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.

Since most of the canned and bottled foodstuffs they carry come from the Middle East, I turned this over to check out exactly where.  Hmm.  The address was Cortazar, a small town in the south of the state of Guanajuato in central Mexico where I lived until recently.

The web is a wonderful thing and it took about one minute to google Dipasa.  Here’s their own blurb.

With over 30 years of experience Dipasa is considered the world’s most reliable processor and supplier of Sesame Seed and it’s derivates like Hulled sesame seed, sesame oil, sesame flour, tahini and sesame candy.

The company is Mexican, started about thirty years ago.  I imagine they originally supplied the local market which uses sesame seeds in a variety of ways, not least to sprinkle on top of Mexico’s signature dish, mole. Now it exports all the products above to 54 countries including Lebanon, Syria and Jordan.

And darn, why didn’t I learn about this when I was still close enough to go visit?  Leaving aside tahini, I want to know how much sesame oil in China and Japan, how many of those seeds on the hamburger buns world wide come from Dipasa.

Samuel Palmer, Gleaning for Wheat under a Harvest Moon, 1833 from Feasts and Festivals

Sometimes things just come together.  Last week I spent a good bit of time at a seminar on Nutritional Anthropology and more writing about how in nineteenth-century Europe, famines ceased to be a regular part of life, as well as going through Frank Trentmann’s fine book Free Trade Nation on why free trade roused as much moral fervor  in nineteenth-century Britain as anti-corporate food politics does in twenty-first century America. And then this morning three blog posts popped up on my feeder, very different posts, but all circling round hunger and trade.

But first, the hungry season.  Most of us aren’t much used to hunger, real gnawing hunger, that is, and we´re not much used to its varieties, tending to think of it in terms of out-and-out famine.   But through most of history, the annual hungry season, the time when last year´s stores were depleted and the harvest had not come in was how many people experienced hunger.  The fruits and vegetables of mid to late summer in northern Europe, for example, could seem a poor joke when you craved something substantial, bread, porridge, a heavy steamed pudding, and the meals of barley, wheat, rye, and the other cereals.

So here’s Liz, in Feasts and Festivals talking about the ancient English festival of Lammas, the first of August.

The first of August is half way between the Summer Solstice and the Autumn Equinox. This is when the agricultural cycle moves from growing to ripening and harvest. In pre-Christian times this was celebrated at the pagan festival of Lughnasadh and Lammas is its Christian successor.

Lammas marks the gathering in of the first summer harvest. In Saxon and medieval societies, when the first grain crop of the year was ready to cut it was an occasion of enormous importance and relief. There were two main times when starvation threatened in agricultural societies – early spring and immediately before harvest time. At Lammas the medieval housewife could bake new bread from the first cut of the grain. No wonder it was a time to celebrate.

When Lughnasadh became Lammas, the first bread was offered at a special mass. The word Lammas derives from the Anglo Saxon ‘hlafmaesse’ – meaning ‘loaf mass’ so technically people were celebrating not the raw grain but the bread made with it – which may distinguish Lammas from Church’s Harvest festival, when all is safely gathered in later in the season, and which is actually a Victorian innovation. Its origin is in Morwenstow in Cornwall when in 1843 the extremely eccentric Rev R.S. Hawker reinvented it.

Given that grain was so expensive to transport except by ship, prior to railroads, containers, and trucks on asphalt roads, given that most governments in an attempt to protect the landowning classes and control the politically-sensitive grain had protectionist policies against grain imports, the hungry season tipped over into famine all too easily.

And here´s a very short clip from the Seattle Times a day or so ago signalling a situation that once might have tipped the hungry season in Russia and some of the former Soviet Republics into famine.

Wheat prices surged in July by the biggest amount in more than a half century as severe drought conditions in Russia and other former Soviet republics destroyed grain crops.

In the mid nineteenth century, Britain did away with its protectionist agricultural tariffs, just as railroads and steamships made wheat from old wheat-growing areas like south Russia and new ones such as the Punjab, Argentina, Australia, Canada and the US available.

Consumers gazing at cheap loaves, jam and cheese

And here´s Frank Trentmann on bread and Free Trade in nineteenth century Britain.

Free Trade put the consumer on the political map. . . .Through a focus on ‘necessities’ or basic goods, cheapness became primarily a language of social justice, distracting from more selfish, acquisitive aspects of consumption.  Consumers, in this view, were part of civic life–not just customers in a shop.  Free Trade, it was hoped, would instil consumers with consideration for the rest of the community. Instead of a retreat from public life, consumption would foster civic participation, and, over time, raise the quality of production.  With the ‘cheap loaf’ as a symbol of the right of all Britons to the cheapest goods available on the world market, Free Traders painted a picture of equity and social solidarity . . . Millionaires and capitalist trusts, as well as hunger and social anarchy, in this view, were the products of protectionist societies abroad.

In short, Free Trade then roused the same kinds of enthusiasm that the local, natural, fresh, doing-good-by-eating-well, slow-and-small trumps fast-and-big movement does today.

As an example, here´s Diana Buja quoting the nineteenth-century British explorer, David Livingstone, extolling the necessity of free trade world wide, including Africa, in 1857.  It´s a perfect example of the harnessing together of the consumer, civic society, civilization and commerce that made up the Free Trade movement.  Don´t be distracted by the bits of Victorian terminology that grate today.

Sending the Gospel to the heathen must … include much more than is implied in the usual picture of a missionary, namely, a man going about with a Bible under his arm.

The promotion of commerce ought to be specially attended to, as this, more speedily than any thing else, demolishes that sense of isolation which heathenism engenders, and makes the tribes feel themselves mutually dependent on, and mutually beneficial to each other.

With a view to this, the missionaries at Kuruman got permission from the government for a trader to reside at the station, and a considerable trade has been the result; the trader himself has become rich enough to retire with a competence.

Those laws which still prevent free commercial intercourse among the civilized nations seem to be nothing else but the remains of our own heathenism.

In the years following World War I, the Free Trade movement lost ground for a whole variety of reasons that I won´t go into in this post. But the problems it addressed–how to make food accessible and cheap year round, how to balance the interests of farmers and consumers, how to handle food trade between nations–are as pressing as ever.

It’s a brown tomato.  It came in a plastic box with half a dozen confreres at my local Wal-Mart in Mexico City.  Inside it’s still brownish.  Tastes fine.  Disconcerting, a bit.  It was new to me.

But here’s the back story on the demand for these tomatoes from the Wall Street Journal. (Thanks to Sonia Banuelos on FB for the link).

And what’s it doing in Mexico City?  Well on the plastic box, where it’s described as the kumato, the “simply unique BROWN tomato” we learn that its a product of Mexico, thanks to Sunset Produce, Kingsville, Ontario.

Go to their website and you see mini kumatos on the front page.  And you learn that this four-generation family business has 1400 acres of vegetables (many organic) under glass.  Do you know how much that is?  It’s about 2.3 miles by one mile, perhaps more.

Not all in one place, of course.  Besides Canada, they are in the US, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Guatamala, Nicaragua, and Panama, and, of course, Mexico.  And in Mexico their distribution center is in Irapuato, in my former home state, Guanajuato.  Big, big farming there. Big foreign investment.

A story in the Mexican newspaper Reforma on Thursday 13th May reports that Mexico is now the world leader in the export of fruits and vegetables (I need to check this).  But it is top in top in avocado, second in papaya, lime, chile, and peppers, third in mangoes, oranges and guavas, fourth in grapefruit and asparagus.  Fruit production has risen 17% in the last ten years, vegetables nearly 10%.

Mexican consumption has declined slightly from 180 kilos a year to 176 kilos.

So that’s the story of the brown tomato.  Want heirloom tomatoes.  Someone will provide them for you.

So I’m fascinated by early Pacific voyages, the early Hawaiians or the galleons that every year from the late sixteenth to the early nineteenth century  sailed between between Acapulco on the west coast of Mexico and Manila in the Philippines.

Just a few ships, tiny by modern standards, stinking of bilge, with crews that barely had enough food and drink to make the journey (or sometimes didn’t) , laden to capacity and beyond with silks and porcelain, silver and spices, that linked Asia and America. So fragile, so stark the juxtapostion of luxury and squalor.

So what made it across these thousands of miles and what didn’t?

Well cacao was one thing.  Perhaps it was taken as seeds. We don’t know.  But  the Mexican way of grinding it, mixing with sugar and shaping it into tablets to be dissolved in hot water went.  Please Burnt Lumpia, tell us that they grind it on the metate.

In Mexico though from the colonial period to the present it was just as often mixed with wet ground maize (or now cornflour) to make a rich food-drink called champurrado, wonderful on a cold winter morning or evening.

What I love is this description of how in the Philippines chocolate tablets are mixed with glutinous rice and evaporated milk to make ‘champorado.’   Burnt Lumpia’s photos make it look like a pudding rather than a drink, I suspect there was a bit of cross-fertilization with American cornflour and milk chocolate pudding at the time when the evaporated milk snuck into the recipe.

Be that as it may, sticky rice, chocolate, and evaporated milk sounds pretty good to me, that unctuous chewiness. A sweet end to that terrifying journey.

Thanks to Susan Ji-Young Park for the link.

“All the eggs served in this restaurant are fresh,” said the menu in tiny letters at the bottom of the page.  Well, they’d better be, hadn’t they?  Who wants stale or, worse, rotten eggs?  Ah, but wait.  This couldn’t be the right contrast.  Fresh instead of preserved, perhaps? Fresh instead of dried and reconstituted, fresh instead of eggbeaters.

These are some of the ambiguities that Susanne Freidburg takes on in her new book, Fresh: A Perishable History that has just been published by Harvard University Press.

It’s not Susanne’s first venture into food.  She had already made a name for herself with a pioneering book, French Beans and Food Scares that traced out all the tensions and ironies in French and English consumers buying fresh green beans produced in poor African countries.  Highly recommended, by the way, particularly because the author’s detailed reporting of what green production means in a very poor country such as Burkino Faso is a welcome breath of international air in food discussions that are often focused on the US and Europe.

Fresh is a similarly informed, well written and well researched book, dedicated to understanding our obsession with fresh foods and what the food industry has done to make sure that we get foods that, in appearance at least, are fresh.

To clear the ground, Susanne points out that freshness means different things in different foods and, very important, that it’s not a value that comes from biology, nutrition or taste alone.   So off I went to the Oxford English Dictionary which made it clear that the word itself is a many splendored thing.  Its etymology is complex, appearing to come from Old French and Old English.  And while its root meaning appears to be new or having the appearance of newness, it fans out into not salty (as in fresh water), cool, bright and blooming, full of vigor, sober, drunk, and a rush of water or wind.

To bring order to such a protean idea, Freidburg links the modern history of fresh food with the history of  refrigeration or “the cold chain” beginning in the late nineteenth century.  Then she invites the reader to consider six kinds of “fresh” foods that thanks to this cold chain can be found in every refrigerator: beef, eggs, fruit, vegetables, milk and fish.

Her analysis of each of these foods is well researched and throws up all kinds of surprises. I particularly enjoyed her clear exposition of the science underlying freshness and its opposites, whether stale or rotten or preserved, for each of these different foods.  Other readers may turn more to the historical twists and turns by which cows were induced to produce equal quantities of milk year round, or chickens to lay eggs at a steady pace, or growers who produced peaches so fine that consumers were willing to pay fifty times the price of ordinary peaches.   The huge American exports of nonfat dry milk to other countries, especially Mexico, gives a new international contest to the problems the American dairy industry has been having in the last six months.   All in all fascinating and clear evidence for the protean nature of freshness.

And what also becomes eminently clear is that keeping foods cold is only the beginning of the business of freshness: all kinds of other techniques have been employed in the last hundred years:  artificial insemination to keep dairy cows producing and well as a huge business in feed for the winter, artificial lighting for the ever-laying chickens,  chemical treatments for luscious looking fruits,  railroads, containers and airplanes for dewy freshness, ingenious packaging in specially engineered plastics for those “fresh” salads, for starters.

By the end of the book, the reader is acutely aware of the point that Susanne reinforces in her brief epilogue, namely that freshness comes at a price, that there is no utopia of freshness, and that the ability to enjoy fresh foods is a privilege of the wealthy parts of the world.

And there she stops. Just stops dead in her tracks.  Whoops.

At first I wanted more, I wanted some punchline, some set of easy conclusions, some set of rules.  On reflection, though, I was relieved.  Bookstore shelves are lined with books on food politics that lecture us, telling us in no uncertain terms what we should believe.  What a pleasant change to be left to figure out the morals according to one’s own values.

So for the past few weeks I have been mulling over freshness.   My conclusion is that for all the ambiguities and unfairnesses that it has implied, it has been a worthwhile quest, perhaps a conclusion that differs from Susanne’s.  And perhaps one way of getting at why is to consider a whole range of freshness that she does not consider: freshly cooked or processed things.

Fresh-baked bread or pie is valued just as much as fresh fruit.  My neighbors here in Mexico like their cheese (a fresh cheese) “muy frescisto” (very fresh).  They even like their candied fruit “muy fresco,” still tender and juicy and tasty.  So amid all the protean meanings of fresh, is one reason why we like it that it does promise benefits that go beyond the usual appeals to “fresh is more nutritious?”  Is it that it also offers something that was a huge evolutionary advantage, tenderness and digestibility?

And here I’ll stop because this leads in to the next book I want to talk about at some length, Richard Wrangham’s Catching Fire.  In the meantime, for anyone who is interested in figuring out the basic ideas that inspire contemporary eating and food production, Fresh is essential reading.

The fact that a movement like SF – anti-progressive, antiscientific, worshipping the traditional societies, fond of the little, stratified and perennial communities in which the place of each is eternally fixed and immutable, uncaring and ignorant of history and of the reality of the relations of production, and thus incapable of seeing the inextricable contradictions and historical fictions which build up this vision – might be considered today, in Italy, ‘left’, is something which deserves a close study and should create, in all those who care for the future of our country, more than a passing worry.

That’s the conclusion to an interesting critique of Slow Food by Italian lawyer Luca Simonetti.  He is not a foodie, but a practicing lawyer with an office in Rome.  He was moved to write this long thoughtful article by the increasing political clout of Slow Food in Italy.  Here’s the link to the-ideology-of-slow-food2.

I should say that he quotes me quite a bit.  But he has his own line and he also has lots of quotes from Slow Food not readily available in English.  I highly recommend this to anyone interested in advancing the debate about how we should think about food in the modern world.

Cow Parade Lala ‘pastarán’ en León, originally uploaded by RightIndex.

Hence soy (I am) in Spanish in the heading of this post–get it? I’m quite ridiculously pleased with myself for this multi-language pun.

Do click on the link to the Economist piece.   Kikkoman’s foreign sales have grown 10% a year for 25 years.  And there are interesting insights into how Kikkoman pulled this off.

And while you are at it, you may not know that Kikkoman supports food history in various ways.  Their interesting web site has a map that shows you how to get to their museum, pages on the history of soy sauce and the Kikkoman company, and downloadable pdfs of their periodical which appears about twice a year, has many interesting articles and great illustrations.  True, it’s company sponsored history, but I don’t know where else you will find a clear explanation of the differences between how chopsticks are made in Japan and how they are made in the rest of the world.

Grains.  Maria, really appreciated your insight that Crete may be self sufficient in most foodstuffs but not grains.

Subsidies.  Kay and Adam, I wish, I wish I had some grip on the subsidy system.  I don’t.  All I know is that governments have always been major players in agriculture and that government decisions are probably more important than weather, market or anything else in whether or not farms make a go of it.  And if anyone can contribute more here, I’d love to hear it.

Normative or positive.  Paola,  I completely agree that much of the US discussion is driven by what should be.  As an empiricist, to throw in another technical term, I think what has happened has to inform what we think should happen.  And I think the fact that small farms (both in terms of acreage and in terms of income) don’t do well in the developed world is something that has to be p0ndered.

Life on farms.  Hard, as Cindy and Kay point too.  And to go back to a comment of Judith Klinger a couple of posts back, yes combing wheat throws up a lot of nasty dust.  Not nearly as much or as nasty as older methods of threshing.

World agriculture.  I’m really talking about the US (and to some extent Europe) in these posts Adam.  As you know there is this constant barrage of “if only we could have small farms . . .” which also throws in sustainable which I have to get to sometime.  I appreciate that I am horribly ignorant of most other parts of the world.  May be we can chat about that later and I’d love to know more about the examples you describe.  But step by step!

More in a couple of days.