Stomachs on legs are proud to present

Coffee is the lifeblood of our morning ritual. Many of us think it nigh on impossible to start the day without imbibing this bitter dark liquid. It’s no wonder then that coffee has become the world’s most legally-traded commodity after oil, another dark liquid, yet decidedly less delicious. Today we have a variety of ways of consuming coffee, more than a dozen different preparations; the most respected being the espresso. It was said that the coffee bean was discovered in the highlands of Ethiopia somewhere in the 9th Century. First eaten by domesticated donkeys, the unroasted green beans bestowed a powerful stimulating affect upon these beasts of burden, then able to stave off fatigue for extended durations.

It wasn’t long until people discovered that roasting the bean created a marked improvement in the flavour and colour, leading to a rapid growth in consumption and trade of the bean. Coffee began to play an important role in many societies, for instance in Africa and Yemen it was used in religious ceremonies; as a result the Ethiopian Church banned its consumption for many years. Then from its beginning in the Muslim world, coffee found its way to Italy, with the first European coffee house opening in Italy in 1645. The Arabs had tried to secure their monopoly on coffee by prohibiting the exportation of plants or unroasted seeds. In 1616 however, the Dutchman Pieter van den Broeck was able to smuggle seedlings from Aden into Europe, thereby opening up the market to the world, with vast plantations being cultivated in Java and Ceylon with the efforts of the British East India Company, coffee became popular throughout the British Colonial Empire.

There are many different gadgets that have been created over the centuries to extract the flavour and caffeine from the coffee bean. The first being the Turkish ibrik popping up around the 13th Century, involving the repetitive boiling of coffee grinds in water, to deliver the super-strong and rather bitter acid tang we associate with Turkish coffee. Centuries of scientific advancement to produce a machine, able to produce a coffee of minimal bitterness and extract the most desirable and flavoursome component of coffee – the crema. The espresso machine was invented by Gaggia of Italy in 1947, its key improvement over earlier machines, was a spring-loaded piston which enabled hot water to be pressurised to nine atmospheres – one atmosphere is the air pressure we feel on our bodies at sea level. When ground roasted coffee gets friendly with high-pressure hot water, a sublime thick liquid is extracted, the consistency of oil and powerfully aromatic, this crema is the most flavoursome part of the espresso and requires utmost care to ensure it is not bitter or acidic. This is why in many countries around the world and increasingly more in the cosmopolitan centres of India, people search out for the best coffee shops in town, where well-trained baristas toil over achieving perfection in a cup. This is rarely found in the larger chain cafes and one must venture to the boutique independent outlets to find this. The top cafes will usually have their own brand of roasted coffee, which will rarely be more than a week old. In comparison to major brands such as Lavazza or Illy, which will in many instances have been roasted four to six months prior to finally making it passed your lips! You only need to think of how enticing freshly baked bread is, to realise the difference time can make and how packing coffee in an airtight container will not preserve the intense aroma of freshly roasted beans. Which leads us to the other component of any good coffee, espresso or otherwise – the bean itself.

The coffee bean comes to us as two major species, Coffea canephora (Robusta) and Coffea arabica. Robusta plants are easier to grow and maintain so is cheaper to produce, it has less flavour than Arabica but twice the caffeine. Because of this it finds its way into instant coffee and cheaper coffee blends. With regards to the Arabica, there are two factors - where it’s grown and under what conditions that directly influence its aroma and taste. Think of the world of wine with reference to growing coffee. Whilst wine is grown in more temperate climates of the world, coffee thrives in the tropics, Ethiopian Arabica is known for is complex fruity flavour, Jamaican Blue Mountain Arabica for its mild flavour and lack of bitterness and the most popular for premium espresso blends - Columbian Arabica, is known for its heavy body and intense acidity when freshly roasted. In analogy to French Sauvignon Blanc wine that typically tastes floral and perfumed, with New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc tending to exhibit traits of tropical fruits and fresh grass. Where it is grown and under what conditions, make all the difference. It is because of these factors, that many small coffee plantations are now returning to methods such as shade-grown or organically cultivated coffee beans, realising that coffee aficionados will pay the extra price for this gourmet coffee.

The hope is that someday - hopefully soon, you’ll enter a café in Singapore or Shanghai and have your senses saturated with the alluring aroma of roasting coffee. As you walkthrough you’ll hear the sound of the beans churning with cool air to arrest the hot beans and will be greeted a by knowledgeable roaster and barista who can guide you through the perfect blend of Columbian and Cuban shade-grown Arabica and should you prefer to drink it in-house, have it ground and extracted to perfection, the crema so thick it hangs from the spout like thick oil and is presented in your cup with a deep sheen, tasting nutty and rich, with nothing more than a slight hint of bitterness.

So next time your poured a cup of coffee by a charming member of your Cathay Pacific or Singapore flight crew, spare a thought for that weary little donkey in the highlands of Ethiopia and the centuries of religious, political and scientific upheaval that have transpired to produce perfection in a cup.

Italians love to tell you how great the food in Italy is. They go on and on about, fresh cheese this, seasonal that. They initiated the Slow Food movement for crying out loud. Taken at face value it seems that Italians have forever been in step with nature, seasonal produce and local artisanal producers. This is just one of the many ways that Italians not so subtly demonstrate that they are well, better than us.

Apparently, however Italian food historian Montanari (1996:161) begs to differ.

Montanari emphasises just how much producers and consumers have traditionally seen seasonality as an affliction. He says 'symbiosis with nature and dependence upon her rhythms was once practically complete, but this is not to say that such a state of affairs was desirable; indeed, at times it was identified as a form of slavery'. This was especially true of the poorer sections of society, where consumption of foods such as grains and legumes was the norm precisely because these foods could be easily conserved. Access to fresh and perishable foods - such as vegetables, meat ad fish - was the luxury of an elite few. This, 'the desire to overcome the seasonality of products and the dependence on nature and region was acute, though the methods for doing so were expensive (and prestigious); they required wealth and power'. Montanari therefore concludes that it is 'doubtful whether we can attribute either a happy symbiosis with nature or and enthusiastic love for the seasonality of food to "traditional" food culture

In Morgan, K., T. Marsden and J. Murdoch, 2006. Worlds of Food: Place, Power, and Provenance in the Food Chain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pg, 9

A man walked into the Ritz Bar. The bartender said, "I heard that you lost a lot in the crash." The man replied, "I did. But I lost everything I wanted in the boom." This exchange, from F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Babylon Revisited," a story set early in the Depression, suggests how a time of economic crisis can provoke a reckoning with what matters most.

That is not glibly to say, in the manner of a moralizing preacher, that concern with money is trivial, or that worry tied to last week's financial jolts is only greed. Job loss, pension insecurity, threat of foreclosure, the squeeze of debt, rising cost of living - if these problems are not properly a source of anxiety, nothing is.

But what is money? There is a clue in the reference in Fitzgerald's title. Babylon, the ancient Mesopotamian city on the Euphrates River, lives in memory as a place of license and sensuality. If captive in Babylon, it is important to maintain a spirit of detachment from its excesses. That's the Biblical reference.

But in the mists of time, predating the Bible, civilization was itself born in the alluvial plain between the Tigris and the Euphrates. That occurred when nomads - hunters, gatherers, herders - settled in cities that were built around agriculture. One of the main innovations of the settled life based on farming was the capacity to accumulate more than was needed to live. This surplus was both a boon - it enhanced survival - and a curse - it led to the organized thievery of social class. The management of surplus became a valued skill, the idea of wealth was born, and, even allowing for inequity, the human species made its great evolutionary leap.

But money predates agriculture. Anthropologists speculate that the first form of currency - a symbol whose value is imputed rather than inherent - were the pieces of flesh that hunters tore from a vanquished beast. It was not only that successful hunters could then eat to live, but that they could take morsels of meat back to their social circles, however defined. The meat had value in itself, but soon enough it took on transcendent worth.

Indeed, the tearing of flesh from the bones of the killed animal became ritualized, a possible origin of religious sacrifice. A kind of divinity was attributed to the victim, which, after all, was now the source of sustenance, and vestiges of the victim's body were now considered to be holy.

The torn meat became something to exchange, a way to accommodate new divisions of labor, compensating those whose contributions to community survival was less direct than joining in the hunt. A sacred aura hung over the whole enterprise, which may have made it work. The bull as a symbol of the stock market, a contemporary sacred cow, is thought to be rooted in this ancient phenomenon. (The historian Dennis King Keenan suggests that the Latin word pecunia comes from pecus, meaning cattle. The English word "money" comes from the Roman goddess Juno Moneta, in whose temple bulls were sacrificed.) Money's subliminal connection to divinity is enshrined even in the way communion wafers of the Christian liturgy are shaped like coins. A sacrament exists to point beyond itself to something sacred. It is not too much to say that the first sacrament was money.

Meat as a form of currency makes the meaning of money clear. Nutrition is what humans need to live. Stored nutrition, managed by a system of credit, is what humans need to live without obsessing about the next meal. All that we associate with civilization followed from that freedom - from writing to art to concern with consciousness itself. Civilization erected walls to protect against the contingency of existence on a dangerous planet, and the chief emblem of that protection is money.

Because direct awareness of normal human vulnerability - the beasts are still out there - is so frighteningly immobilizing, it became normal to think that what protects us is absolutely trustworthy. That is why primitive humans began to explicitly regard their money as divine, and it is why, equally, if less explicitly, we do, too.

But, in fact, the money is not what protects us. Nor do the gods. Human inventiveness is our protection, and that remains firmly on display.

Link

Aaaahhhhhh, somehow anthropological musings on the current global finance calamity makes it all seem so much more manageable. Anthropologists love to stress that so many of the challenges faced by humanity are in fact human constructed, yet we fetishize them as if they were beyond our control. If only we would wake up and see that the only limits are the collective ones we place upon ourselves they seem to taunt. And while this is to some degree true, understanding that meat is the pre-modern money and it is all linked to social status within tribes and groups, and that is what gives it it's power, does little to allay my fears that our savings may not be safe and that the US dollar is likely to collapse

There's been a small discussion over at the Last Appetite about the dearth of good food writing in the mainstream media, from which this excellent quote emerged

Steingarten in Vogue reminds me a little of running “quality” articles in Playboy magazine.

Phil Lees, 2008

Serious talk of food seems now to be relegated to a seemingly endless list of single commodity food analyses which Nalika once described as "crude"

Their basic premise is to illustrate wider economic, social, political and environmental issues through analysing one type of food. And it seems increasingly to be the stock and trade of many an academic these days seeking to escape their dusty old offices to seek fame and fortune on book signing tours for serious "foodies"

I began a list of these a while ago, and I'm sure that the list is incomplete, but here are some (are there anymore that you can think of?)

- the banana book “Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World”

- the oyster book “The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell"

- the cod book “Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World”

- the sushi book “The Sushi Economy: Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy”

- the coffee book ” The coffee paradox: Global markets, commodity trade and the elusive promise of development ”

- the rice book “Rice and Man”

- the potato book "The Potato: How the Humble Spud Rescued the Western World"

- The salt book "Salt: A World History"

- The spice book "Spice: The History of a Temptation"

- the chocolate book "The True History of Chocolate"

- the corn book "Corn and Capitalism: How a Botanical Bastard Grew to Global Dominance"

- the vanilla book "Vanilla : The Cultural History of the World's Favorite Flavor and Fragrance"

- and a forthcoming is a book on the matsutake mushroom


As I said in the comments page of Last Appetite, it sometimes makes me want to yell “argghhhh…we get it food is symbolic of wider economic, political, social and environmental issues”. But the point is that food writing varies from the sublimely silly and superfluous to the deeply analytical and enlightening. Personally I like a bit of sugar with my fibre, junk food for my brain if you will.

But now comes a new type of food book, in line with Patel's Stuffed and Starved these new food books do not focus on one type of food and the limited insight that they may afford of a vastly complex system, they are not seeking to make you feel more enlightened about your everyday commodities but rather explain to you why we're all fucked.

The book ,The End of Food by Paul Roberts explains that while industrial food may be in crisis, its still making the best out of a bad situation.

A reviewer says

Reading through the recent food-politics bookshelf, it's too easy to take away an "industrial food bad, local food good" attitude. But how many modern-day locavores would readily embrace the life of, say, a 19th-century prairie farmer, tending to livestock, grain crops, and a vegetable patch without electricity or machine power? Shopping at farmers markets and joining CSAs -- activities I wholeheartedly support -- present a necessary challenge to a global food system gone mad, but are unlikely to prove sufficient for transforming it. To mount a real challenge, we'll need a clear-eyed grounding in the history and economics of food production, in addition to locavore zeal. And that's were Roberts makes an important contribution.....Robert's historical frame drives home a key point that his predecessors didn't quite nail down: In many ways, modern food production is an attractive response to centuries of chronic food insecurity. Who wants to spend nearly all of one's income on food, and rely on sugared tea as a key source of calories, as did the 19th-century British working class? Who wants to spend hours a day preparing food as peasant women did, not by choice but for survival? By the dawn of the 20th century, people quite understandably longed for food security and freedom from drudgery. The modern food system -- for all of the new problems it created -- largely met those desires, at least in the United States and Europe. The locavore movement will eventually have to confront them head on.

Yes, who indeed wants to live like a peasant? (aside from you Phil and Hock who's apparent dream is to spend all of their waking hours cold smoking meats and makin bacon)

Basically, the point is that yes modern food is deeply problematic but if we get rid of it human kind will undoubtedly face starvation....the end of food, and all those mindlessly indulgent food writers and bloggers and the equally useless academics that go along with it.

Today I found a cool site that provides a basic historical timeline of food.

Earliest known foods are

water & ice
salt I & II
shellfish & fish
eggs & mushrooms
insects
rice I, II & III

if you want to know more about salt part one and part two, and more interestingly rice I, II and III click on the link

with the agricultural revolution around 10,000 BC came, soup, bread and beer.....4000 BC bought us yeast breads, and chestnuts apparently hail the beginning of "bible era foods"

Although it hasn't been included yet, I'm sure 2008 will be recorded at the year of the french fry battered bacon on a stick