Why White Bread and Maize Were/Are Preferred (Again)
Lockwood Kipling, Rudyard’s father and head art teacher at the Sir Jamsetje Jeejeboy College of Art in Bombay, founded by the epynonymous Indian benefactor, reflects on the Indian peasant diet.
The succulent [literally juicy from the Latin succus] food of the West, rich and full of flavour, is eaten with a closed mouth, while appreciative lips, palate, and tongue relieve the teeth from hard labour.
But the Indian peasant’s dry thick cake of millet or wheaten meal must be steadily chewed, completely milled and masticated before it can be swallowed, and it is only when it is touched with ghi or dipped in stewed vegetables or pulse that the lips close on a morsel with any semblance of gourmandise.
Beast and Man in India, first published in 1891, 137.
I think it is easy to forget how much chewing had to be done with traditional whole meal dishes and, if they were baked, how dry they were. Most societies have something to help it down, in this case ghee, or to soften it, soup in the case of French peasant breads. And what Kipling does not mention is that this unpalatability was true of many European breads until pretty shortly before he wrote. Sheila Hamilton (thanks) sent along this comment about The Long Affray, a history of poaching in Britain by Harry Hopkins.
It includes this note on the diet in Berkshire in 1795 (the information was gathered by a local vicar who was concerned about the poverty of his parishioners):
“Bread and potatoes – ‘tatters and shake’ (ie salt) – was now the basic diet, and in some areas that bread was heavy barley bread, bannocks, baked over the fire. Meat, butter and cheese, which the labourer had enjoyed earlier in the century, before he had been banished from the farmer’s board, had all but disappeared. Even milk could be hard to come by now that farmers were sending it in bulk into the towns. Tea – an extravagance much reprobated by the labourers’ mentors- was all too often boiling water poured on burned bread crusts.”
For a perspective on maize in South Africa here is an extract from White Food by the interesting blogger Tangerine and Cinnamon. Worth clicking on the link to read the whole thing.
A recent article published by the magnificent Mail and Guardian explores South Africa’s taste for whiter, finer maize meal:
“In the poorest communities a bag of maize meal is often the only way of satisfying a family’s hunger, and the cost factor plays a role too. An 80kg bag of maize meal is about R400: on a 500g portion a person a day, an extended family of 10 people would consume an 80kg bag in about 16 days. The daily total consumption of maize meal in South Africa is about 10 000 tonnes.
But these maize-meal consumers demand a product that is white – stripped of roughage and nutrients – and manufacturers have remodelled their businesses to serve this demand.
South Africa’s best-selling brand of maize meal is White Star, produced by Pioneer Foods. White Star is whiter and finer than other brands. Premier Foods and Tiger Brands, the country’s other two big producers of maize meal, have also invested in technology which produces this whiter maize meal.”
For me the bottom line is this.Either you assume that those who lived largely on grains were deluded or driven by an irrational desire for status to prefer white. This seems an act of enormous condescension since neither I nor, I suspect, the readers of this blog have ever lived largely on grains.Or you assume that they had good reasons.
I’m not sure that I understand why the white meal would be “stripped of roughage and nutrients”. The While meal that is prefered in South Africa and Zimbabwe is made from white maize to the best of my knowledge, so it will be naturally white.
One of the maize stables in Zimbabwe is “Sadza”, not sure what it was made from prior to the introduction of maize, but I bet is wasn’t bright yellow colour. Maize is unusual in having some stains that produce such a bright yellow coloured flour. This site indicates that Sadza is made from a range of different meals that give a range of coloured products:
http://fieldtofeast.blogspot.com/2006/09/muddy-sadza-smelly-fish.html
The choice of white maize could simply be stochastic is origin, with later re-enforcent. Did white maize just happen to be the frst to be introduced and there by considered the “norm”?
This site suggests that a preference for white maize is actually rooted in the perception of higher quality, do to the historical importation of poor quality yellow maize.
http://www.dfid.gov.uk/r4d/SearchResearchDatabase.asp?ProjectID=578
Also, many food choices are irrational. The British market prefers brown eggs, other markets white. This isn’t about nutrition.
As always Adam, you have lots of points here. Thanks for the links to Sadza.
On maize, I think one has to be very sensitive to its use. In Mexico, white maize is a maize that is excellent for making tortillas. American yellow maize is not.
As I said to Sarah Emily, I think there are lots of rational considerations that go into food choices that go well beyond nutrition. Is it not true that the Brits were subjected to much advertizing about brown farm eggs?
Hi
And thanks for referring to my post. I’m really sorry that you feel that my post of condescending. Far from it, my point is simply that a range of factors – rational and otherwise – cause people to choose what they eat. Of course, people choose finely milled maize because it’s easier to prepare and digest. But they’re also choosing this product – which has little or no nutritional value – because it represents a variety of other things, like comfort and luxury.
I think was trying to apply Sidney Mintz’s thinking on sugar in Britain to maize in South Africa.
Kind regards
Sarah Emily
Sarah Emily, As I said in my email to you, this was just clumsy wording on my blog. I did not for one minute mean to say you were condescending. My apologies.
For both you and Adam. I think I would like to make the notion of rationality broader when it comes to food choices. Not just nutrition. And I think status is often a stand in for other values that may make a lot of sense.
A Zimbabwean based in London has started farming white maize: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/4397164.stm
One comment may be relevant to this discussion:
“Mr Mwanaka explained that white maize is “much sweeter” than British corn, and has a much higher starch content.”
I’m not sure what effect that might have on the porridge made from it – more filling? smoother texture?
Thanks for this Sheila. Very interesting. I wish there were clearer variety names. In the US, white corn often means sweet corn. In Mexico it doesn’t at all. This sounds more like the Mexican corn. I also wonder what Mr Mwanaka means by sweet. I think it is often used as a synonym for tasty.
Fascinating, as ever, but I think you get to the heart of the matter when you say you “wish there were clearer variety names”. A moment’s reflection suggests that white vs yellow is just not that meaningful a distinction for anything other than colour.
Absolutely Jeremy. Like you, I am sure, I could go on for hours about maize and its varieties. In public discussion in Mexico (not among botanists obviously), white maize is simply a shorthand for the kind of maize grown in Mexico that makes good tortillas as opposed to the maize imported from the US for animals and industrial use.
I hope that this link works, but it has lots of interesting information on how white maize became dominant in Africa. “Maize and grace: Africa’s encounter with a New World crop, 1500-2000” By James McCann
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=qPyrpL7U6vUC&pg=PA112&dq=white+maize+south+africa&hl=en&ei=EZLcTt2cHMjdsgb3ivnhCw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CEUQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=white%20maize%20south%20africa&f=false
Politics and Colonial trade it seems.
McCann’s book is a great addition to the literature.
Don’t forget that Richard Wrangham brought up the chewing thing in his book, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. Status and advertising go a long way in influencing food habits. Robert Dirks’s quite-up-to-date bibliography of world food habits at http://lilt.ilstu.edu/rtdirks/ really offers a tremendous number of readings on the various ways in which people choose what to eat when they can make that choice. We can talk all we want about nutrition, but I still think that nutritionists miss the boat a lot in giving advice on what to eat because their training does not prepare them to really understand this issue, though they might argue otherwise.