Books that shed light. Richards, The Unending Frontier
For the past several weeks I’ve been perusing John F. Richards’ The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World (California, 2005). There’s a lot of it to peruse. The book runs nearly 700 pages. For a food historian, the fascination is that this is the other side of food history. When people wanted foods badly enough–sugar for its sweetnes or dried cod for its everlasting life and light weight–then environmental impacts followed. Of course, people also wanted precious metals and lush, warm furs and other goodies.
As a food historian, though, I read the book for what it tells me about what people in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries wanted to eat.
The Dutch for example wanted grains. When they set up settlements in Taiwan in the mid-seventeenth century they took a dim view of the local shifting farming. Wheat was out of the question. Importing rice was too expensive. So they offered incentives to the Chinese to come and grow rice. And so the Chinese began settling Taiwan. Sparks thoughts about the Dutch as movers and shakers in the spread of rice eating, about just how Chinese is Taiwan.
Take Russia. Peasants could gather between six and fifty kilos of mushrooms from a hectare of forest To get some perspective twenty kilos is a common airline maximum for baggage. A hectare is a hundred meters by a hundred meters. That’s a lot of mushrooms.
Then this morning I learned from one of my email lists that Richards died a few days ago. In Memoriam Richards. And thanks.
