Food in History

Description

Review: Tasty food for mind too! - Excellent book !Well researched on various aspects of food history of world,tasty for mind too,of that tasteful thing for tongue! Review: A Gastronomic Grand Tour - As the title indicates, this is an exposition on the role that food - its cultivation, enjoyment, transportation, and its politics - has played in history. As the author notes in her introduction, for all our technological savvy and utopian visions of the approaching singularity, the fact remains that humanity is still not rid of its all-too-earthly dependence on food. The author begins by looking at the origin of the human species ; forced onto the treacherous Savannah by the retreating ice caps, our primate ancestors evolved big brains and bipedal motion, the better to cooperate socially and chuck rocks at potential prey. From these inauspicious beginnings and precarious technology, we stumbled upon agriculture - and with the burgeoning populations that this afforded, came the first administrative centers, the first vague sense of social unity, and eventually the first cities and civilizations. The author then looks at the food stuffs of the major civilizations from the ancient Mesopotamians, the Romans, the Chinese and the Indians - always making sure to delineate how the climate, availability of grain crops, and available technology determined the variety of food available to these ancient peoples, and also detailing how these burgeoning national cuisines dovetailed and commingled with an emerging national character. (Somewhat pathetically, apparently the only commonality among these different civilizations spanning the globe was the near universal distinction between the quality of food available to the upper classes and that of the lower classes) The author does a fantastic job in subtly adjoining her descriptions of the food cultures of various places in the world with broader historical shifts and changes in fortune ; for example, the Roman Republic took to seafaring primarily because they needed access to the grain of the fertile Nile plains, all the better to fulfill the “panem” part of their governing ethos (“panem et circenses”) ; the curious evolution of Indian vegetarianism, a development that had historical parallels with the early Jews ; the European hunger for spices, arising from their climactically conditioned blandness of food, which led to the great seafarers looking for the spice islands of Indonesia, but instead stumbling upon the giant land mass of North America ; the British and Dutch attempts to escape the stranglehold of the Portuguese on said spice trade, and the resulting British domination of the subcontinent ; the rise of plantations, indentured servitude, and slavery from the new sugar crops found in the West Indies and Cuba, and the expansion of this method to other crops - there are plenty of such deft connections across history, geography, and gastronomy performed. The book ends with a discussion of the Industrial Revolution, and the associated revolutions of food transportation and supply, quality management, and the scientific revolutions, which brought us the Green and White revolutions. The author ends with an enigmatic epilogue which posits that the early co-evolution of culture and cuisine was determined by the nature of an indigenous terrain, and thus, for a particular purpose ; but since these purposes have been transcended by technology and globalization, many peoples consume their traditional food uncognizant of the mismatch between the intended purposes of such food and the current reality. This is an impressive, and engrossing work, with plenty of insights regarding the fundamental nature of our food and its subterranean role in far-flung phenomena with apparently little overlap ; the historical aspect aside, there are many interesting glances into the nature of various cuisine, and how they managed to get that way. This is a good book for fans of general history, food writing, or millennial males who enjoy reading about food without ever once stepping into a kitchen.