Season 2, Episode 1: A Little Food history
LISTEN TO THE EPISODE:
On Today’s Episode:
It was a $1.38 worth of tomato seeds that changed my life forever. I don't remember where I got them. I don't remember what brand they were, but I do remember this: those seeds refused to grow. Which got me to thinking: How hard is it to grow food anyways? And how did food start being something from far away, instead of something from right in our own backyards in the first place?
This is Was Is Could Be and on this season: how we get our FOOD.
With Special Guests:
Michael J. Lansing is Associate Professor of History at Augsburg University in Minneapolis, MN. A historian of the modern United States, his current book project is Enriched: Industrial Carbohydrates and the Rise of Nutrition Capitalism—a history of factory-processed grains and the hidden logic that drives contemporary food systems. He is the author of Insurgent Democracy: The Nonpartisan League in North American Politics (University of Chicago Press, 2015) as well as commentaries in MinnPost, BillMoyers.com, and Zócalo Public Square.
Eleanor Barnett is a food historian at the University of Cambridge (UK). She recently completed a PhD at Christ's College, Cambridge, which looks at the relationship between food and religion in the English Protestant and Italian Catholic Reformations (c. 1560 - c. 1640). She is interested more broadly in how food and eating reflects our identities, beliefs, and connects us to the past - and she shares the most fascinating food history facts, images, objects, and recipes that she finds on Instagram @historyeats! Check out her website at https://eleanorbarnett.com/.
Derrick Pratt is the Museum Educator and Interim Curator at the Erie Canal Museum in Syracuse, NY. A native of Chittenango, NY, Derrick received a B.A in Social Studies Education from SUNY Cortland and a M.A. in Museum Studies from Syracuse University. Prior to his job at the Erie Canal Museum, Derrick served as Director of Programs at Chittenango Landing Canal Boat Museum for 3 years. Check out the Erie Eats Exhibit at the Erie Canal Museum.
The Was Is Could Be podcast is produced by Liz Russell at To Eat and To Love, LLC. Each episode is carefully edited by Joshua Rivers of Podcast Guy Media, LLC. Our theme music is made by Neil Cross and published by ImageCollect Publishing.
Want more? Follow the Was Is Could Be podcast on Instagram and Facebook.
For advertising or guest appearances, check out the media kit.
Liz Russell Narration:
It was $1.38 worth of tomato seeds that changed my life forever. I don't remember where I got them. I don't remember what brand they were, but I do remember this, those seeds refused to grow. It wasn't their fault. I was putting them in our backyard, which was a tiny portion of our small lot full of shade and surrounded by black walnut trees. The only place that might've been harder for those tomatoes to grow was a desert, which got me to thinking how hard is it to grow our own food anyways?
[🎶Theme music🎶]
Liz Russell Narration:
It's an interesting thing to go to the grocery store and find empty shelves. It's even more interesting to then come home to news of dairies pouring out milk because there's too much supply. It just didn't make sense, but that's exactly what we all did in March of 2020. At the time I was still working on season one of the podcast and I had been intent to share a two-part final episode on the history of food. Kind of funny to look back on, funny that I would try to put the history of something literally required for human life into two short episodes. And it was just my bad luck that that thing at the time would be a point of contention and fear for people. But this isn't a story about COVID or about my ranky tomatoes. It's not even a story about the history of food itself. This is Was Is Could Be. And this is just one story about how food started being something from far away, instead of something from right in our own backyards. And it's also a story about the extremes I would take to ask my usual question, what if we still live that way today?
Michael Lansing (Historian):
My name is Michael Lansing. I'm an associate professor of history at Augsburg University in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Liz Russell Narration:
I found Michael Lansing after falling down an internet rabbit hole. And I happened on an interview he did about processed food for WUNC radio. I emailed him for an interview pre-COVID and he accepted.
Michael Lansing (Historian):
The grains and the ways in which they have created a particular food system that we live with. I think it's important when we're talking about the ways in which ancestors of many different kinds and in many different places, across a broad swath of humanity in different parts of the globe fought and processed and talked about food, the way that they ate food. I think it's really important to understand that processing was really crucial for them. That food that was fresh was not always the greatest food, and food that was local was not always the greatest food. It's important to remember that many foodstuffs are inedible unless you engage in some kind of processing. And of course cooking is fundamentally a form of processing food, but across human cultures and across different times, going back thousands of years, people have been very inventive and creative in figuring out ways to take a fresh item and to either make it edible or to figure out how to preserve it so that it might be edible a month or two months or three months.
Liz Russell Narration:
One of my favorite ways to think about this comes from Michael Pollan. He says, one of the reasons we process food is to keep nature from taking it back. It's important to stress: This is pretty much just how food works, whether we're talking about agriculture today or hunting 300 years ago, the plants that make up our food supply will eventually die. The animals once killed, will eventually rot. And even though science and technology are helping extend growing seasons and increased harvests, there are so many, many foods that are not available in their freshest form year round. So we have to process them. I realized while doing this research that I was always thinking of processing as canning in my mind, that's where processing food launched from and how we got to where we are today. When I reached out to Michael Lansing, that's what I had thought we would be talking about, but it turns out that processing food has been going on in many, many forms for centuries.
Eleanor Barnett (History Eats historian):
Yeah, thank you for joining me so early on your time, my name is Eleanor Barnett. I've just finished a PhD at Cambridge University in the UK, which looks at the importance of food in religious identities in the Reformation period. So I look at how Protestants in England and Catholics in Italy had different understandings of what food was and what they should eat.
Liz Russell Narration:
I found Eleanor Barnett through her Instagram account @historyeats. I found it by happenstance. I think, I can't even remember now, but what struck me was really the depth of it. She shares so many examples of food history from so many time periods. When I thought of trying to preserve food at our house, I thought of Mason jars and a freezer and a dehydrator, all of which require electricity, but what would we do if these things didn't even exist? I wanted to look further back to understand what food preservation was like even before the 19th century. So we're headed a little back in time to England almost 300 years before the industrialization of food.
Eleanor Barnett (History Eats historian):
I should say also that I enjoy food history in general. So I post a lot on Instagram as @historyeats. Yeah. And I’m very interested in food history from all time periods. It's kind of hard for us to imagine, I suppose, cause we're so used to having fridges and freezers. But that technology, well I suppose it developed in the 18th century, but really wasn't kind of common in households until the 20th century. So right back into the early modern period, so 16th and 17th centuries. There were many ways to preserve food. Say perhaps simply you could dry food, especially in the Northern countries. So you could just air dry stock fish, and then in the kind of hotter countries, so down in Italy and Spain, Portugal, you might dry out food like fruits. So you might dry figs and dates and things like that.
But perhaps salt, I think that's probably the most important preservation method. So again, you could salt your fish and then dry it. And then you could use the easier way to kind of transport your fish across the country in barrels. So that people who were, you know, away from the oceans could eat fish for Lent and for other religious fast days. You could also pickle. So pickled herring to preserve food in vinegars and things like that. You could smoke food, which also kind of changes the color of food. So you could make things like fish turn red, red herrings. And another way was preserving foods that were cooked in pies. So actually today you want to eat the whole pie, but in the early modern period, the pie casing was more for preservation and protection and you wouldn't have eaten the actual casing. And then if there were any holes in the pastry, you might fill it with some butter or use storage jars and pots and things like that. And in the early modern period, so especially in the 17th century, sugar was an important way of preserving food, but it's also very expensive food.
Liz Russell Narration:
Even though I had originally asked Michael Lansing to talk about the late 1800s, he also had many examples of food preservation from before this time.
Michael Lansing (Historian):
There's a multitude of methods through which people figured out how to make food palatable, sometimes how to make it taste better. And of course, how to make it last. You think about the drying of food. So for instance, indigenous people in the center of North America on the Great Plains for hundreds of years had been creating dried buffalo meat. What's often called pemmican by crushing berries and mixing it with this dried meat. And then suddenly they had this high calorie, high protein food that was easily transported and so it could last for months when you mix it with little animal fat in part of that processing, or you can think about something that we have today, like soy sauce in which you have soybeans, which of course go bad eventually you can only store them for so long. So what happens if you ferment them and add a couple things to that particular mix and suddenly you've got this tasty sauce you can use year round. In central Europe, sauerkraut, perfect example of shredding cabbage and letting natural fermentation take its course.
Many cheeses, of course, fresh milk comes from a cow or a goat or any number of other animals that humans have gotten milk from, but fresh milk spoils pretty fast in a world without refrigeration. So ancient people got really creative in figuring out how to curdle fresh milk and to create different types of products. Sometimes they would curdle that milk and then they would separate the curds and whey, and then they would let things grow from it. And sometimes they would just eat one of those things that was immediately curdled. There were all kinds of variants. Of course, depending on the culture you can think about dried chickpeas in what's now the middle east or salted fish in Northern Europe or in Western Europe, there's endless variations on the processing of food and the processing of food that was done largely by individuals and largely in the home. And these were all ways of making food more edible or tastier, or just being able to keep it longer. So processing has a long history.
Liz Russell:
So how did processing get its bad name? When you hear the word processed foods right now, it's something that's typically associated with being negative. It's often not called food by people. People will make comments that it's not even food. How did we get from processing as a vital part of how we live to processing as seen as somewhat evil and this disconnect between, you know, lower processed foods and highly, highly processed foods?
Michael Lansing (Historian):
Yeah. Well, the question really turns on who's doing the processing. What kind of processing is being done and who benefits from that processing? And there's this massive shift in the late 19th century in both Western Europe and in North America. And the massive shift is in relation to who's doing the processing and how the foodstuff is being processed, and that shift transforms everything. We live on this side of that transformation because it was 150 years ago. So many of us in the 21st century, these older ways of preserving food through processing are really unusual, but of course they were the norm until the second half of the 19th century. And essentially what happened is that food started being processed in industrial settings by that, I mean factories and the first three kinds of categories of food that became factory processed foods, that is they weren't done in households or in your village or in your rural neighborhood.
They were being processed at some far away place in a factory where wage workers were working, where there was lots of machinery. The three kinds of food that fell into those first industrial food categories were canned goods, meat, and bread flour. Those were the first food items to be processed in large factory settings in Western Europe and North America. This transition at the second half of the 19th century towards industrially processed foods is of course, part of this broader context in this massive rearrangement of the United States, the United States is becoming more broadly, much more into.
Liz Russell Narration:
That's true. My interest was piqued. I was living less than a mile from a major contributor to the rearrangement of the United States, albeit maybe a slightly different one than the one Michael Lansing was referring to, the Erie Canal. Suddenly things just got a lot more local because here's the thing, the story of preserving food isn't just about keeping it year round. It's also a story about keeping food safe so it can travel.
Derrick Pratt (Erie Canal):
I'm Derrick Pratt, the museum educator here at the Erie Canal Museum and at the moment, our interim curator as well. I’m running our Erie Eats project, which is our big initiative here in 2021 at the Erie Canal Museum.
Liz Russell Narration:
I met Derrick at the Weighlock building, a beautiful Greek revival style building located in downtown Syracuse. It's where the Erie Canal Museum is now housed. We met upstairs in the former state offices where dark mahogany cabinets line the walls and tables were covered in different artifacts and paperwork. Even above the exhibit halls, this place felt busy.
Derrick Pratt (Erie Canal):
The mission of the museum is to preserve the Weighlock Building and our canal heritage as well as inform the public about the Erie Canal and the transforming effect it's had on New York's past, present and future. Because so many people are surprised even today to learn the Erie Canal still operates. You can still take a boat from Buffalo to Albany even today, and you've been able to do it for almost 200 years.
Liz Russell Narration:
I asked Derrick to treat me like I didn't know anything, and I'm glad I did, because even though I had learned a lot in middle school, there was a lot of Erie Canal history that I actually didn't know.
Derrick Pratt (Erie Canal):
At the moment we're commemorating the bicentennial of the construction of the Erie Canal. It started in Rome, New York, July 4th, 1817, and was completed in October of 1825. It took eight years, which was itself incredible. At the time, it was a 363 mile long, entirely man made waterway running from Buffalo to Albany. And that therefore connects the Great Lakes at Lake Erie to the Hudson River by Albany and from the Hudson River, you can get down to the Atlantic Ocean. So it connected essentially Minnesota to the Atlantic Ocean and all points in between. So it massively transformed New York State and the United States. It was built by New York in 1817, paid for entirely by the state. And it's still operated by the state today. It’s the first major, really state-funded infrastructure project.
Liz Russell Narration:
Derrick explained this was funded by New York because they couldn't get federal funding. They were actually laughed out of the room. The idea of the canal was considered that ridiculous. Thomas Jefferson himself had called the idea a little short of madness. Others referred to the project as Clinton's ditch or Clinton's folly for then New York governor DeWitt Clinton.
Liz Russell:
Why did people think it was crazy? Why were they laughed out of the room?
Derrick Pratt (Erie Canal):
Well, it was the early 1800s. America was less than 50 years old at the time. There was not a single trained American engineer yet at the time, or at least civilian engineer. There were a few being trained in the military, but they weren't involved in the project. A few canal projects have been tried. That was really why Thomas Jefferson said it was nothing short of madness. George Washington had proposed a canal of the Potomac Canal that would have connected essentially where Washington DC is nowadays to the Ohio river. That was a massive failure because they couldn't find adequate funding largely. And the kind of technological resources of it also weren't there. That's why everyone thought it was kind of insane. There was also Syracuse where we are today. In 1820, the Erie Canal actually went through Syracuse with a population of 250 people.
Liz Russell Narration:
The engineers worked on the Erie Canal went on to work on some of the largest projects in the nation at the time, the Croton Aqueduct, which would bring water to New York City, for example, was built by engineers who got their start on the Erie Canal project. So before that canal, how did goods get from east coast port cities into the interior of US?
Derrick Pratt (Erie Canal):
The large part? They often wouldn't ‘cause you could either go down to New Orleans, try to take the Mississippi River up out of Mississippi, it has an incredibly strong current. So before steamboats, that was a difficult proposition to go up the Mississippi River. Waterways are generally the easiest path. However, the Mohawk River valley had been used for centuries, millennia since the Hudna Shawnee were in the area as a traditional route, everyone recognizes incredible paths through the Appalachian mountains. And by waterway, you would generally carry your goods from Albany to around where Schenectady is. So you could get around the Great Falls of Cohoes, which are massive waterfalls. Then you would take what are generally called Durham boats through there too, an early kind of watercraft in America that you would push upstream, which was from what I understand incredibly difficult, you might be familiar with them.
They're what George Washington crossed the Delaware in. And so if you've seen those paintings, those sorts of boats, however, the Mohawk is not like the Hudson. Hudson's a nice flat waterway. Doesn't have significant elevation change. The Mohawk has tons of rapids, waterfalls and so on. So whenever you arrived at those points, you would have to carry all your goods around those obstacles, including your boat, which boats aren't easy to carry places. Most notably there was a stretch called the Great Carry in Rome, New York, where the Mohawk River starts to turn north into the Adirondacks where it's not as useful. You carry it to this little stream called Wood Creek. Interestingly, if you know your Revolutionary War history, Fort Stanwix, that's why that was there. It was to protect this kind of clearing place. Wood Creek was this little tiny stream, winding, half the time didn't have water in it, but you could take it to Oneida Lake.
And from there that hooks up to the Seneca River system, kind of drains into Lake Ontario as well as you can get to the Finger Lakes, kind of like Ontario, you can take that to Niagara Falls, where you again have to carry all your stuff around to get to Lake Erie. So that was complicated. There were also some early roads which were originally native American trails that kind of got expanded. They were notoriously just awful in wet times. They would be nothing but mud while dry seasons you'd be caked in dust. There weren't bridges. From what we understand there were just giant kind of like tree trunks, that would be in the middle of them because they were brand new. And to fix that, they tried a system known as corduroy roads, where they would cut logs and lay them all next to each other. It would make sort of a corduroy pattern. However, those would work a little bit, but the logs would wear out very quickly, rot, or people would just drive over them and they were out. So corduroy roads weren't too efficient. They were very expensive to maintain. So there were a lot of issues with moving goods into the interior.
Liz Russell Narration:
The canal ended up being a boom to the city of Syracuse. The population of 250 in 1820 quickly grew to 22,000 by 1850. This is a very local example, well local to me anyways, of the kind of shift that Michael Lansing was talking about.
Michael Lansing (Historian):
This transition at the second half of the 19th century towards industrially processed foods is of course, part of this broader context in this massive rearrangement of the United States. The United States is becoming more broadly, much more industrial, nearly every type of category or economic activity was becoming industrialized in some way. That is it's becoming a large scale. It's somehow associated with wage work and factories. And that's a process that had begun decades and decades before, but it was really taking off in those years after the Civil War and food is just one of those categories. And there are all kinds of changes that go with industrialization, including the shift from a largely rural population to a largely urban population. So in 1870, between depending on who's counting and which statistics you look at, it's possible to see 70 or 80% of Americans living in rural spaces. By 1920, 50% of Americans were living in cities.
So that becomes a very kind of important demographic shift in relation to food, because if you're living or if you're moving from the country and into one of these growing cities, anywhere across the United States in the south and the west in the midwest, in the east, you move into a space where you might've had chickens, you know, on your small farm, you might've had a cow that you milked. You might have had a few pigs that you kept around. You might have had a very close relationship to a butcher shop in the small town, by your farm. All those relationships with both animals and people are gone, they're all rearranged and scrambled. You suddenly find yourself in a much more densely settled space and industrial food arrives right at the same time. So as a consumer, you're actually starting to be swept up in a culture of consumption.
That's really different because you're buying these pre-prepared factory made food products. Sometimes it's because it's new, it's novel. It's interesting. It's exciting. Sometimes it's because you think it's better, like the whiter the bread flour was the more prized it was. And the fact that more people could get better and whiter bread flour more cheaply was seen as an incredible innovation by many at the time. People today, for instance, who think about white bread as the problem would be shocked to read some of the things in the 1870s, 1880s, that people are saying, and not just these companies that are promoting their products, but also consumers just saying like, oh my God, this is great. This flour or these canned tomatoes or whatever the food product is. It's just better than what I used to get. And it's cheaper too. So there's a culture of consumption that grows up around these industrial food products.
And then the third thing that grows up around this transition to industrially processed foods is this question of trust. There's a kind of a dark underbelly, which is that what's on the outside may not match what's on the inside as one historian has recently suggested that you can look at a foodstuff on a shelf, in a store, in a city, and there's a label, but is that label telling the truth? And who's in charge of making sure that it might be telling the truth? And how has the information about what's inside translated to you as a regular consumer? You know, most of us are not chemists. So, there's a whole set of things that have to be negotiated around the question of trust with these new consumer products. They're both appealing and in some ways problematic at the same time, it much depends on who you are and how much money you have and what your interests are and what cultural tradition you come from. Even where you are in the country can matter in terms of how you're reacting to those different things.
Liz Russell Narration:
And this is what I started to hone in on: where I am in the country and how that impacts my relationship to food.
[🎶Theme music🎶]
Liz Russell Narration:
Next time on Was Is Could Be, a cow and a pig go into a Volkswagen. Nope. This is not the start of a weird joke. If you want to learn more about my food journey, follow me on Instagram @itslizrussell, or check out www.itslizrussell.com/podcast. Michael Lansing is a professor and department chair at Augsburg University in Minnesota. You can find out more about his work through Augsburg University's website, augsburg.edu. If you want to learn more about the Erie Eats project mentioned by Derrick Pratt, head to the Erie Canal Museum in downtown Syracuse, or check out eriecanalmuseum.org/erie-eats. And don't forget to follow Eleanor Barnett on Instagram at @historyeats.