Last updated on May 24, 2015
Food historian and philosopher of science and technology Rachel Laudan, whose book Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History just came out in paperback this last month, has a great article in the latest issue of Jacobin magazine.
There are just too many excellent tidbits to Rachel’s article that I have to quote many of them. There’s this:
It is a mark of sophistication to bemoan the steel roller mill and supermarket bread while yearning for stone ground flour and brick ovens; to seek out heirloom apples and pumpkins while despising modern tomatoes and hybrid corn; to be hostile to agronomists who develop high-yielding modern crops and to home economists who invent new recipes for General Mills.
And this:
Culinary Luddism involves more than just taste. Since the days of the counterculture, it has also presented itself as a moral and political crusade.
And then there’s this:
As an historian I cannot accept the account of the past implied by Culinary Luddism, a past sharply divided between good and bad, between the sunny rural days of yore and the gray industrial present. My enthusiasm for Luddite kitchen wisdom does not carry over to their history, any more than my response to a stirring political speech inclines me to accept the orator as scholar.
The Luddites’ fable of disaster, of a fall from grace, smacks more of wishful thinking than of digging through archives. It gains credence not from scholarship but from evocative dichotomies: fresh and natural versus processed and preserved; local versus global; slow versus fast: artisanal and traditional versus urban and industrial; healthful versus contaminated and fatty. History shows, I believe, that the Luddites have things back to front.
That food should be fresh and natural has become an article of faith. It comes as something of a shock to realize that this is a latter-day creed. For our ancestors, natural was something quite nasty. Natural often tasted bad.
This is the kind of article I wish I could have written myself. Head over to the Jacobin website for the whole thing.