Rachel Laudan

Food history is the best history. Living in a world of endless fusion dishes and specialty restaurants is great from the perspective of the average eater - never in history has it been so cheap, convenient, and possible to develop a taste for so many different styles of cooking - but it makes you wonder about where all of these cooking styles came from, and why different cultures have the specific attitudes they do to the food that they eat. Food isn't just fuel; it's both a shared experience within a society and a dividing line between societies, so any complete discussion of the hows and whys of cooking styles has to include some discussion of the societies that produced them. Laudan reaches back to the beginning of the Agricultural Revolution to explain how people's attitudes towards food have changed over time due to religious conversions, imperialism, class conflict, technological change, rising incomes, and simple shifting tastes.

Laudan starts off with a quick review of the history of the development of agriculture, though thankfully she doesn't exhaust the reader à la Guns, Germs & Steel with descriptions of every plant domestication in world history. This is a social history and not a history of farming, though she does briefly discuss the botanical properties of barley, millet, maize, etc. She spends most of her time focusing on grains and to a lesser extent roots, since it was their large amount of stored calories that allowed civilizations to elevate them from raw fuel to food and hence cuisine as we know it. Depressingly but unsurprisingly, most of humanity has subsisted on extremely basic and monotonous diets since time immemorial, yet while domestication has vastly enriched the variety of foods available to the masses, the greatest driver of cuisine was political and cultural change.

The Greeks philosophized at length and in quantity about food as a source of civic strength and virtue. Plato's specific views in The Republic might seem odd to modern readers, but his general thoughts on moderation and excess, what foods are okay and which aren't, and how the character is determined by the food you eat are still echoed nearly unchanged by many people. What you eat says something about you, so anyone who has read their Eric Schlosser, Michael Pollan, Mark Bittman, or Michael Moss will be familiar with how those fronts in the food wars are still open. Even today, describing a diet as "spartan" implies toughness and character-building, while the modern word "foodie" has a slightly decadent ring to it. Anyone with even moderate means today eats the diet of the kings of yesterday, which can lead to almost absurdly dedicated coolness cascades, as people with excessive time and money on their hands try to seek out ever-more rarefied culinary experiences. Or, in reverse, particularly strict diets (e.g. paleo) not only demonstrate to others that you have the willpower to eschew harmful luxuries, you're also invoking the presumed strengths of the ancients.

Absorbing as those status/identity concerns are, more interesting are the details about how religions informed cuisines. Nearly every religion has some sort of dietary stricture or custom on how foods should be prepared or consumed, and so often changes in cuisines were driven by the rise and fall of religious conquest. Alexander, Ashoka, Mohammed, Jesus, and the Buddha all had profound effects on the way that people ate, even if their ideologies were being spread for quite different reasons. Since they were less familiar to me, I found the sections about the spread of Buddhist ideas into China to be fascinating - I did not know that it was Buddhist missionaries, attempting to proselytize their reluctance to eat meat, who originally introduced tofu to Chinese cooking. The Colombian Exchange is the most famous example of the transmission of foodstuffs, but it's interesting to see that cooking techniques have been getting swapped for thousands of years.

One weakness of the book is that often when she's discussing cuisines she'll present a long lists of dishes or ingredients that someone ate or served at a meal. Lists are perhaps unavoidable, and even occasionally desirable, but occasionally it's hard to tell how the specific ingredients in each cuisine belong to it or help define it. I'm loathe to encourage Great Man ("Great Meal"?)-type history, but maybe some focus of the Planet Taco or The World in Six Glasses variety would have been nice. She makes good points about the nature of "fusion" cuisines, which is that there are rarely completely seamless meldings of cooking styles, but rather deliberate adaptations of certain elements, piece by piece, to make the foreign more familiar. An example that comes to mind is the Korean taco, where typically a single Korean food item like bulgogi or kimchi is placed in a Mexican context, rather than a total merging of Korean and Mexican ingredients and preparation styles. What would the reverse look like, with Mexican meats like picadillo imported into Korean banchan, for example? What will the future bring, as global commerce brings even the most obscure cuisines to cities across the world?

The modern era is unique in that food innovation has taken place peacefully rather than by force. The great global accumulation of wealth that has continued since the Industrial Revolution has made it easier than ever for the development and propagation of "middling cuisines", Laudan's term for cuisines that everyone can eat, not exclusively the upper classes or the peasantry. An immense amount of ingenuity has gone into satisfying our desires for food, and this book makes you see cookbooks differently, as a repository of culture rather than mere recipes. I think her closing discussion of middling cuisines is spot-on, with many lessons for how we should think about food:

"The challenge is to acknowledge that not all is right with modern cuisines without romanticizing earlier ones; to recognize that contemporary cuisines have problems with health and equity without jumping to the conclusion that this is new; to face up to new nutritional challenges of abundance without being paternalist or authoritarian; to extend the benefits of industrialized food processing to all those who still labor with pestles and mortars; and to realize that the problem of feeding the world is a matter not simply of providing enough calories but of extending to everyone the choice, the responsibility, the dignity, and the pleasure of a middling cuisine."… (altro)