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"The Oldest Technologies"

Review Article by Harry Rand

The Cambridge Complete World History of Food, 2 vols

Kenneth F. Kiple & Kriemhild Coneè Ornelas, eds.
(Cambridge University Press) 2000, $175

Two years ago the massive (3200 pages in two volumes) and grandly titled The Cambridge Complete World History of Food was published.(1) A compendium on food, there isn't a single recipe in it. Yet, despite what might seem a subject worthy, at best, of aesthetic consideration, this work has a lot to tell the readers of Leonardo about technology and art. That may come as a surprise to the book's authors as much as to Leonardo's readers. In recent years it has become fashionable, almost irresistible, to link the word "technology" with advanced (often electronic) devices and procedures. The allure of new software and hardware direct our attentions as gold or spices lured our ancestors into new territory; we conceive our best selves in pursuit of, or as the progenitors of, bio-tech or electronics and its computational gifts. This may prove an inflated estimate of our accomplishments and the spirit of the era.

Every generation over-rates itself, exulting in the efficiency it has introduced. The horse collar was as great a breakthrough as the invention of soap; the daring of the flying buttress or the potentiality of paper, both changed the world; the wheel and inclined ramps to haul stones made the world a better place for hominids. But, today, only specialists conjure the past according to these milestones of technology. Mostly, the past is furnished with other, gaudier, images and the personalities of the inventors are, sadly, over-shadowed. We, too, happily mislead ourselves about our `ultimate' accomplishments.

The present era will probably not be known as the epoch of the computer or the new electronic technology. We must disenthrall from the allure of the future and reckon only what has actually been accomplished. What decisively and dramatically differentiated our age from previous human history have been two technologies--neither of them electronic. First, anesthesia and antibiotics produced authentic medicine capable of effectively intervening against insults to the body; secondly, the hydrology of sewers and pure water delivery dramatically reduced preventable deaths and altered everything about how we live and expect to dwell. Neither the medical nor the hydrological glows with the Buck Rodgers aesthetic that, only recently, came to be associated with the word "technology"; nevertheless, these two, quintessentially modern developments, more than anything else, shaped modern expectations.

Yes, bio-tech and electronic advances do revivify the idea of progress, and this is no small matter during a cynically ironic era when modernism's progressive outlook must, somehow, survive in the public imagination. The alternative is ghastly. Currently, infatuation with progress is not widespread, being too easily linked with the complex issues of globalization and the universal leveling of local cultures before the behemoth of world civilization. Only the most recent variety of technology earns popular allegiance although the really important stuff is not brand-new.

The precursors of today's knowledge are often lost. And what is technology if not the ability to ameliorate the world? We have spent a lot of time trying to make the world more hospitable, hundreds of thousands of years already. The old technologies hav e never been replaced, but built upon, added to but not superseded. They have faded into the background, becoming so commonplace as to become invisible. We use them still. That is where the Cambridge Complete World History of Food begins us thinking. Preeminent among the old technologies is language. Having appeared less than Þ million years ago, language is our oldest technology and still, in some ways, the most resplendent. The "information age" presumes language and language is the reason we need an information age. Every other creature communicates through the same channels by which it senses the world. Insects taste and smell to make a picture of the world and they (mainly) converse with pheromones, i.e. tastes and smells.(2) Cuttlefish and squid see and also communicate with colors. (Watching a cuttlefish `think' in color is ample invitation to an alien intelligence.) Dogs smell the world more than they see it, and marked with their own odors and a thousand other scents, the terrain is a very different place for a dog and its owner out for a walk. Dolphins and whales hear and speak the world (not `their' world) into being, everything a sound. Yet, people see the world as a visual array but communicate sonically through organs that make the air vibrate at low frequency.

Our species is distinctly bi-modal and comments through sound about what the other senses perceive. Accordingly, we are always "translating"; we make approximations in speech of what has occurred in the dimensions of heat, weight, smell, taste, etc. Translation creates symbols: thought. There is no information without thought.

This oldest technology of speech is not yet understood in its origins, operations, maximum capacities and limitations. Mainly, it is invisible amid the glitter of our gadgets. We do it and generally do not think about speech unless we are linguists or poets. That is, we are still mining the possibilities of this first technology. The next great advance was the invention and mastery of the fiber arts. The idea is so counter-intuitive. Why dismantle a perfectly warm and durable sheepskin and create threads or yarn? Why turn a sturdy stalk of flax into flimsy fibers? A string will not keep you warm, even a wrapping of string is not as useful as the sheepskin from which it was derived. Making threads followed--that is, ensued conceptually and not just chronologically--the formation of purposeful intentions; the idea of weaving and knotting as technology had to proceed the practice.(3) Exactly this same pattern of yearning requited by technology marked the development of aviation. From string came knots and packages. (Tied bundles of loose objects anticipated the commutative adding of disparate things; many loose items become one tight parcel.) Eventually, after thousands of generation of experimentation with tied loops and dense braids, early fabrics and weaving on the loom, emerged. But, though we are all clothed, few of us are weavers. This is one more basic technology about which we, mainly, do not think except as hobbyists or economists.

The most spectacular leap accompanied the mastery of pyrotechnics. Fire was friend and threat, servant and enemy, but at least it could be an ally when summoned as opposed to an unrelenting foe when appearing unbidden. Fire gave warmth and comfort which conserved calories so that food supplies were extended.(4) Fire's light meant night's curtain no longer dropped, ending most activity; fire extended the hours for social exchange and deliberation and, thereby, the evolution of thought accelerated. Fire repelled animals and supplied a zone of safety around the hearth; the hairless and bipedal prey animal--arisen from scurrying nocturnal mammals--was spared predation after sunset. Fire produces chemical changes whose transmutations led to other technologies (ceramics and metallurgy, among others). The tangible world could be altered into the immaterial when solids became smoke, and fire--li ke life itself--grows and spreads as long as it is fed. The solidly palpable made immaterial by fire suggested a spiritual world apart from what is available to the senses: religion. Fire made things disappear, where to? Some worshipped fire, some used it to purify; all used it to live by. Pyrotechnology yielded hard, brittle, and especially non-corrosive ceramics. These heat-resistant containers were waterproof and could extend food's edible "shelf-life" without air-drying and before the discovery of salting. Ceramic containers allowed controlled fermentation which boosts the nutritive value of foods and, most importantly, ceramic s allowed the preparation of stews; the importance of this advance cannot be over-stressed. Stewing, which softens foods, made some of our species biologically dependent on technology for the first time.(5) Those with poor or worn teeth no longer need die of malnutrition. The esthetics of this technological transformation are expressed in the range of preferences that cooking works on its available materials. And we all eat; we all partake of this technology and all have strong preferences and opinions, regardless of expertise. Cooking is probably the most invisible of primordial technological advances, being submerged in aesthetics, culture, tradition, habit and, most recently, the hype of agri-business and food companies. The true science of food preparation concentrates many separate spheres of inquiry and joins cooking in the ranks of other advanced sub-specialties, like the craft of medicine--which is not itself a science but which relies on many fields of research.(6) It is a commonplace to assert (usually with false modesty) that medicine is an art but it is just as true to assert that cooking is applied technology. In this sense, a wonderful, even essential, one-volume summary of the dependence of cooking procedures upon the physio-chemical nature of each food--and therefore how the appropriate treatment of each food arose from the practical knowledge of evolutionary experimentation--can be found in the magisterial On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee.(7) But this book is neither a history nor a personal critique, though McGee allows himself an occasional droll aside.

The artistry of cooking was never better essayed than by the late eighteenth-century philosopher of eating, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin in The Physiology of Taste.(8) His observations help reconstruct an approximate idea of early-modern food, how it was served, and, only incidentally, the chef's technological resources. Since then various recollections in the food trade recount what it is like to master the techniques of food-preparation and to live by that knowledge and vocation.(9) The technical corpus leads from food preparation to the corollaries of presentation: the restaurant.(10) From this sort of literature arose the popularizers; some, like the pioneer James Beard, were American prophets in a near wilderness whose words and ideas were incomprehensible to the masses but who (a culinary John the Baptist) made possible the jaunty and learned preaching of the academy-trained Julia Child. Upon this base of acceptance the highly practiced professionals--like the franco-American Jacques Pepin, a real cross-cultural ambassador for the popular acceptance of gastronomy--advanced the developing "science of food". A few globalists made possible a synthesizing of cultural traditions (aesthetic preferences) and the hard products of chemistry and physics. Without these teachers there would be no significant modern literature on cookery in the English language outside of professional dietetics, as there would be no audience for multi-volume sets like The Cambridge Complete World History of Food. On the non-biographical and non-existentialist side, the touchstone for modern cooking derived from the French model remains the recently up-dated Larousse Gastronomique a practical, handy and accessible how-to book that actually, with witty self-consciousness, enculturates a traditional technology every bit as custom-bound as the etiquette performed before a resplendent tribal chieftain.(11) It is an inadvertent work of anthropology and a deliberate essay in applied technology. As a reference work, it directly descends from Apicius' first-century cookbook, the earliest surviving collection of recipes, which also, incidentally, indicates the state of food technology at about the time Pompeii was buried.(12) Significantly, the 1200-page Larousse bills itself as a culinary encyclopedia, which is accurate, in a limited way, but it is not a history, as Cambridge claims to be. The Cambridge volume has some stiff competition.

Barbara Ketcham Wheaton's amiable volume, Savoring the Past, historically surveys the social and technological dynamics that shaped cooking from the middle ages to the French Revolution, from an ancient approach to food preparation to the birth of modern cookery and the creation of the restaurant--an establishment that did not exist before that time.(13) A compact survey of the historical development of cooking, Reay Tannahill's Food in History is a fine one-volume celebration (14), while food's cultural resonance--its ever-dilating exchange with mythology and society (derived from technology and history)--can be sampled in Margaret Visser's Much Depends on Dinner.(15) Into a banquet of publications on food and cooking sailed the grand vessel deceptively named The Cambridge Complete World History of Food; it is neither complete nor does it balance the world's cooking traditions (which determine what is food) nor is it a proper history, but it is gloriously invaluable nonetheless. The wealth of knowledge contained here, however arranged, is inspiring. Hundreds of food plant species are assigned summary descriptions, and each of these cultivated or wild flora represents a technological breakthrough, a genetic adaptation to circumstance.

Implicit here is the distinction between food and cooking. While the latter is more obviously a technology using implements the former is the original bio-tech in which the implements disappear in the final product. Consider learning that the four edible species of Asian tropical taro--each now completely dependent on humans for their reproduction, and thus every bit as artificial a form of life as anything cooked up in a DNA lab--may have been the earliest domesticated plant foods; that tidbit changes the tilt of human geography away from the northern hemisphere. Some humans and taro are now (and more clearly once were) interdependent. These pages glitter with such insights. Cooking and food are inseparable, although the processes of arriving at each are different. Each food item has a story to tell and it is worth disentangling one from the other. Despite its alluring title, promising a narrative, this immense two volume set is not really a narrative record at all. If it were the section on "The Question of Paleolithic Nutrition and Modern Health" would not be on page 1704 in the second volume, but integrated near the beginning. While this arresting article is subtitled "From the End to the Beginning", hints at a circle being closed, since everything we know of paleolithic diet is inferential--including butchering marks on the bones of supposed game animals, in a history this study should have been front-loaded to lead the other essays. In short, the articles in the immensely useful study could have been dealt out in a more strictly chronological order and produced a more densely told history, or something more nearly like a history. The fault is not the many authors' responsibility.

The whole two-volume work is an under-edited mine in which history's raw materials are carefully presented in innumerable choice articles by divers specialists; the pieces are not reconciled and curiously arranged. They are a garden in profusion, each article its own species with its own logic and order, the totality a rich jumble. The daunting chore of organizing this material into something vaguely narrative was a job the editors shirked. They relegated ordering the loosely-quilted fabric to benighted indexers who had to make some sense of all this material. And they did. No book is more in need of reading from the indices. Without the table of contents and the thorough indexing as guide, the perplexed and fascinated reader would stumble, lost through unknown continents of information. Odd, in such an ambitious venture, but the index is the consistently most useful part of this whole project, though it is neither scholarly nor as readable as the articles. Without an encyclopedia's alphabetic format--like Craig Claiborne's grandly titled but superficial and skimpy, New York Times Food Encyclopedia--and without a consistent historical thread, the Cambridge Complete World History's deficiencies will almost certainly glare, imperfections that might have been hidden within an easily-accessed organization.(16) Inconsistency is the watchword. Every author apparently set his/her own standards about what to include. Some articles are historical and illustrated; most are unillustrated. A discussion of the cereal grain and green vegetable amaranth is unillustrated, although the plant is not easily visualized, while an article on watermelons, an easily visualized fruit, features several photographs that illustrate things as mundane as the appearance of a Japanese watermelon hothouse (looking exactly as you'd expect). And while amaranth is described in depth, the other South American grain of current interest, quinoa, must be located through the index, like Ethiopian tef, a grain of equal antiquity and interest. You will find nothing on the domestication of cavi (Guinea Pigs) as a food source. The two illustrations of yaks are so unrepresentative that if a reader did not know the appearance of this animal it would be impossible to accurately visualize it from the representations. Did no one oversee quality control of the images? Finally, lest the reader suppose I cavil unfairly, on page 582 in an article on turkeys, a caption reads "Only two domestic animals greeted the first Europeans to visit the southwestern pueblos. They were the dog and the turkey"; this below a picture of...a dog and a turkey. Surely visual resources could have been better invested. The wildly uneven and irregular nature of the pieces in the Cambridge History differ in word-length, range of focus and historical depth, type and extent of supporting materials and just about every other variable. In short, a real history of food--an idea inseparable from a history of cooking as technology--can and should still be written, and most of the necessary materials are already in this book. None of this carping, however, detracts from the necessity to reckon with this monumental (in size and content) effort to summarize what is known. The book is essential to consult for an overview of this basic technology by which, over thousands of generations of hominids' (erectus-neanderthal-sapiens) unremitting experimentation, the world has been adapted so that the planet's carrying power has zoomed for today's staggering human population. What the sum of these innumerable essays convey is a converging realization. For better or worse, we live in the age of the globalization of crops. Sustained into a future, this homogenizing legacy will distinguish the maturity of our species as a planetary entity, truly out of eden and consciously in charge. And one of the first of the deliberate systematics is the entire globe as a pattern of agriculture(s). Compared to this highly structured organization, the glamour of aviation, biotech, electronics, etc. will only play supporting roles. Without food nothing else matters.

Notes
1. Kenneth F. Kiple & Kriemhild Coneè Ornelas, eds. The Cambridge Complete World History of Food (Cambridge University Press) 2000
2. To be honest about it, so do people, as enjoined by Psalms 34 :8 "O taste and see that the Lord is good".
3. Retted flax fibers and even the continuous strand of silk suggested function and technology. A great intellectual leap envisioned a use for twisted fibers before weaving. Spinning, then plying and braiding, produced very strong, flexible, and sometimes durable strands. Today, "string theory" is alluring to physicists, but real string was an amazing technological advance and, however it began, with vines or retted stalks, it continues with carbon nanotubes.
4. With more bodily energy available for something other than maintaining internal temperature, some marginal illnesses might not bloom into life-threatening disease.
5. Raw foods need strong jaws for ripping and chewing. Only the vigorous with healthy teeth and digestion survive, even if they only share in the hunt and are not themselves hunters. The tastier fibers of fired meats (broiled) are broken down so that softened foods can nourish those with weaker teeth and jaws (the aged or infirm). With broiling, meat could nourish those who, formerly, would not have been able to survive on a diet of raw meat. In a fire-proof ceramic container (pot) stewed foods are easier to chew and digest than the merely broiled. Even those without teeth, the truly aged, could be nourished into dotage. The community that hunted and made pots and cooked and wove fiber could maintain those who could make none of these contributions. Ceramics extended human lifespan and the aged wisdom of venerable toothless survivors could accumulate useful information and experience for a younger generation. Cooking in ceramics vastly dilated the range of cultural resources and memory. Since the introduction of fire and ceramics the human jaw has been shrinking at a measurable percentage (hence the problem of where to put "wisdom teeth" when the increasingly gracile jaw has no room for these big grinders). In that far-distant era of the first ceramic technology humans and their inventions became inter-dependent on the course of future evolution. We have been androids for at least eight or nine thousand years--a condition of machine dependence only intensified by the widespread use of surgical (caesarian) delivery. Technology skews who lives through birthing and thereby drastically alters the gene pool toward androids who are further dependent on technological intervention for their reproduction.
6. The medical doctor, like the chef, is a clinician--intuitive, creative, making use of technical developments few of which are locally concocted. Only the exceptional practitioner in each field is distinguished with a named syndrome or dish.
7. Harold McGee, On Food and Cooking (New York: Charles Scribner & Sons) 1984.
8. Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin's The Physiology of Taste: or Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy, M.F.K. Fisher, trans. (Washington, D.C: Counterpoint) 1948/94. The life of this aesthete and gastronome can be found in Giles MacDonogh's Brillat-Savarin: The Judge and His Stomach (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee) 1992.
9. A prime example of this genre is Pierre Franey's A Chef's Tale (New York: Knopf) 1994.
10. See, for example: George Lang, Nobody Knows the Truffles I've Seen (New York: Knopf) 1998.
11. Larousse Gastronomique, ed. Jennifer Harvey Lang (New York: Crown) 1988.
12. M. Gabius Apicius, Cookery and Dining in Imperial Rome, ed. & trans. Joseph Dommers Vehling (New York: Dover) 1977.
13. Barbara Ketcham Wheaton, Savoring the Past: The French Kitchen and Table from 1300 to 1789 (University of Pennsylvania Press) 1983.
14. Reay Tannahill, Food in History (New York: Crown) 1988.
15. Margaret Visser, Much Depends on Dinner (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart) 1986.
16. Craig Claiborne, The New York Times Food Encyclopedia (New York: Times Books) 1985.

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