How Ordinary Food Changes Everything

The year has changed, so perhaps it’s appropriate to look through the years at what causes life to change. How about salt, spice and fish? Surprisingly, these and other seemingly ordinary foods in your kitchen have been powerful weapons of mass reconstruction, shifting history to a different lane, ultimately creating the countries, cultures, and globalization we have today. And the eat goes on. Most recently, just after World War II, the original CARE packages of coffee and chocolate bombed down on West Berlin exploded enough power and goodwill to give us the peaceful political and economic alliances that brought our country safely into the 21st Century. Here are some everyday foods that really changed the world.

Sandra Garson is the author of Veggiyana, the Dharma of Cooking and How to Fix a Leek and Other Food From Your Farmers’ Market. As a longtime student of Tibetan Buddhism and well-known cook for Dharma centers from Maine to Mongolia, she became the first food historian to explore the Buddha’s influence on how the world now eats. This led to exploration of more religious beliefs about food.

Salt

Sodium chloride is so vital to survival--as a nutrient and preservative, for pottery and medicine, most of history reveals a quest to have or to hold salt. Having it made Venice a Medieval world power, named Salzburg, Austria, and all those “wich” (site of salt) towns of England, caused the French and English to fight over colonization of Canada (those fishermen uniquely came on shore for salt to preserve their catch) and got the Erie Canal built to transport it. Salt worked as currency when ancient Greeks went into the slave trade, giving us the expression “to be worth your salt.” Romans allotted it to soldiers sent to conquer North Africa and the Middle East, giving us the word “salary.” Holding led to mass western migrations from eastern Central Asia, wars in Africa and Texas. In 1864, Union forces in the Civil War made a forced march to fight a 36-hour battle and capture Saltville, Virginia, the site of a salt processing plant deemed essential to sustaining the South's beleaguered armies. Taxing salt led to the French Revolution and Gandhi’s non-violent destruction of the British Raj that tried to subdue Hindu unrest with taxes that put this necessity out of reach. The search for salt mines sent Lewis and Clark across the North American continent. Having one put Utah on the map.

Noodles

Thank the Buddha for all those noodle dishes so beloved in Japan and Southeast Asia, the ones we slurp as pho, pad Thai, laksa and khao soi. We think of them as iconic native dishes, but in truth they streamed out of 8th Century China when its merchant class fled an onslaught of anti-business, anti-profit, anti-materialism edicts of compassion promulgated by newly converted T’ang emperors. Evidently the emigrants were as attached to their noodles as they were to capitalism; their first move was to embed them in the kitchens of foreign lands where they are now considered native. The Japanese monks who imported Buddhism from China included with it the vegetarian noodle dishes served at monasteries. About a millennium later, Chinese refugees fleeing religious persecution brought with them their beloved ra-mian soup, launching the Japanese craze—now ours too, for ramen.

Cod

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The Pilgrims who landed at Plymouth Rock did not exactly cross the ocean to start a country dedicated to absolute freedom of worship. When they signed up to go overseas to establish a land base for yet another of the Plymouth Syndicate’s fishing stations, they were seeking their own religious freedom, but also financial prosperity. For the preceding century, every kingdom had been sending out search ships to catch and cache Atlantic cod because the thickly fleshed fish was Europe’s crucial protein. Most of the continent was Catholic, obliged to eat fish on Fridays as well as the weeks of Lent, so whoever found, salted and shipped cod to meet this never-ending need was guaranteed a fortune. Desperately competitive pursuit led to the astonishing discovery of a North American continent and the subsequent race to settle it around harbors where the catch could be salted and shipped and most crucially, monopolized. By the time the Pilgrims landed to colonize Massachusetts, the Mayflower had made earlier crossings and the Plymouth Syndicate had successful fishing colonies in Maine.

Pasta

Italians may have done the best job of popularizing pasta, but they did not invent it. It turns out this magical combination of hard (durum) wheat and water --air, sun or now oven dried to last forever --was an Islamic invention, food figured out by some anonymous Arab General tasked with moving Muslim armies of conquest across the known world. All those men in all those hot, arid environments had to eat and nothing was working. The original tiny, rot-resistant balls of “macaroni”, were created to replace barley as food that could be carried in a pocket for months and quickly cooked. They are still made in Lebanon, Syria, Tunisia and Algeria as well as in Sardinia where they’re called fregola. Israeli couscous looks like them but includes softer wheat. Dried pasta was a political boon because it could travel with armies but also be stockpiled to alleviate famine and natural disasters, warding off revolt at home. More importantly, it was the gift that gave Europe stamina for those long game-changing voyages of exploration and conquest. Columbus could not have sailed the ocean blue in 1492 without plenty of pasta in the galley.

Potatoes

When he crashed into Central America, Columbus was looking for the lucre of gold and spices in East Asia, and almost lost his head for bringing back to Spain no gold or spice, but some colorful, storable tubers that were the staple food of the Andes. The Spanish didn’t realize potatoes would become more valuable than gold, more universally sought after than spice, or that they would actually save the world by doubling its food supply. Today there is hardly a country that does not cook potatoes. Potatoes solved Great Britain’s problem of feeding a population industrialization had supersized, raised its standard of living and thus provided the strength for colonization and empire. The tuber put an end to continual famine in cold climes like Sweden, Russia and Ireland, pushing these nations onto the world stage as strong players. When the crop failed in the 19th century bringing back famine, the Irish migrated in droves to America, forever changing its political landscape. Reliance on potatoes led to what we know now as monoculture industrial agriculture and the pesticide industry. And let’s not forget the fry and the chip as much as the burger gave birth to the fast food industry that has altered the way the world eats.

The CARE Package

The original square brown boxes packed with 30 lbs of treats like coffee, chocolate, bacon and canned tuna by a charitable coalition called Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe were the sweetest part of Operation Vittles, the military food bombing campaign known as the Berlin Airlift. Once WWII ended, the Allied victors divvied up the city of Berlin, putting the West’s sector deep in Stalin-controlled East Germany. Sensing that whoever controlled Berlin could conquer all Germany and then France, Stalin immediately set up a siege, blocking all roads to starve West Berliners into submission to Russia. But the Brits and Americans found a way in: by air. For a year, they flew in formation, bombing with food the people they had just been bombing with fire. Operation Vittles instantly erased all enmity between Germans and Americans, and foiled the sociopathic Stalin. The successful cooperation behind the choreographed bombing gave birth to NATO, to the resounding prosperity of West Germany, the unification of Europe and eventually the fall of The Wall, which led to the disintegration of the whole Iron Curtain. “Generosity,” a Tibetan meal chant says, ‘is the virtue that produces peace.”