Podcast appearances and mentions of Rachel Laudan

La bebida Moka no se hace con la cafetera Moka, la Moka se inventó a miles de kilómetros de la ciudad de Moka, en ninguna cafetería de Moka te van a servir un Moka. El lenguaje del café puede ser confuso. Viajemos al centro de Moka. Este episodio de Gastropolítica llega a ustedes gracias a Vermut Flores. Citas y textos de base: El Monje de Moka, Dave Eggers; Gastronomía e Imperio, Rachel Laudan; Historia de los estimulantes, Wolfgang Schivelbusch; El mundo de la cafeína, Bennet Weinberg y Bonnie Bealer; Coffee, a global history, Jonathan Morris; Uncommon Grounds, Mark Pendergrast; Café, Nicolás Artusi; Coffee, ed. Thurnston, Morris y Steiman; La cucina italiana non esiste, Alberto Grandi; The Italian coffee triangle: From Brazilian colonos to Ethiopian colonialisti, Diane Garvin; Genius barista, Will Oremus. Música: Maxi Martínez, Medeski, Martin and Wood, Zakir Hussain, Manouche, The Devil's Anvil, Eric Bibb, Serge Gainsbourg, Franco Battiato, Paolo Conte, Fabrizio De André, Caetano Veloso, Ennio Morricone, Tinariwen, Jarvis Cocker, Dave Brubeck, Mushi Mushi Orquesta. Audios adicionales: Ocupación de Addis Abeba, Archivio Luce Cinecittá; entrevista a Dawn Pinaud en el podcast Bolder and Wiser. Gastropolítica es un podcast escrito, narrado y editado por Maxi Guerra Diseño sonoro: Maxi Martínez Diseño de portada: Pablo Corrado Grazie mille

It's an enduring puzzle. For hundreds of thousands of years, our ancestors were nomadic, ranging over large territories, hunting and gathering for sustenance. Then, beginning roughly 12,000 years ago, we pivoted. Within a short timeframe—in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas—humans suddenly decided to settle down. We started to store our food. We domesticated plants. We set off, in other words, down a path that would reshape our cultures, our technologies, our social structures, even our minds. Yet no one has yet been able to account for this shift. No one has been able to fully explain why agriculture happened when it happened and where it happened. Unless, that is, someone just did.  My guest today is Dr. Andrea Matranga. Andrea is an economist at the University of Torino, in Italy, with a focus on economic history. In a new paper, he puts forward an ambitious, unifying theory of the rise of agriculture in our species. He argues that the key trigger was a spike in seasonality—with certain parts of the world, particularly parts of the northern hemisphere, suddenly experiencing warmer summers and colder winters. This led risk-averse humans in these places to start to store food and, eventually, to experiment with farming.    In this conversation, Andrea and I talk about how he developed his theory, in steps, over the course almost 20 years. We consider the weaknesses of earlier explanations of agriculture, including explanations that focused on climate. We discuss how he wrangled vast historical datasets to test his theory. And we talk about some of the downstream effects that agriculture seems to have had. Along the way we touch on: salmon, wheat, taro, and milk; agriculture as a franchise model; Milankovitch Cycles; risk-aversion and consumption-smoothing; interloping in the debates of other disciplines; the possibility of a fig-based civilization; and how we inevitably project our own concerns onto the past. Alright friends, I hope you enjoy this one. As I said at the top, the origins of agriculture is just one of those irresistible, perennial puzzles—one that cuts across the human sciences. And, I have to say, I find Andrea's solution to this puzzle quite compelling. I'll be curious to hear if you agree. Without further ado, on to my conversation with Andrea Matranga. Enjoy!   A transcript of this episode will be available soon.   Notes and links  8:00 – Various versions of the fable ‘The Ant and the Grasshopper' are compiled here. 13:00 – One of the last remaining ziggurat complexes is Chogha Zanbil. 16:00 – The classic paper by anthropologist Alain Testart on food storage among hunter-gatherers. 19:30 – An influential study emphasizing that agriculture occurred after the Ice Age due to warming conditions. Other studies have posited that other features of climate may have led to the rise in agriculture (e.g., here). 21:00 – An (illustrated) explanation of Milankovitch Cycles.   27:00 – For Marshal Sahlins' discussion of ‘The Original Affluent Society,' see here. 32:00 – Jared Diamond's popular article, ‘The Worse Mistake in the History of the Human Race.' 33:00 – A paper criticizing the particularistic focus of many archaeological treatments of the origins of agriculture.   36:30 – Dr. Matranga used a variety of data sources to test his theory, including a dataset compiling dates of agricultural adoption. 42:00 – A report detailing evidence of agriculture in Kuk swamp in New Guinea. 43:00 – The book Cuisine and Empire, by Rachel Laudan. 44:00 – A paper by Luigi Pascali and collaborators on the rise of states and the “appropriability” of cereals.  1:01:00 – A paper about the Natufian culture, which is considered to occupy and intermediate step on the road to agriculture.    Recommendations What We Did to Father (republished as The Evolution Man), by Roy Lewis The Living Fields, by Jack Harlan Kalahari Hunter-Gatherers, by Richard Lee and Irven Devore   Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala.   Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here! We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com.    For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

Follow: https://stree.ai/podcast | Sub: https://stree.ai/sub | New episodes every Monday! Join us on the Real-Time Analytics podcast as Tim Berglund sits down with Dr. Rachel Laudan, renowned food historian and author, for a fascinating exploration into the evolution of food delivery and its cultural implications. Dr. Laudan shares her insights on how cooking and food preparation have transformed over centuries, reflecting broader social and economic shifts. This episode promises to deepen your understanding of our culinary past and present, shedding light on the future of meal delivery.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Book review: Cuisine and Empire, published by eukaryote on January 22, 2024 on LessWrong. People began cooking our food maybe two million years ago and have not stopped since. Cooking is almost a cultural universal. Bits of raw fruit or leaves or flesh are a rare occasional treat or garnish - we prefer our meals transformed. There are other millennia-old procedures we do to make raw ingredients into cooking: separating parts, drying, soaking, slicing, grinding, freezing, fermenting. We do all of this for good reason: Cooking makes food more calorically efficient and less dangerous. Other techniques contribute to this, or help preserve food over time. Also, it tastes good. Cuisine and Empire by Rachel Laudan is an overview of human history by major cuisines - the kind of things people cooked and ate. It is not trying to be a history of cultures, agriculture, or nutrition, although it touches on all of these things incidentally, as well as some histories of things you might not expect, like identity and technology and philosophy. Grains (plant seeds) and roots were the staples of most cuisines. They're relatively calorically dense, storeable, and grow within a season. Remote islands really had to make do with whatever early colonists brought with them. Not only did pre-Columbian Hawaii not have metal, they didn't have clay to make pots with! They cooked stuff in pits. Running in the background throughout a lot of this is the clock of domestication - with enough time and enough breeding you can make some really naturally-digestible varieties out of something you'd initially have to process to within an inch of its life. It takes time, quantity, and ideally knowledge and the ability to experiment with different strains to get better breeds. Potatoes came out of the Andes and were eaten alongside quinoa. Early potato cuisines didn't seem to eat a lot of whole or cut-up potatoes - they processed the shit out of them, chopping, drying or freeze-drying them, soaking them, reconstituting them. They had to do a lot of these because the potatoes weren't as consumer-friendly as modern breeds - less digestible composition, more phytotoxins, etc. As cities and societies caught on, so did wealth. Wealthy people all around the world started making "high cuisines" of highly-processed, calorically dense, tasty, rare, and fancifully prepared ingredients. Meat and oil and sweeteners and spices and alcohol and sauces. Palace cooks came together and developed elaborate philosophical and nutritional theories to declare what was good to eat. Things people nigh-universally like to eat: Salt Fat Sugar Starch Sauces Finely-ground or processed things A variety of flavors, textures, options, etc Meat Drugs Alcohol Stimulants (chocolate, caffeine, tea, etc) Things they believe are healthy Things they believe are high-class Pure or uncontaminated things (both morally and from, like, lead) All people like these things, and low cuisines were not devoid of joy, but these properties showed up way more in high cuisines than low cuisines. Low cuisines tended to be a lot of grain or tubers and bits of whatever cooked or pickled vegetables or meat (often wild-caught, like fish or game) could be scrounged up. In the classic way that oppressive social structures become self-reinforcing, rich people generally thought that rich people were better-off eating this kind of diet - carefully balanced - whereas it wasn't just necessary, it was good for the poor to eat meager, boring foods. They were physically built for that. Eating a wealthy diet would harm them. In lots of early civilizations, food and sacrifice of food was an important part of religion. Gods were attracted by offered meals or meat and good smells, and blessed harvests. There were gods of bread and corn and rice. One thing I appreciate about this...

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Book review: Cuisine and Empire, published by eukaryote on January 22, 2024 on LessWrong. People began cooking our food maybe two million years ago and have not stopped since. Cooking is almost a cultural universal. Bits of raw fruit or leaves or flesh are a rare occasional treat or garnish - we prefer our meals transformed. There are other millennia-old procedures we do to make raw ingredients into cooking: separating parts, drying, soaking, slicing, grinding, freezing, fermenting. We do all of this for good reason: Cooking makes food more calorically efficient and less dangerous. Other techniques contribute to this, or help preserve food over time. Also, it tastes good. Cuisine and Empire by Rachel Laudan is an overview of human history by major cuisines - the kind of things people cooked and ate. It is not trying to be a history of cultures, agriculture, or nutrition, although it touches on all of these things incidentally, as well as some histories of things you might not expect, like identity and technology and philosophy. Grains (plant seeds) and roots were the staples of most cuisines. They're relatively calorically dense, storeable, and grow within a season. Remote islands really had to make do with whatever early colonists brought with them. Not only did pre-Columbian Hawaii not have metal, they didn't have clay to make pots with! They cooked stuff in pits. Running in the background throughout a lot of this is the clock of domestication - with enough time and enough breeding you can make some really naturally-digestible varieties out of something you'd initially have to process to within an inch of its life. It takes time, quantity, and ideally knowledge and the ability to experiment with different strains to get better breeds. Potatoes came out of the Andes and were eaten alongside quinoa. Early potato cuisines didn't seem to eat a lot of whole or cut-up potatoes - they processed the shit out of them, chopping, drying or freeze-drying them, soaking them, reconstituting them. They had to do a lot of these because the potatoes weren't as consumer-friendly as modern breeds - less digestible composition, more phytotoxins, etc. As cities and societies caught on, so did wealth. Wealthy people all around the world started making "high cuisines" of highly-processed, calorically dense, tasty, rare, and fancifully prepared ingredients. Meat and oil and sweeteners and spices and alcohol and sauces. Palace cooks came together and developed elaborate philosophical and nutritional theories to declare what was good to eat. Things people nigh-universally like to eat: Salt Fat Sugar Starch Sauces Finely-ground or processed things A variety of flavors, textures, options, etc Meat Drugs Alcohol Stimulants (chocolate, caffeine, tea, etc) Things they believe are healthy Things they believe are high-class Pure or uncontaminated things (both morally and from, like, lead) All people like these things, and low cuisines were not devoid of joy, but these properties showed up way more in high cuisines than low cuisines. Low cuisines tended to be a lot of grain or tubers and bits of whatever cooked or pickled vegetables or meat (often wild-caught, like fish or game) could be scrounged up. In the classic way that oppressive social structures become self-reinforcing, rich people generally thought that rich people were better-off eating this kind of diet - carefully balanced - whereas it wasn't just necessary, it was good for the poor to eat meager, boring foods. They were physically built for that. Eating a wealthy diet would harm them. In lots of early civilizations, food and sacrifice of food was an important part of religion. Gods were attracted by offered meals or meat and good smells, and blessed harvests. There were gods of bread and corn and rice. One thing I appreciate about this...

Everything has a history, even breakfast cereal. And that history is involved with the history of grain–which means it is involved with both the history of agriculture and urbanism; how humans mark time during the day; meal customs, which means it's also involved with the history of the family; nutrition and health, and all the ideas and fears involved with those terms, as well as the history of science and, believe it or not, the history of religion and of political progressivism;  and, since the late twentieth century, marketing and mass-culture. Breakfast cereal, it turns out, is connected to just about everything. With me to talk about her new book Breakfast Cereal: A Global History is Kathryn Cornell Dolan. She is an associate professor in the department of English and Technical Communication at Missouri University of Science and Technology. Her previous books are Beyond the Fruited Plain: Food and Agriculture in US Literature, 1850-1905 and Cattle Country: Livestock in the Cultural Imagination. For Further Investigation Previous podcasts interlink with this conversation in ways that I didn't anticipate. Rachel Laudan spoke about the history of food in Episode 44; Jonathan Rees and I discussed nutrition and diet as part of our conversation about J. Harvey Wiley in Episode 222; and John Arthur talked about the importance of beer to nutrition and culture throughout world history in Episode 253. Atlas Obscura has an article on the surviving buildings of the Battle Creek Sanitarium. They are amazingly big. If you would like to benefit from the wealth of C.W. Post, you can do so thanks to his only child, Marjorie Merriweather Post who grew the fortune even bigger. She also built amazingly big houses, including one in Florida she named Mar-a-Lago...can't think if I've ever heard of it before. Her home in Washington, DC, was Hillwood, and is now a museum now open to the public. Kathryn's book is notable for having recipes at the back. Until you buy it, you can content yourself with these porridge recipes from around the world, collected by at Saveur magazine. Who hasn't at some point really craved turkey congee? Better than a gobbler sandwich the day after Thanksgiving!

How old is fast food? And to what extent was food actually healthier in the past, before our days of factory farming and artificial preservatives? A deep dive into the pros and cons of convenience food then and now.Links:A Plea for Culinary Modernism by Rachel Laudan, 2001 Thread and replies on the article (Jason Crawford, Twitter)11/21/23 episode including a brief background on the baguette (Cool Stuff Ride Home) 01/29/21 episode on the Pompeii snack bar (Cool Stuff Ride Home)Maintenance Phase "You Just Need to Lose Weight": And 19 Other Myths about Fat People by Aubrey Gordon McDonald's Opens a Tiny Restaurant — and It's Only for Bees (OpenCulture, 2019) Jackson Bird on TwitterSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

We hear over and over that processed food is bad for us. But is there actually something funky going on here — or is it just junk food? We dig into what these foods are doing to our bodies. You'll hear from Dr. Kevin Hall, Prof. Carlos Monteiro, Dr. Cathrina Edwards, and Dr. Sheela Sathyanarayana.  Find our transcript here: https://bit.ly/3xYhHHZ  This episode was produced by Rose Rimler with help from Michelle Dang, Meryl Horn, Ekedi Fausther-Keeys, and Rasha Aridi. Our executive producer is Wendy Zukerman. We're edited by Blythe Terrell. Fact checking by Erica Akiko Howard. Mix and sound design by Bumi Hidaka. Music written by Bumi Hidaka, Peter Leonard, Emma Munger, Marcus Bagala, and Bobby Lord. Thanks to all the researchers we got in touch with for this episode, including Dr. Anthony Fardet, Dr. Bernard Srour, Prof. Jose Miguel Aguilera, Dr. Mathilde Touvier, Dr. Melissa Melough, Dr. Rachel Laudan, Prof. Niyati Parekh, and lots of others. Special thanks to Paul Adams.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For our first deep dive in our spring series we'll tackle The Nature of Technological Knowledge. Are Models of Scientific Change Relevant?,  edited by Rachel Laudan. Follow on Twitter: https://twitter.com/kendallgiles Join to support the show and for exclusive content, including episode notes, scripts, and other writings: https://patreon.com/kendallgiles 

The Cuisine and Empire author dishes on the anti-French origins of Turkey Day, why she hates "organic" food, and the genius of Julia Child.

Rachel Laudan tells the remarkable story of the rise and fall of the world's great cuisines―from the mastery of grain cooking some twenty thousand years ago, to the present―in this superbly researched book. Rachel Laudan is a food historian, an author of the prizewinning Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. Learn more: https://www.rachellaudan.com/

Beatriz Sarlo es la intelectual más influyente del país pero es, antes y después, una de las personas que más sabe sobre literatura argentina. Directora de la histórica revista Punto de vista, titular por dos décadas de la cátedra de Literatura argentina II en la carrera de Letras de la UBA, autora de decenas de libros sobre literatura, Sarlo es quien desde la academia y los libros ayudó a consolidar un canon, una serie de autores y textos privilegiados que naturalmente puede ser cuestionable pero que, en definitiva, dicta un orden de calidad con argumentos sólidos y pone de relieve los nombres de la literatura local. Autora de libros capitales de la crítica, entre ellos está Borges un escritor en las orillas, que reúne las cuatro conferencias sobre el gran autor argentino que Sarlo dictó a comienzos de los 90 en Cambridge. En Libros que sí, Hinde recomendó Wilcock”, de Adolfo Bioy Casares, con edición de Daniel Martino y “Gastronomía e imperio. La cocina en la historia del mundo” de Rachel Laudan y en El Extranjero comentó “Breve diccionario de enfermedades (y necedades) literarias” de Marco Rossari En Mesita de luz, el escritor Federico Jeanmaire contó que libros está leyendo y En Voz Alta, la actriz y escritora Manuela Martínez leyó el comienzo de “Sodio “de Jorge Consiglio.

For as much as people talk about food, a good case can be made that we don’t give it the attention or respect it actually deserves. Food is central to human life, and how we go about the process of creating and consuming it — from agriculture to distribution to cooking to dining — touches the most mundane aspects of our daily routines as well as large-scale questions of geopolitics and culture. Rachel Laudan is a historian of science whose masterful book, Cuisine and Empire, traces the development of the major world cuisines and how they intersect with politics, religion, and war. We talk about all this, and Rachel gives her pitch for granting more respect to “middling cuisine” around the world.Support Mindscape on Patreon.Rachel Laudan received a Ph. D. in History and Philosophy of Science from University College London. She retired from academia after teaching at Carnegie-Mellon, the University of Pittsburgh, Virginia Tech, and the University of Hawaii. Among her awards are the Jane Grigson/Julia Child prize of the International Association of Culinary Professionals and the IACP Cookbook Award for Best Book in Culinary History.Web siteBlogAmazon author pageWikipediaTwitter

Rachel Laudan, visiting scholar at the University of Texas and author of Cuisine and Empire, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the history of food. Topics covered include the importance of grain, the spread of various styles of cooking, why French cooking has elite status, and the reach of McDonald's. The conversation concludes with a discussion of the appeal of local food and other recent food passions. Actually released Aug 17 2015.

It’s undeniable that the way people eat has changed drastically in the last century. It took thousands of years for human societies to transition from hunter-gatherers to farmers. By contrast, it’s only been in the last hundred years or so that people have moved away from growing their own crops and raising their own livestock to getting most of their food from a restaurant or store. Food historian Rachel Laudan thinks that this recent and rapid transition is ultimately a good thing. She takes issue with the conventional wisdom that industrialized food is a blight. In her book Cuisine and Empire, she details the rise of “middling cuisine”—the food of the middle class. On this episode of UnTextbooked, producer Grace Davis interviews Rachel Laudan about how greater access to a wide variety of food is a marker of social equality.Book: Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History and “A Plea for Culinary Modernism”Guest: Dr. Rachel LaudanProducer: Grace DavisMusic: Silas Bohen and Coleman HamiltonEditors: Bethany Denton and Jeff Emtman

Understanding our current food system, where it came from and especially where it might go is much easier if one understands history. Our field needs historians, thoughtful scholars who can do deep exploration of what has preceded the snapshot in time that represents what we're experiencing today. This is why an exciting development was the recent publication of a book entitled Food Fights edited by two historians at North Carolina State University, Charles Ludington and Matthew Booker. We're joined today by both of the editors. About Charles Ludington and Matthew Booker Charles Ludington is teaching associate professor in the department of history at North Carolina State University. He has taught and written about food history including the book entitled The Politics of Wine In Britain, The New Cultural History. Matthew Booker is associate professor of environmental history at North Carolina State university. He has written about oyster growers and oyster pirates, that would be interesting to talk about. This current book explores the rise and fall of aquaculture in American industrial cities.   Interview Summary Guys, thanks very much for joining us. And let's begin with the following question. Food Fights, your book, is described as a book that looks at food and food related debates through a historical lens. What does that mean, looking at things through a historical lens? The basic idea is that we think that looking at the past of the current debates that we're having, the origins of these debates, that helps us to understand a little more why we are here in the first place. For example, why it is we have the Farm Bill. So, looking at the past and the origins of the Farm Bill helps us to, I think, take some heat off the pressure of the debate and people blaming each other for this and that and neither side seeing things in wholly black and white terms. The idea is to take a variety of debates that we think are prominent in society, today and looking at their origins in order to understand why we're here and hopefully by doing that we can move forward. Yeah, just to pile on, I think Chad has really explained the point of the thing, which is that as historians, we always feel that there are roots and often invisible roots to the questions we debate in the present. Many of our current problems today are actually the results of solutions of yesteryear. Chad mentioned the Farm Bill, the origins of food subsidies in the United States. Food subsidies today are very unpopular on the extreme right and on the left of American politics, but those subsidies exist because in the 1930s the United States faced a real crisis for agriculture for farmers. So, there are good historical reasons why we have those subsidies. They may no longer serve exactly the purposes they were originally intended for, but there are good historical reasons why they exist. So Matthew, there are a lot of things historians could choose to look at. Why have folks decided to look at food as a way of looking at the history and vice versa? We both, I think I'm speaking for Chad here, we both feel that food as something that occupies every human being on a daily level is an absolutely perfect way to get through and into the deepest questions we ask as people. In other words, food is a kind of repository for all of the hopes and dreams and fears of modern society. If you're interested in policy for example of any kind, you can find some of our most interesting policy debates in the questions we ask about what shall we eat? Who should produce it? And under what conditions? If you're interested in the role of gender and class and race as we are as historians, all of those things are inherent in the way that we produce and consume food. And then of course, our questions of the way we relate to the world around us, the environmental questions they're all caught up in our food system, which is a major contributor to climate change and is also perhaps a path to a less carbon dense future. Why did you decide to set the book up as a series of debates between leading scholars and food and agriculture? That's an excellent question. We wanted to do that because first of all, the book itself stems from a conference that we had at NC State that Matthew and I organized at NC State. And in taking all these ideas, we realized we had a number of divergent opinions and that the best way to present these might be a series of debates in which the authors actually speak to each other, hopefully thereby providing an example of civil discourse. Not that scholars generally have a problem with that, but I would say in broader society that's becoming more and more difficult. By having these debates showing that there are multiple valid sides to these arguments, that it's not necessarily black and white. In fact, it's almost never black and white, we thought this format would be both engaging for the reader and also educational in as much as people would understand that these ideas are held very passionately by historians who spend a lot of time studying these issues and that we're not going to simply solve the problem by declaring one side the Victor and the other side evil. We have to move forward with these debates. So, let's go ahead and have a book that actually sets out these debates, not necessarily attacking each other's points, but certainly pointing out strengths and weaknesses. And hopefully that way we can, over time, begin to build a consensus about how we might move forward. Can you give us some examples of some of the topics covered in the book? A woman named Margaret Mellon who is both a scientist and a lawyer by training, she writes about genetic modification or genetic engineering, as she prefers to call it, and suggests that it's not delivered on almost all the promises that it made back in the 70s and 80s when it was really emerging as a field. At the same time, she doesn't condemn it also, but says that there's a place for genetically engineered food, but it's not nearly as great as many in the food industry might claim that, nor is there an evil. We move onto, from there, Peter Coclanis, a professor at UNC, goes on to defend a big ag, as it's called, saying that big ag has done wonders for the American economy. It's a huge success story and that in the 19th century we envisioned a world in which agriculture was run as it is today. And we now produce huge amounts of food and the American family spends, broadly speaking, around 10% of their income on food, which is historically speaking a very, very low figure. And he suggests our system might not be perfect, but in many ways it's done exactly what we as a society in the 19th century and the early 20th century wanted it to do and we should be very proud of that fact, despite the imperfections. And then Steve Striffler (University of Massachussets-Boston) who says, "Well wait a minute though, all of these things overlook workers. Our food system has the biggest problem and the fact that labor is so often overlooked." So, that section on producing food really takes on some major, major arguments. Especially Steve's argument is particularly interesting in my mind because he tackles the very food movement of which the book itself was a product, but he tackled it from the left basically saying that the big problem is the capitalist system itself and the way it treats workers. And none of the attempts at organic food, the organic food movement and food co-ops and all of this, none of these things will actually address the major problems, which is the way that the workers are treated, the way the animals are treated. Because most of our food movements are all consumer-based and we need to move away from that to worker-based or producer-based food movement. So, right away we get into some very contentious debates. Choosing food, has number of articles about taste and taste and social class and nutrition and the way that nutrition changes very often. And Charlotte Biltekoff (University of California-Davis) argues there is that nutrition, in many ways, follows both the desires and the values of elites in society. And that's why it often changes. Matthew's chapter is on food safety. My wife Sarah Ludington has written on food subsidies. And then section four is gendering food, babies and baby food and also on who cooks at home. And then finally cooking and eating food. Is it important to cook? The Michael Pollan, Mark Bittman on the one side as represented by Ken Albala (University of the Pacific) in his essay. And then Rachel Laudan (University of Texas-Austin) chimes in with a response saying, "Yeah, that's a very romantic notion of the kitchen and of food and we need to move beyond that." So, Matthew, let me ask you this question. What are some of the key ideas in the book that address the issue of how we think of a healthy meal? Throughout the book there's a basic assumption and it's inherent in the title that there are reasonable and thoughtful positions on most of the major debates. We wanted to present the best arguments for, for example, cheap processed food and the best arguments against cheap processed food. We wanted those to be there so that readers whom we imagine as undergraduates, as well as the broad public, could make up their own minds and have evidence to do it. So that they're not operating from a set of opinions or just one side on the issue. To get back to your question about the home cooked meal or about what is a good meal, our final essays are this wonderful back and forth between two extremely strong voices on the topic of the home cooked meal. The first is by Ken Abala, who is a food study scholar, widely published, a really interesting thoughtful person. His is called A Plea For Culinary Luddism and so he's arguing that cooking food at home and cooking for others, in particular, gives us joy. It really is a way of connecting with other people. It's an act of love and that we should all do it as much of it as we can. And that's kind of his argument. But it's followed by Rachel Laudan, who's a quite well known food studies scholar in her own right. She's rewritten her famous essay actually in food studies. She's retitled it A Plea For Culinary Modernism, Why We Should Love Fast Modern Processed Food. And Rachel Laudan points out that it is beautiful and wonderful to cook for others, but that much of the time that cooking is done by people who are overworked, who are underpaid and who are working a second shift or sometimes a third shift. And in other words, women. And that the modern fast processed food system has given American workers and American working class people and women in particular, this enormous gift of time. Sometimes time to be with their families. So, what does a good meal turns out to be a fairly rich question and one that is not simple. It's not as simple as, we should all cook more at home. A woman named Margo Finn at Michigan argues that it's social class more than anything else that determines taste and that tastes changes over time precisely because when something becomes popular, say sushi, which might be a mark of distinction 15 years ago because it's foreign, so it gives you social cachet. You travel, as it were, when you eat sushi. There was a time when sushi was consumed largely by wealthy Americans, but that as it's become popularized, the elite move on to some other type of food in order to stay ahead of the game and she sees most of tastes as being a product of that. She also argues that taste and what we eat is something that helps to position us in society and at a time in American society when there's ever greater disparity in incomes, tastes and eating and food is something that has relatively low entry cost for consumers. So that those people with a great deal of cultural capital but not a great deal of financial capital can nevertheless place themselves fairly high up in society by eating organic foods and going to the farmer's market and doing things that give them, again, a certain cultural cache. I come along in my essay and say that class is very much a part of taste and what determines what we think is best. But it's not simply that food is gendered and so often make decisions based on how we want to define ourselves as men, as women or as non-binary. Because food itself has a gender that we give it. I talk about authenticity in the way that we often eat in order to be perceived as authentic and to think of ourselves as authentic. I write about taste for beer in America and on the one hand you have people who drink craft beer. Well, they might like craft beer, but part of it too is to say that, "I'm drinking a beer that has a history, this is the way beer used to be made. And so therefore, I myself am more authentic when I drink this craft beer." Well, of course, others come along and say, "I actually drink Bud Light because that's a real beer. It's none of this hoity-toity stuff. This is what gives me authenticity, is by drinking, Bud Light." Authenticity, gender, social class, ethnicity. All of these things come into play and help to determine what forms our taste. It's quite complex, but it's an ever moving target also because, as you know, what we're eating today probably won't be what we're eating five, 10 years from now. I'd like to end with asking you each the following question. Then Matthew, why don't we hear from you first. What were your favorite anecdotes or stories in the book or things that surprised you the most? I especially loved essays by Sarah Ludington and Peter Coclanis, but those two especially appealed to me. And in Peter's case, it's the humor that he brought with him to the topic. He's defending industrial agriculture, which is not frequently done, it isn't. And if it is done in American popular writing or in academic writing for that matter, Peter's case is very different. He's defending industrial agriculture as an economist and historian. But his larger point is that this is a field, this is an industry, our first national industry, agriculture, that has driven almost all of our other industries. That innovation, for example, much of American innovation comes out of agriculture. And so, if you look at the patent office postings filings from the 19th century, what you see is thousands and thousands of different innovations, patents for agricultural implements, but also bread slicers and apple corers. And so I think that's the anecdote that sticks with me. I'm a big fan of my wife's essay, not simply because she is my wife, but because it's a really wonderful history that hasn't been written before. It's a very straightforward history of the Farm Bill and food subsidies. And it really simplifies the story so that people can understand why the Farm Bill emerged, what it does today, and I think that that's going to be a very important essay. As Matthew pointed out earlier, both on the right and left, there's a lot of critiques of the Farm Bill and of food subsidies because, of course, the Farm Bill is not only about subsidizing farmers, roughly 80%. It's about the SNAP program, what we used to call food stamps. That essay I think is really going to be very important the way that it just takes this issue on without a political agenda and helps to explain both sides. I also really like Rachel Laudan's postscript, because the essay that she wrote for is a reprint of a very famous essay that she wrote, I think, first back in 2001. This new postscript helps to describe what she thinks are the four different ways in which people think about food. She calls one the aristocratic, was the old European way of looking at it. Then there's the Republican philosophy of food, which she says is broadly speaking, a lowercase R Republican. It is the American way of looking at food, which is food should be plentiful, that we should share it together, et cetera, et cetera. And then she goes on to talk about the romantic conception of food and the socialist conception of food. And in many ways, she's absolutely right. When we think about ourselves as individuals and how we imagine cooking and eating and producing food, we almost all fall into one of these four categories. And so it really helps us get broader picture about both the past, but also the present.

With Al Zambone this week is Rachel Laudan, author of the fascinating Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History (University of California Press, 2015). Once a historian of science and technology, living and teaching in Hawaii made her a historian of food. In her book she describes the development and decline of cuisines throughout world history over 20,000 years, and how shifts in “culinary philosophy”—how humans have thought about what they eat—led to the creation of new cuisines. It’s a rich collection of history and insights into how not only past generations but we ourselves choose to live our lives and tell our history to ourselves. Along the way she has some gentle admonitions to gluten-free advocates, paleo-dieters, Michael Pollan, and those of us who have considered having “Eat Local” tattooed on our forearms. She and Al also discuss how “normal people” might begin to not only collect their family’s recipes, but “do” food history. Al Zambone is a historian and the host of the podcast Historically Thinking. You can subscribe to Historically Thinking on Apple Podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With Al Zambone this week is Rachel Laudan, author of the fascinating Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History (University of California Press, 2015). Once a historian of science and technology, living and teaching in Hawaii made her a historian of food. In her book she describes the development and decline of cuisines throughout world history over 20,000 years, and how shifts in “culinary philosophy”—how humans have thought about what they eat—led to the creation of new cuisines. It’s a rich collection of history and insights into how not only past generations but we ourselves choose to live our lives and tell our history to ourselves. Along the way she has some gentle admonitions to gluten-free advocates, paleo-dieters, Michael Pollan, and those of us who have considered having “Eat Local” tattooed on our forearms. She and Al also discuss how “normal people” might begin to not only collect their family’s recipes, but “do” food history. Al Zambone is a historian and the host of the podcast Historically Thinking. You can subscribe to Historically Thinking on Apple Podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With Al Zambone this week is Rachel Laudan, author of the fascinating Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History (University of California Press, 2015). Once a historian of science and technology, living and teaching in Hawaii made her a historian of food. In her book she describes the development and decline of cuisines throughout world history over 20,000 years, and how shifts in “culinary philosophy”—how humans have thought about what they eat—led to the creation of new cuisines. It’s a rich collection of history and insights into how not only past generations but we ourselves choose to live our lives and tell our history to ourselves. Along the way she has some gentle admonitions to gluten-free advocates, paleo-dieters, Michael Pollan, and those of us who have considered having “Eat Local” tattooed on our forearms. She and Al also discuss how “normal people” might begin to not only collect their family’s recipes, but “do” food history. Al Zambone is a historian and the host of the podcast Historically Thinking. You can subscribe to Historically Thinking on Apple Podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With Al Zambone this week is Rachel Laudan, author of the fascinating Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History (University of California Press, 2015). Once a historian of science and technology, living and teaching in Hawaii made her a historian of food. In her book she describes the development and decline of cuisines throughout world history over 20,000 years, and how shifts in “culinary philosophy”—how humans have thought about what they eat—led to the creation of new cuisines. It’s a rich collection of history and insights into how not only past generations but we ourselves choose to live our lives and tell our history to ourselves. Along the way she has some gentle admonitions to gluten-free advocates, paleo-dieters, Michael Pollan, and those of us who have considered having “Eat Local” tattooed on our forearms. She and Al also discuss how “normal people” might begin to not only collect their family’s recipes, but “do” food history. Al Zambone is a historian and the host of the podcast Historically Thinking. You can subscribe to Historically Thinking on Apple Podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Pizza from Argentina, Asian food in Mexico, and Portugese donuts in Hawaii. This week we’re talking with food historian Rachel Laudan. Show Notes: Rachel Laudan’s website Rachel Laudan’s books Rachel’s article A Plea for Culinary Modernism Rachel’s article What’s the True History of Pizza: Consider Argentina Destination Eat Drink episode Read more... The post Destination Eat Drink – Food Historian, Rachel Laudan appeared first on Radio Misfits.

In the United States, Cinco de Mayo is an excuse for margarita-fueled partying. But in Mexico, that date—the anniversary of a military triumph over Napoleon on May 5, 1862—is marked by a parade and not much else. The real celebrations happen on September 16, which is Mexican Independence Day. At Gastropod, we’re always down to party, so here’s to Mexico’s true national holiday—and its true national dish: mole! But what is mole? Listen in this episode as we trace mole’s complicated evolution from medieval Moors to the invention of the blender, and from something that had been considered peasant food to a special occasion showstopper. Rachel Laudan is a food historian and author of Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History—but, when she started researching mole, the first document she uncovered was hardly deep in the archives. When she first visited Mexico in the 1990s, Laudan went to a restaurant famous for its mole. “And, of course, they had the statutory place mat with the story of mole poblano being invented in a convent in the eighteenth century,” she told us. According to the origin story on the place mat, some nuns, in a panic because an archbishop was visiting and they had nothing to serve him, threw a bunch of spices in a pot and somehow came up with the perfect rich, chocolate-brown sauce. “That, to me, just sounds like propaganda,” said Fernando Lopez, one of three siblings whose father founded Guelaguetza, an Angeleno restaurant that is a temple to Oaxacan mole. He believes mole is far too complex to have been created overnight. Plus, mole comes in many varieties and colors. Guelaguetza serves six kinds of mole—mole negro, mole rojo, mole coloradito, mole amarillo, mole verde, and mole estofado—but Sandra Aguilar-Rodriguez, associate professor of Latin American history at Moravian College in Pennsylvania, told us that she could name ten versions off the top of her head, and that each town in the south of Mexico will have its own variation on the classic recipes. So where does this delicious and extremely labor-intensive sauce come from? This episode, with the help of chef Iliana de la Vega, Rachel Laudan, Sandra Aguilar-Rodriguez, and the Lopez siblings, we trace the varied elements that make up mole: the indigenous tradition of hand-ground sauces, the Old World ingredients and Baroque aesthetic, the surprising Islamic influence, and, yes, the nuns. And we tell the story of how mole was elevated from its humble, southern origins to become a sophisticated sauce that doubles as Mexico’s national dish. Plus, we’ve got the expert verdict on jarred mole pastes, for those of you who can’t face spending two to three days roasting and grinding nuts, chiles, and spices. Listen in now for a deep dive—literally, someone falls into a bucket of the stuff—into the mysteries of mole.Episode NotesGuelaguetza Guelaguetza’s website is ilovemole.com, and the restaurant in LA’s Koreatown is known for its delicious mole, as well as other Oaxacan specialties. We spoke to three of the four Lopez siblings—Bricia, Paulina, and Fernando Jr.—who run it today. You can buy mole paste from their online store (they have three varieties: rojo, negro, and coloradito) and order their new cookbook here.Iliana de la Vega and El Naranjo Chef Iliana de la Vega grew up in Mexico City, but her mother was from Oaxaca, and when she opened her first restaurant, El Naranjo, it was in Oaxaca. So many people asked for her mole recipe that she ended up opening a cooking school there, too. In 2006, she moved to Austin, Texas, and re-opened El Naranjo there; this year, she was a semi-finalist in the James Beard Awards for best chef in the Southwest.Rachel Laudan Rachel Laudan is a food historian whose most recent book, Cuisine and Empire, won Best Book in Culinary History from the International Association of Culinary Professionals Award in 2014. Her blog is required reading.Sandra Aguilar-Rodriguez Sandra Aguilar-Rodriguez is assistant professor of history at Moravian College, and author of the recent article, “Mole and mestizaje: race and national identity in twentieth-century Mexico.” The post Celebrate Mexico’s True National Holiday with the Mysteries of Mole appeared first on Gastropod.

Is Slow Food and organic produce an elitist form of status signalling? What's so good about McDonalds?! And why do we need food waste?Food historian Rachel Laudan joins Adam Grubb and Sarah Coles to talk reasons why she thinks many in the ethical and sustainable food movements could use a little historical perspective, and it's a fascinating and provocative discussion. See her critique of the Slow Food movement, and her award winning book 2013's Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History for further reading.

The Los Angeles Times wrote: “It seems like every time you hear someone mention processed food, it’s accompanied with the words ‘bad’ or ‘unhealthy,’ plus a shaking finger. Unless you’re author Rachel Laudan.” As a historian, Rachel has concluded that never have such a large proportion of humans enjoyed such healthful and tasty food, a case she makes in A Plea for Culinary Modernism: Why We Should Love Fast, New, Processed Food (2001). Her most recent book, Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History won the 2014 IACP Best Book in Culinary History award. Rachel Laudan is currently a Senior Research Fellow at University of Texas Austin, and is working on a new book about the use of the grind-stone. Powered by Simplecast https://simplecast.com/podcasts [1]https://www.rachellaudan.com/ [2]https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0520286316/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0

Rachel Laudan is a food historian and award-winning author of Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History, a book about the rise and fall of various culinary traditions and philosophies. She has over twenty years of dedicated research to the evolution of our food systems. She’s also an engaging speaker who helps industry professionals, students and professors, and public groups see food from a long-term and global perspective. Today, Rachel joins me to share a brief overview of what food history is all about. She shares her thoughts on various food movements and diets, how traditional foods came to be considered traditional, and why people today have better food than most kings and queens in the past. She also explains the importance of separating processed food from what is “bad food” and what she believes we should consider to be “good food.”   “One should tell food history as a series of expansions, migrations, cuisines, or systems of eating.” - Rachel Laudan       This Week on The Future of Agriculture Podcast:    What encouraged her interest in agriculture and food history? Foods we think are traditional, but really not. Is there truth to having better sustainability in the pre-processed food era? Her thoughts on how to feed the exploding human population. Why she thinks corn is an amazing crop. Her perspective on the "Natural Food" trend. What counts as a "good" food? What is "Culinary Modernism"?   Rachel Laudan’s Words of Wisdom: We should realize how great modern food is. Average-earning populations can eat better than most kings or royalty in the past. Almost everything we eat has been transformed from its natural state. If we eat nothing but raw food, the human race will find survival difficult.   Connect with Rachel Laudan:   Rachel Laudan official website Twitter Cuisine and Empire The Food Paradise Check Out Our Sponsor for the “Sustainability at Scale” Series   Have you ever heard of Marrone’s BIO WITH BITE? Marrone Bio Innovation offers crop pest protection for the modern organic and conventional production systems. To make sure every grower using their products realize the best possible return on investment, Marrone invests time and resources to thoroughly test and demonstrate the efficacy of those new state of the art products. With serious trial data to back it up! You can see more and connect directly with Marrone by visiting them at www.marronebio.com Marrone is very proud to support The Future Of Agriculture blog series on sustainability in agriculture with Tim Hammerich.   We Are a Part of a Bigger Family!    The Future of Agriculture Podcast is now part of the Farm and Rural Ag Network. Listen to more ag-related podcasts by subscribing on iTunes or on the Farm and Rural Ag Network Website today.      Share the Ag-Love!    Thanks for joining us on the Future of Agriculture Podcast – your spot for valuable information, content, and interviews with industry leaders throughout the agricultural space! If you enjoyed this week’s episode, please subscribe on iTunes and leave your honest feedback. Don’t forget to share it with your friends on your favorite social media spots!    Learn more about AgGrad by visiting:  Future of Agriculture Website AgGrad Website AgGrad on Twitter  AgGrad on Facebook  AgGrad on LinkedIn  AgGrad on Instagram   

Rachel Laudan on the rise and fall of white bread

Historian Rachel Laudan talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about food waste. Laudan argues that there are tradeoffs in preventing food waste--in reduced time for example, or a reduction in food security, and that these tradeoffs need to be measured carefully when considering policy or giving advice to individuals or organizations. She also discusses the role of food taboos and moralizing about food. Along the way, Laudan defends the virtue of individual choice and freedom in deciding what to eat.

Historian Rachel Laudan talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about food waste. Laudan argues that there are tradeoffs in preventing food waste--in reduced time for example, or a reduction in food security, and that these tradeoffs need to be measured carefully when considering policy or giving advice to individuals or organizations. She also discusses the role of food taboos and moralizing about food. Along the way, Laudan defends the virtue of individual choice and freedom in deciding what to eat.

My guest for this episode is Noel Johnson of George Mason University, and if that name sounds familiar, it's because he was the coauthor on the paper I discussed with Mark Koyama last month. Noel recently released a working paper titled "The Effects of Land Redistribution: Evidence from the French Revolution." It is coauthored with Theresa Finley and Raphael Franck. The paper examines the consequences of the land auctions held by the Revolutionary government in France. The abstract reads as follows: This study exploits the confiscation and auctioning off of Church property that occurred during the French Revolution to assess the role played by transaction costs in delaying the reallocation of property rights in the aftermath of fundamental institutional reform. French districts with a greater proportion of land redistributed during the Revolution experienced higher levels of agricultural productivity in 1841 and 1852 as well as more investment in irrigation and more efficient land use. We trace these increases in productivity to an increase in land inequality associated with the Revolutionary auction process. We also show how the benefits associated with the head-start given to districts with more Church land initially, and thus greater land redistribution by auction during the Revolution, dissipated over the course of the nineteenth century as other districts gradually overcame the transaction costs associated with reallocating the property rights associated with the feudal system. What's so interesting about this particular instance of land redistribution is the fact that it was all sold to the highest bidder rather than being given to the poor. This breaks with the pattern of most attempts at land reform throughout history. People have been trying to take land away from the rich and give it to the poor since at least Tiberius Gracchus in the second century BCE. But the Revolutionary government needed money and they needed it fast. So they concocted a plan to seize and auction off all French lands owned by the Catholic Church, which comprised about 6.5 percent of the country. Land auctions take time though, and the government desperately needed funds in the short term, so they issued a monetary instrument known as the assignat that could be used in these land auctions. The land was eventually auctioned off and then traded in secondary markets, where much of it was consolidated into large estates that could employ capital-intensive agricultural practices on a large scale. The evidence suggests that these land auctions added to the productivity of the regions where they occurred. Noel argues that this occurred because the reduction in transaction costs allowed for a more efficient allocation of property rights. One could argue, however, that the Church might have simply owned more productive land to begin with, and the paper uses a series of identification strategies to show that this is not the main driver of their results. Related Links: McCloskey (1998) on the Coase theorem. Galor and Moav (2004) on the relationship between inequality and productivity in economies dependent on physical capital vs human capital. Gallica, the website where you can download a ton of digitized French archives. Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson (2005) on Atlantic trade. Rachel Laudan discusses the history of potatoes and other foods on EconTalk. Photo credit: Early French banknote issue during the French Revolution (Assignat) for 400 livres, (1792), from the National Numismatic Collection at the Smithsonian Institution.  

A few years ago, scholars suggested that the Agricultural Revolution in mankind's deep past might have been nothing short of a disaster. Not so fast, says Rachel Laudan, this week's guest, while raising some new questions of her own.

Thousands of years before recorded human history, anthropologists have traced the evolution of human society from a nomadic hunter-gatherer phase to the rise of agricultural practices, which allowed people to stay settled in one place, form complex societies, and ultimately early civilizations. This transition, it is said, was so momentous that it has become known as the Agricultural Revolution. A few decades ago, however, a scholar posited that humans lost leisure time in the process, becoming virtual slaves to their new agricultural lifestyles that required hours of maintenance daily. This counterargument declared that the Agricultural Revolution was nothing less than the greatest disaster to ever befall mankind. Not so fast, says our guest this week. Thousands of years before recorded human history, anthropologists have traced the evolution of human society from a nomadic hunter-gatherer phase to the rise of agricultural practices, which allowed people to stay settled in one place, form complex societies, and ultimately early civilizations. This transition, it is said, was so momentous that it has become known as the Agricultural Revolution. A few decades ago, however, a scholar posited that humans lost leisure time in the process, becoming virtual slaves to their new agricultural lifestyles that required hours of maintenance daily. This counterargument declared that the Agricultural Revolution was nothing less than the greatest disaster to ever befall mankind. Not so fast, says our guest this week. Rachel Laudan, a renowned food historian and author of Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History, argues that this thesis, which has found a champion in Jared Diamond’s best-selling Guns, Germs & Steel, fails to take food preparation into account. Our interview offers a different perspective and raises some new questions about the social impact of the beginnings of agriculture.

Food that has been processed, packaged, flavoured and often pre-cooked for us has increasingly become a normal part of everyday life around the globe. But what is the rise and rise of convenience food really doing to us? Many argue it is the root cause of spiralling obesity and diabetes rates, but could we survive without it and feed the world in the process? Manuela Saragosa chews over the issues with a global panel of experts: Award-winning investigative journalist Joanna Blythman, author of Swallow This: Serving Up the Food Industry's Darkest Secrets; Jean-Claude Moubarac, an anthropologist and researcher in nutrition specialising in the effect of processed foods; Food journalist Mark Schatzker, author of The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor. Plus, we travel to China to look at the cultural impact of ‘western’ food. And, historian Rachel Laudan tells us why processed food is at the very heart of what makes us human. (Photo: Supermarket aisles. Credit: Thinkstock)

It's the New Year, and Historically Thinking is back from an extended Christmas-New Year's Break. With Al Zambone this week is Rachel Laudan, author of the fascinating Cuisine and Empire. Once a historian of science and technology, living and teaching in Hawaii made her a historian of food. In her book she describes the development and decline of cuisines throughout world history over 20,000 years, and how shifts in “culinary philosophy”—how humans have thought about what they eat—led to the creation of new cuisines. It's a rich collection of history and insights into how not only past generations but we ourselves choose to live our lives and tell our history to ourselves. Along the way she has some gentle admonitions to gluten-free advocates, paleo-dieters, Michael Pollan, and those of us who have considered having "Eat Local" tattooed on our forearms. She and Al also discuss how "normal people" might begin to not only collect their family's recipes, but "do" food history. Guten apetit! For Further Reading Rachel Laudan, Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History Her eponymous website: see particularly "Getting Started in Food History" Further books and articles by Rachel

On this episode we discuss using the past to understand the present. How can we make eating part of a well-lived life, a daily pleasure that neither scares us nor takes an inordinate amount of time and money.  And of course how to extend that to the whole world.  Today’s guest is Rachel Laudan, author of the prize-winning global food history, Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. For many years she was a history professor in various American research universities, specializing in history of science and technology. She has been interested in food all her life from an upbringing on a dairy and wheat farm in England to cooking and dining on five different continents. For more information and show notes visit www.SoundBitesRD.com/blog  

Rachel Laudan, visiting scholar at the University of Texas and author of Cuisine and Empire, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the history of food. Topics covered include the importance of grain, the spread of various styles of cooking, why French cooking has elite status, and the reach of McDonald's. The conversation concludes with a discussion of the appeal of local food and other recent food passions.

Randall’s Island is a small piece of land just east of 125th Street in New York’s East River. It is also around 2 degrees further south than the northern limit of rice growing on Hokkaido in Japan. What could be more natural, then, than for a community farm on Randall’s Island to have a go at growing rice, a staple that the kids who come to the farm enjoy, but one that they’ve never seen growing? The assistant horticulture manager scored some rice seeds and with advice from her grandmother in Korea set to. They built a miniature paddy, like a flooded raised bed, and managed to harvest about six kilograms of rice. And that’s when their trouble began. Rice is darn difficult to hull and clean. A piece by Rachel Laudan tipped me off to the Randall’s Island rice, and I was excited to discover that the person who origially wrote the story for The New Yorker was Nicola Twilley, a writer whose Edible Geography (and other projects) I have long admired. Luckily for me, she was happy to talk. What intrigued me about the story of hulling rice in the northeastern US, was how it resonated with the plight of subsistence farmers in India, Bolivia and elsewhere. The women in many communities spend hours a day of hard and often dangerous work to prepare the seeds they have grown and harvested. I can’t blame them if they would just as soon sell their back-breaking crop and buy prepared convenience foods, and hang the nutritional consequences. I’ve seen for myself how electrical mini-mills remove this drudgery for women in the Kolli Hills of India, and in so doing boost the consumption of nutritious millets. The same sort of approach, an inexpensive, locally-built machine, has made processing quinoa much easier for farmers on the Altiplano of Bolivia. There’s something fitting about New York rice being treated in a similar way. Notes Edible Geography, Nicola Twilley’s website, is endlessly interesting and entertaining. If you’re into podcasts, don’t miss the great show Roman Mars and 99pi did based on her research into cow tunnels. Rachel Laudan has made something of a specialty of pointing out that growing cereals is the easy part; preparing them for food is what takes hard work and ingenuity. Ecological Rice Farming in the Northeastern USA is not nearly as silly as it may first seem. And for all the details of Don Brill’s rice hullers, you need to head over to Brill Engineering, which sounds a lot grander than an inveterate tinkerer with a basement full of bits and pieces. Daniel Felder, head of research at Momofuku, takes research into fermentation and terroir very seriously. Nicola has written about that too. Photo of Don Brill and a volunteer rice peddler by Nicola Twilley, as are all the others. Thanks.

About a month ago I got wind of a conference called Food for Thought: Culture and Cuisine in Russia & Eastern Europe, 1800-present, at the University of Texas at Austin. In some dream world, I would have booked a flight there and then, packed my audio gear, and plunged in. Next best thing, thanks to the kind offices of Rachel Laudan, was to talk to Mary C. Neuburger, the conference organiser. It isn’t clear whether the symposium will give rise to a publication. I hope so. And if, by chance, any of the authors have made versions of their talks available, I would be delighted to link to them here. Just let me know. Other sources include The Austin Chronicle, which took the opportunity to visit and review a local Russian restaurant. And Mary Neuburger also mentioned Anya von Bremzen’s memoir Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing. That, I hope, is another story for another time, preferably not in a dream world. Looking through the conference programme, I had singled out a few papers that I thought might be of interest, and Mary was kind enough to deal with almost all of them, and more besides. Specifics: Bella Bychkova-Jordan, University of Texas “Traveling Foods: Diffusion of Native Food Complexes from the New World to Different Parts of Eurasia.” Michael Pesenson, University of Texas “Feasting and Fasting in Muscovite Rus.” Irina Glouchshenko, Moscow School of Higher Economics “Industrialization of Taste: Anastas Mikoyan and the Making of Soviet Cuisine in the 1930s.” Brian Davies and Kolleen Guy, University of Texas San Antonio “Why Don’t We Drink Russian Malbec: The Crimean Origins of a ‘French’ Varietal?” Nikolai Burlakoff, Independent Scholar "Borsch (Borscht, Bortsch, Borschch): From Hogweed Soup to Outer Space, the Improbable Odyssey of the World’s Best Known Soup Dish.” Mary Neuburger, University of Texas “Cooking for Bai Tosho: A Bulgarian Celebrity Chef Serves up the Past.” Engage

Rachel Laudan is taking a culinary approach to world history in her book, Cuisine & Emire! This week on A Taste of the Past, Linda Pelaccio talks with Rachel about the influences of medicine, politics, and religion on cuisine throughout the ages. Learn about humorism, and how this system of belief affected the food that ancient people ate. Find out what agricultural products different religious groups relied on across Eurasia. Why are most cuisines based in grain? Tune in to learn about the New World exploration, and how that inequitable culinary exchange altered the food ways of continents. Where does the United States fit into the culinary landscape? Find out all of this and more on this week’s edition of A Taste of the Past. This program has been sponsored by Heritage Foods USA. Music by SNOWMINE. “We now expect only one cuisine to every nation. All you have to do is look at the cookbook section in the bookstore to get this idea.” [4:45] “Everybody now can eat the same kinds of cuisine. In the past, there was a huge distinction between high and humble cuisines.” [15:10] — Rachel Laudan on A Taste of the Past

Not all progress is bad. Rachel Laudan makes a powerful case that modern methods of making sugar and salt are far superior.