Global Migration of Dishes and Recipes III
Lots of disciplines wrestle with understanding the diffusion of ideas, technologies, products and so on. I find browsing the work of archaeologists, economists, historians and others a fruitful source of ideas for understanding change in food.
For the last few months I have been dipping into Richard Fletcher’s The Barbarian Conversion: From Paganism to Christianity. Historians have been producing some fascinating books on the spread of the world’s religions. I’ve already referred to one on the rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier. Since converting to a new religion normally means changing what you eat, I find this literature particularly suggestive.
The Barbarian Conversion is a measured book, scholarly in tone, careful in its way of teasing out conclusions from fragmentary evidence. It’s not a book to read all at once. Its five hundred pages work carefully through the conversion of Europe over a thousand years. But it has lots of interesting ideas.
For example, in the first chapter he lists nine questions to be posed when thinking about conversion. I think most of them are just as important for understanding changes in cuisine (or changes in taste to put it another way). Here are the first three.
1. The apostolic impulse. Why were churchmen’s enthusiasm for changing the beliefs of others go up and down? Translate to food. Why have certain people (rulers, religious leaders, nutritionists) sometimes decided that it was important to change people’s eating habits.
This may seem like a strange question. But just consider the efforts in the US in the last century to Americanize immigrants’ diets. Or now to make people eat fewer processed foods. Apostolic impulses all and just the tip of the iceberg. Efforts to change diet have been going on for millennia.
2. The nature of the evangelists. Who were they, why did they take on these tasks, what were their models, how did they develop strategy and tactics?
3. The missionary target. Who are you going to focus on? The wealthy, the poor, the migrant, the old, the young? HOw are you going to reach them?
More of these questions in a day or so.
