We learn: “Food historians uncover, record, and reproduce food stories, recipes and dishes. They search literary texts and non-fiction works, including old cookbooks, for hints of daily diet and culinary customs to get a clearer picture of what the average person, not just the wealthy and privileged, ate at any given time and place.

They search for new sources studying kitchen inventories, trade and taxation records, and ancient cave carvings, drawings, menus and then look around for ways to use their knowledge. Their information may be combined with a job in travel, teaching, or writing.”

Culinary libraries need the help of historians, as do academic journals and publishers. So, too, do modern movie makers and producers of TV series. Directors must make sure Braveheart warriors, diners on The Titanic, Upstairs, Downstairs and Harry Potter characters eat the food of their period in history.

Trend predictors and futurists rely on historical patterns too because it is imperative to understand the past in order to grasp what is happening now and what is likely to occur in the future.

Writing the history of what we eat provides a geographic destiny, and social history of the nation. Food puts everything into a living, ever evolving reference derived from paintings, photographs as well as diaries and oral histories.

I CAN DO THAT! ICDT!

In China,it is considered barbaric to present a piece of meat that looks like the animal from which it came, and it is considered impolite to expect a guest to cut their own food into bite-sized pieces. This task belongs to the cook. Such a philosophy of eating naturally led to the invention of chopsticks.

Fred Ferretti reports in Food Arts magazine that Jae Lee, a native of South Korea, created a job for himself and his increasing number of American employees: he makes multiple million chopsticks for export to China, Japan and other far Eastern countries.

Everybody has to eat, but the methods that people all over the world use to get their food from the plate to mouth vary.  Figures from the Japanese Restaurant Association divide the world’s population into four categories:

• 1.2 billion people eat with chopsticks.
• 1.5 billion eat with fork, knife and spoon.
• 350 million eat with a knife and their hands.
• 250 million eat with their hands only.

In fast food restaurants plastic utensils are optional for pizza.

It’s starting to feel like fall around here. The leaves are just beginning to change to shades of bright yellow and golden amber and vibrant red. The weather has turned decidedly cooler, so much so that I had to turn on the heat for the first time this past weekend. I even made a lovely bean soup, filled with layers and layers of flavor and color.

Beans: a History by Ken Albala

Making soup leads me to recall that beans by another name are legumes and legumes are also known as pulses. It is the mature seeds that grow inside pods that we call peas, beans and lentils. We call some peas beans, and some of the beans peas, but lentils are always called lentils.

The garbanzo bean (also known as the chickpea) is both a bean and a pea, so it is called a legume.

But fear not. There will not be a quiz on this subject matter. Though if you want to know more about the dizzying array of legumes, may I heartily suggest Ken Albala’s book, Beans: A History.  He offers a virtual college course on beans in his book.