The Secret History of Food

by Matt Siegel

  So the industry as a whole pivoted completely, from Graham flour and granula to Cookie Crisp and Count Chocula.

  And this wasn’t the first time a food or ingredient has undergone such a dramatic shift; a lot of the foods in our pantries and refrigerators were, once upon a time, thought to be evil or dangerous. For example, potatoes, as we’ll read in chapter 10, used to be associated with witchcraft and Devil worship; before they were America’s most popular vegetable (owing largely to their use as French fries), people called them “the Devil’s apples,” blamed them for causing syphilis, and literally burned them at the stake. Tomatoes, similarly, were said to be poisonous and used to summon werewolves.

  Almost anything we can put into our mouths or onto our skin has, at one time, been vilified—or praised—for stirring up “the unclean fires of morbid lust.”

  Explains Jeremy MacClancy:

  A short list of aphrodisiacs might include101 anchovies, ant juice, artichokes, barbel,* bamboo shoots, basil, wild cabbage, calves’ brains, camel bone, caper berries, stuffed capon, caraway, caviar, milk of chameleon, crabapple jelly, crocodile tail, preserved dates, deer sperm, dill, doves’ brains, eel soup, egg-yolk in a small glass of cognac, fennel, flea-wort sap, dried frog, gall of a jackal, game birds, garlic, ginger omelettes, goat’s testicle boiled in milk and sugar, goose tongues, grapes, halibut, hare soup, haricot beans, herring, horse penis, horseradish, mackerel, lamprey, leeks, powdered lizard with sweet wine, marjoram, milk pudding, mugwort, musk, ninjin,* nutmeg, oysters, paprika, pâté of bone-marrow, Parmesan cheese, pepper, plaice,* quince jelly, ray, radishes, rhinoceros horn, rocket, rosemary, saffron, sage, salmon, candied sea holly, shallots, sheep’s kidneys, spinach, swan’s genitals, tarragon, terrapin soup, thyme, turmeric, viper broth, woodcock, and pineapple fritters.

  Indeed, long before Graham questioned the wholesomeness of common bread, Athenian women were baking bread in the shape of penises and using olive oil as a lubricant to make economical sex toys called olisbokollix (“loaf-of-bread dildo”),102 and women in seventeenth-century England were baking loaves in the shape of their own sex organs103 (literally pressing the dough against their skin as a mold) out of a magical belief that the men who ate them would fall in love with them.

  Nor were Graham and Kellogg the first to suggest the moral superiority of a bland diet and implicate pleasure and flavor as barriers to happiness and spiritual fulfillment.

  Writes Plato, circa 360 BC:

  Those, therefore, who have no experience of wisdom and goodness,104 and do nothing but have a good time . . . never rise higher to see or reach the true top, nor achieve any real fulfilment or sure and unadulterated pleasure. They bend over their tables, like sheep with heads bent over their pasture and eyes on the ground, they stuff themselves and copulate, and in their greed for more they kick and butt each other with hooves and horns of steel, and kill each other because they are not satisfied, as they cannot be while they fill with unrealities a part of themselves which is itself unreal and insatiable.

  Similar ideals lay behind the Christian prohibition of meat during Lent; the Jewish tradition of eating bitter herbs on Passover; the Japanese philosophy of wabi-sabi that teaches “an acceptance and appreciation of the impermanent,105 imperfect, and incomplete nature of everything,” often observed by the aesthetic of chipped or asymmetric tea bowls; and Brillat-Savarin’s declaration that “Men who stuff themselves and grow tipsy106 know neither how to eat nor how to drink.”

  Meanwhile, the Greek philosopher Epicurus (341–270 BC), whose name has become falsely synonymous with sexual and culinary hedonism, was perhaps history’s biggest fan of bland breakfasts, writing “To whom a little is not enough, nothing is107 enough. Give me a barley-cake and water, and I am ready to vie even with Zeus in happiness,” “I am thrilled with pleasure in the body,108 when I live on bread and water, and I spit upon luxurious pleasures not for their own sake, but because of the inconveniences that follow them,” and “We ought to be on our guard against any dishes109 which, though we are eagerly desirous of them beforehand, yet leave no sense of gratitude behind after we have enjoyed them.”

  His basic idea being that true pleasure was the absence of pain—and that bland foods tended to remove the pains of hunger, leading to sustainable pleasure, while luxurious foods tended to make the rest of the world seem bland by comparison, leading to short-lived pleasure and prolonged pain.

  So Epicurus would have liked Kellogg’s original corn flakes, not because they were hard or righteous, nor because sugar was evil, but rather because starting the day with frosting, free prizes, and marshmallows tends to make the rest of the day seem bitter.

  Chapter 4

  Children of the Corn

  And thus it is that the maize plant1 was the bridge over which English civilization crept, tremblingly and uncertainly, at first, then boldly and surely . . .

  —Arthur C. Parker

  Remarkably, the saga of corn flakes—from ready-to-eat torture device to the seed that spawned an industry of confectionery breakfasts that turn milk pink—might actually be the least interesting thing about corn. Certainly, it’s one of the least impactful, just a blip in the annals of a grain that’s responsible for not just the development of modern breakfast cereal but modern civilization as a whole.

  In fact, corn is right up there with fire in terms of anthropological game changers. Yet while the domestication of fire turned out to be a lucky break, whether the domestication of corn has been a good thing is still up for debate, as it’s a relatively modern invention. And to call corn an invention is entirely accurate, as it wouldn’t exist without humans—nor would we, or most things we depend on, exist without corn.

  You see, up until roughly ten or twelve thousand years ago2 corn wasn’t a thing, and neither was farming.3 Up to that point, everyone who’d ever lived had survived by hunting and gathering: roaming around in nature and getting their groceries in the wild by foraging for things like roots, grains, acorns, snails, and seasonal berries.4

  It’s tempting to picture these early foragers as savage and uncivilized, because they were too ignorant to, say, live in overcrowded cities, fill oceans with single-use plastic containers, and breed animals in dark, crowded cages amid their own feces after cutting off their beaks, horns, and testicles without anesthetics.5 Certainly they weren’t civilized in the sense that they weren’t citizens of urban communities with immovable structures and civic laws and obligations, but that doesn’t mean they were unintelligent—and in many ways they enjoyed a higher quality of life than the agrarians who replaced them.

  Remember all that stuff in the last chapter about the Unabomber calling the Industrial Revolution “a disaster for the human race” and the Epicurean weariness of things that end up causing more problems than they’re worth? Well, the shift from hunting and gathering to sedentary agriculture gives these arguments a lot of ammunition. Farming, for example, generally led to a decline in food quality and nutrition,6 as people started eating a smaller variety of foods due to their dependence on a small number of staple crops and consuming less protein, too, as they spent less time hunting, trapping, and scavenging for meat. And any plants and animals they did eat were generally less nutritious than their wild equivalents, having been either grown in depleted soils or fed crops from these soils. Breeding animals in close captivity also encouraged the spread of parasites and disease. Meanwhile, staying in one place wasn’t good for humans, either, as it spread germs through contaminated food and water supplies and communal waste systems—or a lack thereof.

  Plus, having land and resources meant people suddenly had to defend themselves from outsiders, so they had to erect fences and raise armies and create political structures and start paying taxes to fund all of this and put up with neighbors moving in across the street—all those buzzkills Epicurus warned us about.

  Farmers also had to work harder than nomadic hunter-gatherers and generally had a lot less free time, as farming returned only about a th
ird as many calories7 for one’s labor as foraging once you account for things like land preparation, seeding, irrigation, and harvesting. Just think how much easier it would’ve been to teach a kid how to gather nuts and berries versus teaching a kid how to farm; would you eat better—and live better—if everyone in your family (including young children, pregnant women, and the elderly) were farming foods or gathering them?

  In fact, in the 1960s a botanist named Jack Rodney Harlan8 asked himself that same question and decided to find out by using a primitive stone sickle to gather wild wheat in Turkey; in the end, he was able to collect “the equivalent of more than two pounds of clean9 wild einkorn grain per hour,” suggesting that “in about a three-week period a family could gather more grain than it could possibly consume in a year.” Conversely, three weeks of farming won’t get you much other than blisters.

  So in many ways, agriculture was sort of a misfire.

  “Instead of being a universal diversion,”10 writes British historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto, “hunting became an elite privilege and a varied diet became the reward of power. The ensuing refinements of civilization—towering monuments built at popular expense for elite satisfaction—meant, for most people, more toil and more tyranny. Women got shackled to the food-chain. Tillers of the soil became something like a caste, from which prowess could not raise them except in time of war.”

  So those uncivilized hunters and gatherers weren’t so uncivilized after all.

  There are a lot of theories as to why they started farming, but the general consensus is that our ancestors never consciously decided to “settle” and “stop playing the fields” but held out as long as they could and slowly surrendered to forces outside their control. For example, it’s probably not a coincidence that the first instances of farming started to occur around the end of the last ice age,11 as warmer temperatures and melting glaciers began opening up these huge masses of previously uninhabitable (and unworkable) lands, which suddenly gave animals a lot more room to roam and evade hunters, making it more difficult to catch and eat them. As B. W. Higman puts it, “people were impelled to move on12 because they felt that they would starve if they stayed where they were and could only hope that where they went would be a better place. They were pushed rather than pulled.”

  At the same time, this also would have made the earth a lot greener and more fruitful, which would have made gathering food more lucrative and also made it possible to start amassing seeds and roots in excess and stockpiling them in subterranean pits,13 where they’d be cooler and out of the reach of most animals.

  Eventually, some of these groceries would have gotten wet and started sprouting, and suddenly, people were farmers.

  Or, at the very least, they had some incentive not to stray too far and to keep returning. It probably also didn’t hurt that some of these wet ingredients, like wheat and barley, would have led to the discovery of fermentation and beermaking14—which might have been the bigger incentive.

  Then one thing led to another, and people had more free time, and no one had anywhere they needed to be in the morning, and there was alcohol involved, and they’d already dug pits for food and maybe even to bury their dead15 and to serve as foundations for houses, and they started having more kids, and then they needed more crops to feed those kids and more kids to work the crops, and before they knew it, they’d laid down literal and figurative roots and could no longer just pick up and leave. Pretty much the same thing that happened with fire.

  And nothing captures this human-plant codependence better than our relationship with corn. This sort of domestication was happening all over the world at roughly the same time, as civilizations began cultivating the native grasses that would become their regional staples: things like rice in Asia,16 wheat in Europe, and an ancient ancestor of corn in North America called teosinte (though unlike indigenous rice and wheat, teosinte bears almost no resemblance to its modern form17 and was nearly inedible).

  We’re not even sure what the people who first ate teosinte actually did with it; for starters, an ear of it contained only five to twelve kernels compared to the five to twelve hundred on an ear of corn today,18 and each of them was only around one-tenth the weight of a modern kernel19. So an entire ear of teosinte would have been about the size of a cigarette, though probably shorter.

  And there wasn’t a central cob,20 so you couldn’t eat the whole thing as you can baby corn.*21 You could eat only the tiny kernels, which were individually wrapped in an almost impenetrable outer casing. Picture five or six grains of rice wrapped up like tamales and hot glued to a blade of grass, and that was pretty much what it looked like—and probably not far from what it tasted like. The best guess we can make is that the first farmers popped teosinte like popcorn,22 crushed it with their teeth and sucked on it, fermented it and drank the resulting liquid, or possibly ground it with stones and soaked it in water to remove the casing, then ground it again to make a dough for primitive tortillas.

  Yet for some reason our ancestors saw potential in this lowly grass and kept replanting it, choosing only the seeds with the most attractive traits23—say, height, girth, tenderness, and disease resistance—until it grew into a tall and dependable grain they could live on. So it was a lot like dating in high school.

  This was essentially the same process that gave us domesticated dogs from savage wolves, as we saw in chapter 1. The French bulldog,24 in particular, is a great illustration of this, as it was systemically bred (and inbred) to emphasize traits that humans liked as opposed to those that were actually advantageous or intended by nature, like facial folds that are prone to developing yeast infections and short noses that obstruct breathing and cause sleep apnea. Adorable, right? And this was done not just to the point that they could no longer survive in the wild but also to the point at which they could no longer survive without surgery; most French bulldogs, upward of 80 percent,25 have to be delivered by caesarean section because of their disproportionately wide heads—which, paradoxically, are often too small for their brains, causing neurological issues such as drooling and impaired movement, not to mention their predisposition to heart disease, reproductive issues, skin conditions, ulcers, pneumonia, and heatstroke.*26

  And we handicapped corn in much the same way. Remember that tough outer casing on teosinte (the one we gradually metamorphosized into a soft, easy-to-peel husk)? Well, it turns out that it was put there for a reason: to protect the kernels from the elements and the digestive systems of animals so they could stay intact long enough to propagate and fulfill their ecological purpose as seeds.

  The same goes for the small number of kernels and the lack of a central cob.27 You see, when ripe, individual kernels of teosinte would naturally separate and fall28 to the ground, where, protected by that tough outer covering, they’d essentially plant themselves. But corn’s unprotected kernels stay attached to their cob, so if they do somehow manage to avoid rotting or being eaten in the wild, they still can’t propagate because each cob deposits five hundred to twelve hundred of them in one spot, so any kernels that do germinate will fight the others for nutrients and essentially starve one another. And all this is compounded by the transformation of teosinte from a fat, wide bush that naturally spaced itself into these tall, thin stalks that can grow right next to one another, creating a condition in which you’ve got cobs basically committing mass suicide by dropping on top of cobs—making corn the only grass on the planet that can’t reseed itself.

  And even once it is seeded, corn is still dependent on humans. A few hundred years ago, this relationship was more low maintenance. The Iroquois planted corn29 together with beans and squash in the same ground in a process called intercropping. The corn would deplete the soil of nitrogen but grow tall stalks for the beans to climb and wrap their vines around. Nodules on the roots of those beans would then provide a home for nitrogen-fixing rhizobia bacteria that would convert unusable nitrogen gas in the air into biologically available ammonia30 in the soil. Finally, the squash
would provide ground cover,31 inhibiting the growth of weeds while providing critical shade to keep the soil from drying out. No one knows how the Iroquois figured this out, by the way. Meanwhile, “civilized” colonists were attempting to fish with frying pans and eating their own dogs32 to keep from starving.

  But that was before we committed to growing corn across a 350,000-square-mile belt of North America33, a scale that required abandoning nature’s symbiotic cycles for cold mechanical efficiency. Rather than waiting for nature to replenish itself seasonally by planting corn with mutualistic beans and squash, we now have to inject the soil with artificial chemicals34 and fertilizers, things like anhydrous ammonia and phosphorus, both of which have been designated “chemicals of interest”35 by the US Department of Homeland Security for their potential to be used in terrorist attacks (anhydrous ammonia also doubles as a key ingredient in the manufacture of methamphetamine, making it a common target of theft36). And because this creates a giant sandbox for weeds and insects, we then have to treat the area with artificial pesticides and fungicides—and because the weeds and insects keep building a resistance to these poisons, we have to continually develop new formulas and come up with feasible alternatives, such as spreading lab-created STDs37 to make parasites sexually sterile or seeding croplands with sterile male insects38 to control the population, because that worked so well in Jurassic Park.

  And think about what all this means in terms of fuel and irrigation; we’re talking about more than 93 million acres of cropland39 in the United States alone, spread across states such as Texas, California, and Colorado40, which aren’t known for having a ton of expendable water. So in addition to consuming more fertilizer than all other US crops41 combined—about 19 billion pounds42 of it each year—corn requires roughly 400,000 gallons of water43 and 140 gallons of fuel per acre44 for transportation, processing, and equipment. Remember, we’re talking about almost 100 million acres—and growing—in the United States alone. All that fertilizer also tends to pollute the groundwater,45 so we then have to spend billions of dollars sucking the same chemicals out of the ground that we put into it.