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)?

My thoughts?  That would need a longer and more reasoned discussion. Let’s just say I am not in general persuaded by Singer.  And I think giving to charity is very, very tricky.  But those are just promissory notes.

And I loved it because Anne is a fan of the food of the British Isles.  While I have become accustomed to just putting on a Mona Lisa smile when well-meaning American friends sympathize about how horribly gastronomically-deprived my young life must have been, I welcome with open arms anyone who can even consider that it might have been otherwise.

Well, Anne is now Dr Anne Bramley.  She has a baby.  And she has a book.  How about that for sheer energy?   She told me when she sent me a copy that I had encouraged her by saying “Three cheers. Not just another paen to the Mediterranean.”  I have no memory whatsoever of the conversation.

But Eat Feed Autumn Winter is an exuberant celebration of the possibilities of winter entertaining.  It’s full of quotes from Shakespeare, suggestions for parties, lists of apples or beers that make it clear that Americans are the beneficiaries of an incredible global system, fantastic photos, and very nice recipes.  If this is what she offered to fellow graduate students, just wait till she hits full stride.

It has given a jump start to my rather hesitant party self. It’s too late for Guy Fawkes and here in Mexico there is no first snowfall–any snowfall is cause for amazement and celebration.  But yes, afternoon tea.  She’s reminded me of clotted cream and the delights of gossip around the tea table.

Onward and upward, Anne!

So it was great to find Farid Zadi’s summary of how Algerian Cuisine has changed in the last thirty or forty years.

In a word, more butter and marge, more chicken breasts, more vanilla, more western-style desserts.

Yes, clearly there was. Muslims conquerers had begun entering India around 1200, 300 plus years before the Mughals. The traveler Al-Biruni describes (more or less accurately) meals at the sultans’ courts. The Sultans of Mandu (central India) ordered the recipes for their exquiste sweets to be recorded in the fifteenth century (Look for a translation by Norah M. Titley, The Ni’matnama Manuscript of the Sultans of Mandu, Routledge-Curson, 2005). The accompanying miniatures offer a stunning glimpse of palace kitchens.

All of which, of simply strengthens the core argument of the article that it useful to think of a belt of Islamic Persian-inspired Cuisine that stretched from India to Spain (and then in the sixteenth century to Mexico). Obviously it varied from place to place and time to time, variations that at the moment we don’t have the historical research to tease out.

That said, I think that there are various clues that suggest that the Mughals made more difference to cuisine in India than earlier Muslim invaders. Here are a few speculations.

1. When the Mughals arrived in India, they did not say “Ah ha, our cuisine is already here.” Instead their diaries are full of complaints about how they miss the foods of their homeland in Central Asia. They go about importing the culinary package: cooks, plants, gardens, irrigation systems etc. What had happened to the cuisine of the Sultans? Had it vanished? Was it so different that the Mughals did not see it as their cuisine?

2. Both are possible. At the end of the fourteenth century, Tamerlane had sacked Delhi and it took a long time to recover. The cuisine of the Sultans in the northern part of India which depended on wealthy courts could well have more or less disappeared from that part of the country. Again the Mongols had conquered Persia in the 13th century. By the 16th century when the Mughals enter India, Persia is again a major power. If only we had a decent history of Persian cuisine (any history in fact) we might find that Persian Cuisine and Persian-influenced Central Asian cuisine differed significantly from the Persian Cuisine of two or three hundred years earlier.

3. The Mughals adopted a different pattern of rule from earlier Muslim invaders. They gave a bigger role to the Hindu population. While the Sultans remained rather remote from their conquered subjects, the Mughals succeeded in making Persian (or its successor language Urdu) the diplomatic language, Persian dress the standard, Persian poetry a preferred taste, and Persian ideas of monarchy melded on to Hindu ones. Why not a much greater influence on food too?

A great series with many of Mexico’s most distinguished food scholars

 Del miércoles 26 de septiembre al 28 de noviembre de 18:00 a 20:00 hrs.

26 de septiembre
Introducción al universo de cultura alimentaria prehispánica
Luis Alberto Vargas

3 de octubre
La milpa
Robert Bye

10 de octubre
La historia de la humanidad es la historia del moler: la importancia de los
metates y de los molcajetes
José Luis Curiel Monteagudo

17 de octubre
Los objetos de cocina y su tecnología en la época prehispánica
Alberto Díaz de Cossio y Adriana Díaz de Cossio

24 de octubre
Plantas comestibles de origen mesoamericano
Edelmira Linares

31 de octubre
Del cacao al chocolate
José Luis Curiel Monteagudo

7 de noviembre
El universo de tamales, un legado milenario
Beatriz Ramírez Woolrich

14 de noviembre
Los animales como alimento
Ricardo Salado

21 de noviembre
Las salsas y los moles
José Luis Curiel Monteagudo

28 de noviembre
Las cocinas indígenas. Las raíces del Mestizaje
Janet Long

Nota: Los ponentes ofrecerán su conferencia en la Casa de las Humanidades y
por videoconferencia se transmitirá cada una de las sesiones a otras
universidades , las cuales se anunciarán en breve cuando confirmen su
enlace.

Costo de recuperación $900.00 público general y $700.00 estudiantes y
profesores. Conferencia única $100.00

Las inscripciones ya están abiertas y se realizan en nuestras instalaciones,
en efectivo o cheque a nombre de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.
No recibimos tarjetas de crédito ni depósitos bancarios.

Las inscripciones ya están abiertas y son en el segundo piso de la Casa de
las Humanidades con
Lourdes Cohen, de 9:00 a 15:00 y de 17:00 a 19:00 horas.

Casa de las Humanidades:

Av. Presidente Carranza 162 (casi  esquina con Tres Cruces),

Coyoacán, México D.F., C.P. 04000,

Teléfonos 55 54  85 13 y 56 58 11 21,

difhum@servidor.unam.mx,

www.cashum.unam.mx 

You get home, cut the elastic round the bunch, and discover a label that says, “Grown in Peru.”