Fundamental, world changing - yet somehow trivial
"Food is our common ground, a universal experience."
James Beard
This is a food blog. There are thousands, possibly millions of them and probably regarded by the non food interested part of the world as trivial rubbish. Not that I make any claim to my humble ramblings being anything other than that. It is, after all, an idle amusement to keep my brain working and to keep boredom at bay. I am generally pretty defensive about it, not just because of my low opinion of the actual writing, and the attendant potential narcissism, but also because it is somehow seen as a futile and trivial area to write about. Maybe if I was writing about quantum physics, high art or the future of the planet this would not be so. But food! It's the domain of awful reality television isn't it? MKR in particular. My husband is always going on about there being whole TV channels being dedicated to food and yes there are a lot of television programs dedicated to food - some of them good - but surely that is interesting in itself. I mean why the obsession with food? Well - we need to eat.
Food is, in fact, a vast subject and covers everything from how to boil an egg, through the origins of vanilla, the human biome, junk food, farming technology, food retailing, customs and traditions, to the higher realms of history, politics, science and medicine. Western civilisation itself, and other urban civilisations too, it is generally agreed, began when man began to domesticate animals and grow crops, rather than hunting and gathering whatever he could find. So what greater claim to the importance of food is there?
It is generally agreed as well that agriculture began in Mesopotamia. Maybe the Chinese have a different view. I don't know.
The domestication of animals was part of it, but civilisation really started to develop when crops were planted - after all you can still be a nomad with domesticated animals, but with crops you have to stay put. Which means buildings, more time to spare on other things, trading, accounting, employment, etc. etc. You all know the general thesis.
Agriculture led to trade with other nations and imbalances of power if you had more of something than the other lot and they had nothing to give in return. Trade led to exploration and colonialism as nations sought a trading and, therefore, a wealth advantage. Spices were a major cause of the growth of some nations and the subjugation of others. It led to wealth - for some and not for others. It eventually led to the discovery of the Americas and the opening up of the East. Which in turn led to cultural exchange (and wars) a process which continues to this day.
Food led to the movement of whole nations - the Jews in search of their land of 'milk and honey', the Irish escaping from the potato famine, todays' refugees fleeing from famine.
Food is a source of power. If you have food and your enemies, or your underlings do not, then you wield immense power. The church and the lords of medieval times, exacted tithes and other similar food tributes from the people over whom they held sway. Some modern dictatorial governments have been accused of withholding food from their subjects in order to keep them subjugated. You can take the food and you can take the means to produce it. For example the various English Inclosure Acts meant that land, previously held in common and used for the grazing of animals, was privatised by the wealthy and unavailable to the poor. Taxes and tariffs protect produces and make food expensive for those who cannot afford it. This still goes on today.
But apply all these strictures at your peril. Keeping people hungry leads to revolution. The American revolution even used food (tea) as a symbol to start the move to independence as tea was thrown into the sea at Boston in protest at its high price.
And one of the main, though not only, reasons for the French revolution was the high price of bread - which at its height took some 80% of a worker's salary.
And on a slightly less 'important' note, the French revolution inadvertently caused the development of the restaurant - what were all those cooks who had worked for the aristocrats to do now that their masters were gone? Open a restaurant. Something that many refugees and immigrants still do today - thus spreading cultural traditions and food around the world and retaining a crucial part of what makes them who they are.
“What is patriotism but the love of the food one ate as a child?” Lin Yutang
Food has changed the world over and over again. It has caused wars and sometimes determined who wins wars. In medieval times the siege was a common battle tactic - and was used in many more recent wars, including WW2 with the siege of Leningrad, not that that one was ultimately successful for the Germans. And if you can't feed your army you will not win - your soldiers will die or desert, as Napoleon amongst many others learnt to his cost. It led to the invention of canning as a way to preserve food to feed your army.
So food is really, really important. We actually cannot live without it. The future of the world's population depends on our ability to feed the world. Without being able to do this there will be wars and famines and mass extinctions. Though water perhaps is even more crucial. But then in the world of the food blogger, water is fair game too.
Not to mention the connection of food to health - increasingly, they seem to think, our mental health as well as our physical wellbeing. We are in the midst of an obesity epidemic. Plenty has led to a catastrophic shortening of the human expected lifespan at a time when it should be extending. What and how much we eat has never been more important to our health.
So food is clearly crucial to our well being, to a peaceful world and indeed the continuation of our civilisation itself. But if you write about it in a blog it becomes trivial.
I suppose you could argue that writing about the next new food fad, or the latest celebrity chef, or the words of one of them, or what to do with an overload is carrots is trivial. And yet it demonstrates how lucky we are really - that we have the time to be able to spend looking into all of these things. Unimportant things - like MKR. Maybe I should do a blog on MKR. I have never watched it, but it is very popular. I should watch it to see why and then write about what that says about our society - because ultimately I think that's one of the reasons I do this blog. To explore modern living - in which food is central in so many ways both positive and negative.
Besides I sort of enjoy doing it, except when lacking in inspiration and I have all those tricks to get over that. Because I am the main provider of meals in this household, food occupies my thoughts more than a fair bit, mostly because I think if you have to eat then you might as well enjoy what you are eating as well as think about what is the right food to eat. I'll just try and bury those niggling thoughts about being trivial and narcissistic deep down.
