Food in World History: A 1995 Course at the University of Hawaii

Why I decided to teach food in world history

It’s hard to remember that just twenty five years ago food was not considered a worthy academic subject, so it was with some trepidation that I went to the Dean of Natural Sciences, where I held my appointment as a historian of science and technology, to see if he would give permission for a course on food history. I would teach it, I explained, not as a matter of taste and gastronomy, but as the history of some of humanity’s most important and complex technologies, and thus entirely appropriate in the Natural Sciences. He gave permission for an experimental run.

For fear of academic death, I’d not mentioned that I had in fact just completed a book, The Food of Paradise: Exploring Hawaii’s Culinary Heritage. (Correction. When I was a Fellow in the Davis Center in the History Department at Princeton a couple of years earlier, I’d asked Natalie Zemon Davis if she knew of anyone doing serious food history. Her answer was that apart from Barbara Wheaton she knew of nobody.) Instead I was sustained by a companionable and highly knowledgeable informal global network of food scholars whose foci were Alan Davidson’s Oxford Symposium in England and the groups of Culinary Historians in the United States, particularly in Boston (Barbara Wheaton, Barbara Haber and Joyce Toomre) and in New York (Betty Fussell, Cara de Silva, Ray Sokolov, Elizabeth Andoh).

One moral of The Food of Paradise was that there was no way to understand the culinary heritage of these tiny isolated Hawaiian islands with understanding a good bit about the evolution and transmission of cuisines around the globe.

It would be fascinating, I thought, to teach a course that inverted that insight by reviewing major world cuisines as a background to the cuisines of Hawaii.

Why might a twenty-five year-old course on ‘Food in World History’ be of interest?

What prompted this post was a brief discussion on Twitter with food historian Rachel Hope Cleeves (check what she writes if you don’t know it because it’s always interesting, well researched, and never stodgy or pretentious). She’s teaching a course on food in world history course this semester.

I think that it might be of some interest because there are so many ways to approach world history of food either in a book or in a course. Another colleague, Rebecca Earle, for example, takes a thematic approach rather than a narrative one, the advantage being that it allows her to systematically address issues such as hunger, vegetarianism, or restaurants that I could not.

Obviously, there’s no right or wrong to this. It depends on students’ interests and backgrounds, teacher’s knowledge, and institutional setting, among other factors.

So I suggest three reasons why a course taught some time ago might still be of interest.

1. Given the background of the undergraduates at the University of Hawaii, most of whom were third or fourth generation Asian Americans, with smaller numbers of Pacific Islanders and ‘haoles’ (whites), this course began with East Asian cuisines and made its way gradually westward, with European and north American cuisines in the penultimate two weeks, and Pacific Island and fusion cuisines as the climax of the course.

2. Because many students at the University of Hawaii came from families involved in food production (sugar, pineapple, coffee, papaya, fishing, ranching, fruit and vegetable gardening) and those from the Islands were expert in the kitchen, it was heavily based on the food processing technologies of different cultures. I wanted to draw on students’ knowledge of that partly for my own benefit but also so that the students could shine.

I hadn’t emphasized food technology just to get the course past the Dean. By looking at the diversity and complexity of these techniques, I hoped to show that cooking broadly understood was one of the most important human technologies.

We were lucky to have the class in an old laboratory. Although the gas had been cut off, there was still running water and ample bench space. With that, an electric frying pan, a food processor, a blender, and various other bits of equipment, we experimented with the different food processing techniques of different major cuisines. Student enrollment was capped at twenty.

About half way through the course it occurred to me that given the number of foods we tasted I should have asked for releases from the students. It was too late. In any case, given that in Hawaii students brought food to share to all their classes and that it would have been extraordinarily rude to refuse these offerings, what we did was common practice across the campus.

3. Food processing technologies were always embedded in some of the most fundamental beliefs of a culture. This was a general lesson I had garnered from teaching history of technology. Technologies were never just a matter of “nuts and bolts” or, in this case, “grindstones and mortars.”

Given that I was largely ignorant of many of the cultural traditions around the world, I was lucky that the University of Hawaii had an exceptional array of experts in Asian traditions, many of whom were more than open to taking food seriously. I learned as much as the students from the really first rate guest lecturers I was able to draw on.

For Chinese gastronomy, Danny Kwok, former chair of history who hosted monthly gatherings at Hawaii’s Chinese restaurants; for Confucian ideas about food, Roger Ames, professor of Chinese philosophy; for Taoist cuisine, Michael Saso; for the Vedic tradition in South Asia, Lee Siegel, historian of religion and novelist; for local Portuguese and fusion food, Wanda Adams author and food editor at the Honolulu Advertiser; for the first stirrings of Hawaii Regional Cuisine at the hands of a group of chefs, John Heckathorn, food editor at Honolulu Magazine.

In retrospect, it perhaps seems odd that I did not address the issues that occupy food studies today, such as food and identity, colonialism and appropriation, and food justice. Those, however, were far in the future. Just getting anything together at all on food history was the trick.

Students read extensively, completed worksheets every couple of weeks, wrote an essay, participated in the practical hands-on displays and demonstrations and had a final exam.

The end-of-semester booklet for ‘Food in World History’

Again it’s hard to remember that twenty five years ago podcasts, web sites, blogs and other nifty ways of presenting course materials had not even been dreamed of. Even email was far from universally available, let alone used.

What was of the moment was self publishing: newsletters, flyers, booklets were possible thanks to word processing and printers that were by then reasonably sophisticated. That’s why at the end of the semester I put together a booklet of student contributions to the major topics in the class.

At the beginning of the class I asked each student to identify the two food traditions they were most familiar with. These are listed on the back page of the booklet (first page of the scan). ‘Local’ as a tradition means the fusion food of Hawaii.

The syllabus for ‘Food in World History’

So here is the syllabus in eight units, followed by the technologies we focussed on in each unit and the handout I put together.

The handouts and hands-on exercises for ‘Food in World History’

Note that here I am only listing the practicals, most of them led by the students. The cultural background is described in the handouts.

Unit One. Introduction and Basic Ways of Turning Animals and Plants into Food

Cutting. A competition to see whether a worked flint or a modern knife could cut up a chicken faster. Grinding and pounding. Millet and rice in a mortar. Wet grain dishes. Making millet porridge. Sampling porridgy-gruelly dishes. Parched grain dishes as instant foods. Baked grain dishes. Flatbreads. Making a list of others known to the students.

Unit Two Early Empires

Western fermentation. A beer-loving student showed the stages of turning grains into beer. Roman fish sauce came to life when a Filipina student brought in the bucket of half-made sauce that her Mother had brewing under the sink.

Unit Three. Foods of China and its sphere of influence

Sand pots and woks. Iron in the kitchen and the field. Millet and rice. A display of soy products from edamame to textured vegetable protein. (This was amazing to all as an example of how a single plant could be turned into diverse tastes, textures and culinary uses). Asian fermented condiments. Making soy milk and tofu. A student from Hong Kong brought in pig’s blood soup and explained its medicinal uses.

Unit Four. Foods of South Asia and its sphere of influence

Here we moved beyond what students’ experience. South Asian treatments of rice and legumes compared to East Asian. Display of spices. South Asian sauces. Milk. Making yogurt, butter, and ghee.

Unit Five. Foods of Islam and the Mediterranean

For both me and the students, this was the unit furthest from our comfort zone. Wheat. I prepared dishes from the Baghdad Cookbook to taste. Distillation. Display of uses of sugar in the kitchen as spice, preservative, foodstuff, flavoring.

Unit Six. Pre-contact foods of the Americas

Maize and what happened when you treated it with alkali. Potatoes. Display. Chiles and their uses other than adding piquancy. Pureed chile and tomato sauces.

Unit Seven. Foods of Europe and North America

Raised bread. Demonstration of structure of the French meal. Wheat flour, milk, butter, sugar, meat-based flavorings. Roux-based sauces. Modern cookbooks and home economics texts (astonishing to the students). Canning and freezing.

Unit Eight. Hawaiian, Pacific Island and Fusion Foods

Pacific Island foods and the Pacific diaspora. Taro, sweet potato, pigs, chickens. Cooking in underground ovens. A detailed analysis of the year’s preparation that went into a Hawaiian luau including slaughtering the pig, collecting limpets, and building the underground oven. A Guamanian feast complete with betel nuts. Local food as fusion of Pacific Island, European (English, American and Portuguese), and Asian (Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Okinawan, and Filipino). The plate lunch.

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It was wonderful last course to teach before leaving academia.

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