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.
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Readings and Links related to this podcast episode
Related Readings
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About this week's guest:
Rachel Laudan's Home page
About ideas and people mentioned in this podcast episode:
Books:
Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History, by Rachel Laudan. At Amazon.com.
Part II, Chapter V, "Sugar: Hawaii" in Some Aspects of the Tariff Question, by Frank Taussig. Library of Economics and Liberty.
Articles:
"A Plea for Culinary Modernism," by Rachel Laudan. Jacobin Magazine, May 22, 2015. Originally appeared in Gastronomica.
"In Praise of Fast Food," by Rachel Laudan. UTNE, September-October 2010.
Web Pages and Resources:
Simplot. Frozen French fries.
Food pyramid (nutrition). Wikipedia.
White Tower Hamburgers. Wikipedia.
Podcast Episodes, Videos, and Blog Entries:
Cowen on Food. EconTalk. April 2012.
De Vany on Steroids, Baseball, and Evolutionary Fitness. EconTalk. March 2010. Brief discussion of Paleolithic diet and evolution.
Boudreaux on the Economics of "Buy Local". EconTalk. April 2007.
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0:33
Intro. [Recording date: July 28, 2015.] Russ: We're going to talk about your book as well as an essay you've written on food and modernity. You book is a rather extraordinary of food, its interaction with empire, nations, and culture. And there's a lot to talk about there. I want to start with grain, wheat in particular, but other grains as well. Why are grains so important in the history of food, and why did they remain important? Guest: Well, let's go back to the Paleolithic. Human beings, it's pretty clear, were incredible careful and intelligent about inventorying the world's food sources. They knew what was edible and what was not. They experimented and found out what was poisonous and what was not. And the trick was to find something that was nutritious, that was storable, that was transportable. And most foodstuffs just don't live up to this. Most foodstuffs are available only episodically, in the summer, in the harvest season, or, if they are big game, they are only available when you've got a big catch. The really neat thing about grains is that they satisfy all those criteria. They are highly nutritious because they are food [?] plants. They are highly storable because they are hard and dry, and they don't rot and go bad. And they are highly transportable because they have a high food-value to weight ratio. Unlike, say, potatoes, which are very wet and heavy and therefore are hard to store and transport. So you have these little things that are potentially very, very useful year-round human food. The downside of them is that they are absolutely the worst foodstuffs or raw materials in the world to turn into something we can put into our mouths. Russ: Yeah; that was one of the most fascinating parts of the book--the length you have to go to. We think, 'Oh, bread comes from wheat; isn't that nice?' But it's a little more complicated. Guest: Absolutely. It was brought home to me when my father, who was a farmer and who grew hundreds of acres of wheat decided it would be interesting to make bread out of his own wheat. And in those days, you couldn't just google and find out how to do it. So he set about taking these grains of wheat; and he beat them in a pestle and mortar, and he ground them through a meat grinder, and he hit them on the stone floor of the kitchen. And all he got was squashed grains. Russ: As opposed to flour. Guest: You have to use a shearing action--I learned that many years later when I moved to Mexico, where people still grind grains. And you have to use a lot of weight with both a vertical and a horizontal force to break up the outside husk and get into the flour in the middle. And that's after you've cleaned them, and washed them, and threshed them, and done all the preliminary processes. That's just to turn them into flour. Russ: It's an amazing thing that someone thought to do that. I mean, I assume that in the beginning people just chewed it, and it wasn't very good or very appealing. Guest: I think if they just chewed it--really the grains passed through you. Their cover was a little hard-skinned on the outside. And you can't get much nutrition from them unless you break them up. And we have speculations about whether or not they were made into popcorn by just simply eating a popped wheat, puffed wheat; whether they were sprouted and made into beer; whether they were ground; whether they were boiled. You have to do one of those things. It's a really cute debate: Did humans start agriculture in order to have beer because they wanted beer so much? But I think that misunderstands the extent to which people were experimenting. I think long before agriculture--by about 20,000 B.C., humans are experimenting with grains. And I think they did absolutely everything to them. They treated them, they heated them, they ground them, they treated them with lye, they popped them. They probably treated them with acid. They sprouted them. Anything to be able to get access to that nutrition. Russ: And one other thing I want to mention in passing that runs through the very earliest part of the book is the power of that kind of transformative process. In particular, cooking. And I think modern people tend to think of cooking as it makes food taste better. We have a modest experience with raw foods: we eat sushi; we might have steak tartare; we eat raw vegetables with dip at cocktail parties. But you point out that the really important part of cooking is it saves time in chewing. Can you explain that? Because that's remarkable. Guest: Both chewing and digesting. Animals, if you think of the standard picture of a cow, they first of all spend a lot of time wandering around, chewing grass, which is tough. And then they have stomachs and they spend much of the day digesting this food. It takes a huge amount of energy to digest food. So that when you cook, what you are essentially doing is outsourcing digesting--chewing and digesting--into the kitchen. And doing it previously. And that saves a lot of energy for the humans who are lucky enough to eat the cooked food. Of course, the energy has to come from somewhere, and part of it is from the thermal energy of the fire; but part of it is from the energy of the people or animals or later on wind or water or steam that are doing the hard work of grinding.
7:36
Russ: And, just to stick with basics for a minute: At one point, quite surprising to me, quite late in the book, you mention the potato. I think of the potato as a very basic foodstuff. But you point out that the potato is a relatively late invention. Talk about its cultural significance and a little bit about its history. Guest: Well, the potato is one of a series of roots--roots in a culinary sense, that is, underground bits of plants that can be cooked into edible foods. They have--the roots have always been of less interest to civilized societies because they are so wet and heavy you cannot provision them [?] fit to use with roots. Now, the one exception or partial exception to this is the high Andes mountains where they did grow potatoes and use them from early on. But they developed an incredibly elaborate way of freeze drying them to make them light enough and storable enough to go into cities as well as combining them with maize, which by then was down there. So when the potato comes into Europe, it's an enormous cultural effort to integrate the potato into the European food system, because for anyone who lives in a settled society with cities, root-eating is a sign of basically being more like animals. Roots were animal food in Europe. And so basically the poor of Europe had to be bludgeoned into adopting the potato in the 17th and 18th century. Russ: It's a little hard to understand because I really love French fries, and it's hard to imagine how someone could resist this. But they didn't have French fries. Talk about what they had. Guest: Well, basically, fat is very expensive for most people. So French fries, until the 1960s, 1970s, well they weren't invented until the middle of the 19th century, late 19th century. But until the invention of frozen French fries in the 1960s and 1970s, French fries were for the elite. Only the richest people could afford the potatoes that were cooked in that much fat. And double-cooked in that fat--which is what you have to do for French fries. What you find in the 19th century, as fats become more available for a large bulk of the population is that potatoes become more acceptable. Because you can put butter on your boiled potatoes; you can layer potatoes with milk and cheese and make a gratin; you can bake them and add butter. And that fat makes them much, much more palatable. Russ: But the point you make in the book is that the potato that was first introduced--I think in the early 18th century-- Guest: Right. Russ: was bitter, and nothing like the Idaho baked potato that we might envision at a potato bar. Guest: No. I've been concentrating in talking to you on the cooking and processing side, but there was also this agricultural trick they had to pull off to turn a plant that lived 8,000, 10,000 feet in the Andes, where seasons are reversed from Northern Europe, into a plant that would grow successfully and be palatable in Europe and the United States. And that took 100 plus years. Russ: And that's true of a lot of the things that we eat, I assume. I assume that if we went back to the 15, 16, 1700s and looked at what they called a 'blank'--whatever blank is, we would find it almost unrecognizable and very unattractive. Is that fair? Or am I being too harsh? Guest: Yes. Very few fruits--there are a few: dates, grapes--are palatable [?] without breeding. But most fruits have been systematically bred over the centuries. Animals have been bred. Probably the only things that we regularly eat but taste as they would have done hundreds of years ago are fish of various kinds. But everything else is the result of human breeding. Russ: Yeah, the goal of fruit has been to make fruit more like an M&M, and it's working evidently. Guest: Exactly.
12:44
Russ: Now, you make a distinction between different kinds of cuisine. Obviously it's a rough distinction, but you talk about high cuisine, humble cuisine, and middling cuisine. What do you have in mind with them and how have they evolved over time? Guest: I think this is an absolutely crucial point, and it's one that we forget because we all eat so well nowadays. Far more than the adoption of the grain, beginning about 20,000 B.C. and long before you get agriculture and then increasing with agriculture, one small group of people have been able to get hold of this storable wealth, the grains. And the philosophers and physicians who served that group developed a physiological theory that, according to each rank of living being, there was an appropriate kind of cuisine. And this was a very comprehensive theory because at that stage the whole world was thought to be living, from minerals up to the spirits or the gods. The spirits or the gods could live on aromas. Minerals just lived on water and stayed static. But if you go to the humans in the middle, the idea was that basically--it's more complicated than this--there were two kinds of humans: there were the aristocrats, the rulers, the nobilities, who had delicate stomachs and had to have highly cooked, highly refined food, the best, whitest bread or rice, the sauces and sweets and meats and alcohols, that characteristic of the high cuisine. And then the rest of the people, which would be 9 out of every 10 people, had coarse, rough stomachs. They were closer to the animals. And they could get by on dark breads, root vegetables. They did not need these fine sauces and sweets. And this was a mark of hierarchy that didn't really begin to disappear until after the French Revolution. Russ: We forget that in our time, for most Americans, food is a form of recreation. It's a mix of art, sports, physical desire. But most of human history, that's not the case. Guest: Absolutely not the case. The main aim of 9 out of 10 of the population, there are folks saying in every society, the test of what matters most is a full stomach. Of course for the aristocrat, yes, food was an art form. And when I talk about middling cuisine, I talk about what happened in the last hundred years, where essentially in the richer countries, with a few exceptions of unfortunate people who kind of slipped into extreme poverty, everybody can eat the food of the aristocrats of the past. So, everybody can eat high cuisine, except now the difference, the striking difference between the culinary philosophy of high cuisine in the past and of middling cuisine today is that in high cuisine you had this physiological that the upper classes were physiologically different from everybody else. Nowadays, we all eat a middling cuisine and we have a physiological theory that says essentially, all human beings can eat the same food. So the USDA (U.S. Department of Agriculture), for example, can put out a Food Pyramid that is supposed to apply to the inter-higher[?] American population. And that's middling. And that's something that is radically new in human history. Russ: Of course, we don't all agree on what that pyramid should look like. An incredible time I think of trying to figure out what's good for us versus tastes good and what's healthy and what's not. Guest: Yes. Quite.
17:27
Russ: I want to talk about three different types of globalization of cuisine that you talk about in the book: British, French, and American. And I want to start with British. The British emphasis on bread and beef, to the near exclusion of everything else was fascinating. And I think of the classic phrase--and I don't know why it's always male, but: 'He's a meat and potatoes man' is a phrase from somewhere in my cultural tool kit. Somehow the idea that British cuisine was attractive spread around. It does not have the best reputation today. What was the bread and beef attraction and what role did the British play in spreading it? Guest: Well, beef was supposed to be the strongest of the meats. And bread was supposed the strongest of the carbohydrates that you have. And it was widely believed, across Europe and the United States but particularly in Britain, that one of the reasons why the British were able to conquer the world, or to expand their empire enormously, particularly in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, was that they were bread and beef eaters. I mean, you, as an economist know there are lots of theories about why the British were able to conquer so much of the world. The British at the time of course had other theories that, you know--the British climate made them tough, or that there was sometimes intrinsic to the British character that made them strong. For a lot of other countries, and you find this in Japan and in Latin America, in particular, who want to develop strong modern nations, the nutritional theory has a lot of appeal, because it's very hard to alter the climate of your nation, and it's very hard to alter the national character of your nation. But you can alter the nutrition of your nation. So, there was this widespread attempt around the world in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to try to convert Mexicans or Argentinians or Brazilians or Japanese to bread and beef diets. Most of those efforts failed because it was economically an incredibly uphill job. But they didn't fail entirely. The Japanese, you know, today eat bread. And so do most of the Latin Americans. And beef is valued in those places. We live with the results of that. Russ: You are what you eat, I guess, is an appealing idea, and to some extent true. But maybe not to the extent they used to believe. So, we have the British having a big influence on world cuisine at the end of the 19th century. Somehow, French cuisine becomes the standard of sophistication and high dining. How did that happen? And it still persists, to some extent. It's lost some of its caché, I'd say in the last 50 years. But it still remains a standard of high dining. How did that come about and why was it important? Guest: I think it's first important to say it's French high cuisine, because the high cuisine of France that became the international standard was something that most French people had never seen and never ate. It did not come, swell up from the peasantry. There's a slightly complicated story about what happened around 1650 when you get a rapid political change and the establishment of, after the Peace of Westphalia, a series of nations in Europe, on supposedly equal terms, combined with a shift of the scientific revolution and the Protestant revolution. And in complicated ways these would act together to produce a new cuisine that the world had never seen before. It's a really striking example of radical and rapid culinary change. The old cuisines of spiced food that--ultimately stemming from Persia but that had really influenced China, dominated in the high cuisine of India, right across to Southern Europe, were displaced by this new Northern European cuisine. And the people who developed it in its most elaborate form, because they had the greatest resources--the richest courts--were the French. And they developed it really terribly rapidly between 1650 and 1700. And that's the point where diplomacy is become important because of this national state system. And the national state system needs something to use for diplomatic dinners, to demonstrate modernity, Europeanness against the Persian-type cuisines that existed before. And so French high cuisine becomes the cuisine of European diplomacy in the 18th century, and then of international diplomacy and the international elite in the 19th century. So that by 1880 you could go to Tokyo, you could go to Santiago de Chile, you could go to Sydney, you could go to San Francisco and the thing to be eating was, if you were really rich or you were really high in politics was high French cuisine. Russ: Tell the story of what happened in Hawaii, because that's really rather remarkable. Guest: Oh, yes, it remarkable. It's really sad. The Hawaiian islands tried to remain independent of the Western powers after they were opened to European influence by Captain Cook in 1788. And King Kalakaua went on a world tour in the 1880s and he visited all the heads of state, in Japan, in Siam, in France, Queen Victoria, the President of America. Everywhere he went, they had high French cuisine. That was what he was treated to. And he went back to Hawaii and it confirmed to him that the policy the Hawaiian monarchs had been trying of trying to use the kind of looking-like a European style monarchy had to be continued. So he built a palace and he had a coronation dinner that cost really about 20% of the state budget. And he had the misfortune to be doing this when there were many powerful Americans in the sugar business as merchants in Hawaii. And they came from a quite different culinary tradition. And I won't say that the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy was just because of the building of a palace and the giving of a coronation dinner, but it was kind of symbolic of a big debate going on in the late 19th century between these old, monarchical, hierarchic, aristocratic cuisines taken up by international diplomats and the route that America was beginning to sketch out for itself. Russ: Talking about French cuisine, I'm reminded of Calvin Trillin's line. He says when you are visiting--I think he's talking about a mid-sized American city or even a largish American city, and your host says, 'You know, you'd be surprised: for a town of our size we have a very good French restaurant,' he said, 'They don't.' Really first-rate French cooking, at least when he wrote the book I'm thinking of--it must be in the 1970s, I think, maybe the 1980s--was limited to a handful of large cities in America at least. But it's a statement really the fact that everyone wanted to have that caché, that sophistication of French cuisine. And I guess Julia Child was the high water mark of that in America. And bouncing off that was Jacques Pepin, who emphasized more of a peasant French cooking-- Guest: Right. Russ: which I always liked more than the fancier stuff. But that's partly--maybe I'm a little bit lazy. Guest: Yes, of course. No, I mean, you know, there is that distinction in French cuisine.
27:28
Russ: Now, as you point out in the book, and American president who was hosting a foreign delegation--I think I have this right--would serve the equivalent of a French dinner until fairly recently, when it's now become fashionable to have our own native cuisine highlighted more directly. Somewhere along that way, the hamburger became a worldwide force, partly associated with McDonald's obviously, but through a whole set of other forces. Talk about the importance of the hamburger. Guest: Well, if I may I'd like to back up a tiny bit about presidents serving French dinners, because the American presidency has had a terrible time deciding what to do at diplomatic dinners from the get-go. There were those, like Jefferson, who said we've got to be part of international culture as well as the economy, and we should go with high French cuisine. But there is also this extraordinarily strong republican--with a small 'r'--tradition in America that's part of what the Revolution is about. And the republican strain in American thought said very emphatically that, 'No, we do not want high French cuisine. We do not want aristocratic dining. That is not appropriate. And they looked back to the Roman republic and to the Dutch republic and to other republican movements in Europe and said, 'What we need is a decent cuisine for all citizens.' And that is very much the origin of Thanksgiving, which is not a fancy French dinner for diplomats but a dinner that essentially all Americans can afford and can cook, of American ingredients. It's a kind of striking symbol of the republican tradition exemplified in an American custom, and was deliberately designed to be so. But what happened--I mean the hamburger is just sort of amazing. People say, 'Well, the British had fish and chips.' Well, fish and chips don't cut it, because fish and chips are not this beef, bread, French fry phenomenon. And what Americans managed to do beginning with White Tower but pulled off triumphantly by McDonald's is to make the food of aspiration worldwide something that in America everybody can afford, and in much of the rest of the world the middle class can afford, namely a kind of ersatz piece of roast beef or steak that is a beef hamburger on a piece of white bread with a bit of fresh vegetable out of season, even in the winter, with a sauce which is part of high cuisine, with French fries, which, you know, are popular--which become really widespread with McDonald's and the frozen French fry, which Simplot perfects--until then the French had said it was the apex of French civilized food--and washed down either with a sparkling cold drink or with a milkshake, sweet and rich and cold and foamy. That is just--it makes the food of aspiration accessible to all, and you have it in this brightly lit dining room that is clean, that you have access to. I think only if we understand how McDonald's taps into all these competing traditions that go back so deep in our culture can we understand why it became such a kind of fire point for and against modern American food. Russ: We're going to come back and talk about that in some detail, but just a clarifying question: That bitter, out-of-season vegetable--is that a tomato? Guest: Oh, sorry. A bit of tomato or a bit of lettuce. Russ: Either one. Guest: Either of those, year round. Russ: I thought you said 'bitter.' You meant 'bit of.' Guest: A small piece. Russ: Yeah. As you point out in the book, I think most Americans who don't travel abroad, and when we do, we're not so likely to eat at McDonald's. But most of us, when we think of McDonald's we think that the same menu gets transported to other places, because people want a McDonald's hamburger and the prices might differ and economists like to sometimes talk about the price of McDonald's in different currencies is a form of measuring currency exchange rates and standards of living. But the hamburger that people are eating around the world at their McDonald's is not--is radically different from the American products. Talk about the way that McDonald's overseas responds to customer demand. Guest: Oh, they're very quick off the mark. Just to mention Hawaii again because I lived there for a long time, I think it was in the 1950s: as soon as they got to Hawaii they had to introduce rice because there's a large Asian population there and they did not want French fries. They wanted rice. That was the prestige thing. And so around the world, McDonald's has been adjusted to local taste, whether it's the teriyaki burger or the very successful Filipino burger. And it's not just the hamburger has been adjusted in terms of its accompaniments and its taste, but that the whole experience of dining at McDonald's, which we think of as simply fast food, varies with the society. In Mexico it's a place where well-to-do women can go and have lunch where their children can play safely out of the range of kidnappers. In China, I'm not sure this is still true but certainly 10 years ago, it was a place to take your children to have a birthday dinner. And in Vietnam it was a place where a working single woman could go and actually have a meal by herself in a public place without being thought to be a prostitute. Russ: It's rather incredible.
34:45
Russ: The other aspect of world cuisine that I learned about from your book that I did not realize was the incredible market effectiveness of ramen, the dried noodles that are then reinvigorated with boiling water and a little bit of flavor. There was a period of my life where I probably ate them every day--for lunch with parmesan cheese, definitely a culinary mixed metaphor, but I went through a long time when I ate them a lot. I haven't had them in a while. But I did not realize how popular they were. So, talk about that. Guest: Well, in fact, this is the kind of lower middling cuisine because it has the same ingredients as the McDonald's hamburger, essentially. What you have is wheat flour again--this time it's as a noodle, not as bread. You've got a meaty taste, which is what everybody wants. And you may have a little few specks of something green floating on the top that are supposed to be dried vegetables. But it's much more inexpensive than a hamburger. It can be reconstituted very easily. And once it was invented it was easy to manufacture. So, you can--manufacturing plants sprung up in places like Indonesia and India, which you might expect, as well as Japan. But then, Nepal. Nepal as a center exporting ramen noodles to India? That really surprised me when I realized about it. But it has been a huge success. Russ: And similarly the flavors are often tailored to the local population. Guest: Oh, yes, absolutely. Russ: I just want to add I would also often add an egg to it. Talk about convenience: if you don't want to spend much time over your meal, bringing water to boil, dropping the noodles in, adding the flavor packet, and then breaking an egg in there until it became solid is very easy. And is very tasty, of course. Guest: Yes. And actually that's not bad food. It's not complete; you probably do need something green or yellow or orange at some point. But you know, you've got protein, you've got carbohydrates, you've got fat. Russ: Well, that's what the M&Ms at the end are for, that's the green, yellow, and orange. The other thing about it, I have to just say, is there's something physically beautiful about the shape of the noodles. They look like mattress springs. Which is not an image you usually associate with nutrition or food. But there's something aesthetic I always found about the way those noodles were created. I don't know who invented that, so that they could be all, you know, coiled up like that. But they can be very beautiful. Guest: That's something nobody has said to me before. But I like it.
38:00
Russ: So, let's shift gears. This is a good transition--we are talking about McDonald's and ramen, which are very fast foods whether you are buying them in a restaurant or you are preparing them, a hamburger or a ramen packet at home. You have a fascinating essay on what you call culinary modernism. And I want to start by--since we are talking about fast food--talk about the slow food movement and how it got started and why are you critical of it. Guest: Well, let's start by saying that often yesterday's successes are today's problems. And what had happened, I think, between, say, the French Revolution and the end of WWII was that the great overriding problem of modern nations, how to get a middling cuisine for everybody, had been basically solved. I mean, not completely solved: there were pockets of poverty; there were inadequate foods, and so on and so forth. But by the 1960s and 1970s, people were not dying of typhoid, they were not dying of pellagra in the United States as they had done in the thousands in the 1930s. They were well fed. The same was true of Europe once they had recovered from WWII. And so the kind of diet that I'm calling the republican/democratic culinary modernist philosophy that had dominated for nearly 200 years--suddenly it all looked easy. And people began instead to take it for granted and begin to perceive problems with it. So, people began to say, 'Well, maybe there are troubles with large corporations producing food.' Or 'Maybe there are troubles with animal welfare,' or with the environment. And I don't think this is to be discounted. For many people, if everybody is eating a middling cuisine, how do you distinguish yourself? How do you show yourself to be one of the privileged if everybody can have a hamburger? And so you have, beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, a series of cookbook authors and then organizations--I think Elizabeth David in England, as a cookbook author was incredibly influential in this, and of course Alice Waters of the famous Chez Panisse in California is a follower of Elizabeth David. You begin to get slow food in Italy reacting against fast food--that's a slightly more complicated situation. But what they are all trying to do is to find some alternative to this small, republican or culinary modernist, culinary philosophy that says the big, big job is to get a middling cuisine for everybody so that we can have a strong nation. And they turn instead to another of the ideas that was developed in the mid-18th century when all this was being kicked around: the Romantic Philosophy of Rousseau, who wrote a lot about food and what kind of food there was. And Rousseau did not take the republican line at all. Nor did he take the other alternative, the socialist or communitarian one. He said, if we don't want aristocratic food what we've got to do is to look to the foods that are close to nature. The food of the peasants. Imagined peasants, I would say, because the real peasants didn't have these foods. And these were to be fresh fruits and vegetables, milk, unprocessed foods; you didn't want to go to state banquets or to restaurants with flunkies who waited on you. You would have the simple food; the ideal food was a meal was not a family dinner at Thanksgiving but a picnic in the open air. Or if not a picnic, a meal with fresh foraged foods that came directly from either tiny farmers or from the forest. And this becomes, by the beginning of the 20th century, an enormously appealing idea because it fits in with the environmentalist ethic; it fits in with the idea that we have gone too far with industrialization, the corporate world, all those kinds of big enterprises that seem to be unmanageable and threatening. And so this becomes very rapidly in the early 21st century the dominant culinary philosophy of those who care about food. Fresh, natural, organic, slow. Russ: Local. Guest: Local. Russ: Unprocessed. Etc. Guest: Unprocessed. They forget--I mean, processing just gets kind of written out of the agenda. Russ: And that sounds nice. I'm not--my listeners know, I have a strong tendency to push back against what I consider romanticism. But one person's romanticism is another person's deep truth. So, on the surface, it seems like a good thing. What's wrong with natural, local, unprocessed, close to the earth? And I should add, you talk about it in the book: there's a certain Garden of Eden aspect to this as well; it taps into another cultural ideal that we have. There's something idyllic about the way we imagine peasants or simpler folk ate, and there's something romantic about going back to that. Guest: Yes. And there's also a sense of self-fulfillment and closeness to nature, that you feel reunified with something bigger. Russ: That said, of course, by someone who has never killed a chicken. But of course there is also a strong movement toward vegetarianism, which avoids that problem. Guest: Yes. Russ: Sorry, I interrupted. Guest: Well, I think the problem is that the appeal is very obvious. I'd say the problem is two-pronged. But the fundamental problem is that the people who subscribe to this view have not worked out the economics and the technology of how you can--and I know people hate the phrase 'feed the world'--but feed the world, with this kind of food unless you have a massive return to small-scale agriculture and to laborious processing. Which there doesn't seem to be a huge rush to do. There is some move to small-scale farming. But there's no sign at the moment that it can be scaled up to produce food in the quantity that the big mid-Western and Californian farms can produce. And so, what's happened is that there has been a series of attempts to give some particularity to this. We want to do organic. Well, then it turns out that organic is a little more complicated because it still involves pesticides, that just natural pesticides, that just organic does not produce safer or tastier food. And it has the lower yields. So, okay, sort of the organic--put to one side slightly and we change to local. And local, supporting your local economy sounds wonderful. Until you work out that you are supporting your local economy and not supporting the one down the road. And that when you count in the effects[?] of modern transport-- Russ: You faded out. You figured out their--when you count in what? Guest: The efficiencies of modern transport--container-style transport and railroads and container ships. It can in fact be very possible to take advantage of the comparative advantage of the climate in New Zealand to have New Zealand lamb sold in the United States and Europe. And then you go from organic and local and you try slow. Or you try some other effort. And each one comes accompanied with a scare. And I think people are becoming a little weary of the successive scares of the food movement. That's just a sense I've had in the last 6 months. Partly as a result of the reaction to the reprinting of this article I did. When it first came out, it had no reaction at all. When it was reprinted in, I think, 2010, in the New York Times and Art New Reader[?], there was an incredibly hostile reaction. Russ: Yes. There would have been. Guest: And now, although there are plenty of hostile comments, there is a much greater interest in thinking about alternatives to the Romantic vision that come to terms with the fact that we have achieved abundance, and we need to move on to new kinds of problems.
49:09
Russ: So, the other criticism you make, though, is that it's not--we can debate, people, reasonable people can disagree about whether local cuisine can be scaled up, be successful, whether organic can be scaled up, whether processed foods are attractive enough to people, whatever you mean by unprocessed--because as you point out, every food is processed, almost, in some fashion. But the other point you make which I found fascinating is that this Romantic vision of the past is inaccurate. That this idea that peasants ate "healthier food" than we do; that slow food is somehow, when it's truly accurate, is appealing--is in fact, it's not. It's the equivalent of saying, 'I want to be self-sufficient, so I'm going to do my own roof.' But are you going to make your own hammer? No. You are going to buy a hammer. You are going to cheat. So you are really not self-sufficient--because self-sufficiency is the road to poverty. Guest: Exactly. Russ: So, talk about why dishonoring or being inaccurate about the history is important. Guest: For just the reasons I think that you have said. That if we--I think it has repercussions at all kinds of levels. If we say that peasants in the past ate healthier and safer food, it's easy to translate that into the world of development and say, 'We really want people to stay in small farms on the land. We want women in South Africa to continue pounding their maize in a mortar with a great big pestle.' And to condemn them to the kind of poverty that our ancestors escaped. [more to come, 51:20]