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From Christmas pudding to Peruvian ceviche, a little history of globalization through food

2022-12-23T05:06:50.816Z


In their book L'Épicerie du monde, historians Pierre Singaravélou and Sylvain Venayre trace the epic of food. A journey to the end of flavors.


"Tell me what you eat, I'll tell you what a globalized gourmet you are": this is the principle of this collective, scholarly, tasty, sometimes mischievous book-investigation, which considers our foods from the point of view of their social history. , cultural, geopolitical.

Because you will know the mixed origins, the surprising routes, the identity issues, you will no longer be able to eat an egg mayo, hummus, parmesan, or drink tea as before...

To discover

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In video, These foods will save you 10 years of life expectancy

Lady Figaro.

– Eighty-eight treated foods, each in a maximum of five pages… at the risk of frustrating the reader?


Pierre Singaravélou.–

Our obsession for ten years has been to write as effectively as possible the history of the world in the 19th and 20th centuries, because we are contemporaneists.


Telling the story through objects is not anecdotal!

Objects are the lowest common denominator in all societies.

Food, too, makes it possible to find at ground level, flush with the bowl, the history of sensitivities, practices, economic history, the history of flows, in short, total history.

Sylvain Venayre.

It's a short format that condemns authors to literature!

Look at the mayonnaise by Philippe Artières and his "coup d'état of the yolk on the egg white"!

But no Wikipedia scholarship.

Present in the United States,

food studies

hardly exist in France, which is surprising in a country that takes pride in its gastronomy.

There is a food research center based in Tours, but there are few specialists.

Our historian and academic friends got started with passion.

Pierre Singaravélou, you wrote the chapters on whiskey and rum: by chance?


PS-

_

Two products that I like for scientific reasons!

And two motors of Western imperialisms.

The history of rum is extraordinary: contrary to popular belief, rum was invented by the slaves of Barbados, who used the residues of sugar cane, itself coming from Papua New Guinea and brought in the Caribbean by Christopher Columbus in the 15th century… The slaves made the tafia, a strong identity element of the culture of Afro-descendants, very important in the sacraments of the voodoo religion to trigger trances.

The slaves drank rum to give themselves courage, to speak to the spirits, but the alcoholization with rum also nourished a form of passive resistance: to work less, to slow down the pace.

We realize that there is nothing more international than the construction of national identities.

People are identified with what they consume.

The French are

froggies,

the English

roast beef.

However, each traditional national dish results from an infinite circulation

Pierre Singaravelou

 Epicerie”, in the language of globalization, translates to

grocery,

but

grocery

comes from the French wholesaler…


PS –

It is a medieval term, which tells us how the grocery store was born in the 12th century, with the guilds of merchants , pepper pots, spice merchants… who sold wholesale, which gave rise to the term wholesaler, which in English became the designation of the retail store,

grocery store.

We know corned beef, a preparation of beef in brine, but not Spam at all.

But his story is crazy!


S.V.

_

-

It's an incredible story!

From 1937, following the Great Depression and in the midst of an economic crisis, Hormel, a Texas company, flooded the American market with canned pork shoulder, Spam, stuffed with sodium nitrite, cheap and nutritious.

American soldiers exported it to Europe and Korea until 1953. Koreans incorporated it into their national dish,

budae jjigae.

Object of derision, this Spam gave rise to a Monty Python sketch!

Then, semantic shift, spam ended up designating the scraps of our digital messaging.

Pragmatic, the Hormel company financed a musical,

Spamalot,

in 2000!

The immoral moral of the story?

There is no bad publicity, only publicity!

Spam, a canned meat returned to the culture.

GettyImages

You cite the hummus war between Israel and Lebanon, couscous of which three countries, Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, are fighting over the origin.

The foods of globalization tell the story of nationalisms?


SV –

The phenomenon of the construction of regional identities in the middle of the 19th century unfolds in our book.

Example, Bulgarian yogurt.

Why Bulgarian?

In 1905, a Ukrainian professor, Metchnikov, from the Pasteur Institute, wanted to understand why the mountain people of Bulgaria lived so long;

he assumes it's related to yogurt;

Professor Grigorov discovers that lactose turns into lactic acid;

in the process, Metchnikov reveals the benefits of the ferment that will be called

lactobacilus bulgarius.

Clever entrepreneurs from the Ottoman Empire will sell yoghurts labeled "Bulgarian", good for health.

The most famous of these entrepreneurs is Isaac Carasso, who will give his company the diminutive of the name of his son Daniel: Danone…

PS

We realize that there is nothing more international than the construction of national identities.

People are identified with what they consume.

The French are

froggies,

the English

roast beef.

However, each traditional national dish results from an infinite circulation.

S.V.

_

So the English Christmas pudding.

Its ingredients come from all over the old empire!

Indian spices, Ceylon cinnamon, English beef kidney fat, Jamaican rum…

Read alsoHow food influences our mental health

What would be your ideal global menu?


PS

A salad of lato, seaweed from the Philippines that is not globalized because their conservation is difficult.

I would wash it down with gin, a drink which symbolized

Dutch courage

in the 17th century, which fascinated the British, who spread it throughout the colonial world where it was consumed with tonic water: it was supposed to fight against malaria!

S.V.

_

For me, a Peruvian ceviche and California rolls, an adaptation of Japanese sushi where the fish is replaced by crab meat and avocado, which poses social problems in Mexico with the mafias, and environmental problems in Kenya with Deforestation.

No champagne?


PS and SV

Of course it is!

(As a chorus.)

Remembering that the English perfected a rudimentary method of champanisation in the 17th century, adding sugar in the spring to their white wines to increase the “prise de mousse”… And without forgetting that the cork of cork comes from Spain and Portugal.

Champagne wine, the fruit of French viticultural genius, has its extranational dimension…

Source: lefigaro

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