Last updated on May 28, 2011
Empires of Food, by Evan D.G. Fraser and Andrew Rimas. I cannot remember who pointed me to this book. This is too bad, because I would really like to properly thank that person. I read this book in order to have a better understanding of how food prices might affect political instability. In this sense, the book was a bit of a letdown (the classic is probably still Rudé’s The Crowd in History), but Fraser and Rimas take the reader on a grand tour of the political economy of food from which I learned quite a bit.
Food riots, for example, are an early warning signal of famine, and volcanic eruptions in a given year are often associated with bad harvests the next year. The last few chapters of the book constitute an interesting takedown of “local and organic” food as well as of Slow Food, the movement founded by Carlo Petrini in 1985. Fraser and Rimas write:
“But contradictions abound. For example, while Slow Food champions the idea of regional distinctions — rival cheeses in Campania, for instance — such distinctions aren’t static and never have been. Ideas of eating are as fluid as the Valpolicella poured at a Mexican restaurant in Vermont. Apart from inside a patch or two of Amazonian bush, or up a forgotten New Guinean gully, there’s no such thing as purely regional cuisine. Promiscuity in foodstuffs is part of human nature. Recall the Stone Age merchants who trucked Middle Eastern wheat across the bread of Asia and laid the foundations for four thousand years of noodles in China.
Take zuppa del contadino (‘peasant soup’), a traditional dish from Petrini’s own home ground of Piedmont. It’s a cluster of rude imports. The chickens that made the broth came to Italy from China by way of India. The tomatoes that give it zing and color are famously South American. Even the garlic — southern Europe’s lordly old flavoring agent — is an immigrant from Central Asia.
What, then, is authentic? Surely the very concept of peasant ‘tradition’ is ridiculous if you take history into account.”
Empires of Food is an excellent overview of how food has been produced, how it has been traded, and how it has been consumed throughout history and across countries. As such, everyone with an interest in food policy should read it.