📖 Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History ✍

A sheaf of wheat is no more food than a boll of cotton is a garment.

"bile" Really?

There is considerable evidence that following the Black Death in the mid-fourteenth century, for example, the survivors ate better as a result of the drop in population.

"Italian" Mental health quote

“The chicken is the country’s but the city eats it,”

People had been working for millennia to discover how to maximize their profit from olive trees, one of the most unpromising of the many unpromising plants from which humans have learned to produce food—a small straggly tree that takes years to mature enough to produce tiny, bitter fruits every other year that cultivation has never succeeded in making good to eat fresh. By the third millennium B.C.E., improved varieties were being cultivated in Syria, Palestine, and Crete.

Alexander and his retinue thus aided and in some cases probably instigated transfers of plants between the Mediterranean and the Middle East and beyond.

Gluttony and rampant sexuality encouraged highly undesirable luxury, a term that comes from the Latin word for the floppy, overabundant growth of plants given too much water and fertilizer.

"Since grains bound society together—peasant to family, family to village, family to ruler, and family to ancestors—to abstain from grain was to reject society." Taoists

khand, whence our word “candy”

"tough, chewy Champa (Vietnamese) rice, which the government insisted they grow, in the south." Which is what?

"Only pork and blood were forbidden. To avoid the latter, animals were slaughtered by cutting their throats and allowing the blood to drain out." Did they do anything with the blood?

"Bread" Details would be useful.

"pastirma" History of pastrami

“Eating the sultan’s bread” was the phrase for receiving a salary.

Bread, the everyday staple, was used as a metaphor to explain Christian beliefs.

"This exchange of raw materials should not blind us to the fact that they all have to be processed to become food. European and Asian food-processing and cooking technology was transferred wholesale to the New World, whereas essentially no American food-processing technology was moved to the Old World." Not even mixtalisation?

"From a culinary perspective, then, as opposed to a biological or ecological one, there was no Columbian Exchange; there was yet one more largely one-way culinary transfer." Underappreciated point.

"Giving everyone the same cuisine meant bringing down the cost of food." Seems one could argue that bringing down the cost of food came first.

The eighteen-year-old Philippe and his thirteen-year-old bride sat expressionless, suffering the humiliation in silence.

The abbé Pluquet calculated in 1786 that the foods reduced to essences for ten gourmets could have been used to feed three hundred hungry people.

Each May, two thousand herring-busses (haringbuizen), each with a crew of fifteen, sailed out of ports such as Rotterdam and Amsterdam for the two-month season when fat herring started breeding.

"loblolly or burgoo" How did these get transferred to pines, pudding and squirrel stew?

The British spent between 38 and 60 percent of their income on food,

In the 1850s, the German economist Ernst Engels formalized this strategy as Engels’s law: the proportion of income spent on food fell with rising incomes, even though the absolute amount increased.

"By 1900, every leading Bordeaux producer used the word “château,” leading one historian to comment that there are “few better examples of the invention of tradition than the process that some wines underwent in this period".” Wine Geese

"To persuade German, British, and other European biologists and biochemists to come to the new Imperial University of Tokyo in the 1870s, the Japanese government ..." Story???

"Maurizio charged that rich countries that attempted to shift the diet of ethnic minorities to white bread were guilty of “dietary imperialism".” Nice phrase

"Feminists saw communal dining as a way to escape domesticity. In Australia," Story???|

"Sturgeon ... When they found that the fish had nonstandard scales, exports resumed." Story???|

Presumably searching for historical antecedents, someone in the U.S. Department of Agriculture condensed Xenophon’s longish discussion of Socrates’s theory of food and the state into the pithy statement, “No man can be called a statesman who is ignorant of problems of wheat.”

Small bakers almost disappeared, their market share in 1939 down to less than 4 percent of the total ($ 20 million, compared to the $ 514 million earned by industrial bakeries).

Chinese noodles and soy sauce, Roman sauces and raised bread, Islamic distillation, Western cakes and chocolate are technological achievements that stand alongside Chinese bronzes, Roman hydraulic engineering, Islamic ceramics, and Western steam engines.

If our vision of the way to have better food is to have less processing, more natural food, more home cooking, and more local food, we will cut ourselves off from the most likely hope for better food in the future.

Industrialized food processing was as necessary to the weakening of social hierarchy as the mastery of grains had been to its appearance.