| Due
to the growth of the field of world history, several publishers have
commissioned short works designed to serve as survey course supplementary
reading or the building blocks for topics seminars. One of these series, "Themes
in World History" by Routledge, under the editorship of Peter Stearns, features
studies by scholars both young and old, but all with established reputation
their field. These include of Migration
in World History (2004) by Pat Manning, The
Indian Ocean in World History (2003) by Milo Kearny and Asian Democracy in World History (2004) by
Alan T. Wood. Fitting easily in such good company in terms of both scholarship
and global reach, is Jeffrey M. Pilcher's Food
in World History. Pilcher, the author of Que Vivan Tamale: Food
and the Making of Mexican Identity (1998), fully achieves his goal of
providing at once a comparative and chronologically driven narrative of
culinary cultures and patterns of consumption and production from Mammoth
hunting to globalization.
Divided
into four parts of four chapters of about seven pages each, Pilcher's narrative
addresses the principle subjects and analytical positions taken on such topics
as the role of gender in early agricultural production, the Columbian Exchange,
the sugar and spice trade, the evolution of national, colonial and migrant
cuisines, and the post-World War II low cost, low wage food production system
pioneered by McDonald's Corporation. Pilcher counts the human and
environmental costs of these developments, from global slavery to global obesity,
but his discussion never rise to the level of soapbox or bully pulpit, save his
conclusion which dispassionately reminds the Western reader of the global
poverty and inequality which makes the rich Western diet, wherever it is found,
possible.
The
weaknesses of the work, such as they are, are inherent in nature of such an
enterprise. Pilcher is not and cannot be a expert in all cuisines, He favors
exemplification of global processes from those cultures he knows best, the
Americas and Europe, but neither India nor China are ignored and attempts are
made to include Africa and the Middle East on his large canvass. He is wise
enough to avoid risky asides or misrepresentation, but (very) occasionally
engages in needless speculation that so departs from his usually strong
analysis that students can briefly lose their way. To avoid this rare event, this
writer prepared (and can make available to any user) a 100 question student
reading guide that keeps them focused on its valuable content.
That
focus was important to me as I used the work as an introduction to a course
that more or less follows it contents, though at much greater depth and extensive
supplemental reading, including Andrew Dalby's Dangerous Tastes (2001), Sidney Mintz's Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (1986), Mike
Davis' Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino
Famines and the Making of the Third World (2002) and Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal (2001). Since most of my students
were core-course seeking undergraduate non-history majors at the academic moral
equivalent of senior secondary/Advanced Placement level, I knew they would need
a solid foundation and a certain degree of comfort if we were to exploit these
resources socratically.
The student response was very positive: they much preferred this work to
readings in its longer, bolder, denser and somewhat Eurocentric chief
competition, Reay Tannahill's History of
Food (1995) and also Kenneth F. Kiple's A Movable Feast: Ten Millennia
of Food Globalization (2007), which was reviewed by Candice Goucher in this
journal (Vol. 5, no. 3, 2008). The full value of Pilcher's work was revealed to
me in ways both direct and subtle. Students had no trouble writing their answers
to the study questions I wrote for Food
in World History and easily recalled the answers orally in class. More
important, when writing their essays, students had developed such a command of
their subject and sources that they did not feel the need to always refer to
their "text," but confidently drew on their readings in depth for answers where
appropriate.
Like
David Christian's This Fleeting World: A
Short History of Humanity (2007), Food in World History is, for all its
brevity, reasonably comprehensive. It avoids cant and delivers what it
promises: a very accessible introduction to its manifold subject suitable for a
wide range of student audiences that offers hope to teachers and students hard
pressed to keep up with expanding world history content and analysis.
Marc Jason Gilbert is co-editor of World History Connected and the National Endowment for the Humanities Chair in World History at Hawaii
Pacific University.
He can be contacted at mgilbert@hpu.edu. |
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