147 | Rachel Laudan on Cuisine, Culture, and Empire

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Sean Carroll | Wondery

Society & Culture, Physics, Philosophy, Science, Ideas, Society

4.8 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 17 May 2021

⏱️ 77 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

For as much as people talk about food, a good case can be made that we don’t give it the attention or respect it actually deserves. Food is central to human life, and how we go about the process of creating and consuming it — from agriculture to distribution to cooking to dining — touches the most mundane aspects of our daily routines as well as large-scale questions of geopolitics and culture. Rachel Laudan is a historian of science whose masterful book, Cuisine and Empire, traces the development of the major world cuisines and how they intersect with politics, religion, and war. We talk about all this, and Rachel gives her pitch for granting more respect to “middling cuisine” around the world.

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Rachel Laudan received a Ph. D. in History and Philosophy of Science from University College London. She retired from academia after teaching at Carnegie-Mellon, the University of Pittsburgh, Virginia Tech, and the University of Hawaii. Among her awards are the Jane Grigson/Julia Child prize of the International Association of Culinary Professionals and the IACP Cookbook Award for Best Book in Culinary History.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll.
0:04.0	And among the topics that I think doesn't get enough intellectual respect in the ways that we
0:09.9	talk about the world is food. Food is enormously important, right? I mean, we eat food every day,
0:16.0	most of us. We think about it. A tremendous amount of our economy is devoted to growing food,
0:22.4	transporting it, cooking it, deciding how to eat it. And food plays in in an intimate way to the
0:29.2	history of the world. Different countries or different nation states are trying to get resources
0:35.6	which include growing food. Their technological development of a society can be driven by ways
0:42.2	to make food better or more interesting or whatever. Today's guest Rachel Loudon is a historian of
0:48.0	scientists who became a historian of food because she realized that not only is the science of food
0:53.9	very interesting, but the cultural and political and even religious history of food is fascinating.
1:01.2	So she wrote a wonderful book. It's a couple years old now, but maybe you don't know about it.
1:04.8	It's called Quizine and Empire. The idea being that different political groups in the history of
1:11.5	the world have been associated with different kinds of cuisines. And we can trace how these cuisines
1:16.9	change over time by who invades, who sends their missionaries to convert, who else. And it's
1:24.3	important. It matters. Again, we eat the food every day. So thinking about when we eat a certain meal,
1:31.2	oh, I'm using rice or I'm using wheat-based pasta or soybeans because of some cultural
1:37.5	history I hadn't even thought of before. So this is a food-based podcast, but we're not
1:42.1	giving any recipes or anything like that. We're talking about food as an element in the greater
1:48.1	history of humanity here on Earth. The religious aspects are kind of interesting to me. The war
1:54.8	aspects, the political and economic aspects, food is everywhere. It's not just in our everyday
1:59.3	lives. It's sort of something we got to do. It plays an important role. So hope you've already
2:04.4	eaten because you might get hungry while we're talking about this stuff. Let's go.
	...

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