Food, Culture and Taste

Indirect Fight & Cooking Methods

• King Gilgamesh sent Shamat to seduce Inkidu with bread and beer, after which Inkidu became human.

Cooking Methods

• Tools used to prepare foods, making them more useful for humans.
• Placing food on fire was critical for human evolution because:
  • It concentrates nutrients.
  • Makes food more delicious via the Maillard reaction (heating proteins).
  • Increased edibility allowed human minds to develop.
• Animals eating raw food need more energy for digestion (e.g., cows with four stomachs).
• Humans developed more nutritional foods through cooking, freeing up energy for brain expansion.
• Cooking makes indigestible foods digestible.
  • Example: grating cassava to remove prussic acid (toxic).

Fermentation

• An early form of cooking, transforms raw milk into yogurt or cheese.
• Relies on enzymes from young animals.
• Young animals (including humans) can digest lactose, but most people lose this ability.
• Fermenting milk into yogurt and cheese makes it more digestible.

Food Preservation Technologies

• Important form of cooking.
• Making butter, especially ghee (clarified butter), preserves perishable dairy.
• Century eggs in China are another example of food preservation.

Consumption Rules

• Meals structure time.
  • Everyday foods vs. special foods for festivals (e.g., Jewish Passover, Muslim Eid).
  • Not eating as a form of memory (e.g., Ramadan, Catholic Lent).
• Conceptual rules:
  • Chopstick etiquette: fitting into society.
• Social hierarchy:
  • Showing deference to elders at the table.
  • Food as sociability: who eats together conveys meaning.
• Notions of health:
  • Chinese traditional medicine: balance via grains and less flavoring.

Flavor Principle

• A familiar set of ingredients within a culture.
• Example: salsa (tomato, green chili, onion, cilantro, lime).
• Cooking any food with these ingredients makes it "Mexican."

Infrastructure

• Physical expression of the food system, economy, and society of food.
• Includes:
  • Agriculture (how foods are grown).
  • Distribution and marketing.
  • Food processing.
  • Food waste management.
• All elements of food culture change historically due to migration, wars, etc.
• Dietary transition:
  • Shift from peasant diet (starches and vegetarian proteins) to industrial diet (fats and sugars).
• This shift led to seeking more "authentic" foods; food cultures are "invented traditions."

Taste

• Flavor principles are tied to identities.
• Sensory perception:
  • More than chemical reactions on taste buds.
  • Involves aroma, sight, touch/texture, and sound.
• Brain processes physical sensations, using memories of past foods as a filter; culture becomes part of taste.
• New foods are compared to past meals (comfort foods or repulsive foods).
• Memory synchronizes taste among people sharing a culture, creating similar tastes.
• Food creates distinction:
  • Some foods associated with the rich (e.g., truffles, fine wine).
  • Knowledge of these foods is cultural capital.
  • Ordering wine incorrectly in a fancy restaurant leads to discomfort.
• Sensory labor:
  • Wine stewards, perfume makers, quality control, flavor chemists, etc.
  • Humans as sensory workers (e.g., gas companies add smell to detect leaks).

Terroir

• Connection between flavor and environment (taste of place).
• Soil affects flavor (e.g., teas of Darjeeling, wines of Bordeaux, coffee from Jamaican Blue Mountains).
• Technologies, knowledge of growers, harvesting, and processing shape taste.
• Each region has its own soil, microclimate, and grower skills.
• Buying specific varieties from special areas provides social distinction compared to commodity foods.

Sustainability

• Ensuring resources are not exhausted, leaving nothing for the future.
• Industrial agriculture produces much food but depletes soil fertility.

Resilience

• Adaptability of a system to catastrophic shocks that cause change.
• 19th-century North American Plains food system:
  • Buffalo hunting.
  • Transformed into European-style agriculture.
  • Crop rotations, animal labor, nutrient cycling, and waste used to maintain fertility.
• Mid-20th century: second change to fossil fuels, synthetic fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides; also, government policies supporting industrial agriculture.
• Modern agriculture:
  • More productive but less resilient due to removed redundancies.
  • Question: does it have a cushion to deal with disruptive influences like COVID, avian flu, or climate change?
• Building resilience: soil/water conservation, perennial crops, community diversity.

Regenerative Sustainability

• Interconnectedness of human and environmental well-being.
• Seeks net positive outcomes by working within the ecological systems.
• Goal: long-term gains and improvements rather than just reducing harm.

Ecological Systems

• Everything in the ecology is connected, illustrated in the ecological pyramid.
• Energy travels from sun to soil, plants, insects, birds, etc.
• Actions affecting one layer impact the entire system.
• Considerations: How do we diversify (only 12 plant species produce 75% of the global food supply, and 15 mammal/bird species provide 90% of the meat we eat). How do we use the land, the water, how do deal with pollution, and climate change.
• Climate change is essential in sustainability: floods, pests, and drought compromise the ability to produce food.

Social Sustainability

• Ability of a community to meet its needs while ensuring future generations' well-being.
• Includes quality of life, equality, diversity, and social cohesion.
• Example: Western North American mining towns boomed with ore extraction and were abandoned when resources ended.
• Same hollowing of society in Great Plains farm communities and Atlantic cod fisheries due to overfishing.

Economic Sustainability

• Practices ensuring long-term growth.
• Contemporary system benefits: food accessible to more people.
  • Middle-class people can afford foods once reserved for the wealthy.
• However, many go hungry; should changes raise costs, even for sustainability?
• Risk of focusing on prices (monetary value) alone.
• Aldo Leopold: by making conservation easy, we've made it trivial (economic value overshadows inherent qualities).
• Fails to value entire biotic communities without direct monetary gain.
• Wastelands (marshes, bogs, dunes, deserts) privatized for profit instead of conserved.
• Leopold called for a land ethic to impose limitations to benefit everyone.
• Interactions between sustainability raise “wicked challenges”: difficult definitions, constant evolution, no clear resolution. Decision-making must account for present and future impacts.

Food Justice

• Ensuring that the benefits and risks of where, what, and how food is grown, produced, transported, distributed, accessed, and eaten are shared fairly.
• Inspired by environmental justice, dealing with externalities (costs not borne by beneficiaries).
• Example: factory pollution affects local communities, while profits go elsewhere.
• Toxic waste dumps often located in poor communities.
• Food justice as a lens to see problems: injustices in food deserts/abundance sites.

Initiatives for Justice

• Intellectual property rights funnel values to particular people, privatizing profits, socializing losses.
• Racial injustice: unequal access to food, hazardous working conditions.
• Racial superiority drives assumptions about food.
  • The Mediterranean diet as the healthiest, while peasant diets elsewhere are considered primitive. Is it better to be European over anything else?
• Generational justice: indigenous people call for seven-generation thinking.
• Globally, 800 million are chronically malnourished; the situation is worsening.
• Nearly one-fifth of the Canadian population is food insecure, despite industrial agriculture gains.

Perspectives on Hunger

• Cornucopians: technology will solve the problem.
• Malthusians: hunger is inevitable.
• Gawaiians: there's plenty of food; distribute it fairly.

Balancing Themes

• Culture: will food support identities and communities?
• Flavor: will food be desirable to eat?
• Sustainability: will it lead to future suffering due to industrial production, fertilizer runoff, and deforestation?
• Food justice: will people be denied food?
• Industrial agriculture designed to generate profits, not feed people, however, there is a question proposed that can modern technology be used without inequalities?
• No magic bullets exist, but understanding problems is the first step.