Plato SDG Proposal -- An Empire of Food
We are what we eat, so says the adage; so it is too with the insatiable economic organism of empire. In a culinary journey across the centuries, historian and food scholar Lizzie Collingsworth reveals the hidden history of how the British Empire shaped our modern diet, to show how an expanding colonial empire harnessed the world's edible resources and, through trade, transformed what we consume and how we think about food. It is an epic of appetites served by imperial ambition, enlivened for readers by examples of recipes drawn from popular dishes served over the past 450 years. Collingsworth sets the scene for each chapter with a meal comprising diverse characters, foods, and cooking methods, highlighting the transformative social economics of food. She transports the reader from Newfoundland to Ireland, to the West Indies and West Africa, to New Zealand and British Columbia, and onward, from cod fish and salt beef to spices, tea and sugar. The glamorous daughter of an African chief shares a pineapple with a slave trader; rum-drinking Americans raise a toast to liberty in a Boston tavern; diamond prospectors in Guyana prepare an iguana curry; the royal chef makes the King's Christmas pudding with ingredients from a dozen nations. Taken together, her scholarly mosaic of menus guides us through a larger story about global conflict and culture, economics and politics. It's food for thought and nourishing discussions.
Week 1: Fish Day: How Newfoundland salt cod laid the foundations for the Empire. (Chapter 1)
Week 2: Oatcakes & Hare: How Ireland fed the emerging Empire and New England colonists clung to bread as the food of the civilized. (Chapter 2 & 3)
Week 3: Pepper Pot : How West India sugar drove the first British Empire. (Chapter 4)
Week 4: Jollof Rice: How West Africa exchanged men for maize and manioc. (Chapter 5)
Week 5: Pigeons & Boeuf a la mode: How pepper took the British to India, where they found calicoes & tea. (Chapter 6)
Week 6: Maize mush & Possum: How the American colony of South Carolina was built on African rice. (Chapter 7 & 8)
Week 7: Rum punch: How rum brought the American colonies together and split Britain's First Empire apart. (Chapter 9 & 10)
Week 8: Liquid Laudanum: How the East India Company turned opium into tea. (Chapter 11)
Week 9: Tinned Goods & Bottled Sauces: How hunger drove European emigration and turned food into magical symbols of home. (Chapter 12 & 13)
Week 10: Abool's Pumpkin and Shrimp Curry: How the spread of European provisions colonized taste (Chapter 14 & 15)
Week 11: Frozen Mutton: How foreign food imports made Britain dependent on its Empire. (Chapter 16 & 17)
Week 12: Making Irio: How the Empire's appetite introduced colonial malnutrition. (Chapter18)
Week 13: Bully beef and the King's Christmas Pudding: How the Empire fed the armies of World War Two and made Christmas a British feast. (Chapter 19 & 20)
Week 14: What's cooking? We wrap up our discussion by examining our own kitchens for imported foodstuffs, sauces and condiments that may reflect how today's International food trade shapes our eating habits. From farm to table, we are the world.
Core Book:
The Taste of Empire: How Britain's Quest for Food Shaped the Modern World by Lizzie Collingham, 367 pages, Basic Books.
https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/lizzie-collingham/the-taste-of-empire/9780465056668/?lens=basic-books
Background reading:
What We Eat: A Global History of Food, edited by Pierre Singaravelou and Sylvain Venayre, translated by Stephen W. Sawyer, 344 pages, Columbia University Press.
https://cup.columbia.edu/book/what-we-eat/9780231221474/#:~:text=Telling%20these%20tales%20and%20many,each%20food%20illuminates%20wider%20histories.
Empires of Food: Feast, Famine, and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations, by Evan D.G. Fraser and Andrew Rimas, 302 pages, Free Press.
https://www.counterpointpress.com/books/empires-of-food/
A History of Food by Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat, 784 pages, Wiley-Blackwell.
Timeline of Food:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_food