Since summer of 2020, many survivors of China’s cultural revolutions, including myself, Chinese dissident Weiwei Ai, Chinese parents in R.I. Though I applaud them for their rightful restoration of House Oversight, Republicans cannot ignore the major threat to America’s future - Critical Race Theory (CRT) and woke culture. Congress started investigations into the Biden administration’s wrongdoings. These are indisputable facts of history, though if you point them out you will be met with stares of disbelief.Recently, the Republican-controlled U.S. Tequila? Promoted as the national drink of Mexico during the 1930s by the Mexican film industry. Greek moussaka? Created in the early 20th century in an attempt to Frenchify Greek food. The French baguette? A 20th-century phenomenon, adopted nationwide only after World War II. For every prized dish that goes back 2,000 years, a dozen have been invented in the last 200. Nor are most “traditional foods” very old. Cities have always enjoyed the best food and have invariably been the focal points of culinary innovation. This is as true of the lasagna of northern Italy as it is of the chicken korma of Mughal Delhi, the moo shu pork of imperial China, and the pilafs, stuffed vegetables, and baklava of the great Ottoman palace in Istanbul. The dishes we call ethnic and assume to be of peasant origin were invented for the urban, or at least urbane, aristocrats who collected the surplus. They subsisted on what was left over, getting by on thin gruels and gritty flatbreads.

Most were burdened with heavy taxes and rents paid in kind (that is, food) or worse, they were indentured, serfs, or slaves. Few who worked the land were independent peasants baking their own bread and salting down their own pig. The presumed corollary–that country people ate better than city dwellers–does not. What about the idea that the best food was country food, handmade by artisans? That food came from the country goes without saying. The Greeks roasted barley and ground it into a meal to eat straight or mixed with water, milk, or butter (as Tibetans still do), while the Aztecs ground roasted maize and mixed it with water (as Mexicans still do).

Hunters tracking their prey, shepherds tending their flocks, soldiers on campaign, and farmers rushing to get in the harvest all needed food that could be eaten quickly and away from home. Happiness was not a verdant Garden of Eden abounding in fresh fruits, but a securely locked storehouse jammed with preserved, processed foods.Īs for slow food, it is easy to wax nostalgic about a time when families and friends met to relax over delicious food, and to forget that, far from being an invention of the late 20th century, fast food has been a mainstay of every society. When the ancient Greeks took it as a sign of bad times if people were driven to eat greens and root vegetables, they were rehearsing common wisdom. They built granaries, dried their meat and their fruit, salted and smoked their fish, curdled and fermented their dairy products, and cheerfully used additives and preservatives–sugar, salt, oil, vinegar, lye–to make edible foodstuffs.Įating fresh, natural food was regarded with suspicion verging on horror only the uncivilized, the poor, and the starving resorted to it. They created sweet oranges and juicy apples and non-bitter legumes, happily abandoning their more natural but less tasty ancestors. So to make food tasty, safe, digestible, and healthy, our forebears bred, ground, soaked, leached, curdled, fermented, and cooked naturally occurring plants and animals until they were literally beaten into submission. Grains, which supplied 50 to 90 percent of the calories in most societies, have to be threshed, ground, and cooked to make them edible. Everywhere seasons of plenty were followed by seasons of hunger. Fresh meat was rank and tough, fresh fruits inedibly sour, fresh vegetables bitter. As a historian notes in a journal about food and culture:įor our ancestors, natural was something quite nasty.

Liberty unyielding kenric ward