So let me add to paulas thanks to all of you who have braved cold. Half of our panel comes from the university. Torontoans are more used to this. We still appreciate it. Let me quickly introduce our panelists, give you some initial thoughts and a bit of the rules of the game. Just moving down the line of panelists, Jeffrey Pilcher is a professor of food history at the university of toronto. He is also the editor of the journal of global food history for those of you thinking of publishing outlets. Steve velazquez next to him is a cure rater in the division of home and Community Life at the National Museum of American History. And of course youve met paula. And next to her is irina, the professor of Museum Studies at the university of torontos i school. And she researches food and museums. And next to her, Teresa Mccullough is a historian of american brewing history, professor of the American Brewing History Initiative, excuse me, here at the National Museum of American History. And this seems such a wonderful place to have this panel on taste because i cant think of any other place really on a global scale that does such an extraordinary job of raising questions of taste and food history and translating those for the general public. I had the privilege of participating in their food history weekend, for those of you who some of it is still up on line. Well worth using for your own pleasure, for your own viewing pleasure. But also in using in class. And i would encourage you to spend some time in the exhibit today. Before it starts to be transformed, expanded. Refreshed. Refreshed. And that in a way leads to some of my opening thoughts. What i would encourage you all to do, were going to lay out some initial questions, give you some quick incites into the ways in which these very, very different perspective, curetorial, Museum Studies, food studies that we address these questions of taste and how thats different from questions of food itself. I would encourage you to start thinking of your own questions as we come along and your own insights and she is the one getting the exercise today, carrying around the microphone. And let me encourage you also, because we are on cspan with us that you wait for the microphone before you give your questions. And we will incorporate those questions not in a questionandanswer session, but rather into the dialogue itself. But the very idea of what were doing here today raises some really kind of fascinating questions about what taste is and what food is. In preparation for today, i actually did a fair a little bit of fairly haphazard research on the american historical association. And we make a certain amount of american historical History Today in that this rick, how many years has the aja been around . This is the 132nd. The 132nd annual meeting. 132nd annual meeting. And that is the very first time that anyone has used a chefs knife, at least ostensibly just for food. No doubt in the early days of the association, things happened. And one can raise really interesting questions about how the aha would have been different if we had been cooking earlier on and the kinds of questions that might have emerged earlier on in the history of our own profession. So 132 years, and it finally has somebody gotten the idea that perhaps if were going to think about the past, we might as well taste it. That also raises a really kind of interesting question of if were cooking, what are we actually cooking with . And what are we tasting . And what is the value of taste to historians . Here is the thing that any of us who have ever studied or thought about food realize. Food rots. So those studying it, studying food in the past, we may have containers. We have recipes. We have packaging. We have empty bottles. We have memories. We have handwritten recipes. We may have the occasional little bit of residue that is left at the bottom of a can or the dregs of the bottle that sort of draw it on to it. But we dont really have the food. And its hard to put food on display for those very same reasons. It rots. Or it gets eaten by visitors and mice and whatever else comes to museums. It also raises some interesting questions about where does the museum end. Where does the archive end . Does it include things like a cafeteria as a part of the visitor experience, not just visitor diet and nutrition. So the questions today that are methodological. Theyre archival. Theyre exhibitionary, and theyre analytical. As we try and figure out where taste is in the museum, given that the food is disappeared. Its rotted or its been digested, for that matter. We raise important questions about how we exhibit food. What is the value to historian of tasting something from the past . And taste is an interesting word. And i just want to lay out a few of the kinds of questions that i know were going to be talking about. We talk about taste as an individual experience. That tastes good to me. But we also taste we also think about taste as a social experience. The american taste. The american table. We talk about the taste of chinese foods, for example. We also talk about taste makers. Those who shaped taste, people like julia child. We talk as well about good tastes and bad tastes, where the physical experience of putting food into ones mouth or bringing it lows to the nose, or indeed refusing to put it into your mouth. Where that enters into the metaphorical. Where we use taste to create a whole set of meanings. Perhaps to create boundaries. So to begin, im going hand it over to jeffrey. And i ask an initial question. A tantalizing one. How have tastes changed over time . Thank you, and to answer that question, id like to start by just asking what exactly is taste . I think we really should think of taste very broadly as the way that we perceive what is good to eat. And by implication, what is not good to eat. And, of course, thats partly, you know, our taste buds. The most obvious way in which we sort of perceive food. But of course as we think about it, right, its more than just what happens on ouring on the, right. We know that our smell, our ol faction of food is essential for ways that we perceive food. And there is actually now a whole field of scientists known as gastroneurology which looks even more broadly at sort of the way that we perceive food. And they found that really all of the senses are critical. Not just the taste buds and the olfaction, but also the sight of food, the texture of food, the touch of food. And even the sound of food. A potato chip crunching are all very important for how we perceive these foods. And its really processed through the brain. And really through our memories of what weve eaten in the past. And so its very much a cultural experience of what food is, right . And in that way that these are understands of food are as much based on these learned perceptions. These very social process of taste. And the if we think about the moments of change of taste over time, and again, very broadly and kind of world historical terms, we can think of the change from hunter gathererers to agriculture, right . The narrowing of the diets from all the different foods that were in an environment down to, you know, the foods that were grown, grains and other things. So the very, very important change in the diet. And some people have felt that that was sort of the beginnings of the of when food started to sort of when we started to assign other means to taste, right, that we started to distinguish people by the foods they ate, according to race or class or gender. But in fact actually archaeologists have now found that even among hunter gatherers who supposedly ate everything in the landscape, if you look at the remains, the foods that they left behind in their little garbage dumps, that even within an area of sort of uniform goods, what would be found there, that some middenesn were very different for event hunter gathers. That were the people who eat this and not that. We can also think of the changes, very significant changes that have come with industrialization, right. If the agrarian revolution, the neolithic revolution was the first big change in the way we eat, then industry certainly is. The rise of sugar and sweetness as such an important part of our diet has been a very important change. And so we can sort of think about these different moments and the ways in which we can perceive these. There are various reasons why diet change has enhanced taste changes. But for me one of the most important is through crosscultural encounter. When people who eat Different Things come together and they exchange their foods. Or they dont exchange their foods. So thats really i think one of the most interesting areas for historians looking for changes in taste. My own research is looking at beer right now, how beer traveled the world. And this actually is an interesting little map of beer around the world. It was done by the pure travel website. And each country is sort of represented by its iconic beer brands. Weve got bud wiser in the United States. Molson in canada, corona in mexico, tsing dow in china. Everybody country has its own brew. Even islamic countries are marked by becks nonalcoholic. All of these beers are an identical variety, a pilsner, a lager beer very light, very clear, fizzy. And so its interesting that you have this sort of global diversity, and yet standardization at the same time. And so what ive been trying to do in my research is sort of look at the ways that this happened. And my own research is really looking at brewing journals. And they dont make very good power points. So what ive done is just presented a few scenes, right. So here is actually chinese beer, right . And so the first encounters between the germans at the german collie in tsing dao and chinese officials. And a scene of how beer later on became associated with the spring festival, a chinese scene. Here is a scene from mexico where beer starts out as a drink of the elite. And very much in contrast to the local brew of pulque, a fermented beverage that was very strong in taste. But later on, the scene and 20 million mexicans can be mistaken was actually the population of mexico at the time. And it sort of illustrates that beer has gone from an elite food to one that was available to all. And then here is actually one of my favorites. So india starts out India Pale Ale is actually the drink of the british colonists there. But later on india beer comes to assume a different this is actually a brand called knockout high punch strong beer. Its illustrated by the iconic image muhammed ali. And basically, this is the beer that people drink because of its to get drunk. And so lots of different meanings of taste, of beer in different societies. And i will leave it at that. Thank you. Good morning. Welcome to the museum. Thank you very much to dan for moderating. And again, i think i need to thank everybody here again for trekking down here in the very cold weather this morning. The American Brewing History Initiative is a project to build an archive of american beer and brewing history here at the museum with the focus on the stories of craft beer and home brewing. The charge to construct an archive of a recent, if not contemporary phenomenon related to a product, beer, that will not itself be present in the archive has presented both challenges and opportunities. To build this archive, i am taking Research Trips throughout the country to collect objects and documents for museums holdings. And along the way, i also record oral histories with the people i meet. These are becoming a centerpiece of our growing archive, and it is here that i would like to concentrate my brief comments today. One historian has written, quote, all kinds of people spend a good deal of time accounting for taste, describing the indescribable, measuring the immeasurable. Taste is conceptually slippery and empirically elusive. End quote. I want to argue, however, that oral history holds unique potential for nailing down such a slippery and elusive subject as taste. I will offer a couple examples of how this is possible, but first a bit of historical context. The stylistic diversity of american beer has exploded since the 1970s. The craft beer revolution as we know it today as changed the american palette. Today more than 6,000 breweries produce beers that are bitter, sour, made advice scouse with alcohol or creamy with lactose. If one were to ask what does american beer tastes like, the answers could be infinite. Beer consumers are key to understanding how notions of taste in relation to beer have changed over time. In oral histories, i approach the concept of taste from different angles, circling around it to consider the multiple kinds of experiences that together compose an archive of taste. For example, i like to begin oral histories with brewers by asking about childhood memories of food and drink. Often their answers shed light on the innovative careers that follow. Fritz maytag of the Maytag Washing Machine Company recalled a formative taste experience as a child in 1940s iowa. During an oral history last spring, he recalled, my father loved really strong flavorful cheese, and he had his own refrigerat refrigerat refrigerator. It was years later why i realized why. I can his mom saying all right, fred you get your own refrigerator. This is mans cheese by what he means is your mother really doesnt like this stuff, but i do. And dont be afraid to eat things with strong flavors, because come on, were in the big world and dont have narrow point of view. Open your mind to things that smell terrible. And he opened my mind. About 25 years later, maytag purchased the struggling Anchor Brewing Company in san francisco. He revitalized the brewerys famous steam beer and went on the brew styles that americans had never heard of at the time. Anchor would become the First AmericanCraft Brewery of our era. Maytag remembered a day in mean 72. I thought we would make a traditional dark beer. I called it anchor porter, and i can remember the first brew. I was cutting open a bag of black patent malt and i fed it down into the mill and i could smell it, and i thought my god, they sent us coffee. It smelled like espresso. They sent us the wrong stuff. Wed never seen black malt before, but it was the real thing. And that very first brew was just superb. And to my knowledge, until i left we never changed the recipe again. Beautiful dark beer. The only dark beer in america and the only porter in the world. Maytags sensitivity to the aromas and tastes profile of this black malt would begin i would argue in his familys iowa home when his father handed him a piece of very smelly cheese and encouraged him to think creatively and broadly about the world of taste. I also asked brewers to describe the flavors of their beers and the kind of customer they imagine when they brew. What messages do you intend to convey with the design of your label, i ask, when you walk through a hop field, or sift through samples through samples of malted barley, what terms do you use to describe what youre smelling and tasting . Finally, it is crucial to ask questions about the Creative Process of recipe formulation and modification. Brewers at avery Brewing Company in boulder, colorado laughed about a notable failure. One of our guys came up with an idea for a mushroom ipa, which was the most disgusting thing i have ever smelled in of our guye idea for a mushroom ipa, which was one of the most disgusting things. Mushrooms in the ipa, we were like no. All right, man, were going to buy whatever it was, 400 worth of mushrooms and see if this works. Did not work. This beer never made it beyond the cutting room floor, so to speak, but detailing flavors like this are just as important as recording the stories of successes. There are many, many examples i could share with you but so far talking about taste and recording that conversation can be a powerful means of translating taste into a more tangible and preservable format. Is it can be surprisingly beneficial to open the file folder just before and after the one you think you need. Similarly, asking a creative range of questions during an oral history can be a way to circle around taste, approach it from a variety of angles and in the process make it just a little less slippery. Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for coming to the museum. Im going to talk about my work as a curator, documenting oral histories that ive conducted with former mexican guest workers who came during world war ii and a current project im working on, looking at mexican americans in the Wine Industry. So, i will give examples of how these men who came on contracts were fed up with institutional tastes, the food and Dining Options that were given to them through this huge program and they took matters into their own hands, creating more familiar tastes and food of their liking, giving them kind of an agency. Giving them a little more power within this program that was really stacked against them. And with the wine workers, im going to look at i looked at several families and looking at how theyre shaping the Wine Industry and how they put taste at the center of their wine business. Tasting rooms, food tasting menus. Theyre using this cultural identity to claim space and make a space on the american table and in the global Wine Industry. So, first off, we did a lot of these oral histories. It was a collaborative project between university of texas, el paso and we documented about 800 oral histories of these men and their experiences in the labor camps and in the railroads. And food was one of these questions that we asked them. What were their memories of the food, the housing conditions, things like that. Not everybody answered those questions. It was kind of interesting, how do you search for this taste in these archives in these oral histories documented George Mason University kindly helped us to create this online web soothe so theyre all available to search. Most of them are in spanish, though, so i had to do a little searching, sandwich, lunch, things like that. Its an interesting challenge we need to think about a little more. A bit about the history of the program. It was a wartime measure, the de