1. Edibility
1.1. Chapter One: Omnivorousness: Defining Food
1.1.1. Omnivorousness
1.1.1.1. "All devouring" and the capacity to consume both meat and plant foods equally (should we choose). Being able to satisfy their nutritional needs by eating a variety of energy and nutrient-rich food sources to maintain activity and health. It does not mean indiscriminate eating, it implies openness to eating a wide range of foodstuffs. It is driven by neophilia-the desire to try new foods.
1.1.2. Omnivore's Dilemma
1.1.2.1. It explains the paradox of food choices we face today, how the industrial revolution changed by the way we eat and see food today and which food choices are the most ethical, sustainable and environmentally friendly.
1.1.3. Humoral Classification
1.1.3.1. The humoral system of classifying foods is one of the most extensive, having diffused across the globe, syncretizing with existing systems of thought and being given new cultural meanings in each context. Includes blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. Blood consists of hot and moist, spring and sanguine, confident and hopeful. Phlegm consists of cold and moist, winter and phlegmatic, sluggish, indifferent, calm. Yellow bile consists of hot and dry, summer and choleric, irritable or passionate. Black bile consists of cold and dry, autumn and melancholy, sad or pensive.
1.1.4. Nutritional Classification
1.1.4.1. In other words, chemical explanations of foods. The nutritional classification of food as macronutrients-protein, fat, and carbs-and micronutrients such as vitamins.
2. Ingredients
2.1. Chapter Two: Settled Ingredients: Domestic Food Production
2.1.1. Food Setting Strategies and Cuisines
2.1.1.1. There are four major types: hunter-gathering or foraging, pastoralism, horticulture, and agriculture. The productive roles accorded to group members are played out through expectations of sharing and exchanging foods and tasks, which create ties and obligations based on ideas of equality, differentiation, and decision-making. For each of the food-getting strategies there are distinct general characteristics, and these will be examined while recognizing there are also unique responses, differences, and ongoing changes that make people’s food-getting strategies a dynamic facet of culture.
2.1.2. Hunter-gathering Foraging
2.1.2.1. All hunter-gatherers are defined by their complete reliance on wild food resources. The range of wild resources used depends on the environment, but hunter-gatherers eat a diversity of foodstuffs.
2.1.3. Domestication of Plants and Animals
2.1.3.1. It can involve more intensive and extensive modifications to the environment, such as improving irrigation and drainage, replanting roots, weeding, and killing predators to look after the food species. Domestication involves the deliberate transplanting of wild species into vicinity of humans, and selectively breeding for useful traits within those species.
2.1.4. Pastoralism
2.1.4.1. Pastoralism is the reliance upon domesticated herd animals as the primary source of food, and of identity. Sheep, goats, cattle are common examples.Many pastoralists are patrilineal and patriarchal, reflecting men’s ownership of herds and their primary role in moving and protecting the herds in often demanding conditions.
2.1.5. Horticulture
2.1.5.1. Horticulture today is particularly prevalent in tropical forest areas with high rainfall, such as within South and Central America, Africa, southeast Asia, and through Melanesia and Polynesia. It has been practised in temperate environments, such as North America and Europe, where it slowly gave rise to agriculture. Horticulture is also known as “shifting,” “extensive,” or “swidden cultivation,” all of which capture one of its main characteristics—new gardens are periodically created and old ones are regenerated in several years with the regrowth of wild vegetation. Sweet potatoes and manioc are some examples.
2.1.6. Agriculture
2.1.6.1. Agriculture began as a distinct food-getting strategy around 6,000 years ago, and was primarily associated with the rise of large-scale societies or “civilizations” around the world. It represents a further intensification of production. Agriculture can be regarded as a specialized food-getting strategy that is highly adaptive to a wide range of environments, allowing agriculturalists to expand into new lands and successfully grow food.Agriculture does produce larger surpluses capable of supporting larger populations, and allowing greater specialization to occur, including food production itself.
2.2. Chapter Three: Mobile Ingredients: Global Food Production
2.2.1. Agriculture Intensification
2.2.1.1. Despite the emigration of some people, there was still a need for agricultural intensification to support a growing population, and an increasingly urbanized workforce who no longer produced food. Malthusian dilemma: can we produce enough for all of us to eat.
2.2.2. Exporting industrial agriculture
2.2.2.1. Industrial agriculture itself has been exported around the world as a means to produce food, often cheaply and profitably, for the global food industry.Across the world, settled hunter-gatherers, pastoralists, horticulturalists, and agriculturalists have been caught within the global system, asserting a new political and economic reality over peoples’ existence. New states have formed,
2.2.3. Commercializing Food: Industrial and National Cuisines
2.2.3.1. Mintz’s term, the proletarian diet, reflects the diet’s association with the working environment of capitalism. Commercial food industry has a role in provisioning the urban industrial workforce. An example of an industrial cuisine was canned salmon. Staple ingredients, flavours, and dishes are important. The food industry’s characteristics are dispersed, mechanized production; processing and preservation; long-distance transportation; and retailing of food, to return a profit to those who have invested in its success.
3. Cooking
3.1. Chapter Four: Cooks and Kitchen
3.1.1. Origin of Fire Use and Cooking
3.1.1.1. Humans’ ability to harness fire was the first act of domestication. Cooking is regarded as external pre-digestion that can kill parasites and neutralize toxins, make food softer and more digestible.
3.1.2. Cooking Techniques
3.1.2.1. Refers to an application of heat to produce an irreversible change.Cooking includes all the preparation: the processing of ingredients to transform them into the recognized food of the culinary tradition. Cooking techniques are learned and influenced by the way of life of a culture.
3.1.3. Cooking and Food-Getting Strategies
3.1.3.1. As food-getting strategies settled down, cooking techniques became more elaborate.
3.1.4. The Culinary Triangle
3.1.4.1. Each culture follows a different subsistence or food-getting strategy, but all are united by the fact that we humans process our ingredients—in other words, we cook them to make food. The culinary triangle: aw natural ingredients are transformed into cultural food by cooking, or become rotten through a natural transformation.
3.1.5. Cooking and Gender
3.1.5.1. There is nothing about cooking that would intrinsically make it the exclusive domain of either women or men, and yet there has come to be an assumption that it is “natural” for women to cook as part of their household or domestic responsibilities toward their families. Wrangham’s cooking hypothesis places women as the cooks in early hunter-gatherer society because this activity allowed men to be ensured food, gathered and prepared by women, which freed their energies to go hunting for the higher-status foodstuffs, such as meat and honey.
3.2. Chapter Five: Recipes and Dishes
3.2.1. Recipes: Creating Dishes
3.2.1.1. The application of cooking techniques to ingredients and flavours involves the use of remembered or read recipes to transform raw materials into a cultural artifact. he combination of the ingredients’ colours, textures, and shapes (such as being finely chopped), and their amalgamation into patterns to be served, are all derived from learned cooking techniques contained in recipes. Recipes become the means of reproduction, imposing order onto techniques, ingredients, and flavours, and whether performed from memory or read and executed, they have a formula-like quality to guide the creation of the dish.They are the instructions to reproduce a cultural artifact, and they reinforce the dish’s presence and identity in the minds of its consumers. Recipes can also allow anyone, regardless of their ethnicity, to make the dishes of world cuisines, allowing the borders of culinary traditions to be crossed and experienced anywhere.
3.2.2. Experimental Cooking: Domestic Recipes
3.2.2.1. Living or oral recipes are remembered and passed down through generations, often between women, but also between men in societies where they publicly cook. These are the recipes, based on local ingredients, of the settled cuisines that define everyday life in specific locations.
3.2.3. Textual Cooking: Commercial Recipes
3.2.3.1. The cookbooks of this time period became instrumental in establishing in the minds of a nation’s citizens what ingredients, flavours, techniques, and dishes could unite everyone and be served at family tables throughout the territory. It is these cookbooks—of national cooking, used within a nation—that are addressed below, before examining the ability of cookbooks, their recipes, and their dishes to be available to anyone, anywhere as de-territorialized cooking, spreading culinary knowledge far beyond the nation’s borders.
4. Eating
4.1. Chapter Six: Eating-in: Commensality and Gastro-politics
4.1.1. Patterns of eating
4.1.1.1. All opportunities to eat will have cultural patterns. These patterns can be organized by five simple short questions.
4.1.2. When, What, How, Where, Who?
4.1.2.1. The number of meals a person has a day is derived from the cultural context, and often the social standing of the individual.Industrialized societies have meal schedules that are arranged by the needs of the productive schedules of the goods, services, and markets. The proper meal represents specific courses and associated dishes, or combinations of dishes, that carry cultural messages of appropriate sustenance for the particular time of day and gathering of people.Commensality is the act of sharing food with other people, and it is an expression of ongoing social relationships performed in accordance with cultural rules of eating etiquette. The location of meals—in private in the domestic sphere, or in public away from home— also plays a role in shaping the significance of a meal, together with influencing the type of food consumed and the nature of the social relationships that are at play. It is the dynamic of who is included in meals eaten at home, and who shares meals eaten away from home, that can shed light on the role of eating in the maintenance and construction of social relationships.
4.2. Chapter Seven: Eating-out and Gatronomy
4.2.1. Risky business?
4.2.1.1. As people moved further afield in their daily business, usually based upon the rise of a market economy, there has always been the constant necessity to eat, and to find food away from home can be as challenging today as in the past.
4.2.2. Street food, public eating, restaurants
4.2.2.1. Street food is fast, portable, and usually accessibly priced. It is very probably the beginning of selling food to accommodate the needs of a diversified workforce who have moved into urban centres and do not have access to kitchens.For public dining in restaurants to be successful there has to be the perception that eating-out is not just about having access to food, but is about making important social and cultural statements.Today we have the opportunity to eat the cuisines of many other ethnic groups, presenting new opportunities to display gastronomic taste—as in social refinement, lessening food’s role as an ethnic marker for some consumers,and more as a statement of social identity.
4.2.3. Culinary Foodscapes
4.2.3.1. Taste, as in the sensory responses of the tongue and nose to create the sensation of flavour, and taste—the awareness of beauty, refinement, and aesthetics—have become fused in the works of gastronomic literature.restaurants were associated with progress and modernity that brought changes to the eating habits of the French, and the restaurant model has been exported and elaborated across the world.Restaurants do provide an economic opportunity for immigrants, and they have played a role in reshaping the eating habits of the general population.
5. Digesting
5.1. Chapter Eight: Gastro-anomie: Global Indigestion
5.1.1. Globalized industrial and indigenous
5.1.1.1. Long-term trends in human dietary change can be charted through time and space. The term gastro-anomie was coined to describe the condition of unsatisfying, meaningless eating of foods from everywhere and nowhere, and especially captures the disintegration of existing food rules which do not extend to new ingredients, flavours, dishes, and eating opportunities. Gastro-anomie captures the loss of pleasure to be gained from food and eating, informed by culinary and health worries spread by public discourse.Many indigenous peoples and ethnic groups did not voluntarily switch to a new diet; instead, the transformation of diets through time represents the convergence of much wider economic, political, and social forces.
5.1.2. Farmers and Food security
5.1.2.1. Genetically modified organisms represented all that was wrong with the industrialized food system.of McDonald’s in the heart of Rome (Leitch 2003, 439). The Slow Food Movement began in the late 1980s in grand Italian style, with a manifesto setting out the intentions of its followers to defend against our enslavement by speed and fast food by returning to the kitchen to enjoy regional foods, develop taste, and embrace the pleasures of gastronomy.The influence of the Slow Food Movement is substantial.It foresees people’s current eating habits as the global norm, involving a dozen species of animals providing 90 per cent of the animal protein consumed, and four crop species—wheat, maize, rice, and soy—providing half of the plant-based calories.
5.2. Chapter Nine: Local Digestion: Making the Global at Home
5.2.1. Localized global food and commodities
5.2.1.1. The raw ingredients for these foodstuffs can be globalized or locally sourced commodities, which are then transformed into recognizable dishes that have become ubiquitous on the global food scene. Sushi is a food with a considerable global reputation. In all these examples, from East Asia to Russia, the arrival of new food and eating spaces has presented opportunities for local consumers to expand their culinary experiences and address change by enacting continuity with traditional meanings and practices surrounding food.
5.2.2. Locavorism and Farmers' Market
5.2.2.1. Peoples’ traditional territories of food sourcing have been encroached upon by urbanization, and changed by industrial agriculture and other competing interests for land usage.The importance of farmers’ markets draws attention to consumer agency, and the power of public discourse to shape decisions regarding the choice of products to purchase.