Food Cultures
Famine foods and the knowledge nobody wants to need
Most food traditions include a set of things eaten only when there is nothing else, and that knowledge is among the first to disappear and the hardest to reconstruct.
Food Cultures
Staple dishes, ferments and why a recipe travels.
Food Cultures
Street food is a system, not a category
Cooked food sold in public space has existed as long as cities have, and it does specific work in a household economy that home cooking cannot.
Food Cultures
Hands, sticks and bread: how food is actually carried to the mouth
Eating implements are not a progression from primitive to civilised. Each system is fitted to the food it evolved alongside, and the rules around it are elaborate everywhere.
Food Cultures
Bees, smoke and the oldest sweetener
Honey was the only concentrated sweetener available to most of the world until quite recently, and the traditions around getting it range from cliff-face raiding to elaborate hive management.
Food Cultures
Salt: the mineral that organised trade routes
A substance people cannot live without, unevenly distributed, and essential for preserving food — which made it one of the most politically consequential commodities in history.
Food Cultures
Noodles, dumplings and the long argument about who was first
Filled and stretched dough appears across Eurasia in forms that are clearly related and whose relationships are much harder to trace than the confident stories suggest.
Food Cultures
Coffee left Yemen and never went back
A plant from the Ethiopian highlands, cultivated in Yemen, spread through the Islamic world and then everywhere else, taking a set of social institutions with it.
Food Cultures
Cheese is a way of keeping milk, and the details are geography
Every cheese tradition is a response to a specific animal, climate, altitude and transport problem, and the differences between them are mostly practical.
Food Cultures
Rice terraces are infrastructure, and they need people
A terraced hillside is a water management system built over centuries, and it collapses within a decade or two if the community maintaining it leaves.
Food Cultures
One leaf, three drinks: how tea diverged
Green, oolong, black and pu-erh all come from the same plant. The difference is entirely in what happens to the leaf in the hours after it is picked.
Food Cultures
The chilli arrived recently, and rewrote several cuisines
Sichuan, Thai, Korean and Indian cooking are unimaginable without chilli, and none of them had it five hundred years ago.
Food Cultures
Salt, time and cabbage: how fermented vegetables were invented everywhere
Sauerkraut, kimchi, pickled mustard greens, torshi, achar. Different flavours, different vegetables, one underlying process that people worked out independently again and again.
Food Cultures
Flatbread, leavened bread, and the oven that decided which
The division between the world’s flatbread regions and its loaf regions tracks fuel, grain and oven design far more closely than it tracks anything cultural.