Thursday, August 25, 2011

Choice



There's a scene in the movie Shakespeare in Love in which a character wanders through a marketplace where a waiter for an outdoor eating venue is reciting daily specials. I've heard that moviemakers making historical films employ historians as fact checkers, but in this case someone wasn't doing his job. The practice of giving diners a choice of what to eat actually evolved hundreds of years after Shakespeare's time, in Paris around the time of the French Revolution.


Innkeepers had sold meals to hungry, paying guests for millenia, but choices were limited to what that innkeeper happened to be offering on that particular day. Eating establishments in Paris before modern restaurants came into vogue were usually locations where a proprietor served the same thing to all of his guests, at designated times rather than whenever they happened to wander in the door.


The tradition of a "restaurant," where diners come on their own schedules and order off of a list of choices, caught on in Paris around the same time that the Industrial Revolution was getting into gear across the channel in England. Rural homesteaders forced off their land began moving to the cities, taking jobs in factories, and working for wages. They became the earliest modern consumers, spending their hard-earned income on afforable luxuries that helped them unwind after long, grueling work days.


Today we take for granted the act of visiting a store and choosing from hundreds or thousands of options. We craft identities based on whether we choose organic or exotic food products, or whether we're partial to high end chocolate. We tend to think of ourselves as individuals first, and then members of a tribe, country, or community and, for better or worse, much of our identity as individuals is tied up in what we buy and how we eat.


As a business owner, I struggle with this. Vending at farmers' markets, my livelihood depends on feeding as many customers as possible as quickly as possible. The more choices you offer, the longer it takes folks to make up their minds. Limiting the number of options also cuts way down on waste. I'm aware that I sometimes lose customers because I don't offer the option of choosing different types of tortillas or different types of cheese, but this business model mostly works for me so I stick with it.


As I was serving this month's Humble Feast Dinner, it occurred to me that this type of dining event is actually more like the pre-industrial common table than a modern restaurant setup. There's a buffet with multiple courses, but they're the same offerings for everyone, and we serve at a set time. This month we came up with a novel approach: we set up a taco bar. Rice, beans, beef, seitan, salsa, hot sauce, cheese, marinated cabbage, pickled carrots and jalapenos. I doubt any two tacos were the same.


Wednesday, August 10, 2011

Social Media




I often find pictures of my hands and my quesadillas on market shoppers' blogs when I idly surf the internet, procrastinating from more urgent tasks. I've even found recipes and calorie counts. Or I'll learn on Twitter that a seasonal vegetable has finally shown up at the farmers' market. Sometimes I'll find the answer to a perplexing question like how to cook cardoons by typing into a search engine.


Today it's easier than ever to access basic culinary information over the internet. But this trend of blogs, websites, and social media is really just the most recent chapter in a story about food and communication technologies that goes back at least as far as the invention of writing.


The earliest written recipes were inscribed on ancient Babylonian tablets. They contain instructions for preparing different types of broths and meats. Cooks and scribes set down this information at a time when it was new and exciting to store learning in a format that could be deciphered by anyone with access to the code. These cooks and scribes must have belonged to the cultural elite, those who knew how to read and write.


The English sociologist Jack Goody wrote a great book called Cooking, Cuisine, and Class, in which he ruminated on the differences between cultures that have a haute cuisine, or a more complex and varied eating style for the upper classes, versus cultures where ordinary folk and their richer compatriots eat basically the same foods, only the wealthy eat more of them. He concluded that cultures with haute cuisines tend to have written traditions while cultures with simpler food systems are more likely to communicate general and culinary knowledge orally.


Ancient Babylonian had perhaps the earliest haute cuisine, that is, it included a body of knowledge that was the province of sophisticated professionals. The ability to preserve information in writing to share with fellow experts and future generations gave the craft of cooking a platform and a reference point, a medium to store and accumulate nuggets of knowledge.


Down the line, the invention of the printing press eventually turned cookbooks into household items. Naturally, the first cookbooks were written by rich folks for rich folks, but eventually more cookbooks were written, and they became more widely available. By the time a few centuries had passed, a typical housewife could get her hands on a basic cookbook geared specifically for a typical household.


Despite the staggering amount of information that we now have available about food via the internet, we really don't have any idea of how this technology will ultimately affect the way we cook. On the one hand, we're able to watch videos about simple things like how to peel a carrot, while we can also learn obscure arts such as how to make tempeh or recreate medieval trenchers.


At its worst, this vast storehouse of food knowledge has the potential to be confusing and unduly complicated, discouraging would-be cooks seeking simple, accessible information. At its best, it can be a powerful tool for healthier, happier eating. Time will tell where it's all heading. In the meantime, I'm going to go peck around for some ideas on how to use those donut peaches I just picked up at the market.

Tuesday, August 2, 2011

It's a Book!



It's called Cavemen, Monks and Slow Food: A History of Eating Well, and it's about our ever changing relationship with the food we eat. I was talking to someone at some point during the writing process, and she said that she'd never been particularly interested in history because it was all about wars. I disagreed. Personally, I grew interested in history when I realized that it was actually all about food.


We first became human when changes to our teeth and legs enabled us to hunt, gather and eat a more interesting diet than our simian ancestors had enjoyed. Civilization and farming evolved hand in hand, and more recently the industrial and technological revolutions both hinged on having an ample food supply.


As a farmers' market vendor, I was especially fascinated to learn about the many important social and political developments that occurred when small-scale agriculture managed to thrive. Ancient Greek democracy emerged among independent olive and grape growers, and the bleak years of medieval feudalism drew to a close when enterprising farmers began clearing and claiming marginal land, and striking out on their own.


But there are already plenty of terrific food history books out there telling you how we came to eat what we eat. I was more interested in exploring how we came to enjoy the foods that we prefer, and how longstanding attitudes and feelings about food tie into today's issues and debates, such as organic foods, local eating, vegetarianism, and whether foodies are inevitably snobbish.


Copies are available on Amazon, and I'm working hard to get it into bookstores and libraries. In the meantime, I'll be blogging more regularly about the long view. Thanks for listening.