Hello

Looking back, at gourds and pumpkins as anomalies, at invented gastronationalism, at a rice bowl, at the ur-parents of citrus, and at the potato as social signifier.

Anachronistic Fruit

A brief article in the Tallahassee Democrat told a story about the domestication of pumpkin and squash. Rachel Mathes recounts how wild relatives of Cucurbita pepo are bitter and tough, and were probably eaten by creatures like the extinct mastodon and other large mammals of the Pleistocene era. Larger animals can detoxify the protective compounds that bitterness signifies more effectively than smaller ones, and then, in the normal way of things, they disperse the seeds with a starter pack of fertiliser. When the megafauna died out, probably as a result of over-hunting by well-equipped immigrants, the proto-pumpkins were left without a dispersal mechanism. Newish research suggests that the immigrants helped the cucurbits, tending them first because dried gourds make fine containers and then, slowly, selecting for more palatable flesh.

The story reminded me of a very famous paper in evolutionary biology: Neotropical Anachronisms: The Fruits the Gomphotheres Ate. In 1982, Dan Janzen and Paul Martin pointed out that several neotropical American trees have large fruits, often with well protected seeds, that probably relied on large mammals to disperse them. Since the Pleistocene extinctions, around 10,000 years ago, these trees had somehow managed to cling on even though their seeds were not being effectively dispersed, while the introduction of horses and cattle would have restored the distribution of at least some of those species. Looking for that paper took me to Anachronistic Fruits and the Ghosts Who Haunt Them, a 2001 book extract published in Arnoldia, the magazine of the Harvard Arboretum.

That article is a long read that explains much of the thinking behind Janzen and Martin’s original proposal and extends it to trees of North America, a few of which have fruits that people like to eat. The author, Connie Barlow, became a controversial figure in tree conservation by promoting direct action to move threatened species directly rather than allowing a degraded nature to take its course. I found it fascinating; perhaps you will too.

Invented Identity

Gastronationalism is one of the nastier -isms around, in my view, claiming that a particular dish “belongs” to one modern nation state rather than another. Most of the examples I’m familiar with are dishes that predate the states that claim them. So it was a bit of a surprise to learn that kway teow pad Thai — meaning “Thai-style stir-fried noodles” — seems to have been invented specifically to offer people in Thailand a national dish that would contribute to a sense of national identity. JSTOR Daily featured a 2009 paper in Gastronomica to explain the origin of what we generally now call pad Thai.

Plaek Phibunsongkhram, usually known as Phibun in English, was prime minister and effectively military dictator of Thailand from 1938 to 1957, with a brief gap from 1944 to 1948. Part of his ultranationalistic push involved Western clothing and the use of forks and spoons rather than hands or “Chinese” chopsticks. He also promoted a national dish of nutritious ingredients, including eggs, beansprouts and peanuts, “that could be bought from Thai farmers or produced in home gardens”. The new dish got a boost in the 1940s, when major floods led to outbreaks of disease. The government pushed pad Thai as a safe food because it was served steaming hot, sharing a simple recipe and encouraging vendors to sell it from adapted carts that were easy to keep clean.

[I]t’s a bit of an odd choice for an iconic Thai food, since its cooking technique — stir-frying — and main ingredient — noodles — come from China. People arriving from China’s Guangdong province probably put together the first dishes of stir-fried noodles, meats, and vegetables served in Thailand.

Odder still, Phibun was staunchly Sinophobic.

Better Batter Bowls

As far as I know, Sri Lanka and Kerala state in India have never come to nationalistic blows concerning what Sri Lanka calls hoppers and Kerala appam. Both are pancake-like objects made of fermented rice batter, rather like a dosa but made in a curved pan so that the edges are lacy and crisp while the centre of the “bowl” remains soft and spongy.

I say “like a dosa,” but that is a reflection of my own inexperience, as I have not eaten either and Goya magazine’s article on appam and hoppers nowhere mentions dosa. Instead, Nisha Thomas compares and contrasts the appams of her Keralite home and the hoppers she discovered in Colombo, and made me want to try both.

8000 Kilometres and 8 Million Years of Interbreeding

As the first oranges and tangerines (maybe) of the new season start piling up at the greengrocer downstairs, I was pleased to read the latest chapter in Erik Grouger’s The Citrus Kingdom, Vendicari and the Citrus Before Time. This one sees Erik visiting the marshy lagoons in the southeast corner of Sicily and allowing himself mentally to travel more than 8000 kilometres and 8 million years to the birthplace of modern citrus. His goal is to explain the history and diversity of modern citrus, a fruitless challenge given how promiscuous citrus can be. Still, he gives it his best shot, identifying the four prime parents — citron, mandarin, papeda, and pomelo — and then their many and varied offspring; sour orange, sweet orange, lemon, grapefruit, lime (Key and Persian), clementine, bergamot and its sibling (!) Meyer lemon.

A great read, even if it doesn’t really help me tell my tangerines from my clementines from my mandarins.

A Potato Is Not Just a Potato

What to make of Using art history to explore society’s changing connections with agriculture, an article in the journal Plants, People, Planet by three researchers at Lancaster University in the UK? I certainly enjoyed seeing all the examples of potatoes represented in art and culture. Is that relevant to the looming challenge of food insecurity and society’s current relationship with food and agriculture? I dunno.

Our initial hypothesis was that art could be used as a source of information from which to infer societal attitudes to food and agriculture. Our analysis clearly reveals that the potato has been viewed differently by societies at different times and in different places. In terms of the suggestion that modern, urbanised society is less connected with food sources than earlier societies, our analysis suggests that if such a disconnect does exist, it lies not in the understanding of the origins of food per se but more likely in its environmental impact. Whereas fine art interpretations of the ‘noble peasant’ farmers depicted by Millet, Bastien-Lepage and others are common up until the mid-20th century, the subsequent wider mass media representation of the potato today is as a cheap convenience item, and as a source of unhealthy, ultra-processed convenience foods. This is consistent with the current view that individuals often have little understanding of the impacts of food production.

Maybe.

Take care