THIST 290: A World History of Food -- Sundermann: Scholarly Sources

Food: A Culinary History explores culinary evolution and eating habits from prehistoric times to the present, offering surprising insights into our social and agricultural practices, religious beliefs, and most unreflected habits. The volume dispels myths such as the tale that Marco Polo brought pasta to Europe from China, that the original recipe for chocolate contained chili instead of sugar, and more. As it builds its history, the text also reveals the dietary rules of the ancient Hebrews, the contributions of Arabic cookery to European cuisine, the table etiquette of the Middle Ages, and the evolution of beverage styles in early America. It concludes with a discussion on the McDonaldization of food and growing popularity of foreign foods today.

Rachel Laudan tells the remarkable story of the rise and fall of the world's great cuisines-from the mastery of grain cooking some twenty thousand years ago, to the present-in this superbly researched book. Probing beneath the apparent confusion of dozens of cuisines to reveal the underlying simplicity of the culinary family tree, she shows how periodic seismic shifts in "culinary philosophy"-beliefs about health, the economy, politics, society and the gods-prompted the construction of new cuisines, a handful of which, chosen as the cuisines of empires, came to dominate the globe. Cuisine and Empire shows how merchants, missionaries, and the military took cuisines over mountains, oceans, deserts, and across political frontiers. Laudan's innovative narrative treats cuisine, like language, clothing, or architecture, as something constructed by humans. By emphasizing how cooking turns farm products into food and by taking the globe rather than the nation as the stage, she challenges the agrarian, romantic, and nationalistic myths that underlie the contemporary food movement.

In 1784, passengers on the ship Empress of China became the first Americans to land in China, and the first to eat Chinese food. Today there are over 40,000 Chinese restaurants across the United States--by far the most plentiful among all our ethnic eateries. Now, in Chop Suey Andrew Coe provides the authoritative history of the American infatuation with Chinese food, telling its fascinating story for the first time. It's a tale that moves from curiosity to disgust and then desire.

For centuries tortillas have remained a staple of the Mexican diet, but the rich significance of this unleavened flatbread stretches far beyond food. Today the tortilla crosses cultures and borders as part of an international network of people, customs, and culinary traditions. In this entertaining and informative account Paula E. Morton surveys the history of the tortilla from its roots in ancient Mesoamerica to the cross-cultural global tortilla. Morton tells the story of tortillas and the people who make and eat them--from the Mexican woman rolling the mano over the metate to grind corn, to the enormous wheat tortillas made in northern Mexico, to twenty-first-century elaborations like the stuffed burrito. This study--the first to extensively present the tortilla's history, symbolism, and impact--shows how the tortilla has changed our understanding of home cooking, industrialized food, healthy cuisine, and the people who live across borders.

Culinary nationalism is not unique to Japan, although its performance by the Japanese government has received significant attention and criticism as exemplified in its so-called "sushi police" program. This and other counterpart programs were explicit attempts to "authenticate" Japanese food abroad, which the government eventually rescinded in response to backlash from within and outside Japan. However, new, diversified, and intensified forms of "authentication" and "certification" systems for Japanese food have been created by the government in recent years, apparently reinvigorated by the inscription of Japanese food, that is, washoku, as Intangible Heritage under the UNESCO in 2013. This article investigates culinary nationalism among the proponents of Japanese food in the context of the heritagization of washoku, with particular reference to the accreditation and certification systems for Japanese food. A number of quasi-official recognition schemes for Japanese restaurants abroad were already in place before heritage inscription, but current systems have taken on a renewed vigor in light of UNESCO recognition. Government-sponsored culinary competitions have also emerged in the period around the inscription; the performance of nationalism in such contexts are also examined, especially through the case of sushi, perhaps the most representative of Japanese food. Subsequently, the social and cultural contexts as well as the consequences of culinary nationalism in Japan are discussed.

Plants have nurtured Native communities' physical, spiritual, and social well-being for centuries, while people reciprocated by caring for plants not only as integral actors embedded in a wider ecosystem, but also as treasured children and cherished ancestors. With the encroachment of non-Native peoples, however, the web of relationships between people, plants, and the landscape came under threat, including indigenous seeds. Throughout these upheavals, some Native individuals fought to retain knowledge and to keep valued seeds viable by planting them. This paper explores how these relationships with seeds have been disrupted, and, as a means of repairing them today, weighs the potential of repatriating seeds held in banks. I argue that a repatriation initiative should consider the perspectives of Native peoples who first bred these seeds, work to ease their access to them, and articulate how to care for them