Food History

Our conception of food and its availability has been shifting for nearly two centuries. Refrigerated carriages in trains so that produce could be carried across the continental United States, canning, bottling plus older preserving methods such as candying, slating, drying and smoking – these have all expanded our ideas of what food can be eaten when. The biggest changes are those from the last two hundred years. And yes, I just repeated myself. It must be swelling on it severely, so say something twice!

This last few years, it has been fresh food that has changed. We have longer seasons for our favourite fruit and vegetable as new varieties have extended seasons and as slow freight is replaced by air travel for chunks of the market.

What I was thinking today, though, was that for some of us, we’re taking careful steps backwards. If we don’t take those steps backwards then we’re in danger of losing favourite apples or bananas with real flavour. This is because the newer varieties have been bred to travel and for size and for ease of handling. A few varieties can dominate the market in a given area. Here, it’s four varieties of oranges: seville (for maybe two weeks every summer), navel, valencia and blood. So our food choice diminishes.

Until recently, too, the land was reshaped (in Australia at least) to fit our new society. Lots of fine quality produce. Not sustainable, but quite amazing. Now we’re beginning to look at sustainability and feeding people in a hundred years time and dealing with the resources we have rather than trying to push the land beyond its limits. I don’t know what the wider effects of that it, but I do know that where I can I’m buying meat that is produced using a form of farming that helps the land rather than killing it slowly.

Where does this leave us?

In food history terms. We’ve reached one of those pivotal moments when things are going to change. I don’t know if the change will be increased problems with food supply, increased or diminishing varieties, or something quite different. Right now, what we’re seeing is lots of approaches. One is new types of farming. Others include genetic engineering.

I don’t know if living during interesting times is good, but these time are most certainly interesting.