Food and History

The foodie in me and the student of history together have a regrettable (particularly in the view of my children) tendency to look for nutritional explanations for historical change.  It is a vice that makes me notice all sorts of odd theories about “Foods that changed the World.”  I think I perhaps first picked it up when a social history professor of mine casually commented that perhaps it was possibly what Napoleon had for breakfast as much as Wellington that caused the French defeat at Waterloo.  Or maybe I’m longing for the perfect recipe for world peace, or for an end to world hunger.  Whatever.  My teenagers would shudder and gag  and accuse me of sabotaging their education  when I mentioned how lead leached from wine jars contributed to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, or how the lentils brought back to Europe from the Crusades provided protein to fuel the 12^th century Renaissance (the Great Pea Theory) or how tomatoes from the New World in union with pasta from China may have caused a decline in the protein in the Italian diet which in turn caused a slackening of the Italian Renaissance (from “Daedalus”  – remember that journal?).  Nevertheless, my search for foodie solutions to the mysteries of history continued on.

In recent years things have started looking up for the foodie school of history.  First, Jared Diamond blazed the way with his account, in Guns, Germs and Steel, of how lactic tolerance among ancestors of Europeans enabled development of a slight resistance to smallpox, which in turn made it possible for Europeans to conquer other lactic intolerant peoples by spreading smallpox like a weapon before them.  Then researchers reported in Scientific American that the development of rice culture may have been a major factor in preventing a prehistoric ice age that could have wiped out humanity before we even got started.  Foodie history was starting to look not so shabby.  Anthropologists jumped into the fray and developed a theory that all civilization began with the cooking of meat, which both provided extra protein energy and time away from digestive napping to do all sorts of things.   And for decades now, pioneers in third world development have reported that a major factor in lagging third world economies is malnutrition, particularly that associated with low protein intake.

Now, further inroads on the Naysayers have occurred.  Earlier this year, Scientific American   reported that at one key point in pre-history, a major drought throughout Africa lasting thousands of years nearly wiped out human ancestors, except for a small band from whom we are all descended, who survived on a diet of seafood.  Then a new, highly praised book appeared,  Extra Virginity: the Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil by Tom Mueller, which along with exposing the nefarious tricks of the shadier olive oil merchants, wrote movingly of the role of olive oil throughout human history.  And just in November, Smithsonian Magazine published a fascinating article, sure to become the core for a book, “How the Potato Changed the World”, that regaled us with the important role of the potato in human history.

Let’s see now: wine, olive oil, tomatoes, lentils, pasta, rice, cheese, meat, seafood, potatoes.  Surely there’s a recipe for world peace in there somewhere.  But let’s start by feeding the hungry or better yet, by helping them to feed themselves.  A good start would be Heifer International, an organization that delivers flocks or herds of animals, from chickens to water buffalo, donated by you, to third world villages to jump-start their economies.  Their URL is Heifer.org.

Happy eating!  You could change the World.