Category Archives: Food History

Dead Man Gnawing: Man Made Maize and the Gods Made Man (3,700 B.C.)

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Writing about genetically modified food last week got me thinking about Humanity’s history of mutating the plant world to its gastro-nutritional whim.  It is those directed mutations that created civilization itself.  For instance:

This Mayan maize god was, among many diverse roles, the partron of scribes.

In the beginning, the gods of the Maya created humans out of mud.  But the mud men squinted at the world, and could not take it in.  They could not move to chase game or to seek shelter, and their thoughts were clogged.  The rains washed them away.

The gods then made humans out of wood.  These men could speak and see and move.  On all fours, they climbed through the jungle canopies and rambled over the valleys, but they failed to honor the gods as the gods saw fit.  Perhaps their taste of freedom was too complete.  Perhaps they razed the jungles where their flesh was found.  The gods thus destroyed them.

And so the gods tried a third time.  They made Man out of maize.  And this Man was in harmony. Continue reading →

Community News: Chief Justice Roberts on Your Fruits and Veggies

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The hubbub over Chief Justice John Roberts deciding in favor of the Affordable Care Act—specifically, the way he found it constitutional on the basis of taxation rather than the power of the federal government to regulate commerce—got me thinking about our gardens and dinners.  See, a shocking amount of American law that I think essential to an equitable society rests on the rather narrow Constitutional text “The Congress shall have the power to regulate commerce.”  A significant aspect of the constitutionality of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, for instance, depended on the Court’s determination that the Commerce Clause gave the feds the power to regulate businesses that served mostly interstate travelers.  Thus motels and restaurants across America could not discriminate against black Americans. Equality through Commerce.  Crazy, right?

Okay, so what does this have to do with food?  Well, the House is currently considering the next Agricultural Appropriations bill, which happens to contain a rider, known as “the Monsanto rider,” that has received, curiously, little to no coverage in the national press.  This rider requires that the Secretary of Agriculture grant a farmer or industrial agri-giant a  permit to plant genetically engineered crops (GMO), even if a federal court has ordered the planting halted for safety or environmental impact studies.  You can read it here.

Monsanto, DuPont, etc., only have to ask, and every ruling by a federal court or enforcement of current consumer protection laws on the part of the White House or a federal regulatory agency is overridden and they can plant whatever crop they chose.  Even state congresses become powerless: if they try to create local or state laws to protect eaters and farmers, they are in violation of federal law, a federal law that is written to override all other pertinent federal laws. Continue reading →

Dead Man Gnawing: Stealth DNA and One Stubborn Old Man (1970 & 2005)

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Canola is also known as Rapeseed. Its seeds are crushed to make vegetable oil.

Since we’re only a few days past Independence Day, I thought I’d take a look at the borders between the dominion of the public and the gated garden of the private.  In 1998, multinational industrial agrichemical giant Monsanto discovered that a Canadian farmer named Percy Schmeiser was growing its Roundup Ready Canola in his fields.  The seeds that grow into our food have generally been considered public property.  That is, our foods are held in common by allhumans; no one person or company can own the seeds that sustain civilization.

Monsanto had the U.S. Plant Variety Protection Act of 1970 at their back, though.  That law gives companies the right to exclusively own the DNA of the plant varieties they develop.  That right of ownership includes the sole right to “reproduce” the plant, i.e. to generate the seed from which the plants grow.  That means that a farmer or gardener is forbidden to save the seeds produced from one year’s crop in order to plant the next year.  Schmeiser was growing Monsanto’s genetically-modified (GM) plants without paying for them. Continue reading →

Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Ice Cream

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Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson: America's first ice cream scribe

Our nation’s love of food runs deep. Thomas Jefferson was a known gourmand who kept notes on French cooking, and is thought to have scribbled down the first American recipe for ice cream. So this Fourth of July, pull out your Sabotiere (that’s the inner canister of an ice cream maker, for those of you not up on your 18th century lingo), and give Tom’s recipe a try. No word on who made the first American ice cream cone, but my money’s on Benjamin Franklin.

6 yolks of eggs
1/2 lb sugar
2 bottles  of good cream

Mix the yolks and sugar together. Put the cream on a fire in a casserole, first putting in a stick of Vanilla. When near boiling, take it off and pour it gently into the mixture of eggs and sugar. Stir it well. Put it on the fire again, stirring it thoroughly with a spoon to prevent its sticking to the casserole. When near boiling, take it off and strain it thro’ a towel. Continue reading →

Dead Man Gnawing: The Hotdog, from Maximilian II to Jimmy Durante (1200s & 1916)

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Two days from now, many New Yorkers and perhaps a greater number of tourists will celebrate the 236th anniversary of These United States by watching a group of Americans stuff as many hotdogs down their gullets as they can.  I refer, obviously, to the famous hotdog eating contest Nathan’s Famous hosts each year.

The hotdog seems to me a most American food.  You can eat it with one hand.  It’s  inexpensive on the Wallet of Now but maybe not so much on the Self of Tomorrow.  Its immigrant origins are hotly debated by those jockeying for brand superiority in a never ending race in which only one can be the victor.

So I poked around.  Here’s what I found: Continue reading →

Dead Man Gnawing: The Netherland Carrot vs. the Byzantine Carrot (500 & 1700 C.E.)

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There is a World Carrot Museum.  It’s only virtual, which leaves me feeling a bit had, but at least there’s a place where you can find the sentence: “Welcome world wide web traveler to the World Carrot Museum, dedicated to telling the fascinating story of the wonderful Carrot.”  A clause in the book The Edible History of Humanity sent me searching, but more on that in a minute.

Our hero carrot’s history is “surrounded by doubt and enigma.”  As far as we know, cultivation started around 3,000 B.C. in Afghanistan.  Imperial Rome grew them for medicinal means and as ingredients for aphrodisiacs.  After the fall of Rome, Europe went carrot-less for ten centuries until the Arabs reintroduced them.  The original carrots (and I’m talking about the roots that we eat here) were purple, white, or yellow.  China developed a foreshadowing red carrot around 1700.  Continue reading →

Feature: The Amish, doughnuts, & Bruegel the Elder @ the Roo

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I did not grow up on doughnuts; we were not a junk food household.  I’d have them occasionally, of course.  I was always jealous of a friend whose old man would disappear the mornings after sleepovers and return to leave a box of Krispy Kreme on the kitchen table to greet us on the way from the bedroom to the den to catch Saturday morning cartoons.  I came to adore Krispy Kreme (at the store, you could watch a massive, sweating, silver machine turn out newborn doughnut after doughnut after doughnut).  I also worked briefly at age 16 for Dunkin Donuts (who trucked their doughnuts in from some unseen source twice a day) and eventually came to lament that Dunkin secured a niche on the country’s coffee addiction train and spread its subpar sugar rings across the national landscape, forcing Krispy Kreme to the fringes.

Living in New York City, I have been lucky enough to discover the Doughnut Plant.  Eating at the Doughnut Plant was my first step to experiencing the doughnut as art; they do things like stuff handmade doughnuts with homemade peanut butter and glaze them with homemade jam, buy bushels of in-season lavender from the farmers market for a beautiful gray-blue glaze, concoct tres leches cake donuts and other artisanal delights.  Stumbling upon this place was like stumbling upon El Dorado when the most precious metal previously known was tin.

But gold isn’t the only precious metal (it’s softer than Sabbath) any more than the Doughnut Plant’s gilded doughnuts are the only doughnuts.  The hands-down, full-on, good-goddamn-a’mighty culinary work of art at the Bonnaroo Music Festival this year was the Amish Baking Company’s doughnuts.  Continue reading →

Dead Man Gnawing: The Provenance of Our Big Gulp (1676 – 2012)

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Among my different jobs is one that takes me to public middle schools to teach creative and academic writing.  In those classrooms, I have discovered that the craptastic school lunches I sometimes ate while that age are nothing compared to the contemporary dining habits of the Bronx’s eleven-to-thirteen set.  Oversized plastic cups of sugared coffee slushy and a few Dunkin donuts, as well as the bags of Skittles or Doritos that were less of a surprise, are routine.  Of course, I had a class at one of those schools whose lunch period began at 9:10, just after first period.  It’s safe to say that our kids are both getting and seeking a raw deal.

And that takes us to Michael Bloomberg, who in spite of getting the law changed so he could have a third term, seems likely to go down in history mostly for banning smoking in bars, making us a more bike-friendly city (!), and trying to outlaw oversized soda containers in certain types of business.

Well, it's not Joe Camel...

I presume the soda ban is national news; I can’t imagine the Glen Becks of the country passing up such an opportunity.  And so I’ve scrounged up a few key pieces of soft drink history: Continue reading →

Dead Man Gnawing: The Stringless Bean (1884)

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This isn't Keeney's brand, but I do love the old-time packaging.

For most of the thousands of years that humans have grown them, beans have had long, fibrous strings running along the pod seam (hence “stringbeans”) and a tough lining between the peas and the pod.  The original bean farmers, native tribes in the Americas, raised beans to shell and discard the pods, not enjoy fresh what we generally know today as green beans.  There are far more fresh, eatable beans than just green beans, of course, but that’s not we’re addressing today.   We’re addressing the origin of those fresh snap beans, a dude named Calvin Keeney. Continue reading →

Stalking the Wild Tortilla Chip

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cavemanWhile eating breakfast tacos at our heavenly neighborhood taqueria, Gueros, this weekend, I began to muse on fat. After all, I could think of many reasons why the tacos were delicious (The tang of those pickled onion! The salt of that queso fresco! The bite of that habanera sauce!), but the plain tortilla chips were just as irresistible, and I had a feeling that it was because of the sheen of glistening oil that they wore after their bath in the deep fryer.

I formed an extemporaneous theory that this must be because of some evolutionary phenomenon. After all, it’s not that fat is bad, necessarily, just that it packs a huge wallop of calories and energy all at once, which was probably quite helpful if you were trying to, say, survive a famine. Jason was skeptical of this thinking—if fat was actually good, then why did his stomach feel so lousy after eating all that grease? If he had stalked a wooly tortilla chip across the icy tundra for four days, I retorted, his stomach would probably feel just fine.

While little information is available about the elusive wild tortilla chip, I did find some interesting evidence that scientific thought about fat is still evolving. Continue reading →