147 | Rachel Laudan on Cuisine, Culture, and Empire

For as much as people talk about food, a good case can be made that we don’t give it the attention or respect it actually deserves. Food is central to human life, and how we go about the process of creating and consuming it — from agriculture to distribution to cooking to dining — touches the most mundane aspects of our daily routines as well as large-scale questions of geopolitics and culture. Rachel Laudan is a historian of science whose masterful book, Cuisine and Empire, traces the development of the major world cuisines and how they intersect with politics, religion, and war. We talk about all this, and Rachel gives her pitch for granting more respect to “middling cuisine” around the world.

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Rachel Laudan received a Ph. D. in History and Philosophy of Science from University College London. She retired from academia after teaching at Carnegie-Mellon, the University of Pittsburgh, Virginia Tech, and the University of Hawaii. Among her awards are the Jane Grigson/Julia Child prize of the International Association of Culinary Professionals and the IACP Cookbook Award for Best Book in Culinary History.

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0:00:00.0 Sean Carroll: Hello, everyone, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I’m your host, Sean Carroll. And among the topics that I think doesn’t get enough intellectual respect in the ways that we talk about the world is food. Food is enormously important, right? We eat food every day, most of us. We think about it, a tremendous amount of our economy is devoted to growing food, transporting it, cooking it, deciding how to eat it, and food plays in in an intimate way to the history of the world. Different countries or different nation states are trying to get resources which include growing food. Their technological development of a society can be driven by ways to make food better or more interesting or whatever.

0:00:45.4 SC: Today’s guest, Rachel Laudan, is a historian of scientists who became a historian of food, because she realized that not only is the science of food very interesting, but the cultural and political and even religious history of food is fascinating. So she wrote a wonderful book, it’s a couple years old now, but maybe you don’t know about it, it’s called Cuisine and Empire, the idea being that different political groups in the history of the world have been associated with different kinds of cuisines, and we can trace how these cuisines change over time by who invades who, who sends their missionaries to convert who else, and it’s important, it matters. Again, we eat the food every day.

0:01:28.4 SC: So thinking about when we eat a certain meal, “Oh, I’m using rice or I’m using wheat-based pasta or soy beans because of some cultural history I hadn’t even thought of before.” So this is a a food-based podcast, but we’re not giving you any recipes or anything like that, we’re talking about food as an element in the greater history of humanity here on Earth. The religious aspects are kind of interesting to me, the war aspects, the political and economic aspects, food is everywhere. It’s not just in our everyday lives as sort of a something we gotta do, it plays an important role. So hope you’ve already eaten, because you might get hungry while we’re talking about this stuff. Let’s go.

[music]

0:02:25.0 SC: Rachel Laudan, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.

0:02:27.3 Rachel Laudan: I’m delighted to be here.

0:02:29.0 SC: I have to say… Here’s my opening question for you. When I was reading your book, Cuisine and Empire, I found that it was much better if I read the book after having eaten, because you’re talking about all these wonderful foodstuffs and it would always get me hungry if I hadn’t eaten yet. Is this an occupational hazard for those who study the history of cuisines? You better start eating before you actually do your work?

[chuckle]

0:02:51.6 RL: It’s funny you ask that, because I have spent the last 20 years fighting the view that if you talk about the history of food, you’re talking about something that is kind of sweet and feminine and full of feasts. And when I talk to publishers about my book, they all said, “Oh, yes, glorious Renaissance pictures of feasts because this is going to be so lovely.”

[chuckle]

0:03:16.6 RL: And yes, of course, there’s all that, and there is the occupational hazard of thinking about food. But food is part of human life and it’s got its downsides as well as its upsides, and there’s anguish as well as joy mixed up in food. So, yes.

0:03:43.4 SC: And politics and war and religion and all these wonderful things, that’s what’s great about the book.

0:03:49.8 RL: Yes.

0:03:50.2 SC: How about to get us into it, I couldn’t think of a better choice than you made in the book talking about your experience in Hawaii, which is a little bit of a melting pot, patchwork quilt of different cuisines coming in at different times. Do you want to tell the audience a little bit about how you think about all those different grains and root vegetables that you discovered when you were living in Hawaii?

0:04:14.5 RL: Yes, Hawaii was a strange experience when I first got there, because everybody says it’s just like California, 2005 miles off the coast of California, and it’s not, not at all. Because in California, you are still in a culture that is dominantly Western. And in Hawaii, that is not true. The islands’ population is made up of three groups, the Pacific Islanders who got there, most of them, 700 or 800 years ago, but have continued to come from the South Pacific, the Anglos, for want of a better word, Americans, British, who have been there for a couple of hundred years, and the Asians who are a very mixed bunch. There are Chinese Hakka, Antan, Okinawans and Japanese, Koreans, Filipinos, many others, most of whom came as plantation workers.

0:05:23.3 RL: Now, what’s interesting is that when Hawaii became a state, the plantation workers voted as a bloc and they took over the state government. And so now, you have a culture where what are still minorities on the mainland are not minorities in Hawaii. And this, from the food point of view, I learnt two really important things in Hawaii. One was that you’ve got these teeny-weeny little islands out there miles from anywhere and everything that people eat has been brought in, they were a desert. You could not have survived in Hawaii.

0:06:11.4 RL: So the Hawaiians brought everything they needed, their cooking equipment, their plants, their techniques, and the Anglos brought their ovens and their what have yous, and so did the Asians. So that taught me that the general idea we have that foods are rooted in place in the terroir, if you want to use the fancy term, and it’s a mistake that foods are mobile, and when people move, food moves.

0:06:47.9 RL: The other thing I learnt was that when you have a political change, of the kind you had in Hawaii, you have going along with it almost invariably a culinary change. That if you have a new identity as citizens of the state of Hawaii, you have to have a state food, and you have to distinguish that from other states. And so what happened in Hawaii was that these three groups… Yes, semi-deliberately, deliberately created what in Hawaii is called local food. But it’s local not because of the terroir but because of the cultures.

0:07:41.8 SC: Well, that’s exactly what I was inspired to ask by what you just said. I mean, this idea, of course, that when people move in, either colonizing or immigrating, they bring food along with them. But I’m wondering is it mostly just because that’s what they like to eat, and therefore they bring it in, or is it more deliberate as in, “This is our culture, we need to preserve it or even impose it on where we’re going?”

0:08:06.4 RL: I think it’s the latter. Most people… It’s not a fashionable thing to say nowadays, it was once throughout history, that you are what you eat. And people, still to a very large extent, deep down tend to believe that. And it’s… Yes, so when people move… And I notice it myself, I’ve moved around the world a fair bit, from England to America to Hawaii to Mexico with lots of stays in other places. And people say, “Ah, but when you lived in Mexico, didn’t you just eat Mexican all the time?” No. No, no, because that’s too abrupt a change. I love Mexican food, but I’m not going to just suddenly abandon the accumulated experience of many years to go completely… To completely change my lifestyle.

0:09:11.9 SC: Yeah, maybe if it’s not quite we are what we eat, but certainly what we choose to eat is a very important part of who we choose to be, right?

0:09:20.9 RL: Yeah.

0:09:21.1 SC: I always joke when we’ve had Thai food last night, and it’s like, “Well, we can’t have Thai food tonight, but of course Thai people have it every night.” [chuckle] But there’s something different in our expectations that goes into who we are. So let’s go all the way back, cooking by itself is a pretty artificial-seeming thing. I know there’s isolated stories of different animal species that cook in some very, very broad sense. But when did cooking start among human beings? Is this something that historians know anything about?

0:09:50.6 RL: That’s really in anthropological territory, and there’s a huge amount of work going on about that at the moment. I think one of the things that anthropologists are gradually realizing is that cooking is not just a matter of heat. First of all they thought once you’ve got the mastery of fire, then you’ve got cooking. But cooking… I keep looking for a good word, processing, preparing, has at least five different, very different kind of processes going on. There are the thermal changes that you get by the use of fire or ice. There are the mechanical changes by grinding or chopping. There are the chemical changes by soaking in alkali or acid. There are the microbiological changes associated with fermentation, and the biological changes because although we don’t do it now, in the ancient world, people also saw breeding plants as a part of cooking, because as you probably know, most of the plants that we eat today have been dramatically modified by human beings.

0:11:09.2 RL: So that this whole business of… Plants and animals are just the raw materials of food, they’re not food. Although people talk about farmers as producing food all the time, they don’t, they produce the raw materials. And it’s what happens afterwards, these five… Well, the breeding of plants doesn’t happen afterwards, but the other four happen afterwards. And usually not just one of them, I mean, you normally chop and heat or ferment and heat or use chemicals so that from very… This makes it terribly difficult to give a date, it’s a process that goes along with becoming human as this amazing set of technologies are gradually mastered.

0:12:03.0 SC: And presumably it goes along with… Again, this… I know nothing about this except from skimming your book, so it’s oversimplified in my head, but there was a transition from being a hunter-gatherer kind of society to being an agricultural kind of society. Did we have what we would today recognize as cooking even back in the hunter-gatherer days?

0:12:21.2 RL: Oh, absolutely. Oh, absolutely. And in fact I really would like to argue against that periodization, as historians call it, that is so deeply embedded in our culture that it’s hunter-gatherer and then an agricultural revolution.

0:12:39.3 SC: I figure you probably would, but I… [chuckle] I had to set the stage.

0:12:44.6 RL: So, no, I think the… I mean, what agriculture is basically about is either grains in the temperate world or sometimes in the tropical world with rice or roots, taro, cassava, potatoes, what have you. Particularly the grains, they are incredibly difficult to prepare, cook. You are not going to farm grains until you have learnt to cook grains. So the important transition is a transition from a very, very mixed diet to the mastery of grains, being able to take these teeny, hard, well-protected by nasty, tough husks little things and turn them into something that humans can actually eat.

0:13:42.3 SC: That was an impressive part of your book where you discuss the grains, because they’re so important everywhere in what we eat, that you really made the case it’s hard to eat grains. Were you telling the story about your father who tried? He was a farmer, and he kinda failed to make grain… His own grains into food?

0:14:00.6 RL: Yes, yes. He thought he could just grind them, and they had already been thrashed in the combine harvester. So he didn’t have to get the outer parts off, all he had to do was to grind them. And in those days there were not handy little YouTubes that you could see about how to grind grain, so…

0:14:23.0 SC: So he was just guessing.

0:14:25.1 RL: He tried with a pestle and mortar, you cannot smash grains into flour.

0:14:29.8 SC: And so, but they are both ubiquitous and fairly early in the development of cuisine. So what was it that inspired people to work so hard to figure out how to make grains edible?

0:14:43.4 RL: I think the inventorying of the Earth’s resources that early humans did was unbelievably impressive, they must have tried everything. And the nice thing about… What they… I don’t know whether they realized this consciously, but the parts of plants that actually have lots of nutrients ’cause they support the new plants are either the grains or the roots. And so that means that they are full of nutrients, it means that they are not only… Let’s just stick to the grains, ’cause the roots are not so important, they tend to be toxic. But the grains can… They have many advantages, they have a very high nutrient to weight value so that you can move them a reasonable distance, like 10 miles without a horse or an ox or water.

0:15:47.9 RL: They are storable because they are designed by nature to be stored. They can support towns because of these two features. But the one that I think is really important and that the people who… The archeologists and historians who’ve looked at grains haven’t mentioned is they can be turned into almost anything. We think of grains as making bread or rice or tortillas, but they also contain… The carbohydrates can be turned into sugars, and the Chinese learnt to do that very early, we still do it with corn syrup. They can be turned into fats, they can be turned into condiments, as the Chinese do with their various fermented pastes and soy sauces and things. So if you’ve got grains, you can practically produce the whole of the human diet. And of course, they’ve been turned into meat, because animals eat them, but…

0:16:57.4 SC: And booze, don’t forget booze, right?

0:17:00.9 RL: Oh, oh, well, I shouldn’t forget booze, should I? Very important. No, definitely not.

0:17:06.4 SC: So that…

0:17:08.7 RL: So they’re just amazing. It’s not easy to do this, but it is… You have got something that you can really depend on.

0:17:18.8 SC: And dependability also, it’s sort of reliable in the sense you don’t have to go out and hunt for it or even wait for it, you can store it over the season, right?

0:17:26.7 RL: Yes.

0:17:26.8 SC: You can eat it in winter if you grew it in summer.

0:17:29.0 RL: Provided the locusts don’t come and the hailstorm doesn’t come and what have you. Yeah.

0:17:34.5 SC: And you mentioned the word towns, so already we see a connection between the human way of life and the food that they’re eating. When you have a town, and maybe you have some differentiation in occupations, not everyone is doing the same thing, there can be farmers, and grains are a good target for them.

0:17:53.9 RL: Yes. You don’t find cities in societies that don’t eat grains. Obviously, the eating of grains comes way before cities, it comes way before agriculture, but it does allow that.

0:18:12.1 SC: Interesting. So yeah, so I wonder how much… I don’t know how cities developed either, but I wonder how much was freedom from spending time hunting, etcetera, once you could farm your grains?

0:18:24.8 RL: Yes, and also freedom to settle in larger groups, because you can bring them in. No, I mean, what human cooking does… And I… This begins, I think, before the grains even with hunter-gatherers, but it continues with the grains. I mean, this whole business of cooking, broadly understood, externalizes what animals have to do for themselves. Animals have to chew, which we don’t even think about, but it is a very time-consuming business for a chimp to chew, a monkey, takes about five hours. So we don’t spend five hours a day chewing, and we don’t count the energy of chew… And digesting is also a very slow and energy-consuming process for the animals.

0:19:17.5 RL: Well, we do that in the kitchen, and that frees up lots of human energy to do other things. The downside of it is that some proportion of the human… Of humanity has to do the cooking. And no. I mean, that’s a very huge burden. People talk all the time. If you read history books, they say, “Oh, agriculture came along, and then everybody had to labor in the fields, and it was such hard work.” Laboring in the fields… Yes, it’s hard work. My father was a farmer, I don’t deny that. But one reason perhaps I wrote the book was in honor of my mother who did the cooking, and nobody paid any attention to that. But that was an enormously, even in industrialized England, an enormously time-consuming business if you had seven people to feed, and you grew all your own vegetables and so on and so forth.

0:20:25.4 SC: It was very… That was a great point in the book, because it reminded me of the ideas of extended cognition. I don’t know how much you follow people in the study of the mind claiming that what we should count as our mind is not just our brain but also the pieces of paper we write on and the way that we keep records and our bodies and so forth, or doing cognitive tasks, spiders encode knowledge in their spider web patterns. And so this is extended metabolism, like the idea of cooking and so forth off-sources some digestive purposes to things that we can do with our hands.

0:21:02.2 RL: Right. Right. No, I hadn’t heard about extended cognition, but I like that idea, and I like the idea of calling it extended metabolism. Yeah.

0:21:13.3 SC: And so you have a wonderful… In the chapters of your book, you talk about the development of cuisines and the major cuisines throughout history. So maybe we can go through some of those. Was the what you call the sacrificial cuisine of barley and wheat, was that the first major cuisine worldwide, or is it… Do we not even know enough to say something like that?

0:21:36.5 RL: Well, let me just say a word about cuisine, because in English, it tends to suggest something very snobby. Unfortunately, we don’t have a word in English for a style of cooking and eating. In Spanish for example, la cocina means both the kitchen and the style of cooking. So I use the word cuisine not to talk about something fancy, but to talk about a particular style of cooking. And going back to cognition, I think what tends to hold cuisines together is our ideas, the what we’re doing with the cuisine.

0:22:27.9 RL: So now we get to sacrificial cuisine. In the ancient world, there are many sacrificial cuisines, but what they have in common is a belief that the gods provided us with food, and that in return that… Particularly the grains, and all the early gods in China or Greece or what have you tend to be grain gods. And in other parts of the world, they’re Demeter and… What’s a Chinese one? I’m blocking on it, but never mind. The millet god in China. And that in return, in order to ensure a supply of the basics of food, humans have to feed the gods, which they do by sacrificing to the gods.

0:23:29.4 RL: And the aromas when the sacrificed goods are cooked, the aromas rise to the gods and feed them. And it’s a very kind of practical view of how you try to live in a difficult and dangerous world with those locusts and hailstorms that might destroy your food, that you have to undertake this bargaining position to whatever those powers up there are.

0:24:04.3 SC: I’m going to admit that I’m forgetting the details of the story, but way back in Cain and Abel in Genesis, didn’t one of them sacrifice a lamb and the other some plants, and God judged them harshly? I forget which one was judged… What was better.

0:24:18.5 SC: I don’t remember that. But no, whether it’s the Bible, whether it’s the early literature in China, whether it’s Greece, Persia, this… These kinds of stories about offering the gods your most precious things, which are always meat and grains, basically, in return for the gods hopefully [chuckle] taking care of you…

0:24:48.5 SC: Smiling down on you. Yeah. That’s very interesting, because I wouldn’t have guessed. If you say after the fact that there’s a particular religion that… In which sacrificing to the gods plays a big role, I would say, “Okay, I get that.” But the fact that it’s universal over very different disconnected cultures is kind of amazing, it was something where very different people said, “Yeah, this is the way to go.”

0:25:10.2 RL: Yeah. There are… The first… When I’m looking at the very early, these early formal cuisines in the very first empires, which is when we first got much written evidence about what’s going on, it’s very striking that around the globe not only are they sacrificial cuisines, but they all believe in that different levels of life have different kinds of food appropriate to them, even different classes of human beings, and that the cooking is part of a whole cosmic process where the power of the sun… The heat of the sun and the rays of the moon drive the processes on the Earth.

0:26:00.7 RL: And at a very general level, those three principles seem to be very, very widespread. Now, is this just a response, you know, that human cognition, human brains have to the world they’re trying to live in and make sense of, or is there a whole bunch of contact that everybody did apparently come out of Africa? At least, that’s the standard story right now, and you know at what point, we don’t know.

0:26:35.8 SC: Right. But okay, despite the fact that maybe everyone did it, you do sort of put your finger on this particular set of cultures in the Middle East, which you associate with the barley and wheat kinds of cuisines. So what were those folks eating and how did they think about eating back in those days?

0:26:53.5 RL: Okay. Well, Plato and Aristotle would have eaten barley bannocks. That is the… At that stage wheat was still not the predominant grain, it was the secondary one. So they would have ground up barley and eaten it as basically flat breads on an open fire. They would have eaten essentially a vegetarian diet most of the year. And meat was normally eaten only in association with a sacrifice, so that the big event, at the Olympics, if you like a nice story, is not… Well, it is the races, but it is also the final ceremony, which is when 30 oxen are brought in and slaughtered. And I sort of think of the… The sort of practicalities of this. You’ve got… It takes a certain amount of time…

0:28:02.5 SC: Yes.

0:28:02.7 RL: To get an animal in and slaughter it, and cut it up and then put it on a sacrificial fire, and then everybody feasts on what turns out, if you do the arithmetic, to be a rather small piece of meat.

0:28:16.6 SC: So the concessions at the stadium are as early as the sports themselves, in other words. I know that even today, the only reason I’ll go to a baseball game is to just have a hot dog and sit outside on a nice day, so some things never change. But you then contrast this with what you identify as a Buddhist kind of cuisine based mostly on rice. And is that… How does that fit in with the idea that I would have that all of East Asia eats rice all the time? Did Buddhism really have some responsibility for bringing rice to China and Japan and Korea?

0:28:53.9 RL: Oh, yes. Millet was the original grain. I mean, you know millet that little thing that goes in bird seed feeders?

0:29:03.0 SC: I’ve heard of it, I don’t…

0:29:04.3 RL: Actually…

0:29:04.6 SC: I don’t eat much…

0:29:05.1 RL: It’s not actually a thing. It’s a lot of different species that have very tiny grains, and that’s what Confucius would have eaten, well, steamed millet.

0:29:18.2 SC: Okay.

0:29:18.5 RL: And I mean, it’s not that Buddha… There was rice in various parts of South China very early on, but when you get a… States beginning to take these new kinds of religions that begin, say, 500 BC, Buddhism and then Christianity and Manichaeism and later Islam, then this political religious coalition tends to have preferred foods and preferred festivals. Most of them are set up in opposition to these earlier sacrificial cuisines. I mean, they’re turning away from sacrifice and instituting a new kind of ethics and understanding of the world where no longer do you have to placate the gods, you have a different relation to them. And in Buddhism, the Buddha… The stories say that he turned away from the killing of animals, that’s away from the sacrifice. And so in Buddhism, there is an avoidance of meat, it’s not complete, but it’s there. And so the cherished foods instead of being meat become sugar and butter and rice.

0:31:07.8 SC: And in India, before Buddhism came along, I’m guessing it was mostly Hindu or pre-Hindu, and were they not eating rice, were they eating something different?

0:31:17.7 RL: Were they not eating rice?

0:31:21.8 SC: Yeah.

0:31:21.8 RL: They were eating rice and millet. I mean, still the poor in India today eat this thing called millet that nobody in America thinks of as human food, but that was incredibly important. It is a grain, and you know, that’s what most people did and many still do eat in India. So this… I mean, rice has always been… Particularly white rice is a very elite food. And so when we’re talking about Buddhists changing things, we are talking primarily about the ruling classes.

0:31:56.8 SC: Okay. And did that… Tell me more about that transition in China, ’cause I don’t know that much about it. I mean, Confucianism is early and was sort of the established way of thinking about things. Buddhism never became the dominant religion in China, as far as I understand, although it did get quite a foothold.

0:32:16.4 RL: It became pretty much the dominant religion between about… Now, please, if you’ve got listeners who are experts on Buddhism in China, I probably… I would need to look in the book…

0:32:29.8 SC: Sure.

0:32:29.9 RL: And get the exact centuries. But I think between the third and the eighth century Buddhism becomes very dominant in China. And then there’s a reaction back against it, and Daoism and Confucianism. There’s always been a complicated dance between those three in China.

0:32:49.7 SC: But the Buddhists in some sense won the culinary battle. They brought their rice in and that stuck with us.

0:32:56.6 RL: They made a huge difference to Chinese cuisine, yes, I mean, it’s an interesting story because you say, well, how did they do it? You’ve got Central Asia there in the middle. And the answer is well, of course, Central Asia was a major route, but also that you don’t need vast numbers of people if you can change minds. And what happened was that certain Indian rulers sent people, sent envoys to India to learn this new religion, and they came back and they brought the texts and they brought the ideas and they brought the way of eating and so it’s… Yeah, I mean for a period… And it was a very, very big thing, because for the Chinese red is the color of happiness, it’s a very good color. And in Buddhism, red stands for meat and alcohol and the things you don’t want. And white is the very good color. So all these things have to be negotiated. It takes a long time, but yes, Buddhism dramatically changes the food of first China, and then Japan and Korea.

0:34:25.4 SC: And it’s interesting, because we previously hinted at it, and I’m sure we’ll get to the colonialism aspect and the empire aspect, but this is not that really. I mean, it’s almost like a cultural religious exchange that kind of sweeps the country, in the case of China. Did it happen at the common level first, or the elite level first, and then trickle down? Do we know things like that?

0:34:50.1 RL: I would say at the elite level. I mean, just simply the logistics of learning about Buddhism from thousands of miles away and getting the texts, no, that’s not something that common people can do. So this… Yes, I think this is a kind of cultural colonialism. Sometimes, obviously, and I don’t want to jump ahead as you very meticulously go through my book, but I mean, that it’s not always gentle either.

0:35:23.0 SC: Right.

0:35:23.3 RL: Either the Persian empire, earlier in the Mediterranean was not a gentle empire. And when the Mongols come into China, that’s not a gentle empire… A gentle colonization either. So it comes in different forms.

0:35:38.1 SC: Well, let’s jump ahead. It’s not that far ahead, because the next great cuisine that you study is… You’ve grouped together Islam and the Mongols in an interesting way. I mean, what was specific about their cuisine?

0:35:53.1 RL: Well, I put them together because in… Although Christianity, which is now a huge world religion and was supported by states, comes before Islam chronologically, in fact, it was largely restricted to Western Europe most of that time, whereas Islam and other religions of the Middle East explode across Central Asia and down into West Africa and East Africa between the 7th and 11th or 12th centuries. So in that sense, they are the next big event in culinary history.

0:36:52.3 RL: Islam is not a set… In Islam, here you have another different working of this grain, meat, alcohol trio. I haven’t mentioned alcohol so much before, but it’s important for Islam. The preferred foods in Islam are very much meat and they keep a form of the sacrifice. They don’t entirely get rid of it. And they are very big wheat eaters, but of course, they tend to avoid alcohol. So that’s the kind of set-up. And they develop wheat cuisines very dramatically with flat breads and noodles, and dishes like that. And these get transmitted. They also do wonderful things with sugar, which they get from India, and distillation, which is not for alcohol so much as for essences. Their technology of food is really impressive.

0:38:02.8 SC: I mean, maybe it’s just too obvious even to mention, but one of the great things about either flat breads made from wheat or bowls of rice is that they can be the base of some foodstuff, right, you can put other things on the sauces and spices, and meats and vegetables. And that seems to be a universal phenomenon, am I correct in that?

0:38:23.5 RL: Yes, I think so. I mean, yeah.

0:38:26.3 SC: Everyone came up with the idea for the sandwich or the taco or whatever it is.

0:38:31.7 RL: Yes, yes. I mean, you get your grain, and for most people, grains would have been 80% or 90% of their calorie intake. And then you have something to make the grain go down, which is a little bit of sauce or something spicy or something salty.

0:38:58.6 SC: And I’m not sure how this fits into your classification of cuisines, but in my very naive picture of it, in Asia and maybe also in Africa, the idea of spices was very, very important, and maybe less important than it was in Western Europe at the time. Is that a fair comparison?

0:39:18.8 RL: Western Europe loves spices from the Middle Ages on, or even from the Roman period on. The trouble is that most of the things that we now classify as spices tend to be tropical, so they’re difficult to… You can’t grow them in Western Europe. They did have… People say it was bland, there is horseradish and there is mustard, and if you’ve ever… And the mustard is not like your little American yellow jar. This is hot, hot mustard, and it’s hot, hot horseradish. So I think something, some condiment that has a strong, either piquant or salty taste or sweet taste, but that’s more difficult, is pretty much universal.

0:40:12.4 SC: Okay, good. That does make sense. But, okay, and then the final pre-modern, if you want, cuisine that you focus on is Christian, I suppose, European. And so what made that different from the Islamic and the Buddhist ways of eating?

0:40:28.3 RL: Well, again, they have a different set of preferred foods. Wine is very important, and grapes are very important. They use raised bread not flat bread. Lamb is important, also is a meat cuisine. Lots of fasting in most Christian pre-Protestant cuisines, fasting almost 50% of the year for most places. And something that is shared in common with the religions in other parts of the world is that, it is the religious houses and the religious establishment that is responsible for feeding those who are in great poverty. That is fairly universal. It’s not the state’s business, it’s the… Although the state sponsors the religion, up until the modern period, the religious houses have the responsibility for feeding the poor.

0:41:43.4 SC: So is that a European Christian thing, or is that more universal?

0:41:46.5 RL: That’s universal.

0:41:47.5 SC: Okay. And you mentioned the fasting, so what would fasting have meant to Europeans in the Middle Ages? It’s not like people today take two weeks of… Two days of the week, maybe, and eat fewer calories to lose weight.

0:42:03.3 RL: Oh, no. It’s no meat. No animal products. So very much like the Greek Orthodox church today. This goes on for 40 days in Lent, in the spring, prior to Easter, and for a number of weeks before Christmas, and for many day, and every Friday, so you are eating a vegetarian or a vegan cuisine for 50% of the year.

0:42:37.3 SC: Okay. And then, of course, Europe explodes across the world. They start being…

0:42:43.1 RL: And then Europe explodes across the world, and particularly to the Americas, early, and the Spanish are really… The Spanish and the Portuguese are the really important ones in spreading this kind of Christian cuisine around the world.

0:43:00.2 SC: And presumably… More than presumably, it certainly goes both ways in terms of flavors and ingredients being brought back from one’s colonies to the homeland, but at the same time, you’re saying this sort of style of eating was brought from the imperial power to the colonies?

0:43:18.7 RL: Let’s look at two of the Spanish ones, Mexico and the Philippines. When the Spanish went to Mexico, they just took their entire kitchen. They did not eat tortillas if they could avoid it. In the first few years, they had to eat to tortillas. But they just… They moved their cuisine. They are not going to eat chilis and tortillas. When they get to the Philippines, pretty much the same kind of thing. They can’t do it quite so forcefully there, because getting across the Pacific is very difficult. But they do try to set up a Spanish cuisine in the Philippines. What do they bring back? There is not… Oh, let me get on a high horse.

0:44:14.2 RL: There is not a Columbian exchange in cuisine. There is a Colombian exchange with plants. Colombian exchange is this phrase that I think Alfred Crosby, the historian, set up to talk about how when Europeans reached the Americas, there was an exchange of plants and animals and diseases across the Atlantic. Doesn’t happen with food. We still… Anglos still have not learnt the basic techniques of Mexican cooking. We can’t, we don’t make corn tortillas by using alkali. We do not basically use dehydrated and rehydrated chilis to create the basis of our sources. We don’t use them for color and flavor and texture, we use them for heat. And that is also true, of say, Europe, Eurasia.

0:45:26.3 RL: When maize goes to Africa and Europe, the techniques for processing it don’t go. It’s only the plant. Same thing with chilis. The techniques don’t go, just the plant.

0:45:42.4 SC: Interesting.

0:45:42.7 RL: So that is, I think, again, because of the power relations, people don’t… You know, we’ve conquered the Americas. We don’t want to eat like them. If we can take these plants and make use of them, we will do. Now, in the case of West Africa and maize, it’s partly that the techniques are just not transmitted because there’s not much back movement into West Africa, but in Europe, people don’t know how to process… Didn’t know how to process maize the American way.

0:46:23.2 SC: It’s very interesting, the idea that it was not quite an exchange of equal partners, but we did bring ingredients back, they did bring ingredients back to Europe that were ultimately very influential. You talk a lot about potatoes, or at least the potato made a big influence on me, the whole fact that potatoes are not easy to grow, and they needed to figure out what to do with them when they brought them back to Europe.

0:46:48.3 RL: Yes, and people really didn’t like them. I mean, it takes two hundred years, three hundred years for the potato to make it really into European cuisine. It’s in the late 18th and early 19th century, when the European population is beginning to explode and rulers are desperate, desperate because starvation is lurking everywhere, famine, and they are forcing people to eat potatoes. They were not welcomed and, really, they have only been welcomed once they get a lot of fat in them.

0:47:26.3 SC: Well, was it more that we cultivated the actual potato or is it that we just learned to douse them in butter or fat or sour cream?

0:47:35.4 RL: First of all, the potato had to be changed to a different day, they come from the southern hemisphere and growing them in the northern hemisphere is not easy.

0:47:49.4 SC: Right.

0:47:49.8 RL: So a lot of breeding had to go on, but also, you know, if you’re eating 90% white bread, if white… Actually they weren’t, most people are eating poorer breads.

0:48:03.1 SC: Brown bread, yeah.

0:48:03.7 RL: Wholemeal breads, but if bread is… You know, “Give us this day our daily bread,” is the prayer. This is food, and then you give somebody a boiled potato which doesn’t have any consistency and not much taste, well, these, many of them didn’t have much taste, that’s not food.

0:48:28.8 SC: And you make the point that French fries were elite for a long time, because they were hard to make. It wasn’t until the frozen French fry came on the scene in the ’60s and ’70s that they became food of the people.

0:48:41.6 RL: Well, French fries, yes, they were elite, they were invented some time during the 19th century, and you know, they’re very difficult to make. You have to have a big pot of fat, which is very expensive, way out of the resources of most people, and then you have to fry the potatoes once, take them outside, drain them, heat the oil to a slightly higher temperature, fry them again, and then serve them. So this is taking a poor ingredient and by massive processing, turn it into something that is an elite food, as it was until you say the ’70s and ’80s when the McCain industry gets going with frozen french fries, where most of the preparation has been done for you.

0:49:38.9 SC: And it’s a characteristic of something you’ve already mentioned, but maybe it’s worth driving home, the idea that all the ingredients of the food we eat now, whether it’s the vegetables or the grains or even the meats, would have been unrecognizable several centuries ago. We’ve done so much cultivation and breeding that tomatoes, carrots, beef, whatever, chicken is just a very different thing than it was back in the day.

0:50:04.1 RL: The prevalent nostalgia about the better food of the past that I rage about all the time, this is part of it. Most of our foods now are much better.

0:50:17.0 SC: And you’ve mentioned this in the case of Spain, but this idea of the connection of cuisine and national character or national pride is worth going into. In this colonial era, in particular, there was French food, there was British food, they were different, and there was this feeling that we’re bringing civilization as well as cuisine to the world.

0:50:39.3 RL: Yes, I’m not sure how much they were actually national as… Until the end of the 18th or the 19th century, I think French and English… Well, there’s a complicated thing in there. The high end… I mean, the French didn’t eat what we think of as French food until about the 1930s. The Italians didn’t eat what we think of as Italian food until the 1950s. Most of the national cuisines that we now see are very recent. Nations are pretty recent inventions, most nations are not really around in anything like our sense of the word nation until a hundred, a couple of hundred years ago, and the vast majority of them in the last 50 years.

0:51:42.4 RL: So that until nations really get established, which is in the 20th century, class is much more important in food than nation. Just to illustrate that, people often ask me about, well, why did the French have such great food and the English have such terrible food. That’s to misinterpret it, because the elite in the 19th century ate French food in England, in France, in America, in Chile, in Japan, in India, everywhere, that was the food of the international elite. Insofar as they were national cuisines, they were among the middle or working classes.

0:52:35.2 SC: Is there a simple answer, probably not very simple, but how did that happen? How did French high cuisine, haute cuisine, become the international food of diplomacy in the elites worldwide?

0:52:50.2 RL: Why French as opposed to English? I think the English sort of ceded that to the French. You know, we’ve got the bigger empire, you can do the diplomacy. I don’t know. But certainly, the kind of thing that Julia Child was teaching, at least until she kind of toned down the stuff, was not what ordinary French people ate. It was what very well-to-do French people ate. The French had this massive export industry of sending chefs, and butchers, and bakers and everything around the world to prepare this for the courts, and the ambassadors, and the newly rich in the industrializing nations.

0:53:52.3 SC: I’m getting a bit of a theme. Maybe I’m over-reaching here, so you can correct me, but there’s an ongoing set of debates within history about how much things are geographically determined, local weather conditions and soil conditions and things like that, but you’re giving a lot of credit to ideas in a broader sense. The idea that people just like their food and they’re going to spread it and evangelize for it, and it works in some sense.

0:54:21.8 RL: Yes, I do want… Maybe I’m over-reacting to the story about the origin and that I’m now just going to talk about food, not about geographic determinism generally. I think this idea that our food is somehow rooted in the land comes along in the 1930s. I think it’s the French who invent it, and I think they have a real problem from, say, the end of the 19th century through the beginning of World War II. They have a republic, they have to try to create a French cuisine that French people actually eat as opposed to one that just for the courts.

0:55:27.2 RL: They are in trouble with the wine industry. So they developed this idea of terroir and the regional foods of France coming together to form a national cuisine. I don’t think so, but so yes, I want to go back to the idea that our ideas really do shape what we eat. Obviously, there’s some kind of… If you’re in Iceland, you’re not going to be able to grow rice and you’ve got to import it. There is a limit on what raw materials you can have and how far you can move them and how much you’re prepared to pay for that. But the way you think about eating, the way you link it to your other beliefs about politics or religion or whatever it happens to be, I think those are more important than…

0:56:33.2 SC: Good. The idea in Britain, as opposed to France, was beef and bread, I think, as you make the point, and that carried over here into the United States, and we’re a remarkably beef and bread-based culture to this day.

0:56:47.5 RL: Yes, and I think, what I think the great contribution of Britain to food was, and it’s a mixed contribution, but was to say that as, and it was very slow and halting, as we extend the franchise, as we move towards a democracy, and this is really important in America, when America declares itself a republic instead of a monarchy. If we’re going to do this, everybody who is a citizen has to be able to eat the same thing.

0:57:27.0 SC: That’s a powerful idea.

0:57:28.9 RL: It’s an amazing idea. I think you see it all the time in American elections, because American presidents, they have to go and eat a hamburger somewhere and every president… Queen Elizabeth is not going to go and stand somewhere and eat a hamburger. So when people will sort of laugh at McDonalds or something, it’s actually, in some ways, a very touching and amazing thing that an entire nation can in fact eat something like that. I mean, we’re now so rich, it looks silly, but it’s not. It’s really amazing.

0:58:11.8 SC: You make a lot of the idea that how the family has eaten has changed in the last 100 and 200 years. What would it have been like to have your sort of daily meal 200 years ago in the US?

0:58:27.1 RL: It would have been rough. You wouldn’t have had… If you were an ordinary person, you’d have had a common bowl and you’ve have had spoons and you would have been eating some kind of mush out of the common bowl.

0:58:39.0 SC: All the scraps go in?

0:58:41.6 RL: Yes. And it would have been… And I have very mixed views about this, but the Republican, and I don’t mean capital R now, I mean small r, tradition in 19th century America stressed enormously the idea that the family unit was sort of the basis of the republic, and that work was divided between the mother, and the father provided the income, the mother provided the food on the table, and the table was the place where children got both moral education in what it was to be a citizen and physical nutrition in terms of making them strong citizen. And this was, again, a very powerful idea. I think it had many good aspects, it also has the terrible aspect that the woman is tied to kitchen.

0:59:50.7 SC: Yeah.

0:59:51.4 RL: So if we want to do anything like it today, we have to find some way of changing that part of it. But it was part of creating an American Republican/Democratic/Liberal/Progressive. I know those all have differences, but all of them are anti, counter to the aristocratic traditions that had reigned in the rest of the world.

1:00:27.2 SC: But the idea that you could sit down at the family meal and have some vegetables and some meat and some rolls of bread or whatever, so that was not here 150 years ago. How much is it a technological change that we’re able to store food and transport it and freeze it much easier?

1:00:46.2 RL: You couldn’t have done this without the industrialization of food. And it’s why I am so pro the industrialization of food.

[laughter]

1:00:55.6 RL: If we went back… If everyone knows the name Alice Waters, I’m sure they do. Alice Waters’ kind of prescription of home-cooked, home-grown food, it’s too labor-intensive. It’s too difficult to do.

1:01:16.9 SC: So it becomes a little bit elitist to imagine that we’re going to locally pick all of our stuff and carefully construct it, but it’s just not practical over a huge scale, is what you’re saying?

1:01:30.0 RL: I don’t think so. I think you’ve got to bring… As I said, my mother lived in industrialized Britain and we could buy our bread from a bakery. It was very good bread, actually, but we did still grow all our own vegetables and milk. And if you want to have green beans in July and cabbage in March, unfortunately, ’cause it’s the only thing, you’ve got plan that and you’ve got seven people. It was a full-time job. It wasn’t completely full-time, she also did the… Other things, but she couldn’t have done that and held down a regular job. And if you see women being able to have an equal part in the workplace, then you’ve got to have the industrialization of food. If you want to include the entire nation, rich, poor and rich eating hamburgers, you’ve got to have industrialized food.

1:02:45.1 SC: So we could draw a distinction between fast food a la McDonalds and convenient food, a la the frozen food aisle in our supermarket, but you’re making the case for both of these being a democratizing influence and even a sort of liberating influence on half of the population that they don’t need to spend all their time cooking food?

1:03:09.5 RL: Yeah, and I don’t think… I mean, we’ve got some really bad stuff. Cheese curls and I mean, Doritos are supposed to be delicious, I think they’re disgusting. But we’ve got… Look at our supermarkets, you’ve got 20 different vegetables in the middle of winter, you’ve got meat that almost everybody can afford. You’ve got lentils and brown rice if you want lentils and brown rice. The American supermarket is just an extraordinary phenomenon. So I would like to work always to make things better. For example, I would love to get better institutional food in hospitals and prisons and schools and things, and there’s no reason why it can’t be good. So there’s lots of things that are still wrong but…

1:04:21.7 SC: Is there a sense in which American cuisine is becoming less focused on the traditional British beef and bread strategy, that we are absorbing influences from outside more, or is that just because I’m an upper middle class person living in Los Angeles, and so I have a completely distorted view of what the world is like?

1:04:43.4 RL: No. Absolutely, it’s absorbing. I mean, you can see it happening day by day. And again, it’s linked to the politics. When you get all what were called ethnic minorities demanding that they have a greater place in society, this is how… You can see it happening in cookbooks and cooking shows and everything. It’s not… And we’re introduced. It’s interesting because it can’t be absolutely everything. So one of the things I’m trying to watch is how new rules and new preferences are being formed out of this potentially huge amount of stuff we can choose from. And they do have to do with convenience and with being… It’s everything being extremely tasty. And with individual choice pushed to I think an almost, to an extreme that I’m not sure is healthy.

1:05:56.3 SC: Why would it not be healthy, say more about that?

1:06:00.1 RL: I don’t mean not healthy in the sense of individual health. I mean, not healthy for a society. Because eating together, eating somebody else’s food says, because we are what we eat, if I eat your food, I am acknowledging that you are somebody I would like to be like.

1:06:23.4 SC: I accept you.

1:06:24.2 RL: Or I can accept. I mean, and going back to Hawaii, where I started. I mean, it was absolutely essential to the creation of a civil society in the new state of Hawaii, that you ate other people’s food. And now if you try to have a party, one person is a pescatarian, and one is a vegan and one…

1:06:48.5 SC: I see.

1:06:49.0 RL: And I think it’s important for children to learn to eat things they don’t like sometimes.

[chuckle]

1:07:00.3 SC: I’m on your side there. I’m reminded of a remark made by Roy Choi, who is a local well-known chef, he started the Kogi BBQ truck. And he explained that his goal was to sell Korean food in places in Los Angeles where people didn’t eat that much Korean food. And so he just decided, it wasn’t for culinary reasons, but he decided to serve it in the form of tacos, because that’s what Americans would eat. And the implicit message being that tacos are American. Even though, of course, we borrowed even those, but they were a delivery mechanism for this more exotic Korean food, and that worked very, very well. But we definitely seem to be learning to appreciate more Asian food. And I guess what I’m getting at is I both feel what you just said about the hyper individualization making it more difficult to have communal meals, but also an opening up to things beyond hamburgers and chicken and things like that, which I would take to be a good sign.

1:08:01.5 RL: Oh, yes, absolutely. Yeah. And it’s very exciting. And which bits, because we can’t accept all Korean food and all Vietnamese food and all English food and all, because it’s too much of it.

1:08:17.6 SC: Yeah. [chuckle] You pick bits.

1:08:20.7 RL: Which bits, and you can see certain bits coming out of the different traditions.

1:08:28.0 SC: And do you think, I don’t know if it’s as, how much credit is due to Alice Waters and Chez Panisse and stuff like that. But we now have a whole celebrity chef culture, right? We have the Food Network. We have these attempts to make very fancy food. Do you think that’s a passing fad? Do you think that’s part of post-modernity? Are we… Is this something that we should look forward to?

1:08:50.9 RL: It’s, I mean, personally, I find it rather boring. I did once go to one of the top 10 restaurants in the world, and I had a lovely time. And it’s something I think it’s nice if everyone can do once in a lifetime, but to have to sit there for three hours on a regular basis, admiring what the chef has produced. No, thank you. I think we’re going… Well, I’d like to see, because this has been a lot about reinventing the cook as artist to give them extra status. And maybe they’ve achieved that status now. And you’re seeing some of them say, well, we’ve now got to do sort of socially important things, like Jose Andres who’s been feeding people in epidemics. It seems… I mean, we can’t have a society full of little individual restaurants run by budding artists. I don’t think we can support that number. But if they can turn some of that energy into making it, taking the burden off the housewife, making better industrial food or takeout food or not industrial, institutional or takeout or fast food, that would be an incredible gift to society.

1:10:25.2 SC: Well, maybe just to wrap things up then, let’s look into the future a little bit. This has been a long story of the interrelationship between food technology and food politics and food culture. These are all continuing to change, especially on the technology side. We have artificial meats. Synthetic biology is letting us do new things. Do you think that science and technology, as well as politics, are going to be dramatically changing how we eat in the years to come?

1:10:53.4 RL: I’m always a bit nervous about projections. I don’t… It depends on your timescale. People… I mean, I am old enough now to have seen a dramatic change in my lifetime. But it’s not overnight. It’s very hard to change food habits overnight. And it’s probably not a good thing, either physiologically or psychologically. So I think I would see an evolution and, say, within a generation or two generations, a very large change, but it’s not… If artificial meats come on the market, well, they are on the market, it’s not going to mean that two years down the road, traditional meat has vanished, I don’t think. Yeah.

1:11:48.4 SC: But maybe hand-in-hand with that, do people spend less time sitting down at family meals these days than they did 50 years ago?

1:11:56.8 RL: I suspect so. Data on this is really hard to get. And I mean, I’m not committed as the 19th century American republicans were to kind of social interaction being primarily at the meal, and particularly at the family meal, I mean, there are other, or it doesn’t have to be home-cooked by mother. I do think, as a society, comparing, say, living in Mexico to living in the United States, in a similar kind of socio-economic environment, one of the things we have lost in the United States is the ability to socialize well, and enjoy it and take the time to do it. And I regret that, and I think it would be great if we could move to a sort of not a later, a slightly more relaxed attitude to spending time with other people whom we like or find interesting. So yeah, I think there’s room there. I don’t know what your opinion is. But I would love to see more, more care and more attention given to how we interact.

1:13:28.2 SC: No, I actually… Yeah, I mean, I can’t agree more. The one thing that is clear is that we work too much, and we’re too busy. And now that we have the convenience of all this food that we can get any ingredient at any time of the year we want, we should take advantage of that and sit down and enjoy it with each other a little bit more often.

1:13:44.6 RL: Exactly. [chuckle]

1:13:45.2 SC: Alright. That’s a great place to end. Rachel Laudan, thanks so much for being on the Mindscape Podcast.

1:13:50.4 RL: Oh, thank you for having me.[/accordion-item][/accordion]