Food Archives - Not Even Past

Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States by James C. Scott (2017)

By Steven Richter

Beginning with the title and continuing through the final pages, James C. Scott’s Against the Grain seeks to subvert the historical narrative of inevitable progress toward civilization that has been dominant for millennia. Instead of framing agriculture as a driver of enlightened civilization, he conceives of it as a social and ecological building block that spawned early states that were more coercive than civil. Scott may not have launched the first attack of this kind, but his clear prose synthesizes evidence from a broad range of disciplines to craft a well-reasoned barrage of arguments, causing irreparable damage to a foundational element of western thought – that, since the first agricultural civilizations, the organized state has brought about enlightened and morally superior society.

Beginning from the perspective of a “thin” Anthropocene, a historical approach that emphasizes the ways in which human action has shaped the environment and landscapes, Scott emphasizes the richness of social-ecological relations before organized states appeared. The more traditional “thick” Anthropocene claims the environmental impact of modern industry has so thoroughly transformed the planet that it constitutes a new geological epoch. The “thin” perspective points out that that human activity, especially ecosystem niche creations through fire, so pervaded the landscape that it is difficult to think of ancient nature as separate from human influence.

Early settled communities built around the diverse and abundant sustenance activities along rivers and wetlands slowly domesticated plants and animals millennia before states first emerged. These novel arrangements, which Scott terms the “late Neolithic multi-species resettlement camps,” constituted the core of a long, slow transition. Contrasting with the more abrupt “Neolithic Revolution,” such a transition yielded not only plants with bigger seeds and more docile animals, but also dangerous new organisms that thrived in larger communities – diseases. Only through the combination of elevated birthrates and inherited immunity in settled communities could states eventually coagulate. But in many ways, these states represented, to borrow a phrase from Chief Seattle’s 1854 speech, “the end of living and the beginning of survival.”

Scott primarily defines states through the presence of tax collection, officials, and walls, with grain serving as the keystone to the political-economic system. Predictable, transportable, and calorie-dense, grain represented a surplus that could be monitored, collected, and, crucially, controlled. Put another way, grain was the perfect resource for taxation, allowing for the emergence of a ruling class. Despite the advantages yielded by such a surplus – a large, non-agricultural workforce – grain-derived civilization remained fragile. A single bad harvest could throw an early state into disarray, and even without catastrophic floods or drought, extractive agricultural and forestry practices often led to a slower demise. When combined with this ecological instability, the laborious nature of agrarian life made it so unappealing that early states likely built walls for restriction as much as for protection.

An Ancient Egyptian Statue of Grinding Grain (via Wikimedia)

Early states had to overcome tremendous social and ecological friction, so much that they typically were short lived. Only through the control and acquisition of its primary resource – people – could early states persist. The incorporation of human assets, whether by conquest of small neighboring communities or through slave trade, invigorated early states. Such a capricious system lacks robustness, and state failure could come from without or within. Such narratives of “collapse,” as it has often been framed, should be viewed critically. Scott argues what may appear to an archeologist as the catastrophic downfall of a monumental capitol may be more accurately, though not exclusively, thought of as disassembly into decentralized, independent communities. It is crucial to keep in mind that, perhaps as late as 1600, non-state peoples constituted the vast majority of global human population. States were “small alluvial archipelagos,” surrounded by hordes of ungoverned people who provided valuable trading and military allies, at least when they weren’t raiding and pillaging.

By incorporating innovative forms of evidence, Scott illuminates a critical perspective on the origins of modern states. He should have pointed out the difficulties of life outside states to create a more balanced narrative, but this omission takes little away from the central argument. Crucially, Scott compels the reader to be cognizant of the invisible or illegible, both historically and in our present lives. To make his argument, Scott relies on historical sources, such as dental analysis of ancient teeth, that prove just as informative as formal edicts or other, more visible historical sources. In a time with so much information, Against the Grain reminds us to be critical of whose story is told and why. For this reason, Scott’s work should have a place in courses focused on both the present and the future, not just the past. It suggests that students ask about the role coercion and bondage play in the twenty first century, or if our economy is built around appropriation or ecological wisdom. The reader, while learning about the distant past, cannot help but ponder what about our daily lives we take for granted and which narratives or stories should be elevated, and which should be relegated to the past.

Steven Richter is currently a PhD Student in the Community and Regional Planning program in the University of Texas School of Architecture whose focus is on sustainability, regional land use, and natural capital.

The Public Archive: Texas Czech Culinary Traditions

Kolaches (Credit: Whitney, via Flickr)

Millions of tweets and millions of state documents. Intimate oral histories and international radio addresses. Ancient pottery and yesterday’s memes. Historians have access to this immense store of online material for doing research, but what else can we do with it? In Spring 2018, graduate students in the Public and Digital History Seminar at UT Austin experimented with ways to make interesting archival materials available and useful to the public; to anyone with access to a computer. Over the Summer, Not Even Past will feature each of these individual projects.

Tracy Heim’s digital project, titled “Food Migrations: Texas Czech Culinary Traditions”, explores the experience of migration through the lens of food. Using the online publishing platform Scalar, “Food Migrations” not only offers a taste of Texan-Czech culinary culture through recipe books, photographs, and maps, but also considers the ways immigrant cultures are preserved – and changed – through food.

More on Heim’s project and The Public Archive here.

Feeding of the Body and Feeding of the Soul: Colonial Latin America Through Objects (No. 5)

This series features five online museum exhibits created by undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Texas at Austin for a class titled “Colonial Latin America Through Objects.” The class assumes that Latin America was never a continent onto itself. The course also insists that objects document the nature of historical change in ways written archives alone cannot.

Pauline Hodencq’s exhibit centers on corn in Aztec culture not only as source of calories but also as the foundation of the most revealing religious metaphors. For the Aztecs milpa corn dominated the agricultural cycle; it was even the source of children’s toys. More important, corn organized Aztec ways of relating to deities and understanding the body. Gods were corn growers and bodies were maize. Gods consumed bodies in the same way humans consumed corn.

What Makes a Good History Blog?

by Jesse Ritner

I love food blogs.

It’s true. The bad jokes. Exclamation marks run rampant. Mouthwatering photographs. The word chocolate, over 70 times in only 1,000 words.

Unsurprisingly, my first foray into history blogs was through food. Websites such as Cooking in the Archive (which posts about antiquated recipes with pictures and all) were natural fits. Yet, there is more to my love of food blogs than a love to cook and the guilty pleasure of overly punctuated sentences. Many of them have perfected essential aspects of blogging.

Take Sally’s Baking Addiction. The posts have attractive titles. (“Death by Chocolate Cupcakes” may be cheesy, but it is perfect for its audience.) They have clear, often linear, narration. They allow for endless side glancing through linked articles. And, most importantly, they have food porn.

(Is that even food?)(via Great British Chefs)

Granted, food blogs have their limits. For lucid prose and thought provoking ideas, I would direct you other places. But even my favorite history blogposts follow a similar model. Demystifying ‘Cool:’ A Brief History begins with a personal anecdote. (Is a story about once being called cool that different from a story about a perfect cupcake?) Flashy pop-culture pictures of Elvis, Lester Young, and the book American Cool take the place of food photography. And the beginning of the post even has runaway italicizing and punctuation: “Ohmigosh…that is so cool.” (A blogger after my own heart.)

Such overtures to internet culture may seem pedestrian, but they play an essential role in communicating complicated processes simply and briefly. Kate Grover’s opening anecdote does not simply hook the reader, it reminds the reader that “cool… is a potent force,” so shouldn’t we know its history? In a similar way, the picture of Elvis diversifies her examples, saving a paragraph on another example of coolness. All of this is to say that the best blogs do not simply use hooks to hook and pictures to illustrate, they use them as evidence to efficiently and enjoyably convince the reader.

Elvis Presley promoting the film Jailhouse Rock, 1957 (via Wikimedia Commons)

Perhaps, a less kitschy example (although still about food) is Res Obscura’s recent post What Did 17^th Century Food Taste Like? Paintings and photos of archival recipes are used throughout the article, but the most successful one for me is the photo of the watermelons. There is no need for the author to waste precious characters explaining how watermelons have adapted throughout the history. Anyone with access to a supermarket can look at the painting and understand. The blogpost is far from perfect. The article gets side tracked on discussions about art history, while the general premise (made clear by the title) is overly complicated by convoluted discussion of global foodways. While it convinces me that the Columbian Exchange enhanced the dynamism of foodways, this discussion distracts from the main point: that food tasted differently four hundred years ago. Nevertheless, what becomes muddled in the argument, is actually reaffirmed through the picture selection. Even those readers who stumble upon this article after falling down a rabbit hole of links, can get the gist just by reading the title and seeing this picture. Certainly as writers, we prefer when people read the entire post, but when engaging in such a malleable form of writing, it is important for our posts to click on all levels.

Giovanni Stanchi, watermelons and other fruits in a landscape, c. 1645 (via Red Obscura)

Something else food blogs are especially good at is embedding links. Food blogs are so effective, in part because I only need to know I want chocolate, vanilla, cookies, or cake. Once I know that, I can skim through almost endless links allowing me to find what I want. Even if I did not know what that was. Although history blogs are engaged with for different purposes, the same principle applies. Once again What Did 17^th Century Food Taste Like? does a great job of embedding extraneous information. In some cases it is a link to “small beer,” (which is apparently a low alcohol beer given to kids and servants), a recipe for an early version of “Maccarony cheese” (note it is from one of my favorite blogs), or simply links to specific food history blogs at the end of the post. These links not only give easy access to similar information, but for those interested, they allow the reader to engage seriously with the author’s sources (even if unintentionally so). In this case, Demystifying ‘Cool:’ A Brief History could certainly benefit from better integration of outside sources (For instance, I had to look up who Lester Young was!).

Good writing and engaging stories will always make good blogposts: There is no substitute. I also understand that food blogs are far from the only genre that engages meaningfully with images, links, and exaggerated stories. Yet, because their goal is usually to explain a recipe, they are a perfect template for making accessible otherwise academic takes on history.

Also by Jesse Ritner on Not Even Past:

The Curious History of Lincoln’s Birth Cabin
Paying for Peace: Reflections on “Lasting Peace” Monument

Domesticating Ethnic Foods and Becoming American

by Madeline Hsu

How to Cook and Eat in Chinese was the earliest popular, English-language guide to Chinese cooking. First published in 1945 and reprinted several times, it remains in wide use today. The author, Dr. Buwei Yang Chao, wrote the cookbook at the urging of fellow faculty wives in New Haven, in particular Agnes Hocking, wife if the idealist philosopher William Hocking. Trained as a physician, Dr. Chao reassured American housewives that she could teach them the complex and exotic art of Chinese cooking because she had learned as an adult herself while a student in Japan.

In addition to providing straightforward and simple directions together with suggestions for obtaining ingredients and alternatives, How to Cook and Eat in Chinese presents its guidance with wit and whimsy provided by Dr. Chao’s husband and translator, the famous linguist Dr. Yuen Ren Chao, who created terms now in common usage such as “stir fry” and “potsticker.” Footnotes add humorous asides that explain family disputes over translations and descriptions for Chinese cultural practices. For example, in the introduction, the language specialist Yuen Ren Chao cannot resist adding a footnote to the otherwise commonplace, “Really, you should not have put yourself to so much trouble!” to explain that this translation is inaccurate because Chinese lacks the “subjunctive perfect.”

Dr. Buwei Yang Chao’s cookbook was so successful that the well-known author, Pearl Buck, who wrote one of its prefaces from the point of view of an American housewife, urged Chao to pen the story of her life. Autobiography of a Chinese Woman appeared in 1947. With great charm, Chao made a persuasive case for the educated, cosmopolitan Chinese family to be accepted as American. The success of Dr. Buwei Chao’s publications bridging Chinese and American peoples underscores the intrinsic relationship between popularizing ethnic food and the assimilation of ethnic and racial minority groups. As Donna Gabaccia wrote in We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans, after World War II, ethnic foods such as Chinese and Italian, would win broader appreciation as part of a more general expansion of the boundaries of mainstream American culture and society.

User-friendly ethnic cookbooks such as How to Cook and Eat in Chinese brought once alien cultures and foodways directly into the kitchens and homes of Euro Americans. According to Fashionable Food: Seven Decades of Food Fads by Sylvia Lovegren, family meal preparation was not only a commonplace form of domestic labor, but one that provides keen insights into broader historical trends. During the Cold War and the Civil Rights era, these shifts emerged in part through the growing popularity of ethnic foods and cookbooks. Dr. Buwei Chao was an early forerunner of the trends that by the late 1960s and early 1970s mobilized leading figures in the food publishing business, such as Judith Jones, Julia Childs’ editor at Knopfand Craig Claiborne, the New York Times food critic, to recruit cooks with ethnic food expertise, personality, and writing ability to introduce general audiences to their cultures.

Jones’ discoveries, sometimes promoted in conjunction with Claiborne, included southern chef, Edna Lewis of Café Nicholson who authored The Edna Lewis Cookbook (1972) and The Taste of Country Cooking (1976); scholar Claudia Roden and A Book of Middle Eastern Food (1968); the late Marcella Hazan and The Classic Italian Cookbook (1973); and restaurant owner Irene Kuo with The Key to Chinese Cooking (1977). Claiborne’s entry into the Chinese cookbook field was The Chinese Cookbook (1972) which he co-authored with Virginia Lee. Both Hazan and Lee attracted Jones and Claiborne’s attention when they began offering cooking lessons out of their homes.

America’s immigrant population and the broad acceptance of ethnic cultures and communities have boomed along with the popularity of ethnic restaurants, cookbooks, cooking shows, and personalities. For an understanding of the early roots of this business and cultural phenomenon, revisit Buwei Yang Chao’s How to Cook and Eat in Chinese.

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