CAPITALISM, COLONIALISM, AND CUISINE

A MOVABLE FEAST
This book, based largely on 'The Cambridge World History of Food', provides a look at the globalization of food from the days of the hunter-gatherers to present-day genetically modified plants and animals. The establishment of agriculture and the domestication of animals in Eurasia, Africa, the Pacific, and the Americas are all treated in some detail along with the subsequent diffusion of farming cultures through the activities of monks, missionaries, migrants, imperialists, explorers, traders, and raiders.
Much attention is given to the “Columbian Exchange” of plants and animals that brought revolutionary demographic change to every corner of the planet and led ultimately to the European occupation of Australia and New Zealand as well as the rest of Oceania.
Final chapters deal with the impact of industrialization on food production, processing, and distribution, and modern-day food-related problems ranging from famine to obesity to genetically modified food to fast food.

"In short, Europe’s colonization of Africa had nothing to do with differences between European and African peoples as white racists assume. Rather, it was due to accidents of geography and biogeography – in particular, to the continent’s different areas, axes, and suites of wild plant and animal species. That is, the different historical trajectories of Africa and Europe stem ultimately from differences in real estate".                           Jared Diamond (1997)

Arguably, the United States and Europe benefited more than most of the world’s regions from the quickened tempo of food globalization that followed the Columbian Exchange because, by increasing food supplies, it fueled their respective Industrial Revolutions. This synergism was first seen in Great Britain, where the calories in sugar and potatoes from the New World stoked labor.  In the towns and cities where that labor was readily available, and where even more labor could be accommodated, industries began to arise. Cities and towns, of course, agriculture, too, had to be industrialized, which, in turn, meant even more migration to the cities because far fewer hands were needed in the fields.
Food production also became mechanized, its transportation and distribution organized, and its processing, capitalized. Railroads, steamships, and developments in canning, freezing, and chilling foods made their shipment possible over long distances. It was nothing short of a revolution in transportation and technology – a revolution in which food production, although of paramount importance for practically all of humankind’s stay on the planet, came to be taken for granted in the industrialized countries practically overnight. Food processing and marketing, not production,lunged to the forefront of the food industry.

Industrialization, coupled with nationalism, also changed approaches to food and its consumption. In the Middle Ages there were no national cuisines but, then again, there was no nationalism either. As nations emerged, however, peoples and governments went to great lengths to set themselves apart, and although Europeans all had access to the same ingredients, their manner of preparing them became distinguishing features as “national” dishes emerged. The English boasted that roast beef and beer – plain food but good – was central to their being: “For your Beef-eating, Beer drinking Britons are souls, Who will shed their last drop for their country and king.” By contrast their French neighbors ate decadent foods dressed up with poisons so that one never knew what they were eating. The French counter attacked with the claim that beef was a common food whose fat was crippling. They also countered with another means of distinction involving a philosophy of food consumption.
The 'grande cuisine' of nineteenth-century French restaurants, for example, emphasized the pleasures of eating and drinking. For the diners the grande cuisine also symbolized the cultural superiority of France over its more puritanical neighbors, who found less joy at the table. The neighbors, however, were not impressed, and called the French “frogs” because of their partiality to frog legs; whereas the Germans became “krauts,” and the English “limeys.” One was, in a very nationalistic way, what one ate. Moving back to the nationalism-free Middle Ages, there were also no food fads then, save among small elites. Peasants engaged in subsistence agriculture were a conservative lot with neither the means nor the inclination to experiment with fashion, and the fashion for all classes was Roman, at least in principal, with grain on the menu but not much meat.
New foods for the wealthy were spread about gradually; the use of butter radiated out raised little food so that workers had to be fed from rural areas – the food reaching urban centers via an increasingly complex network of railroads. As this occurred, more and more rural individuals were attracted to city life and factory wages, draining the countryside of manpower. Consequently from Germany, saffron from Spain, and dried fruits from southern Europe. But this relatively static situation changed with industrialization. Far fewer people were tied to the land, and food-marketing techniques were brought to bear on workers with wages. Demand was created for countless new products – especially those made from sugar and products that came in cans and bottle's – beginning the food crazes we still live with. Yet, if industrialization meant a better life for the fortunate, it managed to add to the ranks of the poor.
During the second half of the eighteenth century, English population growth outdistanced grain production creating, among other things, a homeless class that down to the middle of the nineteenth century comprised between 10 and 20 percent of the population. Prices for wheat and other staples skyrocketed, reducing the quantities of bread, cheese, and even turnips that could be afforded and putting meat out of reach for those not among the ranks of the fortunate. For those that were, such as the eighteenth century canon of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, it was an entirely different world. At age 77, he calculated that over the course of his lifetime he had consumed 44 wagonloads of meat and drink that could have saved 100 people from starving to death. Life got no better for the poor during the nineteenth century when industrialization quadrupled the population of London, among other cities, and bread, potatoes, and tea constituted the bulk of the diet, with perhaps the addition of a little milk and sugar once a week and a piece of bacon once a year. And average height fell precipitously during most of the century – especially for the poor – only taking a pronounced upward turn following the beginning of the twentieth century. Thus, at the close of the Napoleonic Wars, the average male worker in Britain was some five inches shorter than his upper class counterpart, close to half the children born in towns died before they were five years old, and those who did not were likely to be badly undernourished, stunted, and deformed by rickets.

In light of this it does not seem surprising that during recruitment for the Boer War (1899–1902) fully 37 percent of the volunteers were pronounced unfit for military duty.This scandal touched off a debate, in Parliament which revealed that in 1883 the minimum height for recruits had been lowered from 5 feet  inches to 5 feet 3 inches and then again, in 1902, to just five feet.
As the middle of the nineteenth century drew near, Irish peasants, despite, or perhaps because of, having dined almost exclusively on potatoes for a century and a half, were considerably sturdier than their English counterparts. Average potato yields were six tons per acre, as opposed to less than one ton for grains, and the “conacre” system gave peasants small plots of land to grow them on in return for agricultural labor to British (and Irish) landlords. Dreary though their meals may have been, the Irish prospered demographically, their population almost doubling between 1800 and 1845 (increasing from 4.5 million to 8 million people), thanks to this New World crop. Not only were the Irish healthy, their potatoes permitted them to marry early because of food security, and younger mothers could more easily nurse their newborn through an always precarious infancy into childhood.
Perhaps the landlords took Irish robustness as a signal that they could be squeezed even more. Conacres shrank as land planted in grains increased, impelling many peasants to seasonally migrate to Scotland for the harvest, their absence reducing potato consumption in Ireland while simultaneously generating money to purchase food.
It was not that an Irish vulnerability to famine was unappreciated. The potato crop had failed in 1816, causing much hunger, and again in 1821, this time leaving perhaps 50,000 dead. The crop failed again in 1831, 1835, and 1836, but not yet from the fungal disease Phytophthora infestans that brought on the great famine that began in 1845. It started in the Low Countries – the fungus apparently arriving with New World potato varieties imported, ironically, to heighten potato disease resistance – then spread to England and Ireland. Called “late blight,” the disease caused apparently healthy-looking potatoes to suddenly rot, turning into a black mush, and in 1845 Ireland lost 40 percent of its crop. But the worst was yet to come. Infected potatoes had been left in the fields and the spores of P. infestans saw to it that scarcely 10 percent of the 1846 potato crop could be salvaged.
At first the British government turned a blind eye to the Irish plight, and exports to England of grain, meat, vegetables, and dairy products continued from that ravaged land, the conservatives in Parliament arguing that the famine was an act of God, and Irish relief – giving them food – would not only go against God’s will but would also paralyze trade. Yet, when America sent relief ships, international embarrassment gave free-traders their chance to get the Corn Laws repealed, which had restricted grain imports from other countries to keep prices high, a repeal that did nothing to help out the Irish. Rather it eliminated Ireland’s favored status as an exporter to the British market, prompting landlords to switch from growing wheat to raising cattle, an enterprise in which peasant labor was no longer needed.
Eviction from their lands, hunger, and illnesses through 1848 caused the death or migration of between one and a half and two million people – a loss from which Ireland, with today’s population less than half of that of 1841, has clearly never recovered. England’s repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 signaled the triumph of the industrialists and free trade over landed and agricultural interests, which meant that much of the food to feed industrial workers now had to be imported. Australia and New Zealand sent meat and butter, and the economies of countries like Ireland and Denmark were geared to an English demand for bacon and dairy products. Fortunately, the nineteenth century witnessed ever greater speed in ocean crossings and, consequently, lower transportation costs that fostered trade expansion and market integration, and brought on a spurt in food globalization. Much of the latter was connected to colonial economies and not just to that of Ireland.
Tea, coffee, and sugar were products that reached European countries directly from those colonies, and brightened the life of even the poor. After all, a cup of hot and sweetened tea could make a cold meal seem like a hot one,  ad sweetened foods, like preserves that required no refrigeration because sugar is a preservative, became the nineteenth-century convenience foods for the harried families of factory workers. Meats (lamb, mutton, beef ), dairy products, and, later, tropical fruits flowed into the British market from Australia and New Zealand after 1870, and especially after 1882, with the beginning of refrigerated shipping, while wheat reached England from its ex-colony, North America.

Iberian imperialism may have opened both Old and New Worlds to an avalanche of new foods, but other imperial powers were not far behind in moving foods around the globe. Illustrative is a rice dish on the streets of Cairo called kushuri made with lentils, onions, and spices – a favorite that the locals believe to be their own. Yet, it originated in India as kitchri and was brought to British-dominated Egypt by British forces from British India. In England, a similar dish called kedgeree had accompanied returnees from India with appetites for curries, mulligatawny (a soup made with meat, dal, chapattis), and chutney. This, in turn, not only created a British demand for turmeric, curry powders, and gooseberry chutney to substitute for the mango chutneys of India, but made Indian restaurants ubiquitous.
Similarly a taste for the myriad spicy dishes of a rijistafel (rice table) and other Indonesian specialties such as nasi from the Dutch East Indian colonies became epidemic in the Netherlands, and Indonesian restaurants Coffee’s fortunes followed a similar, if less erratic, course. In the nineteenth century, upwards of 95 percent of the world’s coffee was produced in Latin America. But during the twentieth century, colonial regimes in Africa brought coffee and its production back to its home continent in places as diverse as Ethiopia, Kenya, Angola, and Uganda. Today, in the aftermath of colonialism, Ethiopia and Uganda continue among Africa’s chief producers and have been joined by the Ivory Coast. The temperance movement in England ushered in an era of record tea consumption. Millions became “tee-totalers” and tea rolled into the British Islands from British India and as well as from China – reduced in like Yemen – provide an excuse for enjoying the drug with friends in a relaxed atmosphere.

Kola

Kola (genus Cola) is the best known and most widely traveled of these relatively obscure beverage ingredients that became nineteenth century curiosities in the larger world. A native of West African forests, the kola nut (about the size of a walnut), like khat, is a stimulant and a masticatory. It delivers both theobromine and caffeine to stimulate the nervous system for which it has been prized for millennia. Kola nuts – along with gold and salt – were the most valuable long-distance trade commodities in the Volta basin of West Africa, and the nuts had spread all the way to East Africa by the time the Portuguese showed up to spearhead European colonialism.
Kola nuts impart a pleasant taste to food and water, which contributed to their medicinal reputation – a reputation that that was known in the seventeenth-century Caribbean where a Jamaican planter began growing them to perk up despondent slaves. Later, the French transplanted kola from Africa to their islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe, and the British introduced seedlings to the East Indies. During the last half of the nineteenth century, kola nuts enjoyed a brisk demand in Great Britain, France, and the United States for use in pharmaceuticals and as a flavoring for cola-based soft drinks.
Another use of kola nuts stemmed from the belief that they imparted courage to their consumers. As a result they were traditionally distributed on African battle fields. This might be written off as superstition yet, it is interesting to note that in 1890, the German War Office ordered thirty tons of the nuts after conducting experiments on their courage-inducing effects.
Tropical crops, especially bananas, also flowed out of the British, French, and U.S. Caribbean, and in the case of the United States, fruit companies were engaged simultaneously in teaching people to eat lots of bananas and people of the Caribbean basin to grow them. They succeeded in both enterprises. By the 1920s, bananas were commonplace in the dinner pails of laborers and the lunch boxes of school children, while the United Fruit Company, which had begun operations in Costa Rica in 1874, had become an empire directing the affairs of numerous Caribbean basin nations.
The machinery of the nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution was also greased by colonial enterprise. Harnessing the energy in water and fossil fuels, then using it to power the motors that drove vehicles and factories, required lubrication – and more of it than was available in Europe. People the second-half of the nineteenth century to near colonial status. Other beverages, or least their ingredients, also moved about in the nineteenth century colonial world.

Kava (genus Piper) has been cultivated in the South Pacific for close to 3,000 years for the narcotic properties of its roots. These are turned first into a pulp and then a soporific drink long employed in rituals but also put to a secular, recreational use. In the nineteenth century kava became a cash crop to meet a pharmaceutical demand in Germany and France, and this market remains. In addition, there was an attempt to make a kava-based soft drink in Germany.
Khat ( Catha edulis) is another plant with narcotic properties – although the origins of this one lie on the other side of the globe from kava – probably in the Ethiopian highlands. It is used by many in the Horn of Africa and southwestern Arabia. A beverage is sometimes made from khat leaves (and “bush tea” still is) but more often in the past than today; now the leaves are mostly chewed. Khat shares a geographic cradle with coffee and, like coffee, helps to promote wakefulness – important for Muslims who pray for long hours – especially during Ramadan.

But the drug was equally popular with Yemenite Jews who started migrating to Ottoman-ruled Palestine in the nineteenth century. By the time Israel was established in 1948, about one-third of Yemen’s Jews had migrated and most of the rest subsequently followed. Not surprisingly then, khat production and consumption is legal in Israel even though it is a scheduled drug on the United Nation’s 1971 Convention’s List of Psychotropic Substances and, consequently, at least theoretically, illegal in nearly 140 countries. Most of these countries, however, particularly those with large numbers of North African immigrants, are not rigorous in enforcing the ban. Khat parties – social events in countries cooked with oils, to be sure – even used them for cosmetic purposes – but olive oil, animal fats, walnut oil, even linseed oil and fish oil were regarded as precious commodities.
In the eighteenth century, just a little fat or butter for bread could be a “cherished luxury” and in the nineteenth century all of these fats and oils combined could not meet the many lubrication demands of steam-powered engines, let alone cooking and soap-making needs. The Europeans were once again forced to look to their colonies – this time for the tropical oils that they could produce in abundance. Coconut oil was one of these.
It flowed into Europe from India, but sailing schooners and, a bit later, tramp steamers also fetched copra (dried or smoked coconut meat) from the Pacific to be pressed in European refineries for still more oil. From the 1840s on, coconuts were grown as a plantation crop in the colonies. This coconut commercialization was spurred along by the discovery that coconuts could be utilized in dynamite production. The early nineteenth century also witnessed a brisk traffic in palm oil from Africa. Around mid-century, however, West African seedlings were transplanted to Southeast Asia.
This had no immediate effect on palm oil production, but in the early twentieth century the oil palm industry in Sumatra and Malaya caught fire. This was about the same time that oil palms were introduced to Guatemala, Panama, and Honduras by the United Fruit company although, again, there was a lag and commercial planting did not begin until 1940.
The palm oil kernels shipped to Europe were originally pressed for candle-making and, of course, as a lubricant for machinery. But after the invention of beef-fat margarine in 1869, it was only a matter of time before European beef fats would become insufficient for the spread’s manufacture and, in 1907, palm oil was put to work by margarine makers.
Oils were hydrogenated for the first time in that same decade so that palm oil also became a foundation for shortenings. A dividend of no small consequence was that coconut and palm kernel processing also yielded a high quality feed-cake for livestock. Coconut and palm oils dominated the oil market for much of the twentieth century, but other oils arrived from colonies as well. By the mid nineteenth century, Senegal was producing peanut oil for the French market, and, after the Suez Canal was opened in 1869, peanut oil reached Europe from India. Its pleasant nutty flavor earned it a place in European kitchens, an acceptance facilitated by the inability of Europe to satisfy its demand for olive oil.
Most peanut oil, however, was transformed into margarine and shortening, and its cake too fed livestock. Moreover at the turn of the twentieth century, George Washington Carver at the Tuskegee Institute in the United States was showing the world some 300 uses for peanuts and their by-products, including that of fashioning peanut butter.Unlike peanut oil, which comes from an American plant, sesame oil was derived from a plant native to India, where it was (and is) extensively employed for cooking in the south. Not that sesame was a total stranger in the New World.

Sesame

Its cultivation had spread from India to Africa, and from there sesame seeds crossed the Atlantic with the slave trade to North America, where the British encouraged sesame cultivation in what was still their American colonies. They cherished the mercantilistic hope that sesame might replace the olive oil they were reluctantly importing from European rivals. All of these oils joined to bring about a food processing revolution in the midst of the Industrial Revolution.
Until the nineteenth century, people obtained their dietary fats from local sources and, as late as 1899, animal fats still accounted for 70 percent of the fats utilized in Europe. But by 1928 that percentage had fallen to just 6 percent and it continued to fall even though the dominance of tropical oils diminished as the Europeans lost their colonies and as the colonies, having lost their monopolies on oil shipments to their ex-mother countries, were forced to compete on the basis of price.
The European Common Market tried to help by eliminating all duties on oils, but this only served to open the floodgates to American soybeans.Soybeans were fairly late arrivals in America and only recently the focus of much agricultural attention. During the latter part of the nineteenth century, high oil prices had encouraged the extraction of oil from cottonseeds in the southern United States, which became Wesson Oil after chemist David Wesson, at the turn of the twentieth century, found a way to deodorize it. Following this, cottonseed oil became dominant in the world’s vegetable oil market until the 1940s.
By contrast, soybeans, although grown in the United States since the eighteenth century, were little more than agricultural curiosities as the twentieth century began. This began to change in 1915, when the nation’s cotton fields became infested with boll weevils, and a shortage of cotton seeds in tandem with elevated oil prices caused by World War I prompted a new look at the virtues of soybean oil.
Throughout the Great Depression and the next World War, soybean oil was increasingly applied to the manufacture of margarine, shortening, salad dressing, and, of course, cooking oil. By the beginning of the 1950s, the United States, which had been the world’s biggest importer of fats, was becoming its biggest exporter thanks to soybeans, accounting for a whopping three-quarters of the world’s soybean crop. Soya was well on its way to achieving the status of being the most widely consumed plant in the world.
The process of industrialization helped mechanize fishing fleets while simultaneously polluting Europe’s inland estuaries and rivers – both these events coming at a time of increasing demand for iced seafood as railroad networks opened large urban markets. On the one hand, the situation produced a booming marine fishing industry; and on the other, it stimulated the application of science to the new field of fisheries.
Administrators in the colonies of India and Africa established fisheries departments during the last decades of the nineteenth century. The original intent was to stock familiar sports fish, but in India, where a large portion of the population did not eat meat, an effort was made to introduce (or reintroduce) Chinese carp and African tilapia for public consumption. In Africa, in addition to sports fish, mosquito-eating fish were cultured to help control malaria.
In the first few decades of the twentieth century it was becoming clear that the days of the colonial empires were numbered. In India, Mahatma Gandhi led his famous “march to the sea” in 1930 to collect salt in defiance of a government monopoly. Such “civil disobedience” was just one of many strategies to break the imperial yoke. But despite this kind of local resistance, the real imperial train wreck came only in the aftermath of World War II with the vanishing empires scattering colonial tastes and culinary influences all over the globe.
Millions emigrated from Africa and Asia to ex-mother countries to nurture these traditions while, conversely, European colonizing influences and ingredients greatly expanded the range of foods employed in the ex-colonies. Can one imagine the cuisines of the West Indies without salt cod, salt pork, salt beef, and rice, the dishes of India without potatoes and chilli peppers, or the West African diet without peanuts, sweet potatoes, and maize?
Because racism drove nineteenth-century imperialism and colonialism which, in turn, drove scientists of the time to discover physical reasons that would help to account for the alleged inferiority of subject peoples, it seems appropriate to close this chapter with a brief discussion of one of these “discoveries” that was food-related.
This was – at the risk of prurience – the (alleged) early age of menstruation in the inferior groups which, it was believed, signaled an earlier sexual maturity that put them closer to the animals.  Yet, the age of menarche is closely linked with nutritional status, and thus to the extent that this was true, we are confronted with the apparent paradox of middle- and upperclass white girls being less well-nourished than their poorer and darker skinned counterparts. The most logical explanation is that the beginning of menstruation among upper class girls of the Victorian Age was significantly underreported, whereas it was exaggerated for those members of the disdained classes.
Yet, this may be too parsimonious an explanation and too dismissive of the role of nutrition. This is because “precocious puberty” was viewed with alarm among the middle and upper classes whose physicians advised that their daughters not eat much meat. Meat was still linked with carnal lust as it had been for a cycle of centuries. But denying good quality protein to maturing young ladies, for whatever reason, could easily have delayed their age of menarche, or at least, caused the amenorrhea now seen among today’s anorectics. It could also have produced the greenish skin color of chlorisis – a disease that singled out upper-class young women. That disease proved ephemeral and is now gone but many suspect that it was anemia.

By Kenneth F. Kiple in the book 'A MOVABLE FEAST'-Ten Millennia of Food Globalization. Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York, 2007, chapter 20, p.214-225. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.

Share this post