Food, Food, (not so) Glorious Food

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, food, secrets

OK. The title is The Secret History of Food: Strange but True Stories About the Origins of Everything We Eat, by Matt Siegel. Right off the bat I would replace the word "Everything" with "a Few Interesting Things".

Mr. Siegel seems to be torn between celebrating food and suspicion about it. He tells us of the process of making vanilla (Ch 6), with a side note about saffron, which is an even more arduous process. The description itself takes no more than a couple of pages, and then we are treated to a history of the uses of vanilla, which remains the most popular flavor of ice cream, as it was in the time of George Washington. It is also the basis of a great many popular perfumes. I learned from a realtor that a few drops of vanilla extract on a piece of cotton, placed on a sunny windowsill during house showings, can lead to larger offers for a house purchase. Of course, vanilla is so popular in so many foods that the natural product can supply only 15% of market demand. The rest is produced chemically. The word "vanilla" has become a metaphor for "ordinary", for example in the sex trade: an "alternative" sex act, one that cannot produce a pregnancy, is something besides "vanilla". When I was a software engineer, my colleagues and I would refer to a program or system that we used right-out-of-the-package without modifying it as "vanilla"; usually we modified stuff.

The second chapter of the book brings us the history of pies in the West. We may remember nursery rhymes such as "four-and-twenty blackbirds baked in a pie." Prior to a century or two ago pies in England, Europe and America were mostly meat pies of numerous varieties—seldom fruity desserts—with a thick, inedible crust that was used as a container and dinner plate. The crust would be discarded. The more recent "chicken pot pie" is a slightly more edible remnant of this tradition…and a shuddery memory of my childhood. The light, flaky pie crusts of today, which are not only edible but can be good for you if made with liquid oil (the way I make them) rather than lard, were an innovation that began in the 1700's.

Many of the stories are about things done to food to make it more profitable for the seller, and often more dangerous for the eater. The scandal about melamine in dog food in 2007, and similar scandals about "fillers" in food for pets and humans, are just recent cases in a centuries-long list of things like chalk in milk, water in wine, and motor oil in "olive" oil. 

The author doesn't get much into food poisoning due to contamination such as E. coli in lettuce (and a whole lot of other kinds of produce). There's a limit to the size of such a book. He has a goal: to show certain trends over time. Foods once considered toxic, such as tomatoes and potatoes (which are nightshades), are now "healthy choices". Of course the Keto crowd eschews potatoes because they are so starchy, so the "progress" is a mixed bag. The leaves and flowers of nightshade-family plants are very toxic. But the fruits (tomatoes) or roots (potatoes) are not, with the caveat that if potatoes are green from sun exposure, they are toxic.

In Chapter 8, titled "The Choices of a New Generation", he starts with the notion of Cockaigne, introduced in Ch 7. As a child I learned the song "Big Rock Candy Mountain", about the bubble-gum trees and the lemonade springs, and so forth. It is in the tradition of fantastic places of plenty, hedonistic heavens. He says, "We're living in a modern-day Cockaigne, a utopian fantasyland where food has no limits and our choices defy natural order." Giant container ships such as the one that recently destroyed a major bridge in Baltimore usually include foodstuffs in their cargo, so we can have oranges from Chile in the wintertime and "winter melons" in summer.

Food, which once required much of our day to earn, obtain, and prepare, has become super-abundant in at least the First World. A typical grocery store stocks 50,000 to 100,000 distinct varieties; so much so that certain store chains such as Aldi pride themselves on a much reduced stock—20,000 varieties or so—of items that are touted as more carefully chosen and better values. Even 20k varieties would shock the leggings right off of our Colonial ancestors (or our great-great grandparents in the Old world).

The book is great fun to read. Perhaps a few parts, such as those about what gets into adulterated food, aren't such wise reading at mealtime. Otherwise, enjoy!