Another day, another attempt to justify studying food history
plus long live the meatball!
As a former long-time vegan, I never thought I would be writing these words, but here goes nothing: there is something so satisfying about meatballs. My apartment has been full of meatball-making lately: Margo made this recipe for Thai-inspired chicken meatball soup last week (well, she actually made it twice after a burnt-plastic-spoon mishap), and last night, Jake made this Youvarlakia Avgolemono, which featured dill-laden turkey meatballs.
During the five years when I was vegan, I sometimes missed non-veg dishes (like spaghetti carbonara or salmon maki). But I can’t say I ever once thought longingly about meatballs. They are, after all, hard to pontificate about in a literary way: they are literally just spherical hunks of meat, as the name would imply. But lately, I (alongside my pals) have been thinking about and making and consuming meatballs a lot. We like the comfort and simplicity of them, we like how you can get a lot of nutrition in a few bites when you mix ground meat, veggies, eggs, and breadcrumbs together. But mostly, I think we like the tactility of them, the feeling of getting your hands dirty and shaping them into perfect (or sometimes lumpy) little spheres.
In a time when I’ve been feeling so disconnected and dissociated and in my head, sometimes it is nice to just zone out and shape meatballs for a little bit (or massage salt into cabbage for sauerkraut, or knead sourdough, or so on and so forth). Food, as every kid knows, is more fun if you can play with it. I’m grateful meatballs allow that sort of play and that sort of connection in a socially acceptable, getting dinner on the table way for adults, too.
Last week, as I shared in previous newsletters, I had a big fellowship interview where I had to justify the importance of studying history. This was not the easiest task, given that most of my interviewers and fellow interviewees were lawyers/doctors/scientists and thus had their own particular orientations to the most pressing problems of today. But lately, everywhere I look it seems I see the intricate ways history informs current attempts to improve agriculture and ameliorate the impacts of anthropogenic climate change around the world.
Take the case of wine in America (a topic I will be exploring more in-depth for a forthcoming article in Civil Eats). Around the US, winemakers are increasingly turning to grapes that are indigenous to North America rather than privileging Vitis vinifera, or traditional European wine grapes. These indigenous American grapes not only provide an “entire flavor frontier,” but also prove hardier and more disease-resistant in the current climate crisis. Winemakers around the US are quite literally diving into the historical archive in order to find grapes that can withstand a changing, unstable climate.
These historical efforts extend beyond grapes. Recently, I’ve been reading a lot about Dr. Debal Deb, an ecologist who has spent the past 25 years collecting over 1,420 rice varieties across India in order to save them from extinction. He initially began to collect these varieties for food security purposes: after cyclone Aila which struck the Sundarbans mangrove forest in 2009, he noticed that “all modern varieties had perished and these native varieties were the only ones that not only survived but also furnished substantial grain yield.” But, for Dr. Deb, this is more than just ecological survival: saving seeds is also a way to prevent the “insidious loss of words, phrases, and oral traditions [which are] a sequel to the loss of thousands of rice landraces and their associated cultural idiom.”
All of this is to say: the historical record provides more than merely fun facts or an interesting diversion. Rather, farmers and scientists from the Hudson Valley to Hyderabad are beginning to recognize the way we can draw on past agricultural practices preserved in both oral traditions and the written record to inform those of the present and future. Dr. Deb’s focus on historical agricultural practices, as well as the current importance of the rice varieties beyond simply caloric value, suggests the ways historians (and anthropologists, literary scholars, folklorists, and so on and so forth) can and must work with scientists and agricultural practitioners to address food production in the current climate crisis. This, at least in my estimation, is the only way forward.
Other food-related pieces occupying my mind:
I’m with Alicia Kennedy that awards like Michelin are “naturally patriarchal, white supremacist, homophobic, transphobic, and capitalist.” But I will say that reading this review of a Michelin star restaurant by a self-described “common as muck” Birmingham denizen brought me a lot of joy, and reminded me of the unfettered pleasure and revelatory nature of some meals.
This piece on the consumption of Amba, or mango pickle is a perfect example of how to do global food studies, taking us from Mumbai to Tel Aviv to Baghdad to London in one fell swoop without losing cultural or historical specificity.
I had never thought before about how climate change will increase risks of food contamination, but after reading this piece in The Counter, it seems so obvious.
It is wonderful when your local faves get the recognition they deserve, so I am thrilled that Food & Wine did this amazing feature on Domestique, a natural wine shop in DC (h/t to Fork Knife for linking it first).
Speaking of Domestique, here is a wine I got Margo for her birthday from there. We drank it last Sunday night, and it was the perfect start to the week/gossip sesh beverage.
This “tangled fruit” co-ferment is actually a blend of vidal blanc grapes alongside apples and pears. It is cidery but not saccharine, and gets the kind of multi-dimensional taste typical of vidal blancs. All in all, would get again!
Here is a brief update on some of the food-related work I’ve been engaging in lately:
A lot of projects are in development, but nothing coming out yet— I am working on a piece about hybrid grapes for Civil Eats, a piece about hops for JStor Daily, and a piece about maize for the Plant Humanities Lab.
In addition to my more public-facing pieces, I am also currently working on two scholarly articles: first, a co-written article for Global Food History on the history of chili sauce in early modern England, and second, an article to be submitted to a peer-reviewed journal on toddy consumption and labor on the Bay of Bengal. Lots to do, but hopefully those will be out in the next year or two.
I’ve also been planning what I am going to do this summer before I start grad school. The answer, pandemic-permitting, is a lot of travel: I’m set to present a paper on the history of the potato in India (adapted from my undergrad thesis) at a food studies conference in Perugia, Italy, and also will spend some time in the UK doing research and maybe a presentation. To say I cannot wait is an understatement.
Thank you all for reading! I hope you have a lovely week. This week, I will be trying out bouldering for the second time ever, and working on fermenting small-batch cider (inspired by my new book Cider Revolution which I purchased from my favorite bookstore Bold Fork Books). I will let you know how it goes!
Love, Julia