This roundtable is on Rachel Laudans book, cuisine and empire. Why are we discussing this book . To bring history and Historical Perspective into broader public and policy conversations. This panel does that by 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 only for sustenance, but for cultural projects. They ardently try the latest restaurants, experiment with new ingredients and recipes, learn about new cuisine, and approach mealtime with a deliberate appreciation. So much so, a new term has been coined to refer to them, foodies. Chefs have become celebrities. Some have even achieved sufficient wealth and public profile that they have created philanthropic organizations, generally addressing hunger which persists. Along with hunger, there are other related social ills like poor nutrition to obesity. Policymakers debate and pursue responses to the consumption of too little, too much, or the wrong kind of food. As this interest in food has burgeoned, so has the attention to history of food. Historians have embraced food as an area of scholarship. Besides dozens of books and articles on food history now published yearly, there are textbooks and primary sourcebooks on history for availability to use in College Courses on food. Interest in food history is equally strong beyond the academy. Cooks and bakers look to historic recipes for new ideas. Any time the American Historical Association today blog runs a piece on food history, it does very well and one example is a piece on the history of food and decolonization that amanda perry wrote. Those pieceshat attract both public and academic readers. That is one of the things i find very notable. In recent years, food history has been an area of Common Ground for scholarly and public audiences. It reflects, in part, the shared desire to recover a lost past, and imagined lost past of distinctive local foods and techniques. Cooking before the advent of modern processes. Rachel laudan challenges the assumption behind that your thing and search for a lost past in food. She asked us to think more carefully about the history of cooking, which she observes as difficult, timeconsuming, and requires an enormous amount of human energy. The reconsideration of how cooking has evolved over time, cc just she suggests, that there are implications for our contemporary debate about food. That is where this panel of esteemed historians will turn to. They each study different eras, have different takes and will be discussing some of these issues at the roundtable. We will start with rachel, offering a synopsis of her book. And, the other panelists will offer their thoughts on topics desk issues raised by the book. Each panelist will have a chance to speak twice. Finally, we will open it up to your questions. Now, let me introduce the panelists. Rachel laudan is a historian. She holds a degree, a phd in the history and philosophy of science from the University College of london. She has a distinguished academic career, teaching at a number of institutions and holding an array of distinguished awards and fellowships. It is also notable in addition to her academic career, she had another career as an independent scholar in the history of food. Her book, cuisine and empire cooking and World History, was published in 2013. By the university of California Press. Paradisethe food of was published in 1996. She has also published widely for public audiences in l. A. Times, boston globe, and other outlets. She has spoken on food in all sorts of places. Her list of accomplishments is far too long to read here. Suffice it to say she brings and , expertise to the history of food that few can match. Sitting next to her is chris hodgson. He is an associate professor to he is an associate professor in the department of history at Brigham Young university. He earned his doctorate from Northwestern University in 2004. After that, he spent two years as a mellon fellow in philadelphia. He has published articles and journals, including the william and mary quarterly, and other journals. His first book, the akkadian diaspora, was published in 2012 by Oxford University press. His second book, discovering empire from the era of crusades to the revolution will be likewise published by oxford. He is currently working on a book project on conservative enlightenment. Next to chris is libby oconnell. She received her phd in American History from the university of virginia. She joined the History Channel, at its conception in 1993. Eventually serving as chief historian and Senior Vice President of corporate responsibility. She has received four emmys for her work. To thethe consultant History Channel while she serves as does on the commission of the centennial commission. She is the author of, most recently, the american plate. Next is amy bentley, professor in the department of nutrition and food studies and Public Health at new york university. A historian with interests in the social, Historical Context food, she is the author of published by the university of California Press in 2014, which was a finalist for a james beard award. She is also a winner of the asf best book award. She has a number of publications. She is cofounder of the experimental cuisine collective. It is an Interdisciplinary Group of scientists, food studies scholars, and chest who study the intersection of science chefs, who study the intersection of science and food. Finally, at the end of the table is paul friedman, who is the chester d trip professor of history at yale university. His primary field is medieval europe. He has written on the history of spain, the church, peasants, and luxury charges in the middle ages, he also has an interest in the history of food and cuisine. He received his phd from berkeley in 1978 and taught at vanderbilt before he moved to yale. Here is the author of a number of books, including the diocese of vick, a 1983 book, and the ingins of servitude catalonia. He published 10 restaurants that changed america in the fall of 2016. Not only a distinguished panel, but a panel with a wide range of interests and areas of expertise. I will now turn it over to rachel. Rachel i cannot say how much it means to be here. A panel on ones work is something that historians dream of, or perhaps, dread a little. So i would like to thank the American History center, the aha, my longtime colleagues, and all of you for turning up here. This is especially significant bigme because like many historical projects, this one also has deep historical and personal roots. I grew up on a farm, surrounded by 1000 acres of wheat, beans, and barley, dairy cattle and beef cattle. My father farmed but my mother just cooked. She had no choice but to just cook. That came with the territory. In some ways, this is a tribute to her because she would love 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 visitors to hawaii in World History about food history. Then, i began teaching a course in food history, but in those days needed special permission from the dean. That course eventually became in much transformed form, cuisine and empire cooking in World History. Why cuisine . Why empire . Why cooking and why World History . Have, iew minutes i would like to lay out the basic ideas underlying my story. I do not consider these the best food history is to be more than a fad driven by contemporary politics, we need to have serious debates about the intellectual foundations of the subject. I will start very simply with cooking. It is true, but not often taken seriously enough that we do not eat grains and we do not eat carcasses. We only eat these things, these Raw Materials when they have been transformed into bread, or steaks, or other prepared foods. Ago, humans passed the point of no return. The bulk of their calories come from foodstuffs transformed from the natural state. These transformations are extraordinarily wideranging and complex. They can be thermal changes, the use of heat and goal cold, mechanical changes, grinding, cutting, slicing. They can be chemical changes, adding salt and alkalines. They can be biochemical changes, particularly fermenting, and even biological changes. Breeding of plants which in the nature ancient world counted as part of cooking. Today, we do not have a good collective term for these various transformations. I actually like processing, but when i considered titling a book in the current political climate, Food Processing in World History, that was clearly starter, so i stuck with cooking. I want to reiterate that cooking required, in the past, and still requires today, a great deal more energy, labor, and time than producing the Raw Materials in the first place. Farming pales in comparison with human effort when compared with processing. For many people, traditionally, it took about five hours a day food for a family of four or five. Because we undertake these transformations, humans inside in fact design their foods. They design and to make them safer, cheer you, tastier, chew, safer, longerlasting. They transform them to establish status, to show piety and moral concern, demonstrate political affiliation, and make money, and a host of often other mutually competing goals. In short, our most basic beliefs about the natural world, including about our own bodies, the social and economic and political world, and the supernatural and moral world, shape the foods we create. Of course, we dont take basic ideas about the political economy or human physiology or about religion into account for every mail we produce. These are often internalized. In times of rapid culinary change these basic beliefs come prominently into play. Those sets of beliefs are what i call culinary philosophies. Also because we design our food, every individual in every society its a set of foodstuffs that have been organized and processed to achieve a certain set of goals. We think about what we want to , and thenlendid meal we design the meal from the Raw Materials and ingredients. This i call a cuisine, style of cooking. Unchanging,ough not they change constantly, are distinct and persistent. This was very evident in hawaii. This is where i got started on the book. You had three roughly competing cuisines. The east asian set of cuisines basically derived from buddhism, leery of meat, favoring rice, and eaten with chopsticks. Hawaiian cuisine, inspired by taroenous cultures using and fish, and cooked in underground evidence and eaten with the hands. And anglo cuisines inspired by cooks ints, wheat ovens and eaten with a knife and fork. Cuisines, 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. Ginger culinary philosophy, convert from one religion to abandon a monarchy and establish a republic has happened in the american revolution, and you will start changing your cuisine and what you bring in line with your new culinary philosophies. Although i start with some very simple point, note we have moved a long way from the general theory that most people subscribe to with cuisine, that amanda just mentioned, namely that cuisines are from the , the territorial theory of conceit cuisines there created in a particular place and evolve slowly and gradually in that place as new plants and techniques are brought in. Is instead a kind of intellectual theory of culinary change. Moment, because in the history of cuisines, grains have been disproportionately important. This is not an accident. There is no other raw material that offers such a wide range of nutrients as the grains do. There is no other raw material that can be turned into so many foodstuffs with so many different kinds of tastesonal virtues and as the grains can. Whole, steamed, ir popped, the alcohols, the ground tastes that are turned into bread or noodles, and even, although we often forget it or think it is very recent, into oils and sweetness such as small sugars. These go way back in history. They were not invented by industrial processes. Only grains, in addition have a a sufficiently high nutrient to. Ait ratio you only need two pounds of grain per person per day to feed an individual. If you try to do it using roots, which are another another highly nutritious source, they are wet and heavy that it takes 15 pounds of ground green a day. With the facilities of the ancient world, the only way people could get food to cities elect tormies was to take grains. Thus, the very existence of the early states and the more complex states empire which i use for political units that can project cultural, military, or economic power over large areas, these empires are dependent on the prior introduction of grain cuisine. There are multiple interactions between states and cuisines. The legitimacy of the state people on the ability of 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 the people are entitled to rights, entitled to riot, if the food supply runs out, the states have the ability to endorse and to some extent, and force their ,referred culinary philosophy and have done so throughout history. Another very important feature is that those cuisines that are associated with powerful states are often believed to be the cause of the power of that state, dietary determinism. An empire that is very powerful tends to have its features appropriated or imposed by surrounding or neighboring or distant states, so that the states and powerful empires get transferred over vast distances. Here we have a map of buddhist cuisine, which between about 200 bc and 800 a. D. Completely ofnsformed the cuisines eastern and southeastern and southern asia. You can see the roots as one state or empire after another pick up this particular cuisine. Ideas, i haveof an overarching story. It begins with the adoption of grain cuisine, a gradual process between 20,000 bc and 10,000 bc that led the first agriculture and then allowed the formation of state and empires. And with that, since scarcity was always at the door, the suites of cuisines, a hierarchy of cuisines with high cuisines for the rich up on the left, and poor cuisines of the lesser grains, the darker grains and beans down at the right. And usually a counter cuisine for those who disagree with the state position. And that continued from the earliest states and empires, really until the last couple of hundred years when you get the development of middling cuisines. That is cuisine that are accessible to everyone. Here we have the president s of america and russia sitting down to a hamburger together. You cannot imagine philip the second as rain dish of spain sitting down to a hamburger of spain sitting down to a hamburger with one of his peasant. The emergence of middling cuisines is again a kind of negotiation between a new culinary philosophy, favors republican and Democratic Political systems, and a transformation of the processing of food, thanks to the introduction of fossil fuel, which reduces the labor for processing and storage and agriculture and transport. So that the price of food falls and everybody can participate in this kind of middling cuisine. Very briefly, have cuisine and empire, cooking in World History , and here is the outline of the way i see the major cuisines throughout history have been formed and created. Thank you very much. [applause] thank you to the organizers for inviting me to participate on this panel. I am chris hodson from Brigham Young university, and as the first center, let me be the first to congratulate the professor, and i really mean this. This is a tremendous book, a really remarkable intellectual accompaniment, someone who tries to work in a number of languages i know how hard it is, and the depth of her learning on these culinary issues is really just staggering. A littlelot smarter, smarter after having read the book. It was really an impressive achievement. Now i am a historian of early modern empires, just the topic i want to get back to, but one thing that means is by my training i do not think i have anything intelligent to say firstthe professors brilliant chapters on the ancient world. I am going to say some stuff anyway because i have the microphone. As a reader, i was particularly taken with her account of the transformation of what i think she calls sacrificial regimes, feasting and fasting and what we might call contemplative ingredients, like fish, sweetened tea, coffee. Persia, whose of methods of projecting elite power through complex, elite, rich cuisine triggered a strong round of emulations and reformulations that laid the foundation for greek, roman, and later European Food ways. To the extent that i have a beef with professor lowden, this five minutes could have all been food puns really easily. With her characterization of what scholars call the Columbian Exchange, this idea of Alfred Crosby from the 1970s, basically the Columbian Exchange stands for the exchange of all kinds of living things, whether they are microbes or plants or animals. That was triggered with columbus First Encounter with the new world at the end of the 15th century. If i am understanding her correctly, she argues that because the transfer of new world plants to the old world occurred without and i think this is a quote the accompanying new world technology, meaning the exchange was more or less a oneway, east to west transfer. 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. A oneway street. And all of that is true, by the way, as professor laudan can tell you. Lots of italians in the 19 centuries consumed maize in the form of polenta got an incredibly gnarly form of disease because they did not know how to cook the corn and therefore did not release its nutrients which is true. That being said, isnt it fact that all italians consuming corn , ana lot rep pelagra important fact within itself. So on the wholesale transferral of plant and preparation, that is a high conceptual bar for the Columbian Exchange and it risks emphasizing what these exchanges did not do. At the expense of what many west east exchanges of things like maize, coffee, and sugar what they did 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 laudans book as an attempt to get her to talk more about it. I am totally convinced by her book that, along with the biological and political aftereffects of the Colombian Exchange, we have to consider culinary issues. It is 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 think a little more about about what the limitations of thinking about food and exchanges and culinary terms really are. Now, to return to my lauding of laudan, i do want to praise the 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 laudan about food and im sure other people do. That being said, as a historian wasarly modern empires, i heightened and convinced by her use of the term empire. Often in my own field, we fall back on nonpolitical terminology. We talk about exchanges and circulation and so on and so forth. Aligning power, alliance, and terror, the imposition of norms, the force d adoption of norms. It is important to note i think, too, that through most of the medieval and early modern perio d, empire did not just implied 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 laudens retelling, it is not just decide effect, it is a vector of imperial power. The imperial dimensions of cuisine attempts to impose it, to adopt it, to repurpose it in the interest of power i think she rightly suggests has been overlooked by National History in an attempt to create out of a really imperial past, national cuisines. So beyond its contribution to 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 for the world war i commission. My response today has nothing to do with world war i, lets go on record here. Thank you to the aha and to the National History center, and also to professor laudan for writing this book. And for inviting me, amanda, to participate in this panel today. Food historyome at from the point of view of an historian. My first job wass working as a costumed historian. Its a Living History Museum in cape cod. I was there in 1975 when jim dietz 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. Attending an open hearth, and also working in the air garden doing herb garden doing medicinal herbs and learning how to milk a cow as well as handling the dairy. So those were big responsibilities and actually i did not know how to cook until i got to the rotation. So my first cooking lessons were were in the 1620s. I wanted to point out about professor laudans book and she mentioned it in her introduction, the importance of Food Processing, and the irony today when you say process food we immediately think of kraft food. I mean what is more processed . Maybe cheez whiz. But the processing of food is such an important way of understanding culinary history, food ways, and the people do that labor. It is heavy labor and of course very timeconsuming. It is an important part, the way food comes from comes into our bodies. We forget how damaging that labor could be to the woman who grow the corn, two other laborers who would end up with arthritis and bent bones for the rest of their lives. Grinding the grains. Toasting things. Even working in carving up 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 it gets more mechanized while people are still doing hand there is a log of Food 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 food is a wonderful was that food is a wonderful way to engage the Public Interest in 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. They may not be drawn to what youre talking about until you address things that make it personally interesting to them. In that way, i dont worry that this is a fad. Well talk about food, that is a 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, itsis time to go, stayed honey, its time to go, stayed and listened to the stories and food ways of the past as it was 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 one. 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 foods go over to europe from the new world, there is a lack of understanding about food process and how to cook these things. But there is also a huge demographic impact and if anything, food is about keeping us alive and also about as us reproducing families, right . And one of the impacts two foods is to change its history forever and one is simply the 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 two more children which is a lot more in their Family Growth and it makes it a 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 world and certainly the history 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 amy bentley from the , nutrition and Food Studies Department at nyu. We used to have we used a public we used to have 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. Fan club. This book is really terrific. I started using it a couple years ago in my food history 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. But yet, she puts her own spin on it as rachel and knowledge. Acknowledged. 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 interact, the two are 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 was mentioned, it is about culinary philosophies. 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 in my classes to pair it with guns, germs, and steel. Which really should be renamed food. Jared diamond covers essentially the same territory but has a very different take. His approach is environmentally determined us. Determinist. 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 , compelling argument, but there are no people or ideas and it at in it at all. So pairing his chapters with Rachel Laudans book is a wonderful example for students to kind of try the ideas out. See for themselves, how important is the culinary cosmos . What does buddhism do in the of rice and tea . How does this move through europe and go globally . What are the ideas behind wheat and meat 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 out one minutes. 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, the industrial food system, the 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 a sentence 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 digest and it is palatable and it might have more calories per ounce or per dollar and so it was hard to disguise ants 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. Informed by an earlier essay you had culinary modernism why we should love modern processed food. It is a nice, concise argument that provides a backdrop for this entire book. I love to give it to students 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. It is assigned for my undergraduate food studies course this coming semester. The sunny side of modern cuisine , the industrial Food Products like sliced white bread or bottled fish sauce in asia or packaged snacks are convenient. Are responsible for the rise of better nutrition globally. And, that rachel opposes the romantic agrarian myth of virtuous artisanal peasant 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 in 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 maza for the tortillas because you have the tortillas themselves or packaged maza to work with. My sense is that the critique of the nostalgia, lets say i agree with that more than the advocacy of modernists modern cuisine with its processed and industrial aspects. This is partly because the book does not discuss the issue of sustainability, of agriculture or the sustainable only of livestock feeding and processing or other actresses that are, in my opinion, not sustainable. That is to say, literally not sustainable because of their environmental costs. So that far from seeing 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 plows, but it may mean paying attention to nutrients in the soil. To replenishing the soil. To not having mono crops rather than having a variety of crops and things like that. So, the choice referred to by amy just now of would you 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. That is, she says, Rachel Laudan says, the diseases of plenty or less appalling that the diseases of poverty. And that is true. The problem is the diseases of plenty are and the diseases of poverty have not been eliminated. Certainly italians do not suffer from pellagra anymore. And the diet of people in the Southern United States and appellatia is better than it was 100 years ago or so. But there are 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 sanctimoniousness of food advocates like Michael Pollan justifies a 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 in 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 somebody wrote the book about the American Transport system and only discussed the detroit or duluth 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 here and it is a part of what im trying to do here. Asides partly why i set agriculture, which i will come back to. Because i do think there has been this tremendous tendency to align food and farming. We talk about food politics and we mean farm politics. We talk about food systems, and its different ways of farming. Since that is only a part of what gets food on the table, and it is not even the largest part, that does not mean it is not very necessary in terms of sustainability. But, you know, there are other 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 eat then i think the Columbian Exchange is just one in a series of many that go right back to the history which prehistory which is why i , start my book with a rather widespreadcussion of transfer of plants and animals around 40005000 bc with the ir Processing Techniques. Because the story of agriculture and food and cuisine is a story of transfers. These are very rarely exchanges. 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 together plants, animals, and food, then, ok. There may be an exchange. The new world gets 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 or accepting western plants or 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 not want to do corn because 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. And exactly not just ok, 1492 and then, you know, the foods of the old world are changed. The funny one. Thanks, paul. And the first point i probably two points here. What i think often gets left out 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 sustain the level of Agricultural Production . I think my impression is that were moving very theres a huge discussion on this. And i cant solve it myself. Because to move into agriculture so ill just leave it there. Because to move into agriculture 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 diet that youre describing. Bread and beef and the kind of 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 with carrot 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 subsistence crisis is. So on that level i buy into professor laudans argument. That being said, i happen to be a person whose spouse is the executive director of a 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 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 capacious 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. One of the tenets of professor laudans book is the idea of the culinary 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 remotely 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 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 buddhism 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 unavailability 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. And im im 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 high 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 mole 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 contemporary issues. Just wanted to say that the among the strongest points of this book, that have been mentioned and perhaps its worth highlighting them are relating cuisines to religious philosophies. Which is itself an aspect of relating cuisine to ideas and outlooks and not just diamond 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 and to export their culinary philosophies. So this is the background to the Colombian Exchange. The Colombian Exchange idea is itself a kind of 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 america as it became, to the 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 saracen. 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 sense of the usual a. H. A. A 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 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 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. Another 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. On the first one, our diets are good for certain physiologies as developed connective with ethnicity or race. I am slightly cynical about this because it seems to me that 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. So 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 your 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 were 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. So 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. And 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 it 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 different places. I marched 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. I mean, thats what i hope. Any other questions . We have time for one more. Any one of you want to make a final comment