Maize, lime, and the pellagra epidemics
Mesoamericans cooked maize with lime or wood ash (nixtamalization), which releases its bound niacin. Europeans and later poor Americans adopted the grain without the technique.
Much Depends on Dinner
5 ideas
Traditional preparation encodes knowledge its users cannot articulate
Cooking customs often carry solutions to problems that their practitioners could not explain, such as detoxifying, balancing nutrients or preserving food. When a food is transplanted or industrialized, it tends to be adopted without the 'irrational' ritual around it. The protective function is then lost and only reappears as a problem, often generations later.
Every ordinary meal is compressed history
Treat the most unremarkable plate of food as an archaeological site. Each item carries layers of domestication, conquest, trade routes, labor systems, taxation, law and myth that made it cheap and familiar. The ordinariness is itself the result of enormous historical effort, and it hides that effort.
Indispensable goods become instruments of state power
Salt is biologically necessary, hard to substitute and produced at a few controllable sites. The same indispensability makes salt a potent symbol of revolt, as in Gandhi's 1930 Salt March against the British salt tax.
Margarine, butter lobbies, and colour laws
Margarine was invented around 1869 by Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès in response to a prize offered under Napoleon III for a cheap butter substitute. Dairy interests then fought it through law, with punitive taxes, labelling rules and bans on colouring it yellow.