and accept farm subsidies. His estate agent Smiths Gore I presume collect the rents and handle the accounts.

Like corporate agribusiness, Prince Charles has integrated vertically by producing a line of food products,  Duchy Products. These he sells not in farmers’ markets but through the large grocery chain, Waitrose. (True, they pay some royalties  into his charity, but that is in trouble at the moment, having to bail out some land investments made by the Prince).  He advertises these industrially-produced foodstuffs by appeal to tradition (a technique pioneered by big wine in late nineteenth-century France).

In 2008, rents from tenant farmers (and presumably from sources such as The Oval cricket ground and holiday rentals in the Scilly Isles) provided him and his family with an income of $26.4 million.

So when I read rave reviews of Prince Charles at the Future of Food conference going on in Washington, D.C., I have to wonder.

Is Prince Charles’ decision to farm 1/135th of his land organically really so compelling?  How can his admirers, most of whom I suspect, distrust agribusiness (and by any standards, Charles’ landholdings have more in common with large corporate landholdings than small family farms), overlook the scale of his operation?

Because of a sneaking deference to royalty?  Because he claims as his own, standard British agricultural practice, such as dung spreading?

Whatever the reason, I find the deference amazing. Prince Charles is, in my view, agribusiness personified.

Prince Charles–Not Your Typical Radical – National Geographic Magazine.  Worth reading.

Much more often there is borrowing of bits and pieces. Could it not be argued that much of contemporary “fusion” cuisine actually involves only the borrowing of ingredients.  Cooks use, say, Asian spices or condiments in dishes that remain Western in their basic structure.

And going back in history, would it not clarify discussions of events such as the Columbian exchange to distinguish exchange of cuisine (of which there was very little at least in the west-east direction), of technique (ditto), and of ingredients, that is stored or preserved or processed raw materials (ditto) and raw materials, that is plants and animals (of which there was a fair bit)?  I’ve blogged about this before here and here.

Languages die out.  The world is littered with dead languages, most of which are unknown to us.  Cuisines die out.  We no longer have the cuisine of Shang China, nor of the Celts, nor of the British Raj, nor of the Britain I grew up in.  (Hence my cynicism about the possibility of preserving cuisines).

Why?  All sorts of reasons in the case of language. Sometimes languages or driven underground by conquerors; sometimes, as is happening now and doubtless happened in the past, the speakers of smaller languages decline in numbers until the language is no longer viable; sometimes the social circumstances that supported them change; and sometimes over time they change so much that there is no alternative but to speak of a new language.

The general reckoning among linguists seems to be that in about a thousand years a given language changes so much that its earlier manifestation is incomprehensible to modern speakers, the history of English being an example familiar to most of us here.  Most of us get the general drift of Shakespeare without translation, can make a stab at Chaucer, and are at a complete loss with Beowulf.

Do cuisines change so much as to be unrecognizable in the same way?  It would appear so. The Greek and Roman cuisines of the ancient world had successors but these are so different that they warrant being called different languages.

Some words appear to be more resistant to change than others, such as words for the more striking parts of the body (finger), the lower numerals, close relatives (mother, father), basic natural features (sun, moon), and basic necessities (bread).[i]

Are there elements in cuisine that are similarly resistant?  Does bread in the cuisines of Europe play this role or rice in the cuisines of much of Asia.  Can we go beyond the basic staple?  Is the flavor profile, for example, very stable?

How are new languages created? Sometimes by fission from their parent languages (the Romance languages from Latin, for example).  Sometimes by fusion with different languages (perhaps Hinglish in India today). Rarely do conscious attempts to create a new language succeed (Esperanto).

What are examples of cuisines created by fission?  Perhaps Spanish cuisine of the sixteenth century was created by splitting off from earlier Roman Cuisine (though it’s not quite so simple because there was also fusion with Celtic and Germanic cuisines). Certainly American Cuisine was created by fission from British (again with fusion with German, Dutch, Italian, etc).

What are example of cuisines created by fusion? Perhaps Mexican, though I tend to think of Mexico as having two tiers of cuisine rather than a fusion cuisine.

Can totally new cuisines be created and gain currency?  I think perhaps the new European cuisine of the sixteenth century, particularly as it developed in France, fits this category.  Perhaps also Buddhist Cuisines though I’d put Christian and Islamic more firmly in the fusion category.

__________________

[i] David W. Anthony,  The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 40.

This draws on a paper that I gave at the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery in 2009 and subsequently published in the Proceedings, Food and Language.  You can find the earlier entries on inventorying cuisines, on mutual unintelligibility,  on families and sub-families of cuisine, on  being bi-cuisinal, and on the geographic expansion and contraction of cuisines.

For the second time this year, the first being in Panamá Gastronómica, I’ve had the feeling of being in a universe parallel to the English-speaking world.  Great events, well-attended (half a million in the “FEEEL” as the Feria del Libro is pronounced in English), discussing the same themes as the English-speaking world.

But influence, copying, no I don’t think so. Not even any reference whatever to the English-speaking world.  Globalization works in mysterious ways and the American belief that it’s all top down is just over-simple.

So something of the FIL, next largest book fair in the world after Frankfurt, the 10,000 lb gorilla (but also not in the US you will note).

So well-organized, little notes in the hotel door every morning about where we had to be and when and how.  And for the truly acquisitive, these carts.

So many presentations, between 3 and 10 every hour from 10 am to 10 pm for an entire week, every one spot on time.  All the best known historians, poets, novelists, etc writing in Spanish, highbrow and popular.

So many books–legal and medical, self help and esoteric, poetry and novels, academic and for children.  A huge convention hall with shelves reaching to the ceiling.

So many requests for an autograph from students who had to show they had been to the FIL.  My fame?  Not for a minute.  My stature, skin color, and comportment. You bet.  Finally in the sea of Spanish speakers a gringa they could nail for an “international” comment.

So many intriguing books on food history from Castilla y León, the invited Spanish guests, and from Brazil (dende, Brazilian influence on Portuguese cooking)

So many opportunities to get a glimpse into other places, books from the Dominican Republic, Cuba (Che Guevara again and again), Columbia, Costa Rica, you name the Spanish-speaking country, they were there.

So evocative, the wine that Columbus first successfully landed in the New World on his third voyage.  (No, I don’t think it tastes the same but even so when sipped as poets read the poems about the Castillian landscape . . . the mind wanders across the oceans).

And so informative (kidding) but actually yes, our panel, talking about all kinds of themes in the history of food in the world of Spanish speakers.

If this is a bit hard to see, I wanted to leave the photos and back drop. Left to right. Laura Caraza, author of many Mexican cookbooks and columns including those in Mexico Desconocido, the magnificent glossy about Mexico that taught me so much when I first came to the country: Jiapsy Arias González, who is expert in convent food and the indigenous food of the Yaquis in particular and teaches at the University of Mexico City;  José Luis Curiel, food engineer, historian, and gastronome; Julio Valles the moderator, former engineer, gastronome and author of many food histories of sixteenth-century Spain; me; and Rosario Olivas, the food historian of Peru.

My goodness, did I enjoy this.

One way of distinguishing dialects from languages  is to ask whether they are mutually unintelligible.  To most English speakers, British English (and its regional dialects), American English, Australian English and Indian English are mutually intelligible.  French and Hindi are not.

Can cuisines be mutually unintelligible?

I think so. I remember a Mexican meal served at the Oxford Symposium a decade or more ago, when Mexican cuisine was even less known outside Mexico than it now is.*   It included maize tortillas. The participants found them baffling. How did you hold tortillas?  Did you eat them before the meal or with the meal? And how did you judge whether they were good or bad? One of the most diverse, inquisitive, and knowledgeable groups of diners you could find anywhere was completely baffled by Mexican Cuisine, at least by the part of it that you might call the “maize cuisine.” Much the same went for the uchepos, the huazontles rellenos de queso and so on.  Harlan Walker, who edited the Symposium volume, described is as “one of the most extraordinary culinary experiences of my life.”

When a group of cooks and diners does not recognize the ingredients, nor understand the rules for combining them, nor have any idea of the context in which certain dishes would be used, nor of the meaning to be attached to them, then he or she does not understand the cuisine.  It is a different cuisine.

Today we pride ourselves on our cosmopolitan knowledge of food.  But how many of us would really know what to serve at breakfast in Japan or for a wedding in Peru or for the main meal in Ghana?

* Lourdes Nichols who pioneered Mexican cooking in England supplied the tortillas.  Bruce Kraig, historian, and food history entrepreneur,  set up the event.   Dudley Nieto catered it.  I was sitting with some of the most knowledgeable food people you could imagine.  On my left was Helen Saberi, the interpreter of Afghan food.  On my right was Anissa Helou, contemplating moving from art to food, a move she accomplished with total aplomb.

Not exactly revolutionary you might think.  Well lots do.  I am just relishing the thought of responding to the flood of hostile comments.  I love controversy.

Nor is it a new idea of mine. Here’s a link to the original article A Plea for Culinary Modernism: Why We should Love Fast, New, Processed Food which appeared nine years ago!

Back story.  Darra Goldstein asked me to write something for the first issue of Gastronomica, the food journal for grownups that was then just a gleam in her eye.  And she included it in the lovely volume, The Gastronomica Reader published by the University of California Press which celebrated 10 years of the journal.  And from there it went to Utne Reader. And from there to the NYT.

That’s called legs.

Edit.

For those of you coming from SF Weekly Blogs, welcome. I hope you have a moment to look at the original article.  And perhaps even to browse the blog.

For those who would like to see the posts there, here’s the link to John Birdsall’s article, “We Evolved to Eat Processed Food. No, Really.” No really indeed. Rachel

End edit.