Cuisine and empire they talk about how culinary practices developed, as well as the evolution of modern process food. Was hosted by the American Historical Association at their annual meeting. It is about 90 minutes. I am the curator of philanthropy at the Smithsonian Museum of American History. Recently, i was an associate at the National History center. We have here the director and assistant director. This roundtable is on Rachel Laudans book, cuisine and and history. Is focusing on an issue that is of great Public Interest today. Food is attracting attention in a variety of ways. People with disposable incomes cook and eat not nearly for sustenance but for cultural projects. They try the latest restaurants, recipes, learn about new coup scenes, and generally approach with deliberation. A new term has been coined for odies. Fo chefs are celebrities. Some have even created philanthropic foundations, generally addressing hunger which persists in the face of bounty. Along with hunger, there are other foodrelated ills. And policymakers pursue responses to the consumption of too little, too much, or the wrong kind of food. Hashis interest in food grown, so has the attention to the history of food. Historians have embraced food as interest. Besides dozens of articles now published yearly, there are textbooks and primary source books food history available for use in many College Courses on food history. Interest in food history is equally strong beyond the economy. Cooks and bakers slip to historic recipes for new ideas. The smithsonian has an annual food history weekend and other cultural institutions have likewise turned to engaging the food history. Anytime the American Food Historical Association runs a piece on food history and does very well. One example is a piece that amanda perry road. Publicieces attract both and academic readers. Years, food history has been an area of Common Ground predominantly in public audiences. It reflects in part a shared desire to recover a lost past. Distinctive local foods, artisan all cooking techniques, before the advent of technological. To challenge the assumption behind that youre earning and in food. R a lost past rachel asks us to think more carefully about the history of cooking, which, she observes is difficult, timeconsuming, and requires enormous amounts of human energy. Howreconsideration of cooking has evolved over time, she suggests, has implications for our contemporary debates about food and that is the top of this panel of esteemed historians will turn to. They each have studied different eras and have different takes. We will discuss these issues at the roundtable. We will start with rachel with a synopsis of her book and then go to the other panelists. Finally, we will open it up to questions. Now let me introduce the panelists. Historian and holds a degree and phd in the history and philosophy of collegefrom university of london and has a distinguished academic career teaching at a number of institutions and holding an array of distinguished of wards and awards and fellowships. In addition to academic career, history ofeer in the food. Her book casino and empires cooking the worlds history, was compiled in 2013 by the university of California Press and her book the for the was publishede by the university of why pleasant 1996. She is also published widely in the new york times, boston globe, and other outlets. In all spoken on food sorts of places. Is list of accomplishments too long to read here but suffice it to say she brings and expertise to the history of food that few can match. Sitting next to her is chris hobson, he is an associate professor in the department of history at Brigham Young university and earned his doctorate from Northwestern University in 2004. After that, he spent two years at the mid neil center for early american studies and philadelphia. He has published articles in journals including the william and mary historical journal for historical studies and other journals. Book on 18thcentury history was published by Oxford University press. His second book, discovering and eight will likewise be published by oxford. He is currently working on a on conservative enlightenment has embodied by benjamin thompson. Who had an interest in food. Next to him is libby oconnell. She received her phd in American History from the university of virginia. She joined the History Channel in 1990 three, eventually serving as chief historian and Senior Vice President of corporate responsibility. She has received four emmy awards for her work in education and today is a historical consultant for the History Channel while she serves as commissioner for the u. S. Wont were centennial commission. She is the author most recently of the american plate a hersary history. Next to amy bentley, a professor in the department of nutrition and food studies and Public Health that new york university. A historian with interest in social, historical, and social context of food. She is the author of inventing baby food. Published by the university of california present. 14 which was a finalist for an award. She is also a winner of the ss best award. Eating for victory, food rationing and politics of domesticity among other publications. Theis cofounder of experimental coup seen collective which is an Interdisciplinary Group of scientists, food studies scholars, and chefs who studied the intersection of science and food. She is the cofounder of the nyu urban farm lab and holds other distinguished positions. Finally, at the end of the table is Paul Friedman, who is the trippr d. Professor at harvard university. He has written about the middle ages and also has asked. s writing about the medieval foods. He received his phd from berkeley in 1978 and taught at vanderbilt before he moved to yale. He is the author of a number of ,s, including the diocese a 1983 book and his food history out of the east spices and the medieval , published by the yield press in 1998. Very recently not only so, not only a distinguished panel but a panel of wide ranging interest and areas of expertise. I now turn it over to rachel. Rachel thank you. Say how much it means to be here. A panel on ones work is something we historians dream of or perhaps dread a little. So i would like to thank the American History center, the aha , ames bentley and Paul Friedman who have been longtime colleagues. And libby and amanda, who i just meant to and thank you for coming up to her. This is especially significant to me because like many big historical projects, this one also has deep historical and personal roots. I grew up on a farm surrounded by 1000 acres of wheat, oats, and barley. Dairy cattle, beef cattle. My farmer father farmed, but my mother just cooked. Justad no choice but to cooked. That came with the territory then and in some ways, this is a tribute to her because she would have loved to be doing what i am doing now and have had a chance to develop her own career and her own ideas. But no choice. The project actually started in earnest in the early 1980s at the university of hawaii where i engaged in long conversations with Jerry Bentley and visited hawaii at others and spoke to them about food history. And then began teaching a course in food history that in those days needed special permission from the dean. That course eventually became a class,ansformed choosing and empire cooking in World History. So why coup seen . Why empire . And why World History . I the few minutes i have, would like to undermine the basic ideas surrounding my story. Isont regard these ideas the only once or necessarily the best ones, but if food history is to be more than a fad driven by contemporary enthusiasm through politics, we need to have serious debate about the intellectual foundations and fundamentals of the subject. So i am going to start very simply with cooking. It is true but not often taken seriously enough that we do not eatgrains and we do not carcasses. Raw materialsese when they have been transformed or stakes or other prepared foods. Ago, humans past the point of no return. The bulk of their calories and nutrients come from foodstuffs transformed from the natural state and these transformations widerangingnarily and complex. They can be thermal changes. The use of heat or cold. Cutting, curdling, slicing. Chemical changes, adding acids and alkalines. They can be biochemical changes. Particularly fermenting. They can even be biological changes, breeding of plants which in the agent world counted as part of cooking. Today we do not have a good collective term for these various transformations. I actually like processing that when i considered titling a book in the current Political Climate processing Food Processing. That wasistory clearly a nostarter. Cooking. With just but i want to be clear that that required in the past and still requires today a great deal more energy, labor, in time that producing the right materials in the first place. Farming pales in comparison to human effort when compared with processing. For many people traditionally, it took about five hours a day to process the food for a family of four or five. Because we undertake these transformations, humans in fact design their foods. They designed them to make them easier to chew and safer and more digestible. They transform them to make them tastier. They transform them to make them longerlasting. They transform them to establish a structure of social status, to show piety or moral concern, to demonstrate political afiliation, to make money and host of other often mutuallycompeting goals. In short, our most recent beliefs about the natural world, including about our own bodies, about social and economic and political worlds and about supernatural worlds shape the foods we create. We dont take basic ideas about political economy or about human physiology or about religion into account for every meal we produce. These are often internalize. Change times of rapidly coming, these beliefs come into play and those i believe are what i call culinary philosophies. Also, because we design our food, every individual in every society eats a set of food been selectedve and organized and process to achieve a certain set of goals. So if we think and then we think about what we want to have, a splendid meal, and then we design that meal to from the Raw Materials and the ingredients. Uisine style of cooking. Isines, although they change constantly, are static and persistent. This was true in hawaii, where i wherearted on this book, you had three roughly competing and very different cuisines. Decent east asian set of cuisines basically descended from buddhism, and rice and eat with chopsticks. Hawaiian food and sparred by indigenous cultures using fish and cooked in the underground ovens and eaten with hands. Inspired byisines protestant christianity favoring wheat, bread, and beef cooked and ovens and eat with a knife and fork. Cuisines then, i think, if you are telling the history of food on a grand scale, the basic unit of analysis. They do evolve constantly but every so often you get a major change. Culinary philosophy, convert from one religion to another, of the end in modernity and establish every republic, that happened during the american revolution. And you will start changing your cuisine to bring it in line with your new culinary philosophy. So although i start this from very simple points, note we have now moved a long way from the general theory that most people subscribe to with cuisine that is mainly that cuisines are from the ground up. The territorial theory of cuisine, that they are created in a particular place and evolve slowly and gradually and that lays as plants and techniques are brought in. This is instead a kind of intellectual theory of culinary change. One moment, because in the history of cuisines, grains have been disproportionately important. This is not an accident. Materialno other raw that offers such a wide range of nutrients as the grains do. And there is no other raw material that can be turned into so many different kinds of foodstuffs with so many different kinds of nutritional virtues and tastes as the grains can. Whole, steamed, or popped grains. Potages that most people lived on through most of history. The alcohol. The ground cakes that are turned into bread or noodles. And even though we often forget or think it is very recent, into oils and sweeteners such as malt sugar. These go way back into history. They were not invented by industrial processes. Only grains, in addition, have a sufficiently high nutrient to nutrient to weight ration. Ratio. You will need to count the day to feed an individual. If you use a doing roots, it takes 15 pounds a day. So that with a poor transport facility of the ancient world, the only way that people could and two to cities armies was to elect to take grains. Of thehe very existence more complex states that i use for political units that can project cultural or military or economic power over large areas, these states and empires are dependent upon the prior introduction of grains. There are multiple interactions. Etween states and cuisines the legitimacy of the state depends upon the ability of people to feed themselves. We often talk about that in terms of the moral economy but this goes right back to the earliest states where if you the people are entitled to riot if the food supply runs out. The states have the ability to endorse and to some extent enforce their preferred culinary philosophy and have done so throughout history. And, another hand very important feature is that those cuisines that are associated with powerful states are often believed to be the core of the power of that state. Dietary determinism. So then an empire that is very powerful tends to have its features appropriated or imposed by surrounding or neighboring or distant states. Of powerfulcuisines states and empires get transferred over vast distances. P we have a map of buddhist cuisine from about 200 bc and completely. D. Transformed the cuisine of the eastern and southeastern and southern asia and you can see the roots there as one state or empire after another picked up. His particular cuisine so, with this set of ideas, i have an overarching story. It begins with the adoption of grain cuisine, a gradual process between 20,000 bc and 10,000 bc that led to first agriculture and then allowed the formation of states and empires and with that, since scarcity was always at the door, the formation of suites of cuisines. A hierarchy of cuisines with high cuisines for the rich up on the left and core cuisines of the lesser grains, the darker grains, and beans down at the right. Countercuisine for those who disagreed with the state position. And, that continued from the early states and empires really up until the last couple of hundred years when you get the development of middling cuisines. That is cuisines that are accessible to everyone. Here we have the president of america and russia sitting down to a hamburger together. Imagine philip the second of spain in previous pictures sitting down to a hamburger with one of his spanish peasants. The emergence of middling cuisine, again, is a kind of a newation between culinary philosophy that favors republican and democratic clinical systems and the transformation of the processing of food thanks to the introduction of fossil fuel, which reduces the labor for processing and storage and transport. And so that the price of food falls and everybody can participate in this kind of middling cuisine. So that very briefly, we have cuisine and empire cooking in World History. And here is the outline of the way we see the major cuisines throughout history have been formed and created and disappeared. Thank you very much. [applause] organizersu to the for inviting me to participate in this panel. I am chris hobson from Brigham Young university and is the first presenter let me be the thet to congratulate professor. This is a Remarkable Book and a book. Able intellectual knowledge on these culinary issues is staggering and i feel a lot smarter, a little smarter, after having read the book. It was really an impressive achievement. I am a historian of early modern empires which is a topic i want to get back to. But one thing that means is that by my training i do not think i have anything particularly intelligent to say about professor lowdens first several aboutapter laudens first several chapters. When she says about sacrificial regimes into feasting and fasting, contemplative foods like fish, sweetened coffees and teas. Remarkable to was her account of the king of her sure whose elites of projecting power through complex, rich, created the cuisine foundation for greek and roman and ultimately medieval European Food. Remarkable, remarkable research. To the extent i have a beef with the professor, as i said before, then food andall you mightve been better for it, actually. I propose is her characterization of the Columbian Exchange. Of the Columbian Exchange which basically stands for the exchange of all kinds of living things. Whether they are microbes, plants, animals, that was triggered with Christopher Columbus is sort of First Encounter with the new world at the end of the 15th century. And if i am understanding her correctly, she argues that because the transfer of new worldplants to the old occurred without and i think this is a quote, the accompanying new world technology, what that means is the exchange was more or less a one way east to west transfer, so another words because toopeans were to stick figure out they had to rehydrate the chilies, for ansys. Or you had to soak the maze to get the kernel out of the husk. To make it nutritive and not sort of quasipoisonous. What that means is sort of a blood weight street. And all of that is true, by the way, as professor laudan can tell you. Lots of italians in the 19 aize in theonsumed m form of polenta and god an redibly gnarly form of because they did not know how to cook the corn and therefore did not release its nutrients which is true. It factng said, isnt that all italians consuming corn , an important fact within itself. So on the wholesale transferral preparation, that is a high conceptual bar for the Columbian Exchange and it risks emphasizing what these exchanges did not do. E, coffee, andiz sugar what they did not do. This is not so much a critique of those are londons work as it is to try to get this is not so much a critique of professor s book as an attempt to get her to talk more about it. We have to consider culinary issues, it is not something i thought very much about before reading the books so it is a nice gift of knowledge for me. I wonder though if we might become little bit more about what the limitations of thinking about food and exchanges and culinary terms really are. Now, to return to my lauding of praise theo want to second term empire. I imagine were going to spend a lot of our time today talking about food and that is great. I have a lot of questions for professor lowden about food and i am sure other people do. Profess laudan about food and im sure other people do. I was confused about her term empire. Often we fall back to nonpolitical terms. Inviting of risks power, alliance, and terror, the imposition of norms, the force of adoption of norms. It is important to note i think, too, that through most of the implied did not just rule overseas in some distant place. It means entertaining or possessing imperium at close range. Even intimate range with people who are your subjects. In professor lowdens retelling, it is not just decide effect, it is a vector of imperial power. The imperial dimensions of insine it proposes to adopt the interest of power i think she rightly suggests has been. Verlooked by history tobeyond its contribution food history this is also i think a profound and powerful history of food and empire. Thank you. [applause] hi. Good afternoon. I am libby oconnell. I am currently the commissioner commission. D war i my response today has nothing to do with world war i, lets go on record here. Thank you to the aha and to professor laudan for writing this book. And for inviting me, amanda, to participate in this panel today. Thet my food history from point of view of an historian. I had my first job is working as a costumed historian. Cape cod. Jims there in 1975 when changed the way we did public history at living history museums. So it was a moment of revolution there and it was also a revolution in how food was being prepared at the plantations for the tourists. I was working primarily in the house where we showcased historical food ways. Also working in the herb garden doing medicinal herbs and learning how to milk a cow as well as handling the derry. So those were big responsibilities and actually i did not know how to cook until i got to the rotation. So my first cooking laces cooking lessons were in the 16 20s. Abouted to point out professor laudans book and she mentioned it in her introduction, the importance of Food Processing and the arnie today when you say process food we immediately think of kraft food. But the processing of food is such an important way of understanding culinary history, ways, and theood people do not labor. It is heavy labor and of course very timeconsuming. It is an important part, the way food comes from comes into our bodies. How damaging that labor could be to the woman who grow the corn to the woman who end up with arthritis to and bent bones for the rest of their lives. Grinding the grains. Meat carcasses. The basic processing of foods is very hard work. It is really interesting i think , the approach to womens labor issues because this remains an issue up until the 20th century when he gets more mechanized while people are still doing food there is a log of processing in the 19th century but there are still people at home, women at home, working hard in that process. One of the lessons i learned when i was at plymouth plantation besides the difficulty in processing was that whod is a wonderful was that food is a wonderful way to inage the Public Interest history. Not just the public, people in your history classes who may not understand what you are talking about until you address some of the things. To what not be drawn youre talking about until you address things that make it personally interesting to them. In that way, do not worry that this is a fad. All talk about food, that is hot topic, the history of food is something that will maybe fade away in a few years. I know that a long time ago when i was working at plymouth plantation, that was the house where people stayed. All of the museum goers would be looking at their watch saying, honey this is time to go, stayed and listened to the stories and as it wasof the past something they understood intuitively. So therefore, you think the future of the history of food and food ways and cuisine is going to be a long and strong ones. The processing aspect is something i wanted to dig in a little bit more. Actually, it relates also to what chris hudson brought up. One thing that is true is when you have the Columbia Exchange and the boots go over to europe world, there is a lack of understanding about Food Processing, but how to cook these things. What there is also but there is also a huge demographic impact and if anything, food is about keeping us alive and also about as reproducing families, right . Foodse of the impacts to is to change its history forever and one is simply deep potato. Take the potato out of everywhere else but ireland and look at the impact of the potato and what happens when the potato fails. Look what happens when corn gets to africa as another supplement to their diet. You have an increase in population, an increase in population pressure were there has never been before because people were able to have more children which is a lot more in their Family Growth and it makes not a deciding factor but a contributing factor to the growth of slavery in the longterm because you have that much territorial conflict. They have raids on each others communities and those are two foods that will have very stark impact on the history of the the historyrtainly and story of the new world. So ironically, that Columbia Exchange example of potatoes and corn changes life in the old world and africa in europe, but then comes back in a different form to really alter the path of American History. So i am up on my time and i just want to also join chris in saying how much i learned from this book, what a valuable experience it is to read it. I recommended to all and i also want to point out the index. It is a great index. Would it on your shelf when you run across that you have not heard of before and you will learn more about them by reading professor laudans book. [applause] will you play music . [laughter] all right. Hi everybody. Im in me from the nutrition and Food Studies Department at nyu. We used a Public Health, now it is at a Different School but it is definitely a foodcentric department. We have lots of students. For 20 years i have been teaching a food history class in addition to other classes. I am also a charter member of the Rachel Laudan club. Terrific. Is really i started using it a couple years ago in my graduate class. I have read it several times in depth and i have had a chance to talk to students about it and gone through their writings about it. It is a brilliant, amazing piece of the. I think it is amazing because it synthesizes a lot of food history that has already been produced. Own spinshe puts her knowledge. Chel and this idea of a cuisine history. Not about agriculture. Not about commodities. The idea of cooking and cuisine through time and its relation to World History. So it kind of follows this similar World History narrative and then you have got cuisine layered over it. The two areract, instrumental and cuisine moves as civilizations develop and change and are absorbed by others. So you can really learn a lot about World History through the study of cuisine. It feels to me, really, and intellectual history book. A book about ideas. As mentioned, about culinary philosophys. The culinary cosmos. The ideas and impulses behind which people do things. And in that way, it is about elites as rachel pointed out. It is about power. About people in power making decisions based on religious ideas, based on cultural ideas, and people are definitely a part of the narrative. One of the things i love to do with classes to pair it guns, germs, and steel. Which really should be renamed. Od Jared Diamond covers essentially the same territory but has a very different take. Environmentally determined us. That is, countries, civilizations grow and develop because they have an abundance of food and the reason why they have an abundance of food is because they are lucky. They got lucky in terms of geography and the right plants and animals that were suitable for investigating and from then on, you move through the evolution of civilization and the people with the most food in the optimal places get the guns, germs, and steel. It is kind of an interesting argument because there are no people or ideas and it at all. So pairing his chapters with Rachel Laudans book is a wonderful example for students ideas out. Try the see for themselves, how important is the culinary cosmos . Foodismuddhism do . How does this move through europe and go globally . What are the ideas behind wheat and meet in particular that are driving their spread and use . That is something i think that is really important to point out in this book and it is the strength of this book and it is something that rachel deliberately focused on and focused on cooking and cuisine. The other thing i want to point ok, i will start now and that will get back to it in my second five minutes and that is as you pointed out, she is really a promoter and then unapologetic champion of the industrial food system. In that way, you can read this book in light of conversations that are going on about the food system today. The global food system, alternative food system, politics. She sticks to her guns. She is unapologetic about the importance of industrial food. In one part of the book, she has a sense that just says what is better . Starving people or people that have some problems from you know Health Problems from industrial food . And that seems to be how she is thinking about it this way. It is more complex than that but of course she has this wonderful disposition on white bread and fish and chips. That white bread is not just desired because the rich could afford it and because it is white but because it is easier to judge just and it is palatable it is easier to digest and it is palatable and it might have more calories per ounce or per dollar and so it additiveso disguise in white bread. So its more than just it is bad for you and you should not have it. So we need to engage a large long history of Food Processing to understand the current contemporary debate going on today. This book is really important. Hadarlier essay you culinary modernism why we should love modern processed. D concise argument that provides a backdrop for this entire book. To studentsve it who are enthusiastic and passionate and energetic and want to go out and change the world and change the food system because it is a little splash of cold water on their face about the complexity. That we can have an alternative food system in part because we have an industrial food system. Thanks. [applause] i hope i am not stealing amys theme if i discuss the sunny view of modern cuisine as rachel herself refers to it. Let me say how much i have learned from her work. From my undergraduate food studies course, i have assigned at this semester. Modern cuisine, the sunnyside, the industrial food products. Like sliced white bread or bottled fish sauce in asia or packaged snacks are convenient. Of responsible for the rise better nutrition globally. Rachel opposes the romantic agrarian myth of peasant artisan all cuisine of the past. She reminds us, as others have pointed out, and as she herself has said, the backbreaking toil involved not just in agriculture but in cooking as well. So, convenience in this sense does not mean merely convenience of, you know, you have frozen peas instead of fresh peas, it means convenience in the sense that you do not break your back grinding the end matzo for the tortillas because you have the ideas themselves or packaged m z sa to work with. My sense is that the critique of nostalgiaia of the lets say i agree with that more than the advocacy of modernists modern cuisine with its processed and industrial aspects. The bookartly because does not discuss the issue of sustainability, of agriculture or the sustainable only of livestock feeding and processing inother actresses that are, my opinion, not sustainable. That is to say, literally not sustainable because of their environmental costs. Seeing far from alternative form of agriculture as a kind of free ride on a solid basis of industrial agriculture, i see these as things that are going to have to be adopted whether we like them or not. That does not mean horsedrawn it may mean paying attention to nutrients in the soil. To replenishing the soil. Ratherhaving mono crops than having a variety of crops and things like that. By the choice referred to would youow of rather have people starving globally or you know, have them starving purely without mcdonalds or without convenient foods is not in my opinion a real choice. She says, Rachel Laudan says, the diseases of plenty or less appalling that the diseases of plenty. And that is true. The problem is the diseases of plenty yard the diseases of poverty have not been eliminated. Certainly italians do not suffer from pellagra anymore. People in thef Southern United States and appellation is better than it was 100 years ago or so. Andnd appellation a waschia is better than 100 years ago or so. Many more people starving under was then because resources have been appropriated by other people or resources have dwindled because of climate change, it self a result of processing and industrialization if not exclusively in food, certainly very much including food. So i do not think the sanctimony business the sanctimonious ness of food advocates like Michael Polen justifies a sunny optimism. [applause] justifies allan sunny optimism. [applause] thank you all of you. Let me address three issues that seem to be essential ones. First, amy, thanks for raising Jared Diamond because reading that book drove me back because he talks about food. There is nothing about what we eat and that book. It is all about agriculture. And that is fine. We cannot have food without agriculture in the modern world. But, you know, if some he wrote the book about the American Transport system and only or duluththe detroit are in ranges and the extraction of iron or they would think, this is a seriously deficient history of the American Transport system and that is a part of what i am trying to do why i said is partly aside agriculture, which i will come back to. Because i do think there has ton this tremendous tendency align food and politics. We talk about food politics and we mean for politics. Since that is only a part of what gets food on the table, and largest part, the is notes not mean it very necessary in terms of sustainability. Are othernow, there issues going on. Weve simply also got to Pay Attention to what gets food into peoples mouths. So that is Jared Diamond. The Colombian Exchange, i think i would like to make three points about it. First, if you are talking about what people are other issues going on. Weve simply also got to pay eat then i think the Columbian Exchange is just one in a series of many that go right back to the history which is why i start my book with a rather tedious discussion of why of transfer of plants and animals around 40005000 bc with the Processing Techniques. Because the story of agriculture and food and cuisine is a story of transfers. Exchanges. Ery rarely exchange suggests two ways. These are normally connected with power systems. The second point about the Columbian Exchange, it really needs to be broken out because if we just run to there may be an exchange. The new world gets lots of animals and the old world gets the new world gets lots of animals and the old world gets lots of plants. But if you look at much of latin america or the Indigenous People from america they still are only partially changed over plants or western western Processing Techniques or western foods. Until very recently, mexico, the vast bulk of mexican population was still eating as they did before the Colombian Exchange as its called. And conversely, if you look at the west coast of africa, james lefleurs recent work or europe, the adoption of food plants itself is a very slow and difficult process. And their transformation into food if youre not bringing over the techniques, and youre not, is a very laborious process. Its not just because theyre too dim to figure it out. My view is the europeans did because to do corn they had rotary mills. And if you have rotary mills you do not want to go back to grinding on so they think they can be clever and just skip that. And you cannot grind wet in a rotary mill. So you i think if we want to talk were now 20 years, 30 years since the Colombian Exchange, its time to introduce a little more sophistication into what exactly is being moved and to whom and how and why. The demographic point, i think, is a really important one. Im not entirely clear how i want to deal with this. The potato again, its not really until the late 18th century that the potato gets picked up. And then its forced on people by governments. Its not something people want. So then of course it probably does lead to a or helps a demographic explosion. I would just like to say again, lets have a bit more analysis on this. 1492 actly not just ok, and then, you know, the foods f the old world are changed. The funny one. Thanks, paul. And and the first point i probably two points here. What i think often gets left t in the discussion of the problematic environmental consequence, particularly of the early industrialization of food and agriculture is that thats not the only thing thats at stake. I cannot imagine how we could have moved to a world of republics and democracies unless everybody had been able to eat roughly the same things. As long as you have a world of monarchies and a world of scarcity, then the power relations are expressed in the color of your bread. And of course now its not true that everybody eats the same thing. Humans love social distinction. And theyre going to find it somewhere. But the fact that everybody in the United States can on occasion eat bread and beef is something utterly unique in World History. I cannot imagine how the american republican experiment could have succeeded unless Something Like this happened. Now, that takes us to the question, i mean, its not just therefore a question of whether were going back to treading the earth with our feet. But how can we preserve the kind of political systems that we feel are more egalitarian and inclusive if we cannot of in the level Agricultural Production . I think my impression is that were moving very theres a huge discussion on this. And i cant solve it myself. So ill just leave it there. Because to move into riculture is to go beyond my ok. Let me try and do the super quick version of my next five minutes. We here in denver are on the very cusp of mormon country. Where i live and work. And mormons have staggeringly bad diets. So the brief rundown on this is that the vast majority of the 19th century converts to mormonism come from england and scandinavia and they exude this outsized influence culturally. So in the 19th century they ate the 19th century english die thate youre describing. Bread and beef and the keevend meals where 100 of the calories in the meal come from fat and also 100 of the calories come from carbs so not particularly healthy. Then because they have such large families, mormons embrace processed food like crazy. We are people of the casserole. All of those casseroles are bad. They contain staggering amounts of cream of mushroom soup. Jello for desert and lime can arrot shavings being the nipus ultra. And in the 1970s we have adopted fast food culture. And you can totally understand why this is happening. Ok . Now, the results of this, your professor laudan talked about it in her book and im totally onboard with the idea that theres a certain amount of hipster food nonsense that should be attacked kind of relentlessly, right . Many of the people who critique the modern industrial food system have never been hungry. And dont know what an actual subsistens crisis is. So on that level i buy into professor laudans argument. That being said, i happen to be a person who whose spouse is the executive director after notforprofit group called get healthy utah thats focused on working with communities to combat obesity. And the statistics are pretty mind boggling. I have one of my spouses spouses slides right here in front of me. She projects by 2050 the obesity rate in utah will be 46. 5 . Unbelievable. 1. 7 million utahans at that point will be obese. She estimates the Economic Cost of that obesity and this is in lost work hours, reduced productivity, problems with physical, emotional, sexual health, to be about 14 billion a year. So while i can certainly agree that what we have now is maybe better than starving maybe to reframe the question for professor laudan because shes such a capashese thinker what i want to know is what do we do now . This is where were going. And based on your exploration of our culinary heritage, what is do you think the appropriate response to all of these trends that youve i think described really, really well . Thank you. Ofessor laudan one of the tenets of professor laudans book is the idea of the cull marry cosmology that you see in different cultures and different empires that is so important. I really enjoyed reading about culinary cosmology and it helped frame lots of different ideas. Im much more familiar with western european history than i am in india, in the history of india or china. And i found her reference to this the culinary cosmology of different empires and different cultures being a really wonderful way of exploring what are the priorities of that empire . What are the priorities of that society . It fits neatly into my early modern european understanding of the great chain of being and how the food that you eat can its reinforces who you are. And its better for you if youre a peasant to be eating peasant food because really its healthier for you just to stay on your land and eat that. And i was interested because i thought that in most of the empires that she addressed, and rachel, i wonder if you agree with this, that people understood that cosmology. It was imposed on them but part of something that they kind of summer along the line understood. Yeah. As part of it. Thats an interesting question. So then i wondered, im sure some people didnt think about it. They were but i wondered how we would understand culinary cosmology today. And is there anything that was motely unifying, that is remotely unifying in the 21st century . I think i can see and we can figure out the cosmology of the culinary cosmology of 20th century United States. But as were getting into this time period where you dont just have one person like Silvester Graham touring the country and saying eat whole grains. You have a variety of people and different points of view about what is the best way to eat and really, i think many of them do dont use the word cosmology but a frame of understanding their life and whats good for their family and thus good for the republic, their country. And many of you perhaps some of you or maybe one or two of you have had the experience of inviting people over for dinner and let me know if you have any Food Allergies and suddenly youre getting all these emails from people that you had no idea, onions, that would be my husband. So you people are much more comfortable talking about what they want to eat, what they wont eat, and what they find offensive to eat. And im wondering if there is a splintering of of cosmology in this country or is there just no cosmology . I would argue that people do see the world in how they eat, whether it may not be as elaborated as it would have been 200 years ago. But certainly it does influence what theyre thinking. I want to just to add on to another topic of questions to see how you all respond. When were talking about the rise of foodism in india and heres a question i have i think one approach to understanding the rise of meatlessness in that society is thinking about the cost of meat. And the availability of meat and how a cosmology can help you accept the inavailability of meat. And your lack of access to that meat. And that vegetarianism can grow out of not just a religious sense, that this is wrong to take a life to eat, but that well, i cant have it so i might as well have a good reason not to have it. Positing that as a possibility and maybe something that works together and you have a combination. But that wasnt something that i it may be in your book because theres so much in your book im always thinking maybe i missed that. But there was theres you know what . Theres so much meat in that book. [laughter] and chris, intelligently raised the appeal of puns on this. But theres so much to talk about on this and so many points that i justify want to end here by saying thank you for writing this. And bringing your knowledge to all of us. [applause] ill be brief so that we can have more time for q a. Just a couple of points. More points about the book that i was thinking about. Theres a lot about the hugh cuisines and cuisine in that traditional sense we talk about. Cuisine has an air to it, i think. We dont really think about peasants having a cuisine, about bread and cheese and grains. But one admirable thing about this book is rachel to the extent possible, shes talking about what she calls high and humble cuisines all the way through. And its much easier to go back in time and try to figure out what elites ate and its much, much more difficult to go back and try to figure out what people of no record, the people without a history ate. And so i really admire that in all of the eras and all around the world she has segments on the high and also the humble cuisines and i like that kind of lit rarely linguistic nudge that shes calling it. A humble cuisine. Because its making us realize, oh, yeah, these are food systems and these have a logic. That are using what they have. But theres also a definite cuisine element that we can talk about in terms of techniques and spicing elements and ingredients. The second thing i want to note is that one important thing about the book that maybe many people arent aware of is that she spends a certain amount of time talking about the islamic influences on european western cuisine. And if youre into that those periods, youre pretty aware that, you know, citrus and ice and irrigation and grafting and a lot of spices and a lot of products, wheat i think is mediterranean at least. But barley, a lot of food and cooking techniques are coming via the arabs and via islamic civilization and moving into spain and then moving up into europe, which i think is in this day and age, maybe we need to be reminded of that more. Maybe we need to kind of think about these things in the longrange. And another fascinating moment in this book and elsewhere that she writes is the connection between mola and mexico and indian curries and that they are both coming from the same source. They have a similar grammar. Similar ingredients. Similar logics to them. All the way across the world. And dont progress or evolve in the same ways that European Food does. So a pretty fascinating little moment in the book that i think can also speak to contrary contemporary issues. That the ted to say among the strongest points of this book, that have been mentioned and perhaps its worth highlighting them are relating cunes cuisines to religious philosophies. Which is itself an aspect of relating cuisine to ideas and diamond and not just or other determinants or environmental or technological situations. So theres an intellectual theory of cultural change that i applaud and embrace. And another idea is this not from the ground up, but cuisine and empire and the ability of empires to impose themselves d to export their culinary philosophies. So this is the background to the Colombian Exchange. The Colombian Exchange idea is itself a kind of piette piety. A little bit like the notion that tourism helps world understanding or that the fact that you eat mexican food is somehow going to make you more tolerant about illegal immigrants. Manifestly false. My i think one of the most original things about this religious and ideological conception is the concept of catholic cuisine. Nobody else calls it this. Sometimes medieval cuisine. Or mediterranean cuisine or medieval mediterranean cuisine as opposed to a kind of Northern European or protestant cuisine which would be a little more widely accepted. And i you know, ive thought about this a lot. And certainly the cuisine thats exported to latin to the s it became, new world, most of the new world that the spanish and portuguese influenced is this catholic cuisine. It is also true that although modern cuisine develops first in france, which is catholic, that it is a rejection of a medieval past, selfconsciously. Interestingly, its also a selfconsciously rejection of an islamic past. Medieval cuisine is described as childlike and sarasan. Like the love of sugar or spices are seen as either an immature or as muslim. So theres just no more thought provoking book out there. And i mean that not in the a. H. A. A sual thought provoking book and i disagree with it entirely. I mean it in the sense this is a thought provoking book and changed my outlook on the history of food. So now we have some time for quegs. Questions. So many different aspects that you brought out with this book. I was wondering that there may be different best ways to eat for different people. And of course going beyond individual allergies and so on, but different ethnic groups may have consult vatted cuisine cultivated cuisines because it was healthier for them. Dairy and milk good for Northern Europeans but so many other people cant digest it and popularity with nut milk like almond milk and so on. So and then also i read that native americans suffered because they adapted industrial european diets, getting away from their more natural diets. And eating too much fast food is never good for anyone. So thats one one particular point. Other one is cuisine and empire. Are we honoring other cultures when we adopt them . You know, this is a question of cultural appropriation. Versus honoring by just adopting and if you can address that. Diets e first one, our are good for certain physiologies as developed connective with ethnicity or race. I am slightly cynical about this because it seems to me hat if you look at it, humans digestive systems evolved very rapidly in the ability to digest milk evolved very rapidly in northern europe. It wasnt there necessarily. And in fact if you lived in hawaii with a large asian population, they particularly if the milk were cultured in some way, did cope with milk. O i do not want to say necessarily i think there is something to the fact that when you change your diet, you tend to have problems because our digestive flora are upset. But i dont want to say this is a kind of fixed thing for all time. I would also but ill let more questions go first link some of this into the questions that chris and i think libby ere raising. On adopting other cuisines, look, we live in a world where trying new foods is a lovely thing to do. Thats very recent. Trying food is dangerous for goodness sake. Youre taking the outside world, and youre putting it in your body and its turning into you. And most people for most of history were naturally very nervous about doing this. Particularly if it was a strange food. And particularly if you also believed in dietary determinism in that you were what you ate. And even in my childhood or my parents, went to a reception at the earl of pembroke. I wont tell you why. They were not friends of the earl of pembroke. And he served raw vegetables and they were outraged because raw vegetables are what animals eat. And there is a very strong belief in most traditional societies that you do not eat raw vegetables. When we talk of now about either our enthusiasm and admiration for other foods or our rejection of them as being perhaps racist, those are very modern categories for being to apply to most of food history. Most people, yes, they did like their own food because it was safer. D because if you did move, problems with your stomach and most people didnt really want other peoples food. Unless it was more powerful. Yes. I really rick warner of Wabash College and i really loved your book as a world historian interested in food for a long time. And as a former professional chef for a decade, and putting things together. And the trend in World History as well to bring people into this story increasingly is now being seen in food history which has gone from a history and commodity in a lot of ways and your book is the direction we really need to move so i wanted to thank you for that. And sorry i dont have a question. But i want to tell everybody that the World History Association Conference in boston at the end of june has two themes. One is atlantic history and the other is food history and World History. And so i invite you to come. We even have a panel, an exhibition Kitchen Panel with five chefs doing demonstration cooking around historical themes. So but i love the book. And i look forward to teaching t next year. Other questions . Do you want me to Say Something about these other two points . I just have a question. So when you were writing this book, rachel, how did you hold all of these things in your head at one time . I mean, astounding. And youre drawing from so many ifferent places. I up and down with my dog i dont have an answer. You go backward and forward and you think you have a theme and then you go back and it doesnt work. And you think you got a theme again. Its very slow. And on the current situation, i dont have an answer to obesity. I dont think had i historians are very good at telling the past. I think were in a very odd period in the fact that for the first time in history, almost everybody can choose what they want to eat. Even children choose what they want to eat. And, you know, in some ways part of me, the part that grew up with traditional parents, this is terrible, part of me says oh, look. People can fashion their own menu, their own cuisine. And that is actually a sort of natural outgrowth of the liberal republican and liberal tradition that you do have choice and this is a way to seek happiness and fulfillment and all those other good things. But, you know, unfortunately, we eat three times a day and several times each meal and that means we get decision fatigue, i think. And so my sense is that perhaps the way forward is not dont tell people to go back in the kitchen and cook because they dont want family meals where they have to eat the same as everybody else because theyve got used to this choice. And they believe that that is part of citizenship. So weve got to find some kind of way of enabling i mean, what happens when you get a sudden change in cuisine is that or not sudden. If you look back to the church fathers, and you got to do you got to create a cuisine that is neither jewish nor roman, the church fathers, it takes two or three a long time to work out what that would be and then internalize it. So you dont have to think every time you go to the table. And were at the moment where for the people who particularly the people on the cutting edge of kind of food activism, they have to think about every single bite they take. And so its a very difficult time. The optimist in me and as you gather im an optimist thinks that over time maybe this will kind of shake down into accepted ways of eating and accepted ways not just restaurants versus home cooking but new ways of feeding people. Mean, thats what i hope. Any other questions . We have time for one more. Any one of you want to make a final comment . All right. Well, thank you. This book has looked at the history of the spread of hugh cuisine and of high cuisine and middling cuisine and interestingly the most important or challenging implications for our public conversation today, i think, are about hunger and Food Insecurity and owe buysity and obesity and i will end with one of the puns that chris avoided this book leaves us with a lot of food for thought. Thank you. 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