Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History (California Studies in Food and Culture) (Volume 43)

Rachel Laudan has given us an important and ground-breaking book. There is profit in it for the general reader who is just curious about the main topic, cuisine; but also for more specialized readers of social history, philosophical anthropology, the history of ideas, and the sociology of religion. The farmer does not give us food. “A sheaf of wheat is no more food,” she asserts, “than a boll of cotton is a garment.” It is a major theme of the book that farming may give us raw materials, but techniques (and importantly, ideas -- “culinary philosophy,” as she has it) of cooking are what give us food. It is, thus, futile to go on about how “natural” this or that foodstuff may be; we no more tear meat from bone with our teeth than we use them to grind the grass seeds that became our corn (maize, or wheat, or whatnot). Human labor, and ingenuity, stand between Nature and dinner. (This is even true of “raw” foods.)Laudan suggests that, by definition, all food is processed food -- from developing the techniques of settled agriculture to the promotion (or prohibition) of certain foods according to ideas (nicely summarized in tables 1.1-1.5) about such things as the four humors, the four or five elements, maintaining harmony in the universe, and sacrality -- and, more recently, as the songwriter said, while “We Are Eating Foods for Health.” (Modern theories of health and diet turn out to be just the latest in a whole series of fashions which change with the checkered changes of ideas in science and cosmology, since Babylon as it were.) Food may be “good to think,” but in any case it is not just material fuel, it is a thing shaped by ideas and their changes. One particularly interesting thesis is that there was a broad movement, across different civilizations, from eating meats in religions of sacrifice, to different sorts of diets under religions of individual salvation. So one will read about Hindu, Buddhist, Islamic, and Catholic cuisines. It would be mistaken to think such changes are merely the direct product of sect or dogma; for the religious cuisines followed differential patterns already set within their respective empires (hence, the title). Thus there are also Roman, Achaemenid, Mauryan, and Han cuisines. Empires need armies; armies, notoriously, march on their stomachs; and so empire as well as urbanization will drive innovation in foods, especially those that can be produced in bulk and transported over long-haul.One of the chief general merits of Cuisine & Empire is that it provides welcome relief from the usual sort of decline from Eden narrative -- often in support of the new new diet fad du mois: the Paleo, etc. -- about the evolution of foodways, the sort which leaps easily from an undifferentiated primordial past to the industrial present. (There is a similar problem with much sociobiological speculation about the evolution of sex.) The book starts, not with some presumed human psychology, but rather with historical differentiation of foodstuffs then goes on to trace convergences, driven by factors like urbanization & military growth which involve empires; though with due attention to continued differentiation in the long process of globalization (major empires converged upon wheat, but did so in different ways; what “Chinese food” is depends at least as much on what the locals’ foodstuffs and preferences are, as what the immigrant Chinese restauranteurs may bring to the table in Lima or Manhattan or London).If our foodways have not declined from Eden, they have not exactly ascended to paradise either, though Laudan thinks that overall we have made reasonable improvement. She is equally critical when it comes to Romantic agrarian nostalgia for an imagined pre-industrial past, and to the thesis that all is converging upon a bland uniform McDonaldization.The scope of the narrative (from the origins of settled agriculture -- particularly grain cultivation -- to the present, and across a range of civilizations) as well as its attention to the secular consequences of major religious change, and the importance of empire army and city, put me in mind of Max Weber. Likewise, Laudan ventures some generalizations: for instance, about the decline of sacrifice; or in the observation that the vast gulf fixed in empires between high cuisine for the few but humble cuisine for the many now survives mainly in the developing world, while in the developed world, since the 19th c., practically everyone eats a “middling cuisine” of one sort or another. The book’s emphasis on the decline of sacrificial religion puts me in mind of Robert Bellah’s theses about religious evolution. Its critique of nostalgia for what were actually quite harsh conditions in the pre-industrial past is reminiscent of C P Snow. The book is well-organized, with clearly-written summaries at transition points. (Here it bests Weber.) Nonetheless it will repay close and slow reading. All this is not to say it is not a fun read, for it is. I learned lots of neat little tidbits of history: high table was a secularization of the altar as banqueting became a secularization of the mass; it was once believed in India that sweets and unripe fruit could poison children; the words for recipe & prescription had been identical; “flour” was “flower;” Jews bought Crisco as an alternative to lard, while Quakers flogged chocolate as an alternative to alcohol (followed by Milton Hershey, a Mennonite); some experts in 19th c. America agreed that fruits and vegetables would cause fever and even cholera, and that pickles should be prohibited as a gateway drug (leading children down the pathway to demon rum); chicken-fried steak is but the baser form of Wiener Schnitzel. My breakfast tamale this morning was actually a “maize dumpling” -- well, yes it is; can’t regard tamales the same way again.

A more comprehensive Gastronomic history of communities on all five continents - rather than just northern hemisphere/America centered accounts.Laudan also addresses a range of 'cultural cuisines' that underline the emergence of different concepts of 'good food'. Her perspective of religious communities makes a change from biological/nutrition centred 'developments', but still emphasizes economic advantages of certain foods, particularly grains.The thesis, about cooking over time, does not begin early enough, i.e. when humans first chose fire, for the necessity of 'cooking' as the author's starting point. When we can be more inclusive of the dollar driven choices that households must make every day to consider other influences on choice, we will have a broader history of TASTES . Fischler's L'Homnivore (2001) sets us on a path for considering the cultural basis of choices.

This is a great book. It uses a synoptic view of cooking to shine a searchlight on the development of human culture by an analysis of the development of cooking; what we cook and how we cook. The author states, in the introduction, that the book "takes seriously the fact that we are the animals that cook." "How [the book] asks, has cooking evolved over the past five thousand years?" If we examine this history we can gain insight into the evolution of human societies. That is the task that the author has set for herself and for the still fairly recent discipline of looking at and looking into the history of food.Laudan writes that "history is more than a pile of facts. It also seeks patterns in those facts." Those patterns lead to understanding the subject matter being examined. The development of human societies is something worthy of study and understanding. This is a wonderful introduction to this way of thinking.

The world has long needed a comprehensive, accurate, up-to-date history of cuisine. This is the book--but it is much more. It traces the sweep of cuisine through history: diffusion, trade, religious influences, migrations of peoples, and, of course, empires. Foodways have a history, and it involves world contacts. Globalism is not new; wheat spread over the Old World by 2000 BCE, and maize did the same (a bit later) in the New. Spices were traded from what is now Indonesia to ancient China and to the Roman Empire. Dr. Laudan traces influences over thousands of miles. One conclusion I take away from this is that it's silly to talk about "hybrid" cuisines--cuisines have been meeting and merging for thousands of years, and "fusion cuisine" is a term that could be applied to all of them.This book is also very well written--Dr. Laudan is a real stylist.Everyone interested in a thorough, deep history of food needs to read this work!

Kudos to the reader who can devour this in one go - there are many ideas and details here that tantalize - some of the writing satisfies and some leaves you wanting. At times, passages are just line lists and have a social studies textbook generality, something along the lines of "This culture ate beef, vegetables, bread, fruit, pastries, fish and drank wine, beer, tea and coffee." I recommend reading the last chapter first before diving into the beginning as it keeps the reader focused on the author's thesis/theses. Otherwise, the chronology and geographic organization of the book has only varying levels of success in keeping the narrative organized.

Provocative questions, interesting arguments, very well written and an easy read.

This book could go wrong but does not i want to know what has been going on in the culinary sense and this book gives some sort of insight

Livre trés interessant ,à lire si vous voulez avoir votre vision sur l'alimentation et ce que vous mangez en particulier.