[A photograph, and nothing more, for silent contemplation.]
Today’s post is number 500!
Why on earth so many cookbooks, when no one cooks? Or do they?
Read Adam Gopnik’s thoughts in the latest food issue of The New Yorker.
He starts out by saying
Handed-down wisdom and worked-up information remain the double piers of a cook’s life. The recipe book always contains two things: news of how something is made, and assurance that there’s a way to make it, with the implicit belief that if I know how it is done I can show you how to do it. The premise of the recipe book is that these two things are naturally balanced; the secret of the recipe book is that they’re not. The space between learning the facts about how something is done and learning how to do it always turns out to be large, at times immense.
He gets a little Zen-like at the end, but then cooking approaches Zen at times. Unless the meal’s a feast and you’re the only cook on the line.
Of course, I have my own theories on the topic, though The New Yorker doesn’t see fit to pay me for my opinion.
President and Mrs. Obama at Governors' Dinner, February 2009 (Reuters)
In the next week, we will see real-time examples of a few of the different types of feasts common to American culture: Thanksgiving — essentially a harvest feast tinged with overtones of cultural identity — and President Barack Obama’s first true State Dinner, to be held on November 24, 2009 for India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh — a feast based on the display of power and good will. Both feasts carry with them great tradition and historical precedent.
Having covered the American Thanksgiving feast in past posts (HERE, HERE, and HERE), I think a look at the State Dinner, and its role in American politics, might prove somewhat edifying.
From the beginning of the young American republic, State Dinners served the purpose of identifying political allies and providing those allies with a glimpse of American intentions. Like any sovereigns in the past, American presidents used (and still use) the bounty of their tables to win friends and awe enemies.
State Dining Room, 1850
State Dinners these days tend to be given for visiting heads of state, but the term “State Dinner” could also mean simply a lavish affair honoring special guests like members of the president’s cabinet or Congress, especially during the nineteenth century. The first State Dinner took place in May 1789, according to Good Housekeeping Magazine, no. 10:
This paper will be accompanied by one describing the White House State Dinners, the Code of Etiquette established on the occasion of the first State Dinner, which was given by President Washington, in May, 1789, in honor of the arrival of Mrs. Washington in New York, having been continuously adhered to by all the succeeding presidents, except in the exigencies of war, or other circumstances which prevented its adoption. This Code of Etiquette is carefully described, as are also the Cards of Invitation sent out and the Menu prepared for the first State Dinner of President and Mrs. Harrison, together with the precedent methods of Seating the Guests, Table Service and the After-Dinner Accomplishments. This paper is prepared by Mrs. L. B. Stelle of the Washington Woman’s Press Association.
President Andrew Johnson
When President Andrew Johnson gave a State Dinner, events transpired in a way much unlike present-day affairs:
The crowd was so great that it was impossible to enforce the customary regulations for the preservation of order and decorum. Although an unusually large detail of policemen and soldiers were on duty in anticipation of a throng, the mass of people became so dense as to be uncontrollable. The policemen stationed at the door of the Red Room to prevent the visitors from rushing through in so large a body as to inconvenience the President and his family were swept away and carried onward with the living tide to the Blue Room, where the throng was soon as dense as it was in all the other rooms and halls. The President seemed to be in excellent health and received the hosts of friends that poured in upon him with sincere pleasure and unflagging courtesy. Nearly all the first dignitaries of the land and Foreign Ministers were present, and among them were many radical Senators and Representatives. (The Story of the White House, by Esther Singleton, p. 112, 1907)
White House entertaining allowed the presidents and their wives to feature American comestibles and to set their tables with the best china and flatware.
Such dinners also enable presidents to press forward agendas of various sorts.
President and Madame Houphouet-Boigny of the Ivory Coast with President and Mrs. Kennedy
On May 22, 1962, long before the Civil Rights Act ever came about, President and Mrs. Kennedy hosted President and Madame Houphouet-Boigny of the Ivory Coast. Although President Houphouet-Boigny ran his country as a dictatorship, history sees him in a fairly benevolent light. Certainly at the time, most of the African Americans in the White House walked in only through the service doors.
Nowadays, the menus and table décor at State Dinners undergo stringent vetting by the State Department, as well as the embassy of the country being honored. That way, the White House kitchen can be assured there will be no problems with allergies and that none of the colors and flowers used in table settings will be offensive to the guests, perhaps having special meanings in their culture.
Since India’s independence from Great Britain, American presidents have welcomed several Indian heads of state. This pictorial rendition of some these visits provides historical background for the upcoming visit by India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh
This will be second time in recent history that Prime Minister Singh enjoys the hospitality of the American people in their house, so to speak.
In 2005, President George W. Bush welcomed Prime Minister Singh; the menu that evening included:
Chilled Asparagus Soup
Chappellet Chardonnay Napa Valley 2003
Pan-Roasted Halibut with Ginger-Carrot Butter
Basmati Rice with Pistachios and Currants
Herbed Summer Vegetables
Trio of Celery Hearts, Leaves and Roots
Bibb Lettuce Salad
Mango, Chocolate-Cardamom, and Cashew Ice Creams
Chef Marcus Samuelsson
Chef Marcus Samuelsson — cookbook author,* executive chef, and co-owner of the acclaimed New York restaurant Aquavit and a naturalized American citizen born in Ethiopia and raised in Sweden — will be cooking for the Obamas on November 24, 2009, along with the regular White House chef, Cris Comerford. No doubt Chef Samuelsson will include similar elements in his menu — like basmati rice, ginger, cardamom, and cashews that will be familiar and welcoming to Prime Minister Singh.
The State Dining Room officially seats 120 people, and the Obamas have reportedly invited 400 guests. Thus, the event will take place outside in a tent, but what a tent!
It promises, indeed, to be an affair to remember. Wish I could be a fly on the wall there, at least!
A few of many books about the presidents and their food:
An Affair to Remember: State Dinners for Home Entertaining, by Laurie G. Firestone (2006)
The President’s Table: Two Hundred Years of Dining and Diplomacy, by Barry Landau (2007)
*Chef Samuelsson’s books include:
Aquavit: And the New Scandinavian Cuisine
© 2009 C. Bertelsen
To all the wonderful readers of “Gherkins & Tomatoes”:
I would like to let you know that starting this week (11/16/2009), I will be temporarily posting two times a week — likely on Mondays and Thursdays, with a picture or a new food book announcement on the weekends when pertinent. Due to a very large and ongoing writing project, my time just doesn’t stretch as far I would like it to. And so, to continue providing you with material worth reading and visiting, I think this arrangement very suitable.
Again thank you all so much for reading and supporting “Gherkins & Tomatoes!” There’s lots more to come!
One cannot both feast and become rich.
Ashanti Proverb
Opera di M. Bartolomeo Scappi (1605)
“Feasting,” for all practical purposes, appears to be the antonym of “hunger.”
And yet, feasting is rife (ripe?) with teeming contradictions and ritualistic conventions. For some, feasting implies hunger.
Ambrose Bierce defined feasting in a rather limiting manner in his irreverent Devil’s Dictionary:
FEAST, n. A festival. A religious celebration usually signalized by gluttony and drunkenness, frequently in honor of some holy person distinguished for abstemiousness. In the Roman Catholic Church feasts are “movable” and “immovable,” but the celebrants are uniformly immovable until they are full. In their earliest development these entertainments took the form of feasts for the dead; such were held by the Greeks, under the name Nemeseia, by the Aztecs and Peruvians, as in modern times they are popular with the Chinese; though it is believed that the ancient dead, like the modern, were light eaters. Among the many feasts of the Romans was the Novemdiale, which was held, according to Livy, whenever stones fell from heaven.
What Bierce describes is termed “mortuary feast,” just one of many types of feasts.
Turkey
Feasts, like the American Thanksgiving feast, may celebrate the harvest, urging the lucky population to give thanks for having escaped famine, enabling them to escape the grip of death for another season. Feasting after the end of war, if there is any food left, offers another example of the thanksgiving feast. Many of these types of feasts now symbolize the society presenting them, providing a sense of identity. Exiles and expatriates, in particular, cling to the accoutrements of these feasts, paying exorbitant prices for food items that cost mere pennies back home. I recall many Thanksgiving feasts in far-away places, where finding a large turkey and pumpkin-like squash for “pumpkin” demanded more mettle than money.
Gluts of food provoke feasting, as in certain African and Native American cultures, as Diana Buja mentions in an excellent commentary on the subject.
But other, more predominate, attributes generally define feasts. Perhaps the most common trait of many feasts — no matter in what culture that feast may occur — has to do with underlying power plays. “Commensal hospitality” sums up the ritual gift-giving associated with feasting (think potlatches on the Northwest Coast of the United States). Politics and power aspirations drove many of the feasts recorded in old cookbooks, and many our present day table manners originated in early feasts.
Renaissance feasting gave rise eventually to banquet-management manuals, further encrusting the ritualistic aspect present in feasting.
Weddings, obviously, represented a joining of families and resources, and the past this arrangement tended to be more economic than romantic. A type of initiation feast as well, the wedding provides a glimpse into the workings of society.
Christine de Lorraine
And one of the most spectacular weddings ever to occur took place between Grand Duke Fernandino I de’ Medici to Christine de Lorraine, a niece of French king Henri III and granddaughter of Catherine de’ Medici. A true display of power and wealth, the preparations for this 1589 wedding boggle the mind. A month-long extravaganza, the wedding demanded planning and resources to accommodate thousands of people, not just guests, but workers and performers as well. Grand, inedible sugar sculptures appeared at one event, while, on Easter day, a thirty-two-course banquet satiated 280 noble women and their companions.
That wedding set a precedent for the October 5, 1600 nuptials of Maria de’ Medici and French king Henri IV. Since gathering the supplies for the wedding feast demanded more than a quick trip to the local supermarket, or even hiring a caterer to handle the food side of things, the measures taken to ensure adequate food make for fascinating contemplation. People outside the inner circle of power suffered when noble feasting was due to take place. In the case of this Medici wedding, beginning nearly a month prior to the big day, vendors in public markets could not sell eggs, poultry, or game birds and other sundry items. The Wedding Deputies co-opted all of these ingredients for the feast. On the day of the wedding, the menu included thirty cold dishes — salads, plums cut in half, beans, stuffed pastas, jellies stuffed with figs, and stewed game birds. Pastries came next, containing peacock, cranes, boars, and “dragons.” Castles made of salami and prosciutto roosters demonstrated the length to which artists got for their medium. Eel and needlefish appeared on the table, too.
Maria de' Medici
After the cold dishes, eighteen hot dishes followed, ranging from roasted game birds (ortolans, quails, pigeons, turkeys, and pheasants) to rabbit cooked alla francese in honor of the French groom, Henri IV. Combining theater with food went on for days like this.
In examining the profound dent placed on the local food supply by feasts like the Medici feasts, as well as the tribute demanded of peasants by the lords, one wonders if eating local was all that present-day local foods advocates claim? No wonder people welcomed — well, some of the time anyway — the foods and spices brought through by trade.
To be continued …
© 2009 C. Bertelsen
[A picture, and nothing more, for silent contemplation.]
Like old cookbooks? Like old recipes?
Then don’t miss this down-to-earth video, shot by Liza de Guia, entitled “The Historic Gastronomist,” about a 27-year-old Brooklyn woman named Sarah Loman who is resuscitating centuries old recipes from American history. Loman writes a food history blog called “Four Pounds Flour.”
Meet Sarah Lohman. She’s not a professional cook, nor a historian, yet what she is passionate about involves both cooking and history.
Sarah is a rare breed of hobbyist. A “historic gastronomist”. She rediscovers and recreates American recipes that went out of style hundreds of years ago. For her, it is the closest thing to time travel…reawakening her senses and opening doors to old flavors and ideas that had once been pop culture.
And it’s a hobby not without purpose. She uses these discoveries to introduce new ingredients and techniques into her cooking today. A trend, she says, that is catching on with chefs all over New York City.
food. curated. spent an afternoon with Sarah in her “kitchen lab” and at Brooklyn’s Old Stonehouse to see what a typical day of recipe testing is like…
An army marches on its stomach.
~~ Napoleon Bonaparte ~~
Unfortunately, war is the human condition. And where there is war, there is hunger.
From time immemorial, hunger has always been a weapon of war and each side will use it, if possible. An enemy’s hungry army, along with time, is often the only weapon the victor needs. “My kingdom for a horse” might better read “My kingdom for a plate of food.”
Siege of Leningrad
Techniques used historically; and more recently in conflicts in Sudan, Mozambique, Somalia, and Liberia; include siege and “scorched earth,” both of which affect soldiers as well as civilians if the soldiers end up living off the land. General William Tecumseh Sherman’s “March to the Sea” during the American Civil War is an example of the “scorched earth” policy. And one of the longest sieges of World War II, the 900-day siege of Leningrad, still causes people to shudder.
Civil War Soldiers Scrounging for Food
Why? What happens when hundreds of thousands of able-bodied soldiers are slowly starving? Mutiny is always a possibility, as George Washington almost learned during that heart-breaking winter at Valley Forge. But mutiny has to occur before the hunger has been going on too long. Otherwise, the human body and spirit are too worn down to protest much.
According to the scanty reports on the physical condition of the Iraqi POWs in Desert Storm, those men had been eating only one meal a day for weeks. Unless those meals were high in fat and rich in protein, thereby assuring an adequate energy intake, it is highly improbable that one meal per day will provide all of a soldier’s greater-than-normal nutritional needs. Stress and increased physical activity intensify nutritional needs. More than likely, Iraqi soldiers were eating foods high in carbohydrates and low in fat. In other words, foods deficient in energy, protein, and vitamins. On this dietary regimen and within a matter of days, Saddam’s army began to manifest the symptoms of slow starvation.
The first symptom, confirmed by the post-WW II studies done by Ancel Keys on human starvation at the University of Minnesota, is lethargy and a consequent decrease in work productivity. The human body simply slows down in order to conserve energy. In wartime, the implications of this are obvious: lethargic men make poor soldiers.
But there’s more. Along with the lethargy comes a decreased ability to handle stress. Again, that is hardly something a commanding officer wants in a soldier. Noises begin to bother the hungry man. He loses his ability to concentrate and plan.
Disoriented, the soldier becomes highly susceptible to food cues. He devotes most of his time, both waking and sleeping, to thinking about food. Food fantasies keep him going. Knowing this, in Desert Storm, Allied Intelligence printed up those now-famous flyers on surrendering: one side of the flyer showed Iraqi soldiers enjoying a sumptuous meal after surrendering.
But the most damaging symptom of starvation, from the point of view of a field commander, is the increasing egocentricity (or selfishness) of the starving soldier. Survival is so deeply ingrained into the human brain that starving people simply do not care about anyone or anything other than themselves. The starving soldier loses his desire and ability to participate in group activities. He forgets what he is fighting for. Once again, hardly the perfect situation when a war is on.
Going hand-in-hand with starvation is disease. Starving people suffer from serious intestinal disorders and skin lesions.
Meals Ready Eat, Brownie (Photo credit: Phillip Stewart)
In fact, in years past, many troop deaths were due to disease and not combat. For example, during the Spanish-American War, of 5,462 troop deaths, only 379 were combat-related. The rest resulted from the poor food available to the U.S. Army in those days. Fortunately, while U.S. armed forces today may not be eating the same menu as that found at high-class restaurants, during Desert Storm, they ate far better than did the Iraqi army. Not surprisingly, Iraqi POWs manifested some starvation-related disease symptoms. Because large numbers of POWs were taken, allied medical personnel had their hands full in trying to prevent lethal epidemics among the prisoners.
The development of MREs (Meals Ready to Eat and K-Rations, which Ancel Keys helped to develop) changed the face of warfare.
History teaches us lessons. In every war, and in every event, there is something to be learned. We know that hunger can be a lethal weapon, for we have wielded it ourselves.
M.F.K. Fisher, in reality a philosopher posing as a food writer, put it very well when she wrote,
I believe that one of the most dignified ways we are capable of, to assert and then reassert our dignity in the face of poverty and war’s fears and pains, is to nourish ourselves with all possible skill, delicacy, and ever-increasing enjoyment. And with our gastronomical growth will come, inevitably, knowledge and perception of a hundred other things, but mainly of ourselves. Then Fate, even tangled as it is with cold wars as well as hot, cannot harm us.
(Now that we know something of hunger, the preciousness of feasting becomes clear.)
For further reading:
William C. Davis, A Taste for War: The Culinary History of the Blue and the Gray (2003).
Darra Goldstein, “Women Under Siege: Leningrad 1941 – 1942.”
© 2009 C. Bertelsen
In the third never-ending winter,
a famine struck the land.
You had nibbled me from inside -
emptiness pulled my chest
towards the spine and
it sunk from yearning.
From Taming Dragons
Copyright Michael Fay
Laughing and joking, we all stood expectantly around my sister-in-law as she stirred the grøt, watching the bubbling white mixture burble lazily in the pot. Dollops of the gluey pudding in bowls, small mounds of sugar, speckles of cinnamon, and melting golden butter resting on the surface of the cooling white gel — for the six children the sight brought back memories of their stern immigrant Danish farmer father and their soft-hearted Norwegian mother.
In a way, it was a moment tying them all to the traditional human past of hunger, a split-second connection with all the ways in which cooks sought to feed their families even when the pantry offered little more than the Holy Trinity of the ancient European farmhouse: milk, grain, and fat. A true hunger food, filling, enough to keep the breath of life going, at least a little longer.
Called simply grøt in that Wisconsin Norwegian farm community, traditionally in Norway Rømmegrøt (made with sour cream) and Flotegrøt (made with milk) were summer/fall dishes, because some observers believe cows stopped producing milk in winter, certainly possible when traditional animal husbandry and lower natural light caused a decrease in milk production. Rømmegrøt, now served at Christmas time as a special dish, started out as a fancier version of the traditional peasant gruel made with barley, oats, or rye. Rømmegrøt, in fact, was the star dish of the autumn harvest festival, a rich man’s version of the country staple of grøt, flour boiled with milk, dating back to ancient times. Rømmegrøt also appeared at weddings and Midsummer’s Eve. It is Norway’s national dish, as a matter of fact, and now can be made from boxed mixes.
Young Girls Eating Rømmegrøt
The specialness of it lay with the use of refined white flour, long a rich man (or woman’s) fare.
Norwegian immigrants, like my mother-in-law’s ancestors, brought the Rømmegrøt tradition with them, except that they kept the original use of the dish, as sustenance for peasants on cold Nordic nights. What they usually made was Flotegrøt, and there was nothing fancy or festive about it. Served for supper after milking cows in the steaming barn and the walk across the crunchy ice-crusted snow to the house, the big oil furnace blazing away while icicles formed inside the bedroom windows upstairs, Flotegrøt fed six children on more than one freezing Wisconsin night. Unless the meal centered around cream and bread, served in much the same way, topped with sugar and cinnamon.
So old is this dish, at least when made with whole grains, it’s only natural to wonder how the Viking raids might have disseminated some of the elements of this gruel, for that is what it is.
Grøt
Serves 4 – 6
3 cups whole milk
1 cup heavy whipping cream
1 cup flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
Butter
Cinnamon
Sugar
Bring 2 cups of the milk to a soft boil for 5 minutes. Sift and slowly stir in ¼ cup flour. Keep heat on low while adding the remainder of the flour and milk and the cream intermittently. Add salt. After adding all the milk and flour, bring mixture to a boil over low heat and cook for an additional 5 minutes while stirring. (Add more flour if you prefer a thicker pudding.) This porridge/pudding is thin and light. Ladle Rømmegrøt onto individual dinner plates or bowls. Sprinkle sugar and cinnamon on top of the pudding. Don’t forget the smørøye (eye of butter — translation) — or a dab of butter.
© 2009 C. Bertelsen
A hungry people listens not to reason, nor cares for justice, nor is bent by any prayers. [Lat., Nec rationem patitur, nec aequitate mitigatur nec ulla prece flectitur, populus esuriens.] De Brevitate Vitoe (XVIII), Seneca (Lucius Annaeus Seneca)
Chronic hunger is something that most of us in the United States will never really know.*
Yet we, like most humans, fear it. Just as people have feared it for centuries. That fear permeated ancient myths and led to such collective cultural commonplaces as the black horse of Apocalypse, generally known as Famine:
When the Lamb opened the third seal, I heard the third living creature say, “Come!” I looked, and there before me was a black horse! Its rider was holding a pair of scales in his hand. Then I heard what sounded like a voice among the four living creatures, saying, “A quart of wheat for a day’s wages, and three quarts of barley for a day’s wages, and do not damage the oil and the wine!”
— Revelation 6:5-6 NIV
Goading people to find food, to prepare it, and to eat it, this primal urge affected what happened within the household, as well as the larger group.
In early human groups, as Richard Wrangham suggests in Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, the practice cooking did much to alleviate the time spent eating and probably led to social contracts between males and females, the beginning of human society.
The Gleaners, by François Millet, 1857
For the individual, the consequences of hunger are obvious: unless adequate calories make up any deficit, death soon occurs, unless the body adjusts to a lower-but-consistent supply of food. For households, hunger and death ensuing from it leads to disruptions in production, familial structure, and obligatory food-related ties within the local community, such as marriage, funerals, and birth celebrations. For societies and cultures, prolonged and catastrophic hunger create disruption and dissension up to a certain level of caloric deprivation; after that people tend to be too weak to protest food shortages vigorously or to do much to remedy the situation. Since the wealthy generally enjoyed vaster stores against deep hunger, elements of power, privilege and class-related entitlement enter into the equation. (Feast days in early Europe provide an interesting view of a tenuous equality between serfs and lords, which later disappeared as the mocking and ridicule became too threatening to the aristocracy.)
It’s when the breakdown in food procurement occurs — for whatever reason at the individual, familial, or societal level — that hunger becomes the goad, the impetus toward change. And it’s then that class differences become glaringly apparent.
Seated Peasant Woman, by Camille Pisarro
Trying to read the history of hunger is difficult. Sara Millman and Robert W. Kates sum up the dilemma beautifully by saying, “The history of hunger is for the most part unwritten. The hungry rarely write history, and historians are rarely hungry.”**
One of the most interesting and telling accounts of hunger comes from the pen of a Bolognese cleric named Giovan Battista Segni. In his Discorso sopra la carestia, e fame (Discourse on Hunger and Famine) (1591), Segni relates the differences between the rich and poor in times of famine. The following paragraph, enumerating the possible ingredients for poor people’s bread, contrasts greatly with that recommended for the wealthy, who might be “forced” to eat whole wheat bread instead of their usual white fare:
Fine sawdust of young trees, such as pears, apples, an cherries, and their bark dried in the oven and pulverized. A quantity of this powder, combined with equal amounts of prepared copuch grass and bran, and a cauldron of mashed turnips, well sieved, and fermented fennel, forms a kind of bread which when well cooked will sustain the poor. From vine-shoots gathered when green, dried, and pulverized, chestnuts, acorns, flour made from any kind of fodder and legumes combined in equal amounts, mixed with boiled pumpkins or spent grapes, first fermented and then well cooked, you get a sort of bread. From the roots of grasses such as artichokes, rinci or carline (a kind of thistle), cyclamen, pan casiuoli and cabbage cores, well washed, dried and combined with an equal amount of couch grass or flour of legumes or fodder and well cooked, you can make bread and sustain yourself.
Photo credit: Antonio Ilardo
A pasta recipe tells a story about this sustenance. Smoked pasta, as in the highly popular spaghetti di grano arso con le vongole (burnt-flour spaghetti with clams), comes from poor women gleaning stray wheat kernels from after threshing, roasting the grains before making them into flour.
A food of extreme poverty. And a recipe for social change.
Some resources for further reading and thinking on the complicated issue of hunger in history:
A couple of excellent Web sites on famine foods:
Purdue University’s database of famine foods
Famine Food Field Guide (Ethiopia) with a list of plants by catagories
Books (of course!):
The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700-2100: Europe, America, and the Third World (Cambridge Studies in Population, Economy and Society in Past Time), by Robert William Fogel (2004)
Hunger and History: The Influence of Hunger on Human History, by E. Parmalee Prentice (1951)
Hunger and History: The Impact of Changing Food Production and Consumption Patterns on Society (Studies in Interdisciplinary History), by Robert I. Rotberg and Theodore K. Rabb (1985)
Hunger: An Unnatural History, by Sharman Apt Russell (2006)
Hunger: A Modern History, by James Vernon (2007)
*Yet hunger exists, and persists. Between 1968 and 1977, the United States Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs (also known as the McGovern Committee) studied the issue of hunger in America. United States Department of Agriculture statistics from 2007 reveal that 36.2 million people lived in food-insecure households.
**Hunger in History: Food Shortage, Poverty, and Deprivation by Lucile F. Newman, ed. (1995). For an account by a sufferer of hunger, see also Hunger As a Factor in Human Affairs, by Pitirim A. Sorokin (1975, based on a 1922 manuscript written by the author who experienced firsthand the great Russian famine of 1921. A Russian sociologist, Sorokin later taught at Harvard and chaired the department of sociology there, which he founded.) In addition, In Memory’s Kitchen: A Legacy from the Women of Terezín, edited by Cara De Silva (1996), provides a tangible example of the impact of hunger on people’s mental processes, in this case Czechoslovakian Jewish women held by the Nazis at Terezín (Theresienstadt) concentration camp.
© 2009 C. Bertelsen
Starvation and Hunger, Humankind’s Constant Companions: A Pre-Thanksgiving Meditation
Now hunger and [Erysichthon's] belly’s deep abyss exhausted his ancestral wealth, but still hunger was unexhausted and the flame of greed blazed unappeased . . . When his wicked frenzy had consumed all sustenance and for the dire disease provision failed, the ill-starred wretch began to gnaw himself, and dwindled bite by bite as his own flesh supplied his appetite.
~~ Ovid, The Metamorphoses
Starvation, by gwenboul
Examining hunger and starvation in individuals is not an easy task, for without body measurements, food-recall questionnaires, blood tests, or any of the other standard tools used by nutritionists to measure nutritional status, accuracy may be fleeting. But if we lack a sure-fire understanding of what happens in individuals, examining the impact of hunger and starvation on populations — in this case, historically — proves to be even more problematical.
But we need to begin with the individual, for a number of reasons.
According to a 1940s classic study of human starvation performed by Ancel Keys at the University of Minnesota, food deprivation impacts greatly on human behavior and goes far beyond the usual marker of weight loss.
How does starvation differ from hunger?
Starvation is the lengthy and continuous deprivation of food, a condition in which the absence of food forces the body to feed on itself. Causes of starvation include famine or other food shortages, war, fasting, systemic illness, social and religious beliefs, or abnormalities of the mucosal lining of the digestive system.
Hunger can be loosely defined as “‘not enough food’ to satisfy body needs. It results in ravenous hunger, eating nearly anything available and lots of it. Eventually, the body adjusts, but the appetite doesn’t.” Causes of hunger include those given for starvation, but more often than the etiology of hunger tends to be economic.
Ovid, by Luca Signorello (ca. 1445-1523)
The Romans knew hunger and made it a goddess, Fames, diametrically opposed to Ceres (Demeter). Ovid describes her in The Metamorphoses 8. 791 ff:
… set out in search of Fames (Hunger) and found her in a stubborn stony field, grubbing with nails and teeth the scanty weeds. Her hair was coarse, her face sallow, her eyes sunken; her lips crusted and white; her throat scaly with scurf. Her parchment skin revealed the bowels within; beneath her hollow loins jutted her withered hips; her sagging breasts seemed hardly fastened to her ribs; her stomach only a void; her joints wasted and huge, her knees like balls, her ankles grossly swollen.
No matter where in the world — or when in history — the human body needs at least two things in order to survive, to prevent and surmount starvation. Those two things are adequate nutrient intake—protein, vitamins, minerals—and sufficient energy to spare the protein in the diet and to make sure that the brain, which uses only glucose, is well supplied without metabolizing any protein intake. [Without enough calories in the diet, the body begins to catabolize — or break down — muscle mass into the energy necessary for the body to function. If enough calories exist in the diet, this breaking down of protein does not occur.]
In the 1940s, when Dr. Ancel Keys studied the effects of starvation on 36 young men, all completely healthy both mentally and physically, he worked with subjects registered as conscientious objectors during World War II, providing them with a diet very low in calories.* The objective was to determine what impact the food conditions in wartime Europe had on the people there. It is unlikely that any such study could ethically be carried out today, because of restrictions on the use of human subjects in medical research. For that reason, Keys’s study is all the more important. The Keys study allows scientists and others to learn about starvation in a controlled situation, rather than by extrapolating data from the so-called “natural” starvation that results during conditions of famine and war. And since the mental health of Keys’s potential subjects was also tested via standard tools, with only the most mentally stable men allowed into the study, psychological testing eliminated the potential variable of pre-existing mental illness.
Exactly what happens physiologically in starvation, other than the expected weight loss?
First to be lost are fat deposits and large quantities of water. The liver, spleen, and muscle tissue then sustain the greatest loss of weight. The heart and brain show little loss proportionately. The starving person becomes weak and lethargic. Body temperature, pulse rate, blood pressure, and basal metabolism continue to fall as starvation progresses, and death eventually ensues, unless feeding resumes.
Essentially a starving person moves from what medical jargon terms “positive nitrogen balance” to “negative nitrogen balance.” In other words, the body begins to catabolize, or break down, protein in the muscles, as mentioned above.
Then, as the body seeks an energy source for the nervous system, primarily the brain, the body begins to burn fat. Although body fat cannot be broken down to glucose and thus provide a source of “food” for the brain, by breaking down fatty acids, which make up body fat, the body can, however, convert glycerol (with its three carbons) to glucose. But this is a very insufficient and inefficient source of energy. A starving person then goes into ketosis, which essentially means that an excessive amount of ketone bodies are circulating in the blood and present in the urine. Negative aspects of long-term ketosis include kidney damage, among others. (Ketone bodies result from the breakdown of fats.) This scenario accounts for the continuing craze for low-carbohydrate diets; people go into ketosis, after losing a large amount of weight at the beginning — chiefly water weight and lean tissue mass, which is rapidly regained when re-feeding occurs, as Keys discovered in the post-starvation part his study.
Photos from Life magazine
In the beginning, some of the typical physical symptoms of the starving subjects in Keys’s study included fatigue, muscle soreness, and hunger pangs. Then the following symptoms appeared with regularity: gastrointestinal discomfort, dizziness, decreased need for sleep, hypersensitivity to light and noise, headaches, fainting, hair loss, poor motor control/clumsiness, decreased cold tolerance, visual disturbances (inability to focus, eye aches, “spots before the eyes”), auditory disturbances, and paresthesia or tingling in the hands and feet. According to Keys, one of the most noticeable symptoms turned out to be extreme emaciation in the face. Keys emphasized that these symptoms illustrate the extremes to which the body will go to preserve and produce energy for the brain’s continued functioning.
Thus even though Keys’s work took place over 60 years ago, his research still offers insights into the impact of constant caloric deprivation on individuals, populations, and, most interesting of all, on how the food deprivation of those individuals and populations may have in turn affected historical events and trends.
To be continued …
© 2009 C. Bertelsen
Great Famine, China, 1946 (Photo credit: George Silk)
When it comers to food, we humans live in a paradox these days. In the West, there’s too much food — as long as one has money with which to buy it — and because of that excess, we begin to look like the Michelin Man or the Pillsbury Doughboy. And on the flip side lies true hunger and its cousin, starvation, usually in Africa and other places where money, transportation, and just plain decent soil (not to mention rain) persistent in short supply.
Hunger and starvation pose complications, and always have been there throughout the sweep of human history.
With Thanksgiving coming up, it seems quite appropriate to examine the role of hunger and starvation in human history. After all, we humans consciously and conceptually know about death. In today’s Western world, side-stepping death’s sting is ultimately the major concern. Obviously, this proved true in the past as well.
Avoiding death requires food.
So, in theory, the history of humankind really isn’t just about kings and queens, battles and sieges: it’s about food. Most human activity boils down to this: procuring, storing, and eating enough food.
Hunger is, and was, a powerful weapon.
A modern irony lies in the self-starvation and meat avoidance so prevalent among certain groups today. That’s not to say that the same phenomenon didn’t occur in past centuries. But today’s luxury choices in food almost make a mockery of the culinary hardship that birthed the very holiday we’re about to celebrate, itself really based upon a myth, as we shall see.
All the lavish writings about food, the chronicling of banquets, the latest “easy” recipes, the gorgeous food photographs, the Twittering about “what I ate at Chez Jean,” hide a fact that, well, we try to ignore. The Bard of Cincinnati coined the perfect saying. When paraphrased, this phrase really implies that humans have only a thin layer of soil between themselves and starvation.
Captain John Smith
We shall begin with a passage concerning Captain John Smith of Jamestown, Virginia:
1607. Being thus left to our fortunes, it fortuned that within ten days scarce ten among us could either go or well stand, such extreme weakness and sickness oppressed us. And thereat none need marvel if they consider the cause and reason, which was this. While the ships stayed, our allowance was somewhat bettered by a daily proportion of biscuits, which the sailors would pilfer to sell, give, or exchange with us for money, sassafras, furs, or love. But when they departed, there remained neither tavern, beer, house, nor place of relief, but the common kettle. Had we been as free from all sins as gluttony and drunkenness, we might have been canonized for saints; but our president [Wingfield] would never have been admitted for engrossing to his private [use] oatmeal, sack, aquavitae, beef, eggs, or what not, but the kettle; that indeed he allowed equally to be distributed, and that was half a pint of wheat, and as much barley boiled with water for a man a day, and this having fried some twenty-six weeks in the ship’s hold, contained as many worms as grains; so that we might truly call it rather so much bran than corn, our drink was water, our lodgings castles in the air.
With this lodging and diet, our extreme toil in bearing and planting palisades so strained and bruised us, and our continual labor in the extremity of the heat had so weakened us, as were cause sufficient to have made us as miserable in our native country, or any other place in the world. (From Generall Historie of Virginia)
Of course some authors beg to differ, chiefly Carville V. Earle.*
A bibliography of hunger, famine and starvation. Somewhat dated, but still pertinent.
*Earle, Carville V. “Environment, Disease, and Mortality in Early Virginia.” In The Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century: Essays on Anglo-American Society, eds. Thad W. Tate and David L. Ammerman, pp. 96-125. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1979.
To be continued …
© 2009 C. Bertelsen
Photo credit: Tracy Hunter
[A picture, and nothing more, for silent contemplation.]
St. Catherine's College, Oxford, 2009 (Photo credit: Nick Atkins Photography)
The Oxford Food Symposium 2009, from an article by Corby Kummer of The Atlantic.
The 2010 Symposium will take place in July 9 – 11, at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford, England; the conference topic is very timely — “Cured, Fermented, and Smoked Foods.” January 15, 2010 marks the deadline for proposals for talks.
Guess what I want for my birthday? (Hint: It involves silver wings and Guinness.)
Photo credit: Annie Schlechter
Marco Polo returned to Italy from his Chinese travels in 1296. The myth, legend, what have you, credits him with introducing pasta into Italy’s culinary repertoire. But Marco Polo did NOT bring pasta to Italy. And 73-year-old Italian author Oretta Zanini de Vita wants you to know that, immediately, upfront and center.
Zanini de Vita says,
Dried pasta, the kind made with durum wheat, is found in Italy from about A.D. 800. It was in fact the Muslim occupiers of Sicily who spread the manufacturing and drying technique.
But the Chinese beg to differ, and that’s another story …*
In the ongoing search for the roots of cuisine comes another branch: Oretta Zanini de Vita’s Encyclopedia of Pasta (California Studies in Food and Culture series, 2009). Translated from the original Italian by Maureen B. Fant, this particular offering far surpasses previous efforts like The Cook’s Encyclopedia of Pasta and so forth.
Photo credit: Alexander von Halem
Ostensibly a catalog of pasta shapes, because — as Zanini de Vita says “Pasta may be the unchallenged symbol of Italian food, yet no in-depth research as ever been done on its many shapes [she found over 1300 names for pastas].” — Encyclopedia of Pasta comes in part from oral history, adding a dimension to food studies research that is usually missing. After all, unless time travel turns out to be part of the new technology, no one can go back and talk to the peasants standing outside the manor house, watching the sides of beef and haunches of venison being carried in for great feasts.
4000-Year-old Chinese Pasta (Photo credit: K.B.K. Teo, E. Minoux et al.)
Most scholars rely on early printed texts, but knowing that an important historical source would soon disappear, Zanini de Vita chose another route. In her own journey, not unlike the wanderlust-infected Marco Polo, she traveled across Italy for ten years, talking
with samplings of very old people, trying to jog their memories about the pasta-making traditions and rituals of the past. … Their stories vividly confirmed … until just after World War II, the country had eaten ‘green,’ that is, only vegetable soup, with pasta a s a rule reserved for the tables of the middle and upper classes in towns and cities and only occasionally for the feast-day tables of the poor.
In addition to the bibliography, bilingual indices, and glossary, the result is 290 pages of alphabetically arranged entries, giving the name of the pasta shape and its type, ingredients, alternative names, how served, where found, and remarks about the pasta made by the informants. No pretty colorful pictures gloss the text, but lovely hand-drawn illustrations by Luciana Marini grace many entries. An ample bibliography of Italian-language works, as well as notes and a glossary, provide the necessary scholarly touch to a work that a reader will actually want to read while burning the midnight oil. Like all good literature, Encyclopedia of Pasta tells a good story, or rather, many great stories about a food that symbolizes, frankly, a collective nostalgic myth surrounding Italian cuisine.
Regarding a stuffed pasta called Ofelle, Zanini de Vita writes:
The word offa used to mean the Roman spelt cake that was offered to the gods. Aeneas himself, when he came face to face with Cerberus at the gates to the underworld, managed to put the terrible dog to sleep by giving him an ‘offa made sleepy with honey and drugged meal.’
And in the many names and shapes of pasta lie a lot of history. Just one example serves to illustrate this aspect of pasta shapes: Cappellacci dei Briganti:
The name, literally ‘brigands’ hats, refers to the conical hat with upturned brim that was part of the everyday uniform of the briganti, from brigantaggio, a bloody and disorderly social and political movement active in the Mezzogiorno during the unification of Italy and the first decade of the Kingdom of Italy.
Among the complaints a reader might have about Encyclopedia of Pasta is that there are no numerically detailed recipes, much like many old cookbooks. However, the enterprising cook could take the list of ingredients and the notes in the “How Made” section and attempt to reproduce the tastes of the past. Another question concerns the reliability of her informants, but the copious bibliography indicates that much textual research went into Encyclopedia of Pasta as well as oral history. Yet more needs to be done, as Oretta Zanini de Vita suggests:
[T]his is a first, hesitant attempt to catalog an unalienable heritage that belongs to all Italians. Perhaps there are some courageous and willing souls to carry it on.
Food of the gods. Maybe.
*The Marco Polo legend, according to Zanini de Vita, began in 1938 in Minneapolis, a “marketing gimmick,” thanks to L. B. Maxwell, for a trade publication, Macaroni Journal. For more about the Chinese/pasta connection, see Houyuan Lu et al. “Culinary archaeology: Millet noodles in Late Neolithic China“. Nature 437: 967–968, October 13, 2005.
© 2009 C. Bertelsen
