Industrial food processing, combined with capitalism has turned the food people eat into a cost, so of course whatever corners they can cut to make that cost smaller are implemented.Ok, but I think that's exactly the kind of nostalgia that she's railing against. What came before industrial food production and capitalism wasn't better. At least, it wasn't better for people in what are now wealthy, industrialized nations. (I think maybe you could argue that it was better for people in some of the poorest parts of the world, although I know less about that.) Pre-industrial, pre-capitalist people went hungry a lot. To suggest that industrial food processing and capitalism have "turned" food bad is to ignore a lot of history.
Choices won't feed us.Well, they will if there's a long drought and all your local crops die. In that case, nothing but choices will feed you.
Yak, bison, and buffalo meats are delicious and about as close as one may now come to the domesticated cattle without entering the realm of domestication.Weren't American buffalo hunted almost to extinction by 1900, though? I don't think that's a very good example of the sustainable wonders of pre-industrial foodways!
But what does this have to do with flavor? Her implication is that these animals are all unfit to eat, rank and rotten tip to tail.Because buffalo wasn't available to most people, and trying to make it available to everyone would have resulted in its extinction. The average ordinary joe before 1900 wasn't eating a lot of meat period, and the meat he or she was eating was not big game. If you were urban, maybe you could buy tongue or a pig's head to boil or something like corned beef: cheap cuts of meat that were affordable, at least sometimes, on a worker's salary. If you were rural, maybe you could kill a chicken once in a while, but certainly not every day and probably not every week. Maybe you worked for someone rich, and they'd let you take home the offal or the tough cuts after they'd eaten the yummy stuff. I'm not saying that delicious meat didn't exist, but I don't think most people were eating very much of it.
This ignores what was probably a primary source of meat for rural Americans before 1900: fish and/or small game. The idea that early rural Americans weren't eating much meat isn't supported by the evidence; meat and potatoes have been our staples since the first days of colonization, with vegetables merely an afterthought.Rural Americans, maybe, although of course that was predicated on some sort of nasty stuff having to do with displacement of the previous population. Rural people anywhere else? I don't think so. Urban people in America? Nope.
Peasants in other countries ate a largely meatless diet, but that's because they were being bled dry by their landowners. As is so often the case with food, this was mostly due to highly unequal distribution, not shortage.Ok, but do you think it's a coincidence that the breakdown of those social hierarchies happened at the same time as urbanization and industrialization, which brought about industrialized food production? I don't think it was. I'm not sure that it would be possible to have pre-modern modes of food production with modern ideas about democracy, workers' rights, child labor, women's equality and whatnot.
That's why I specified rural Americans -- which is who you were talking about in the portion of your comment I highlighted.I actually wasn't specifically talking about Americans, which is why I said "your ordinary average Joe," not "your ordinary average American." I was, however, specific here:
I don't doubt that the American urban poor ate much less meat than the rich, but the idea that they ate meat "certainly not every day and probably not every week" is inaccurate.The full quote is:
If you were rural, maybe you could kill a chicken once in a while, but certainly not every day and probably not every week.The fact that I was talking about rural people is signaled by the phrase "if you were rural." And while I've been reading around a bit and it appears that Americans ate more meat in the 19th century than I thought (and than was true for Europeans), that was in fact true for a lot of the rural population. Specifically, in the postbellum period, both white and black sharecroppers didn't eat a ton of meat, and what they did eat tended to be salt pork and occasional chicken, both of which were more like the tough meat that the author describes than like the buffalo and yak that you like to hunt.
I was simply replying to your inaccurate view of American meat eating pre-1900.Congratulations! You scored a point! It doesn't actually have anything to do with the author's claims, though, because she never addressed America in particular and never said that meat was rare.
You (and the author of the article) seem to want meat to have been rare and/or unpleasant, but it was not actually so.She actually didn't say it was rare in the passage to which you objected, although she would have been correct if she did. She said it was tough. Nothing you've cited disputes that, actually. You haven't shown that the average American, much less the average anyone else, was eating meat that was equivalent to the fresh bison and yak meat that you hunt.
Nice, very nice actually, to be idea of the day in the New York Times blog. The idea, in a nutshell, is that modern food is great, a huge improvement on the last 10,000 years. Not perfect. But reason to go forward, not wallow in nostalgia.posted by Miko at 6:10 AM on August 16, 2010
Not exactly revolutionary you might think. Well lots do. I am just relishing the thought of responding to the flood of hostile comments. I love controversy.
Nor is it a new idea of mine. Here’s a link to the original article A Plea for Culinary Modernism: Why We should Love Fast, New, Processed Food which appeared nine years ago!
Back story. Darra Goldstein asked me to write something for the first issue of Gastronomica, the food journal for grownups that was then just a gleam in her eye. And she included it in the lovely volume, The Gastronomica Reader published by the University of California Press which celebrated 10 years of the journal. And from there it went to Utne Reader. And from there to the NYT.
That’s called legs.
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Also, I find this interesting:
"If we urge the Mexican to stay at her metate, the farmer to stay at his olive press, the housewife to stay at her stove, all so that we may eat handmade tortillas, traditionally pressed olive oil, and home-cooked meals, we are assuming the mantle of the aristocrats of old."
posted by hermitosis at 9:33 AM on August 15, 2010 [3 favorites]