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.