This roundtable is on Rachel Laudans book, cuisine and empire. Why are we discussing this book . To bring history and Historical Perspective into broader public and policy conversations. This panel does that by 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 only for sustenance, but for cultural projects. They ardently try the latest restaurants, experiment with new ingredients and recipes, learn about new cuisine, and approach mealtime with a deliberate appreciation. So much so, a new term has been coined to refer to them, foodies. Chefs have become celebrities. Some have even achieved sufficient wealth and public profile that they have created philanthropic organizations, generally addressing hunger which persists. Along with hunger, there are other related social ills like poor nutrition to obesity. Policymakers debate and pursue responses to the consumption of too little, too much, or the wrong kind of food. As this interest in food has burgeoned, so has the attention to history of food. Historians have embraced food as an area of scholarship. Besides dozens of books and articles on food history now published yearly, there are textbooks and primary sourcebooks on history for availability to use in College Courses on food. Interest in food history is equally strong beyond the academy. Cooks and bakers look to historic recipes for new ideas. Any time the American Historical Association today blog runs a piece on food history, it does very well and one example is a piece on the history of food and decolonization that amanda perry wrote. Those pieceshat attract both public and academic readers. That is one of the things i find very notable. In recent years, food history has been an area of Common Ground for scholarly and public audiences. It reflects, in part, the shared desire to recover a lost past, and imagined lost past of distinctive local foods and techniques. Cooking before the advent of modern processes. Rachel laudan challenges the assumption behind that your thing and search for a lost past in food. She asked us to think more carefully about the history of cooking, which she observes as difficult, timeconsuming, and requires an enormous amount of human energy. The reconsideration of how cooking has evolved over time, cc just she suggests, that there are implications for our contemporary debate about food. That is where this panel of esteemed historians will turn to. They each study different eras, have different takes and will be discussing some of these issues at the roundtable. We will start with rachel, offering a synopsis of her book. And, the other panelists will offer their thoughts on topics desk issues raised by the book. Each panelist will have a chance to speak twice. Finally, we will open it up to your questions. Now, let me introduce the panelists. Rachel laudan is a historian. She holds a degree, a phd in the history and philosophy of science from the University College of london. She has a distinguished academic career, teaching at a number of institutions and holding an array of distinguished awards and fellowships. It is also notable in addition to her academic career, she had another career as an independent scholar in the history of food. Her book, cuisine and empire cooking and World History, was published in 2013. By the university of California Press. Paradisethe food of was published in 1996. She has also published widely for public audiences in l. A. Times, boston globe, and other outlets. She has spoken on food in all sorts of places. Her list of accomplishments is far too long to read here. Suffice it to say she brings and , expertise to the history of food that few can match. Sitting next to her is chris hodgson. He is an associate professor to he is an associate professor in the department of history at Brigham Young university. He earned his doctorate from Northwestern University in 2004. After that, he spent two years as a mellon fellow in philadelphia. He has published articles and journals, including the william and mary quarterly, and other journals. His first book, the akkadian diaspora, was published in 2012 by Oxford University press. His second book, discovering empire from the era of crusades to the revolution will be likewise published by oxford. He is currently working on a book project on conservative enlightenment. Next to chris is libby oconnell. She received her phd in American History from the university of virginia. She joined the History Channel, at its conception in 1993. Eventually serving as chief historian and Senior Vice President of corporate responsibility. She has received four emmys for her work. To thethe consultant History Channel while she serves as does on the commission of the centennial commission. She is the author of, most recently, the american plate. Next is amy bentley, professor in the department of nutrition and food studies and Public Health at new york university. A historian with interests in the social, Historical Context food, she is the author of published by the university of California Press in 2014, which was a finalist for a james beard award. She is also a winner of the asf best book award. She has a number of publications. She is cofounder of the experimental cuisine collective. It is an Interdisciplinary Group of scientists, food studies scholars, and chest who study the intersection of science chefs, who study the intersection of science and food. Finally, at the end of the table is paul friedman, who is the chester d trip professor of history at yale university. His primary field is medieval europe. He has written on the history of spain, the church, peasants, and luxury charges in the middle ages, he also has an interest in the history of food and cuisine. He received his phd from berkeley in 1978 and taught at vanderbilt before he moved to yale. Here is the author of a number of books, including the diocese of vick, a 1983 book, and the ingins of servitude catalonia. He published 10 restaurants that changed america in the fall of 2016. Not only a distinguished panel, but a panel with a wide range of interests and areas of expertise. I will now turn it over to rachel. Rachel i cannot say how much it means to be here. A panel on ones work is something that historians dream of, or perhaps, dread a little. So i would like to thank the American History center, the aha, my longtime colleagues, and all of you for turning up here. This is especially significant bigme because like many historical projects, this one also has deep historical and personal roots. I grew up on a farm, surrounded by 1000 acres of wheat, beans, and barley, dairy cattle and beef cattle. My father farmed but my mother just cooked. She had no choice but to just cook. That came with the territory. In some ways, this is a tribute to her because she would love 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 visitors to hawaii in World History about food history. Then, i began teaching a course in food history, but in those days needed special permission from the dean. That course eventually became in much transformed form, cuisine and empire cooking in World History. Why cuisine . Why empire . Why cooking and why World History . Have, iew minutes i would like to lay out the basic ideas underlying my story. I do not consider these the best food history is to be more than a fad driven by contemporary politics, we need to have serious debates about the intellectual foundations of the subject. I will start very simply with cooking. It is true, but not often taken seriously enough that we do not eat grains and we do not eat carcasses. We only eat these things, these Raw Materials when they have been transformed into bread, or steaks, or other prepared foods. Ago, humans passed the point of no return. The bulk of their calories come from foodstuffs transformed from the natural state. These transformations are extraordinarily wideranging and complex. They can be thermal changes, the use of heat and goal cold, mechanical changes, grinding, cutting, slicing. They can be chemical changes, adding salt and alkalines. They can be biochemical changes, particularly fermenting, and even biological changes. Breeding of plants which in the nature ancient world counted as part of cooking. Today, we do not have a good collective term for these various transformations. I actually like processing, but when i considered titling a book in the current political climate, Food Processing in World History, that was clearly starter, so i stuck with cooking. I want to reiterate that cooking required, in the past, and still requires today, a great deal more energy, labor, and time than producing the Raw Materials in the first place. Farming pales in comparison with human effort when compared with processing. For many people, traditionally, it took about five hours a day food for a family of four or five. Because we undertake these transformations, humans inside in fact design their foods. They design and to make them safer, cheer you, tastier, chew, safer, longerlasting. They transform them to establish status, to show piety and moral concern, demonstrate political affiliation, and make money, and a host of often other mutually competing goals. In short, our most basic beliefs about the natural world, including about our own bodies, the social and economic and political world, and the supernatural and moral world, shape the foods we create. Of course, we dont take basic ideas about the political economy or human physiology or about religion into account for every mail we produce. These are often internalized. In times of rapid culinary change these basic beliefs come prominently into play. Those sets of beliefs are what i call culinary philosophies. Also because we design our food, every individual in every society its a set of foodstuffs that have been organized and processed to achieve a certain set of goals. We think about what we want to , and thenlendid meal we design the meal from the Raw Materials and ingredients. This i call a cuisine, style of cooking. Unchanging,ough not they change constantly, are distinct and persistent. This was very evident in hawaii. This is where i got started on the book. You had three roughly competing cuisines. The east asian set of cuisines basically derived from buddhism, leery of meat, favoring rice, and eaten with chopsticks. Hawaiian cuisine, inspired by taroenous cultures using and fish, and cooked in underground evidence and eaten with the hands. And anglo cuisines inspired by cooks ints, wheat ovens and eaten with a knife and fork. Cuisines, 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. Ginger culinary philosophy, convert from one religion to abandon a monarchy and establish a republic has happened in the american revolution, and you will start changing your cuisine and what you bring in line with your new culinary philosophies. Although i start with some very simple point, note we have moved a long way from the general theory that most people subscribe to with cuisine, that amanda just mentioned, namely that cuisines are from the , the territorial theory of conceit cuisines there created in a particular place and evolve slowly and gradually in that place as new plants and techniques are brought in. Is instead a kind of intellectual theory of culinary change. Moment, because in the history of cuisines, grains have been disproportionately important. This is not an accident. There is no other raw material that offers such a wide range of nutrients as the grains do. There is no other raw material that can be turned into so many foodstuffs with so many different kinds of tastesonal virtues and as the grains can. Whole, steamed, ir popped, the alcohols, the ground tastes that are turned into bread or noodles, and even, although we often forget it or think it is very recent, into oils and sweetness such as small sugars. These go way back in history. They were not invented by industrial processes. Only grains, in addition have a a sufficiently high nutrient to. Ait ratio you only need two pounds of grain per person per day to feed an individual. If you try to do it using roots, which are another another highly nutritious source, they are wet and heavy that it takes 15 pounds of ground green a day. With the facilities of the ancient world, the only way people could get food to cities elect tormies was to take grains. Thus, the very existence of the early states and the more complex states empire which i use for political units that can project cultural, military, or economic power over large areas, these empires are dependent on the prior introduction of grain cuisine. There are multiple interactions between states and cuisines. The legitimacy of the state people on the ability of 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 the people are entitled to rights, entitled to riot, if the food supply runs out, the states have the ability to endorse and to some extent, and force their ,referred culinary philosophy and have done so throughout history. Another very important feature is that those cuisines that are associated with powerful states are often believed to be the cause of the power of that state, dietary determinism. An empire that is very powerful tends to have its features appropriated or imposed by surrounding or neighboring or distant states, so that the states and powerful empires get transferred over vast distances. Here we have a map of buddhist cuisine, which between about 200 bc and 800 a. D. Completely ofnsformed the cuisines eastern and southeastern and southern asia. You can see the roots as one state or empire after another pick up this particular cuisine. Ideas, i haveof an overarching story. It begins with the adoption of grain cuisine, a gradual process between 20,000 bc and 10,000 bc that led the first agriculture and then allowed the formation of state and empires. And with that, since scarcity was always at the door, the suites of cuisines, a hierarchy of cuisines with high cuisines for the rich up on the left, and poor cuisines of the lesser grains, the darker grains and beans down at the right. And usually a counter cuisine for those who disagree with the state position. And that continued from the earliest states and empires, really until the last couple of hundred years when you get the development of middling cuisines. That is cuisine that are accessible to everyone. Here we have the president s of america and russia sitting down to a hamburger together. You cannot imagine philip the second as rain dish of spain sitting down to a hamburger of spain sitting down to a hamburger with one of his peasant. The emergence of middling cuisines is again a kind of negotiation between a new culinary philosophy, favors republican and Democratic Political systems, and a transformation of the processing of food, thanks to the introduction of fossil fuel, which reduces the labor for processing and storage and agriculture and transport. So that the price of food falls and everybody can participate in this kind of middling cuisine. Very briefly, have cuisine and empire, cooking in World History , and here is the outline of the way i see the major cuisines throughout history have been formed and created. Thank you very much. [applause] thank you to the organizers for inviting me to participate on this panel. I am chris hodson from Brigham Young university, and as the first center, let me be the first to congratulate the professor, and i really mean this. This is a tremendous book, a really remarkable intellectual accompaniment, someone who tries to work in a number of languages i know how hard it is, and the depth of her learning on these culinary issues is really just staggering. A littlelot smarter, smarter after having read the book. It was really an impressive achievement. Now i am a historian of early modern empires, just the topic i want to get back to, but one thing that means is by my training i do not think i have anything intelligent to say firstthe professors brilliant chapters on the ancient world. I am going to say some stuff anyway because i have the microphone. As a reader, i was particularly taken with her account of the transformation of what i think she calls sacrificial regimes, feasting and fasting and what we might call contemplative ingredients, like fish, sweetened tea, coffee. Persia, whose of methods of projecting elite power through complex, elite, rich cuisine triggered a strong round of emulations and reformulations that laid the foundation for greek, roman, and later European Food ways. To the extent that i have a beef with professor lowden, this five minutes could have all been food puns really easily. With her characterization of what scholars call the Columbian Exchange, this idea of Alfred Crosby from the 1970s, basically the Columbian Exchange stands for the exchange of all kinds of living things, whether they are microbes or plants or animals. That was triggered with columbus First Encounter with the new world at the end of the 15th century. If i am understanding her correctly, she argues that because the transfer of new world plants to the old world occurred without and i think this is a quote the accompanying new world technology, meaning