Food History

Today was market day. The local farmers’ markets have been going for a few months now and I have been every few weeks and everyone seems to know me. They can’t always sort out food history from food technology, but they know me and will explain who I am and why I ask strange questions to anyone who happens to be near.

The maker of pâtés and rillettes sent a message today that there were “pork-free products for your Jewish friend.” I rolled up to see what he was referring to and it turned out to be pure duck rillettes. They taste very northern French and the maker, I thought, was Vietnamese. Just shows you should always ask people their background, because he’s Belgian. I know about the similarities between Belgian and Normandy pâtés and rillettes, but not a thing about the differences. Next time I go to the market I need to ask him some questions. (He knows his stuff – that duck was very good and just as rich as it ought to be – we had it with lunch.)

On the vegetable front, there was some very bad news: the wonderful purveyor of heritage carrots had his whole crop wiped out by a hailstorm. There will be a new crop in a few weeks, but in the meantime he has to weather $100,000 worth of damage. It’s bad for him, and it’s also a salutary reminder of what we no longer have to put up with.

A famine in, say, the Middle Ages or the Renaissance was typically regional (like that hailstorm). A bigger event with wider destruction could wipe out crops in a wider area (the potato famine in Ireland in the nineteenth century is a terribly depressing example of this) but for every big famine, there were maybe dozens of little ones, chronicled locally but not reported elsewhere. I have a list of some of them for the Middle Ages (put together from work by French scholars) but it’s woefully inadequate. We just don’t have reports on every famine that happened until very recently.

These days we may be guilty of neglect (due to modern communications we tend to be aware of famines, but only a very few people move to do something about them) but we have completely different transport and distribution to one hundred and fifty years ago and earlier. If the major root crop disintegrates for one area, food can be brought in from elsewhere. Australia is emerging (probably may be emerging – I’m guilty of wishful thinking) from one of the worst droughts in recorded Australian history. Farmers have gone bankrupt, but no-one local has starved to death from it.

The patterns of not finding food are historically radically different now from what they once were. There was always politics involved in famines – who would help whom and why never quite fades from the picture. These days, though, politics is more important and regional production less. The underlying structure of food production has changed, and our lives with it.