Christopher Cumo - Foods That Changed History: How Foods Shaped Civilization from the Ancient World to the Present

Copyright 2015 by ABC-CLIO, LLC

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cumo, Christopher.

Foods that changed history : how foods shaped civilization from the ancient world to the present / Christopher Cumo.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4408-3536-0 (alk. paper)ISBN 978-1-4408-3537-7 (ebook) 1. FoodHistoryEncyclopedias. 2. AgricultureHistoryEncyclopedias. 3. CookingHistoryEncyclopedias. 4. CivilizationHistoryEncyclopedias. I. Title.

TX349.C86 2015

641.3003dc23 2015000810

ISBN: 978-1-4408-3536-0

EISBN: 978-1-4408-3537-7

19 18 17 16 15 1 2 3 4 5

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Contents

Alphabetical List of Entries

Topical List of Entries

Plant Based Foods

Animal Based Foods

Beverages as Food

Composite Foods

Sweeteners

Condiments

Fungus

Preface

This encyclopedia, Foods That Changed History: How Foods Shaped Civilization from the Ancient World to the Present, aims to introduce students to the vast and trendy field of food studies. It is an important discipline that complements the study of global history, botany, animal husbandry, culinary traditions, and other fields. Within this field, this work aims to focus attention on the many foods that have shaped world history, attended the rise of monotheism and other religions, spurred the rise of civilizations, and forged culinary habits for centuries, if not millennia. Fish, for example, are tied to the canonical Gospels and have come to symbolize Jesus. In this context, they helped spur the rise of Christianity. The potato affected numerous fields of study: plant pathology, demography, a prelude to the Malthusian crisis, warfare, the decline of bread in northern Europe, and other developments. The Columbian Exchange has made the Andean potato a global staple in temperate zones. Sugarcane and coffee were the initial impetus for the rise of African slavery in the American tropics. This topic is full of perils, giving rise to racism and all the evils of slavery. Because blackness was conflated with slavery, a whole system of inferiority and exploitation attended the rise of slavery. Even a branch of pseudoscience emerged to try to prove the innate inferiority of Africans. In this case racism corrupted science, which was advertised to be objective. Mutton and lamb fueled the rise of Judaism and are the subjects of notable passages in the Old Testament, particularly the plagues upon Egypt that Exodus professes to record. The fig, apple, and banana may be at the core of the Genesis creation account, each acting as the putative forbidden fruit, at least according to some scholars. One might multiply examples, but the point is that these foods and others had a disproportionate effect on the world. They shaped what we read and think. They have, in a real sense, shaped who we are as a species. Indeed, the study of food has shaped our own evolution and that of our close kin Neanderthals. Popular imagination views Neanderthals as having been crude and primitive. This stereotype could not be more wrong. They were creative, gifted, and intelligent people whose story is bound up in the rise of fishing among anatomically modern humans during about the last 40,000 years or so.

The scope of this encyclopedia covers a range of disciplines, geographies, and foods. The nearly 100 entries span a large range of foods from the fish, beef, chicken, and mutton and lamb of prehistory to the Coca-Cola of the modern era. This wide-ranging treatment necessarily covers all the habitable continents, from the first stirrings of wheat and barley culture in southwestern Asia some 10,000 years ago to the meteoric rise of hamburgers and hot dogs in modern America. These foods have left a deep imprint. Fish, a food of sustenance for the earliest humans, has led to overfishing and ecological crisis. The very fecundity of our food production and processing system has led to a global population of some 7 billion people, leading to the specter of a Malthusian Crisis, a danger that the Irish Potato Famine in the 1840s may prefigure. Such a large population only reinforces the degree to which a prodigious food supply is essential to survival. Food is essential to all animals. We are the species that strains under the burden of the food supply, perhaps more than many other species. This was a struggle that British cleric Thomas Malthus predicted in the 18th century, and the problem has only worsened with the passage of time. Indeed, the Green Revolution, important as it was, has granted humans only a temporary buffer zone against the implacable limits of our food supply. Some dour scientists fear that some of the foods on which humans depend, rice being a good example, are near their biological limit in producing edible biomass. How, in such a context, will we derive more food to feed ever more people?

This encyclopedia has an alphabetical organization, an aid to readers who may easily find the foods of their choice. Each entry treats a single food in the context of how that food has changed history and performed the other functions outlined earlier in this preface. The treatment of each entry is chronological. Where possible, each subsection treats a way in which the food has shaped the world. The emphasis is not only on history, but also on botany, aquaculture, animal husbandry, social cohesion, competition for scarce resources, human evolution, and a variety of other disciplines. This encyclopedia is thus a multidisciplinary undertaking that relies on the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences. Each entry closes with suggestions for further exploration: books, articles, and websites that enhance the readers knowledge. Foods That Changed History begins with a list of entries arranged alphabetically, as mentioned above, along with a list of entries grouped in topical categories to help users identify entries on related topics. The encyclopedia has a timeline and an introductory essay that overviews how foods changed world history. The encyclopedia closes with a selected, general bibliography of print and electronic resources to support student research.

Introduction

The acquisition of food is basic to all life. Early in the tenure of life on earth arose green algae, some bacteria, and ultimately plants capable of producing food in the form of the sugar glucose by harnessing the energy of sunlight. These organisms combined sunlight, carbon dioxide, and water to yield this sugar. Almost all other life, including humans, depends on plants for food. This dependence is direct when a person eats a plant or part of a plant, say, a potato, which is an underground tuber of the potato plant. This dependence is a step removed when humans eat the herbivores that have in turn gotten their energy from plants, say, when people eat beef, pork, or any of a number of such animals.