Review: An Edible History of Humanity
September 16th, 2009 9:43 pm by Shane
I love history books and I try to read/listen to as many as I can. In the last year or so, I've read two books about the Roman Empire, two about the Middle Ages, one about Charlemagne, one about Alexander the Great, and one about Augustus Caesar. It's not a huge number of books, and I wish I had more time: I mostly listen to books while I mow my lawn which can be measured in acres. Coming across this book, "An Edible History of Humanity" by Tom Standage, something about it clicked, and I gave it a listen and was rewarded with a really great book.
The first thing that a reader will notice in the first part of the book, is that Standage is somewhat critical of the concept of "organic" equaling natural. Almost immediately in the book, the author explains how not a single crop we eat today is natural. Cereal crops were all manipulated by man to produce better yields. The forerunner of maize, teosinte, is completely unrecognizable as a food. Tomatoes were yellow until Europeans bred them to be red. Carrots weren't originally orange: the orange color arose from the House of Orange in the 17th century and became popular in the west. Nothing we eat is "natural" anymore. It's all man-made. Now, mind you, Standage is not hostile to organic farming per se, but he wanted to dispel some of the mystique around it.
One other interesting thing I learned from the book, was the difficult transfer from hunter-gatherer cultures to agrarian cultures. It is true that hunter-gatherers lived short and brutish lives, however they seemed to have better nutrition that the initial agrarians. They were as tall as modern humans: around 5'9 for men and 5'4 for women. After transitioning to agrarian societies, ignorant of the concept of nutrition, those numbers dropped to 5'4 for men, and 5'0 for women. It's taken us nearly 7,000 years to get back to the same height as our early Holocene ancestors.
There were actually advantages to being a hunter-gatherer that I hadn't considered either. In some places, gathering food was much easier and less time consuming than farming. Families were smaller (anything that promotes less kids is a bonus in my book) because large families are hard to move around. Standage, by no means, advocates going back to hunter-gatherers, but simply illustrates that it hasn't been a direct line of progress over the last 10,000 years.
Standage mentions Thomas Malthus a lot, who two hundred years ago declared that the Earth would soon not be able to feed its population. At the time there were about a billion people worldwide. Obviously, Malthus was wrong and he was one in a long line of people who have predicted doom concerning population growth. Every time we've been able to figure out some way to produce more food on the same land increasing overall yield. This part made me a little uneasy, because, well, now that we have almost 7 billion people we have to be close to the limit, right? Well, while my gut says yes, most times in history I would be dead wrong, so I have to pause. Growth rates are slowing and some population models have us declining in the late 21st century.
Another interesting part of the book was the large section on the Middle Age spice trade. Spices we take for granted today, such as black pepper, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, and ginger were only known to Europeans in the finished form. No one had ever seen what unprocessed cinnamon looked like as late as 1492 when Christopher Columbus returned to Spain from his first voyage with some sort of bark he claimed was cinnamon but didn't really smell or taste like it. No one knew how to make it. A lot of the spices originated from small islands in the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia, imported into Europe through Arab traders. Remember my post about my oldest known ancestor Martin Vielhauer? When Martin was born, his family had no idea what cinnamon was made from, where nutmeg came from, or what it took to make black pepper. It wasn't until the mid 1600's and early 1700's that Europeans finally found the actual islands the spices came from. This desire for spices helped trigger the exploration of the Americas and European colonialism that forever changed history. All for food additives that few of us even think twice about. (As a side note, the book also highlighted the non-European world of commerce and trade, while not new to me, is not taught nearly enough).
The last section of the book I want to go over is the section on the "Green Revolution". This part of the book will also bother "organic" proponents, because Standage can come off somewhat cavalier about the use of ammonia based fertilizers and pesticides. The invention of both has had a huge impact on farming and our environment. Before the invention of mass produced ammonia based fertilizers farmers relied on animal manure and legume type crops to reintroduce nitrogen into the soil. Both methods were improvements from ancient times, but still very inefficient.
In the early 1900's, the Haber-Bosch process was developed which brought on the age of chemical fertilizers and the world hasn't been the same since. It's fair to say we would have starved without this process. Also, important to the "Green Revolution" was the development of new cereal crops the by the late great Norman Borlaug. He practically single handedly changed the way the world is fed, and he won a Nobel Prize for it. This post cannot do him justice, and since he recently passed away (September 12, 2009), there happens to be a lot of information about him in the news, so check it out. Reading about him is somewhat awe inspiring, to think that a single man could have such an impact on the food supply of the world. There is some controversy surrounding him and the concept of cross-breeding, but his effect on the world cannot be denied.
At the end of the book, Standage talks more about "organic" farming, and while parts of the book could seem hostile to proponents, in the end he wraps it up by positing that the future really lies in the combination of the industrialization of modern agriculture and the environmental concerns of the "organic" movement. There already has been some cross over, and I don't mean in terms of big agriculture companies running "organic" farms. Methods like "no-till" farming are something that could be catching on. Seed companies are working on plants that require less fertilizer and pesticides, not to mention significant changes in how crops are watered.
I'm not sure that everyone will see the book the same as I did: some reviews on Amazon.com were down right harsh. However, I have to say that I think Tom Standage did his best to present the facts as unbiased as he could. I don't know his personal opinions on "organic" farming, but I really think he was pretty balanced in this book. If you're fan of food, or just like history in general, I think you'll like this book.
The Family Tree
September 11th, 2009 1:49 pm by Shane
This past week I caught the genealogy bug and started looking back at my family tree. I'm a somewhat avid reader of history and I just wanted to see where my family was during the last couple hundred years. Something about knowing that my great-great-great-great-great-great grandparents lived in a small city state just outside of the Holy Roman Empire holds great appeal to me. (I didn't count out the "greats" so I might be off there) If, along the way, I find out that someone in my family was a noteworthy person of a time, well, that would definitely spark some interest in wherever my family was.
I have only started the long process of tracking down my family. I've been contacting family members collating names, places, stories, etc, all the things one needs to slowly piece a family tree together. I have access to Ancestry.com through the Kansas City Public Library, and it's been an invaluable source so far. All the US Census Lists from 1790 through 1930 are available with the exception of the 1890 census which was lost in a fire, tons of marriage and death records are online, and various newspapers have been scanned in and optically read. A lot of the documents are also available as image files so you can peruse them yourself to interpret the handwriting. I've found a lot of names that were just hard to convert from image to text automatically.
So what have I found? The most distance ancestor I can find is Martin Vielhauer born in 1505 in a village known as Böeckingen, Germany. When he was born, it was basically a free village associate with Hielbronn, Germany which seems to have worked out some deal with the Holy Roman Empire to remain free and independent. The Vielhauers stayed there until the 1860's when they started to emigrate to the Herkimer, NY area where a bunch still remain. It is in Herkimer, NY that the Brady and Vielhauer line came together.
Which leads me to the next thing I found. My great-grandfather Roy Brady's father has been extremely hard to find. I don't even know his name yet. It's also possible that his name was originally spelled "Bradey" and that he changed it later. I have a bunch more avenues available to me to find out who my great-great grandfather was, so I'm not done yet. Once I figure out who he is, I can finally trace my Brad(e)y heritage. I do remember my grandfather telling me there was some Scottish in the line as well, so that is helpful.
On my mother's side, I found out something completely new to me. I was always under the impression that my grandfather on my mother's side was born from two German immigrants. I was surprised to learn that my great grandfather was born in Belgium and reported on the 1930's census that his first language was French. I had no idea. I found his brother and his birthplace, and he too was born in Belgium, specifically the Leuven, Belgium area. I still can't explain why French was listed as a first language, but it appears that I have a lot of Flemish in me, and that's something I wasn't aware of.
I'm not that familiar with the Flemish ethnic group, but now that I know I'm part Flemish, I'm interested enough to read a book or two. I don't expect to learn anything about myself, and I don't feel any particular connection to Belgium that would effect me. There is just nothing I have in common with anyone then in Belgium. My ancestors were either farmers or jacks of all trades living in a time before electricity. Me, I'm a computer programmer addicted to electronic devices for almost everything I do. I've made it thirty-four years without knowing I'm Flemish, and if I'd never found out, I'm sure I'd be just fine.
So what is the end result of this? Some of the result of all this, I will explain in next week's post, when I talk about a book I recently read. It's history book that detailed the spice trade history of the middle ages, and now I'm able to tie it into my family history somewhat. You'll see next week how I do it. But more importantly, I think genealogy is a great way to get people interested, to see how history could have affected their lives. My Irish ancestors came here most likely because of potato famine. That's why I'm in the United States. This post is really an introduction for future posts about science and history and ways it shaped the different paths my family has taken. I would also like to suggest people all try ancestry.com out or see if your local library has access. I think everyone could find it very interesting.
The Louisville which took great-grand uncle Richard Max from Liverpool to New York City