Transcripts For CSPAN3 Cuisine And Empire 20170219 : vimarsa

Cuisine and empire they talk about how culinary practices developed, as well as the evolution of modern process food. Was hosted by the American Historical Association at their annual meeting. It is about 90 minutes. I am the curator of philanthropy at the Smithsonian Museum of American History. Recently, i was an associate at the National History center. We have here the director and assistant director. This roundtable is on Rachel Laudans book, cuisine and and history. Is focusing on an issue that is of great Public Interest today. Food is attracting attention in a variety of ways. People with disposable incomes cook and eat not nearly for sustenance but for cultural projects. They try the latest restaurants, recipes, learn about new coup scenes, and generally approach with deliberation. A new term has been coined for odies. Fo chefs are celebrities. Some have even created philanthropic foundations, generally addressing hunger which persists in the face of bounty. Along with hunger, there are other foodrelated ills. And policymakers pursue responses to the consumption of too little, too much, or the wrong kind of food. Hashis interest in food grown, so has the attention to the history of food. Historians have embraced food as interest. Besides dozens of articles now published yearly, there are textbooks and primary source books food history available for use in many College Courses on food history. Interest in food history is equally strong beyond the economy. Cooks and bakers slip to historic recipes for new ideas. The smithsonian has an annual food history weekend and other cultural institutions have likewise turned to engaging the food history. Anytime the American Food Historical Association runs a piece on food history and does very well. One example is a piece that amanda perry road. Publicieces attract both and academic readers. Years, food history has been an area of Common Ground predominantly in public audiences. It reflects in part a shared desire to recover a lost past. Distinctive local foods, artisan all cooking techniques, before the advent of technological. To challenge the assumption behind that youre earning and in food. R a lost past rachel asks us to think more carefully about the history of cooking, which, she observes is difficult, timeconsuming, and requires enormous amounts of human energy. Howreconsideration of cooking has evolved over time, she suggests, has implications for our contemporary debates about food and that is the top of this panel of esteemed historians will turn to. They each have studied different eras and have different takes. We will discuss these issues at the roundtable. We will start with rachel with a synopsis of her book and then go to the other panelists. Finally, we will open it up to questions. Now let me introduce the panelists. Historian and holds a degree and phd in the history and philosophy of collegefrom university of london and has a distinguished academic career teaching at a number of institutions and holding an array of distinguished of wards and awards and fellowships. In addition to academic career, history ofeer in the food. Her book casino and empires cooking the worlds history, was compiled in 2013 by the university of California Press and her book the for the was publishede by the university of why pleasant 1996. She is also published widely in the new york times, boston globe, and other outlets. In all spoken on food sorts of places. Is list of accomplishments too long to read here but suffice it to say she brings and expertise to the history of food that few can match. Sitting next to her is chris hobson, he is an associate professor in the department of history at Brigham Young university and earned his doctorate from Northwestern University in 2004. After that, he spent two years at the mid neil center for early american studies and philadelphia. He has published articles in journals including the william and mary historical journal for historical studies and other journals. Book on 18thcentury history was published by Oxford University press. His second book, discovering and eight will likewise be published by oxford. He is currently working on a on conservative enlightenment has embodied by benjamin thompson. Who had an interest in food. Next to him is libby oconnell. She received her phd in American History from the university of virginia. She joined the History Channel in 1990 three, eventually serving as chief historian and Senior Vice President of corporate responsibility. She has received four emmy awards for her work in education and today is a historical consultant for the History Channel while she serves as commissioner for the u. S. Wont were centennial commission. She is the author most recently of the american plate a hersary history. Next to amy bentley, a professor in the department of nutrition and food studies and Public Health that new york university. A historian with interest in social, historical, and social context of food. She is the author of inventing baby food. Published by the university of california present. 14 which was a finalist for an award. She is also a winner of the ss best award. Eating for victory, food rationing and politics of domesticity among other publications. Theis cofounder of experimental coup seen collective which is an Interdisciplinary Group of scientists, food studies scholars, and chefs who studied the intersection of science and food. She is the cofounder of the nyu urban farm lab and holds other distinguished positions. Finally, at the end of the table is Paul Friedman, who is the trippr d. Professor at harvard university. He has written about the middle ages and also has asked. s writing about the medieval foods. He received his phd from berkeley in 1978 and taught at vanderbilt before he moved to yale. He is the author of a number of ,s, including the diocese a 1983 book and his food history out of the east spices and the medieval , published by the yield press in 1998. Very recently not only so, not only a distinguished panel but a panel of wide ranging interest and areas of expertise. I now turn it over to rachel. Rachel thank you. Say how much it means to be here. A panel on ones work is something we historians dream of or perhaps dread a little. So i would like to thank the American History center, the aha , ames bentley and Paul Friedman who have been longtime colleagues. And libby and amanda, who i just meant to and thank you for coming up to her. This is especially significant to me because like many big historical projects, this one also has deep historical and personal roots. I grew up on a farm surrounded by 1000 acres of wheat, oats, and barley. Dairy cattle, beef cattle. My farmer father farmed, but my mother just cooked. Justad no choice but to cooked. That came with the territory then and in some ways, this is a tribute to her because she would have loved to be doing what i am doing now and have had a chance to develop her own career and her own ideas. But no choice. The project actually started in earnest in the early 1980s at the university of hawaii where i engaged in long conversations with Jerry Bentley and visited hawaii at others and spoke to them about food history. And then began teaching a course in food history that in those days needed special permission from the dean. That course eventually became a class,ansformed choosing and empire cooking in World History. So why coup seen . Why empire . And why World History . I the few minutes i have, would like to undermine the basic ideas surrounding my story. Isont regard these ideas the only once or necessarily the best ones, but if food history is to be more than a fad driven by contemporary enthusiasm through politics, we need to have serious debate about the intellectual foundations and fundamentals of the subject. So i am going to start very simply with cooking. It is true but not often taken seriously enough that we do not eatgrains and we do not carcasses. Raw materialsese when they have been transformed or stakes or other prepared foods. Ago, humans past the point of no return. The bulk of their calories and nutrients come from foodstuffs transformed from the natural state and these transformations widerangingnarily and complex. They can be thermal changes. The use of heat or cold. Cutting, curdling, slicing. Chemical changes, adding acids and alkalines. They can be biochemical changes. Particularly fermenting. They can even be biological changes, breeding of plants which in the agent world counted as part of cooking. Today we do not have a good collective term for these various transformations. I actually like processing that when i considered titling a book in the current Political Climate processing Food Processing. That wasistory clearly a nostarter. Cooking. With just but i want to be clear that that required in the past and still requires today a great deal more energy, labor, in time that producing the right materials in the first place. Farming pales in comparison to human effort when compared with processing. For many people traditionally, it took about five hours a day to process the food for a family of four or five. Because we undertake these transformations, humans in fact design their foods. They designed them to make them easier to chew and safer and more digestible. They transform them to make them tastier. They transform them to make them longerlasting. They transform them to establish a structure of social status, to show piety or moral concern, to demonstrate political afiliation, to make money and host of other often mutuallycompeting goals. In short, our most recent beliefs about the natural world, including about our own bodies, about social and economic and political worlds and about supernatural worlds shape the foods we create. We dont take basic ideas about political economy or about human physiology or about religion into account for every meal we produce. These are often internalize. Change times of rapidly coming, these beliefs come into play and those i believe are what i call culinary philosophies. Also, because we design our food, every individual in every society eats a set of food been selectedve and organized and process to achieve a certain set of goals. So if we think and then we think about what we want to have, a splendid meal, and then we design that meal to from the Raw Materials and the ingredients. Uisine style of cooking. Isines, although they change constantly, are static and persistent. This was true in hawaii, where i wherearted on this book, you had three roughly competing and very different cuisines. Decent east asian set of cuisines basically descended from buddhism, and rice and eat with chopsticks. Hawaiian food and sparred by indigenous cultures using fish and cooked in the underground ovens and eaten with hands. Inspired byisines protestant christianity favoring wheat, bread, and beef cooked and ovens and eat with a knife and fork. Cuisines then, i think, if you are telling the history of food on a grand scale, the basic unit of analysis. They do evolve constantly but every so often you get a major change. Culinary philosophy, convert from one religion to another, of the end in modernity and establish every republic, that happened during the american revolution. And you will start changing your cuisine to bring it in line with your new culinary philosophy. So although i start this from very simple points, note we have now moved a long way from the general theory that most people subscribe to with cuisine that is mainly that cuisines are from the ground up. The territorial theory of cuisine, that they are created in a particular place and evolve slowly and gradually and that lays as plants and techniques are brought in. This is instead a kind of intellectual theory of culinary change. One moment, because in the history of cuisines, grains have been disproportionately important. This is not an accident. Materialno other raw that offers such a wide range of nutrients as the grains do. And there is no other raw material that can be turned into so many different kinds of foodstuffs with so many different kinds of nutritional virtues and tastes as the grains can. Whole, steamed, or popped grains. Potages that most people lived on through most of history. The alcohol. The ground cakes that are turned into bread or noodles. And even though we often forget or think it is very recent, into oils and sweeteners such as malt sugar. These go way back into history. They were not invented by industrial processes. Only grains, in addition, have a sufficiently high nutrient to nutrient to weight ration. Ratio. You will need to count the day to feed an individual. If you use a doing roots, it takes 15 pounds a day. So that with a poor transport facility of the ancient world, the only way that people could and two to cities armies was to elect to take grains. Of thehe very existence more complex states that i use for political units that can project cultural or military or economic power over large areas, these states and empires are dependent upon the prior introduction of grains. There are multiple interactions. Etween states and cuisines the legitimacy of the state depends upon the ability of people to feed themselves. We often talk about that in terms of the moral economy but this goes right back to the earliest states where if you the people are entitled to riot if the food supply runs out. The states have the ability to endorse and to some extent enforce their preferred culinary philosophy and have done so throughout history. And, another hand very important feature is that those cuisines that are associated with powerful states are often believed to be the core of the power of that state. Dietary determinism. So then an empire that is very powerful tends to have its features appropriated or imposed by surrounding or neighboring or distant states. Of powerfulcuisines states and empires get transferred over vast distances. P we have a map of buddhist cuisine from about 200 bc and completely. D. Transformed the cuisine of the eastern and southeastern and southern asia and you can see the roots there as one state or empire after another picked up. His particular cuisine so, with this set of ideas, i have an overarching story. It begins with the adoption of grain cuisine, a gradual process between 20,000 bc and 10,000 bc that led to first agriculture and then allowed the formation of states and empires and with that, since scarcity was always at the door, the formation of suites of cuisines. A hierarchy of cuisines with high cuisines for the rich up on the left and core cuisines of the lesser grains, the darker grains, and beans down at the right. Countercuisine for those who disagreed with the state position. And, that continued from the early states and empires really up until the last couple of hundred years when you get the development of middling cuisines. That is cuisines that are accessible to everyone. Here we have the president of america and russia sitting down to a hamburger together. Imagine philip the second of spain in previous pictures sitting down to a hamburger with one of his spanish peasants. The emergence of middling cuisine, again, is a kind of a newation between culinary philosophy that favors republican and democratic clinical systems and the transformation of the processing of food thanks to the introduction of fossil fuel, which reduces the labor for processing and storage and transport. And so that the price of food falls and everybody can participate in this kind of middling cuisine. So that very briefly, we have cuisine and empire cooking in World History. And here is the outline of the way we see the major cuisines throughout history have been formed and created and disappeared. Thank you very much. [applause] organizersu to the for inviting me to participate in this panel. I am chris hobson from Brigham Young university and is the first presenter let me be the thet to congratulate professor. This is a Remarkable Book and a book. Able intellectual knowledge on these culinary issues is staggering and i feel a lot smarter, a little smarter, after having read the book. It was really an impressive achievement. I am a historian of early modern empires which is a topic i want to get back to. But one thing that means is that by my training i do not think i have anything particularly intelligent to say about professor lowdens first several aboutapter laudens first several chapters. When she says about sacrificial regimes into feasting and fasting, contemplative foods like fish, sweetened coffees and teas. Remarkable to was her account of the king of her sure whose elites of projecting power through complex, rich, created the cuisine foundation for greek and roman and ultimately medieval European Food. Remarkable, remarkable research. To the extent i have a beef with the professor, as i said before, then food andall you mightve been better for it, actually. I propose is her characterization of the Columbian Exchange. Of the Columbian Exchange which basically stands for the exchange of all kinds of living things. Whether they are microbes, plants, animals, that was triggered with Christopher Columbus is sort of First Encounter with the new world at the end of the 15th century. And if i am understanding her correctly, she argues that because the transfer of new worldplants to the old occurred without and i think this is a quote, the accompanying new world technology, what that means is the exchange was more or less a one way east to west transfer, so another words because toopeans were to stick figure out they had to rehydrate the chilies, for ansys. Or you had to soak the maze to get the kernel out of the husk. To make it nutritive and not sort of q