Tem

14: FEB 28

Assigned

• Rachel Lauden, Cusine and Empire Introduction and Chapter 1, "Mastering Grain Cookery, 20,000 to 300 bce", p. 1-55

Lauden, Rachel, C1, "Mastering Grain Cookery"

General Claims and Inferences

• This overview of "grain and root" cooking from 20,000 ya should expand your sense of human foods in several ways:

• not just a binary of paleolithic/neolithic (preag/ag). Cooking grains goes back 20K.
• long before bread, grain cookery produced cakes, porridges, pottages, ashcakes, flatbreads, pasta, etc. Maize isn't just corn on the cob, but tortilla, polenta, etc.
• alot of grain in the ancient world went to beer production
• before markets, people still had to make calculations of labor calories for food calories. Lauden argues that root cuisines could not support cities (details at 31-32, also 35). Still, grains are also labor intensive.

• Cooking, Cuisines, and Ancient Culinary philosophy

• Cooking - p. 11 --
• "Cuisine" is more than the foods themselves. A Cuisine represents a system of food production (food system, and cooking skills) that represent a life sustaining diet. But a culinary philosophy relates our cuisine to larger structures (43), :

• a principle of hierarchy - nomad, peasant, poor town dweller, ....noble. Monarch's status connected to power to protect harvest. (Power to feed fed power.) moral theory of food values. 44.
• a sacrificial bargain - gets replaced by universal religions and personal salvation. like the transaction with monarch. includes human sacrifice. blood never neutral in cuisine. Either strong positive or negative.
• a theory of the culinary cosmos -- Fire thought to be a thing, not just kinetic energy. analogy of fire from sun in growth to fire in cooking. also, heat in the belly.

• "Culinary philosophy - relates us to divinity, society, and the natural world (2), also, new political and philosophical ideas affect cuisines (6) (ex. Buddhist cuisines) -- "Food situates us." 50 (story of Tuscan friend)

• Group Discussion: Are there modern equivalents in our food culture for the categories of ancient culinary philosophy? Do we engage in hierarchical eating? Have we made some other kind of bargain with the forces that we believe sustain our food security? Do we have a culinary cosmos?

Reading Notes

• Introduction - core idea for the book from her Hawaii book. Movements of food, technology, and technique get consolidated into cuisines that spread, often in connection with power and empire or nation state. Wants to displace an older story in which high cuisine is an evolution from humble cuisine.

• Hypothesizes 10 global cuisines, all based on roots and grains.

• 1,000 bc - 50 million humans, cities no larger than 10,000. Cooking already for up to 2 million years.

• Major change: technology to harvest food from hard seed of herbaceous plants (grains) Lake Kinneret site (Sea of Galilee) 19.4K ya. Only grain cultures were able to support cities.

• Cuisines of the Yellow River (18), Yangzte River (19), and barley wheat cuisines of Turkey, Mediterranean.

• 24ff: the sacrificial feast. Note food hierarchies, 25.

• Carribean and South American cassava and potato cuisines. Maize Cuisine of Mesoamerica. Corn 7,000 bc, by 3,000 maize extends into Ecuador.

• high vs. humble cuisine.

• high cuisines heavy in meats, sweets, fats, and intoxicants. highly processed ingredients (whiter flour). luury foods, appetizers (70% of calories)
• humble cuisines - roots or grains with greens. 80-90% of population, 70-75% of calories from this.

• humble eaters shorter, less energetic, and less clever. malnutrition in pregnancy is a horror for development....

• town poor vs. country poor -- town poor often fared better. "The chicken is the country's but the city eats it". Below the peasant was the nomad.