What’s Not to Like About Industrially Processed Food?
I just spent two days at an a conference on the theme “Beyond Sweetness: New Histories of Sugar in the Early Atlantic World.” It was an exceptional gathering both in terms of the papers and of the organization as one might expect of the John Carter Brown Library, one of the premier collections for the study of the early history of the Americas. I’ll be blogging about it in the next couple of days.
It was also an exceptional springboard for my presentation on “What’s Not to Like About Industrially Processed Food?” which I will be giving this evening to the Gastronomy Program at Boston University at 6 p.m. in Room 313 of the College of Arts and Sciences Building, 725 Commonwealth Avenue. I’d love to see Boston friends there.
And
9 November. “What’s Not to Like About Industrially Processed Food?” 10:30 am. Culinary Historians of Southern California, Los Angeles Central Library, Taper Auditorium. Open to the public. More details here.
10 November. “What’s Not to Like About Industrially Processed Food?” Culinary Historians of Northern California, Omnivore Books, 3885 Cesar Chavez A, San Francisco. More details about Omnivore Books Events.
Just compare these two pictures.
The Human Labor Involved in Turning Cane into Sugar. Theodor de Bry, America, 1595. John Carter Brown Library
Industrial sugar mill. Each was capable of refining, concentrating, and granulating the juice of ninety thousand tons of beets during the three-month harvest period. This refinery plant belonged to the Compagnie de Fives-Lille, which by World War I had refineries for beet or cane sugar plants or offices in Java, Réunion, Brazil, the Caribbean, Egypt, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Russia, Italy, Argentina, Mexico, the Philippines, Australia, China, and the United States. From Edward H. Knight, Knight’s New Mechanical Dictionary (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1884), pl. XLVII, opp. p. 873.
