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FOOD / a global history

THIRTEEN COURSES · PRESS → TO BEGIN No. 02 ~ origins ~ course one The Seven Hearths around 10,000 BC, agriculture begins — independently — in many...

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THIRTEEN COURSES · PRESS → TO BEGIN No. 02 ~ origins ~ course one The Seven Hearths around 10,000 BC, agriculture begins — independently — in many places at once For 200,000 years humans foraged. Then, almost simultaneously, scattered groups began to plant, weed, and wait. Key sections include: FOOD a global history; The Seven Hearths; The Big Three; Tame Companions; Pepper, Cinnamon, Nutmeg; The Columbian Exchange; Tin Cans & Cold Rooms; Bread from Air; Globalize the Plate; Too Much, Too Cheap.

Key sections

  • 01FOOD a global history
  • 02The Seven Hearths
  • 03The Big Three
  • 04Tame Companions
  • 05Pepper, Cinnamon, Nutmeg
  • 06The Columbian Exchange
  • 07Tin Cans & Cold Rooms
  • 08Bread from Air
  • 09Globalize the Plate
  • 10Too Much, Too Cheap
  • 11The Future Pantry
  • 12Why Food Matters
  • 13Further Reading

Topics covered

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Slide outline
  1. 01FOOD a global history
  2. 02The Seven Hearths
  3. 03The Big Three
  4. 04Tame Companions
  5. 05Pepper, Cinnamon, Nutmeg
  6. 06The Columbian Exchange
  7. 07Tin Cans & Cold Rooms
  8. 08Bread from Air
  9. 09Globalize the Plate
  10. 10Too Much, Too Cheap
  11. 11The Future Pantry
  12. 12Why Food Matters
  13. 13Further Reading
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Presentation Transcript

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Slide 01

FOOD a global history

  • ~ a global history ~
  • Agriculture · Trade · Taste
  • THIRTEEN COURSES · PRESS → TO BEGIN
Slide 02

The Seven Hearths

  • No. 02~ origins ~
  • course one
  • around 10,000 BC, agriculture begins — independently — in many places at once
  • For 200,000 years humans foraged. Then, almost simultaneously, scattered groups began to plant, weed, and wait.
  • Fertile Crescent
  • wheat, barley, lentils
  • North China
  • millet, soybean
  • Yangtze
  • rice
  • Mesoamerica
  • maize, beans, squash
  • Andes
  • potato, quinoa
  • New Guinea
  • taro, banana, sugarcane
  • West Africa
  • sorghum, yam, okra
  • Why now? Stable post-Ice-Age climates, dense edible grass-grains, and the gradual logic of staying near the harvest. Villages followed. Then walls, surplus, kings.
Slide 03

The Big Three

  • No. 03~ the staples ~
  • course two
  • wheat · rice · maize — the calories that built civilization
  • Wheat
  • Fertile Crescent · ~9,000 BC
  • Storable, grindable, leavenable. Bread became the load-bearing wall of Mediterranean and European life — and the Latin companion meant "one who shares bread."
  • Rice
  • Yangtze valley · ~7,000 BC
  • The most calorie-dense grain per acre when paddies flood. It enabled the dense river-valley populations of East and Southeast Asia, and a cuisine of rice-plus-everything-else.
  • Maize
  • Mexico · ~7,000 BC
  • Bred from a wild grass called teosinte over millennia. Nixtamalization — soaking in lime — unlocked its niacin and made tortillas, tamales, and the Mesoamerican world possible.
  • Today these three grains still provide more than half of all calories eaten on Earth.
Slide 04

Tame Companions

  • No. 04~ the herd ~
  • course three
  • first the dog by the fire — then the pasture, the pen, the coop
  • Dog (~15,000 BC) — wolves drawn to camp scraps; co-evolved before any crop was planted
  • Sheep & goat (~10,000 BC) — Anatolia & the Zagros; first beasts of the Neolithic farm
  • Cattle (~10,500 BC) — wild aurochs domesticated twice, in the Near East and South Asia; gave milk, traction, hides
  • Pig (~9,000 BC) — independently tamed in Anatolia and China; the all-purpose village omnivore
  • Chicken (~6,000 BC) — from the red junglefowl of Southeast Asia; a global protein machine
  • Horse (~3,500 BC) — Eurasian steppe; less food, more mobility — but reshaped what could be eaten where
  • Every domestication is a bargain: shelter and feed in exchange for milk, eggs, muscle, meat.
Slide 05

Pepper, Cinnamon, Nutmeg

  • No. 05~ the spice routes ~
  • course four
  • flavor as cargo · trade as engine
  • Spices are tiny, dry, and durable — perfect cargo for a 4,000-mile journey. Rome paid Indian merchants in gold for pepper. Medieval Europe paid Venice. Venice paid the Mamluks. The price multiplied at every hand.
  • The whole age of European exploration — Vasco da Gama, Columbus, the Dutch East India Company — was an attempt to cut out the middlemen on flavor.
  • Two great systems carried the trade: the Silk Road overland through Central Asia, and the older, larger Indian Ocean network of monsoon-driven dhows linking East Africa, Arabia, India, and the spice islands of Indonesia.
  • Cargo Manifest, c.1500
  • Origin: the MoluccasMarkup: ~1000%
  • Holds
  • Black pepper (Malabar coast)
  • Cinnamon (Ceylon)
  • Cloves (Ternate, Tidore)
  • Nutmeg & mace (Banda Islands)
  • Ginger, cardamom, turmeric
  • Method
  • Buy cheap from local growers.
  • Ride the monsoon home.
  • Sell dear to a hungry empire.
  • Repeat until the world is reshaped.
Slide 06

The Columbian Exchange

  • No. 06~ great exchange ~
  • course five
  • after 1492, the menu of the world is rewritten
  • Tomato → Italy
  • Andean fruit; Italian peasants made sugo by the 1700s. Pizza Margherita followed only in 1889.
  • Potato → Ireland
  • One acre of spuds fed a family. Population doubled — then collapsed in the 1845 blight.
  • Chili → Asia
  • Indian, Sichuan, Thai, Korean cuisines as we know them are post-Columbian. Before 1500: no spicy curry.
  • Sugar → Americas
  • A New-World plantation crop fed by the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The most violent food in history.
  • "After Columbus, no one ate dinner the way their grandparents did."
  • maize → Africa
  • cacao → Europe
  • peanut → China
  • coffee → Brazil
  • wheat → the Plains
  • cattle → the pampas
Slide 07

Tin Cans & Cold Rooms

  • No. 07~ keeping it ~
  • course six
  • preservation rewrites the calendar of food
  • 1809 — Nicolas Appert, a Parisian confectioner, wins Napoleon's prize for sealing food in glass jars and boiling them. The army eats. Canning is born.
  • 1810 — Englishman Peter Durand patents the tin can.
  • 1870s — mechanical refrigeration matures; the first refrigerated rail cars cross the United States.
  • 1880s — frozen Argentine and New Zealand beef and lamb reach London by ship.
  • 1920s — Clarence Birdseye watches Inuit fishermen flash-freeze fish on the Labrador ice and brings the idea home.
  • Suddenly, season and distance stop mattering.
  • A Londoner can eat lamb from the South Pacific. A Kansas farmer can sell beef in New York. A housewife in Ohio can keep milk for a week. The local kitchen joins a planetary supply chain.
  • Every modern food system — supermarkets, fast food, frozen pizza, the global cold chain — is downstream of these two inventions.
Slide 08

Bread from Air

  • No. 08~ the great increase ~
  • course seven
  • industrial agriculture · 1909 onward
  • 1909. A German chemist named Fritz Haber pulls nitrogen out of the atmosphere and binds it into ammonia. Carl Bosch industrializes the reaction. Synthetic fertilizer is born.
  • Roughly half of the nitrogen in your body right now arrived through a Haber-Bosch reactor. Without it, the Earth feeds maybe four billion people, not eight.
  • Mechanization
  • The tractor replaces the ox by 1940. One farmer comes to feed 150 — then 500.
  • Green Revolution
  • Norman Borlaug's dwarf wheat (1960s) and IRRI's rice double yields in India, Mexico, the Philippines.
  • Monoculture
  • Cheap calories, fragile fields. Soybean, corn, palm — three crops cover an empire of land.
  • More food than ever — and a planet learning the bill.
Slide 09

Globalize the Plate

  • No. 09~ the table now ~
  • course eight
  • regional cuisine becomes world cuisine
  • Sushi — a Tokyo street food in 1900; a global staple by 2000.
  • Pizza — a Neapolitan workers' supper; now the most-eaten dish on Earth.
  • Tacos al pastor — Lebanese shawarma meets Mexican pork, around 1960.
  • Molecular gastronomy — Ferran Adrià, Heston Blumenthal: foam, spherification, the lab as kitchen.
  • The celebrity chef — Julia Child → Anthony Bourdain → YouTube. Cooking is content.
  • Restaurant cities — Tokyo, San Sebastián, Lima, Copenhagen, Bangkok — each a world capital of taste.
  • A teenager in Ohio cooks Korean. A grandmother in Seoul orders Italian. The kitchen is no longer national.
Slide 10

Too Much, Too Cheap

  • No. 10~ the bill ~
  • course nine
  • ultra-processed foods & the metabolic crisis
  • For most of human history hunger was the threat. In 2025 obesity kills more people globally than under-nutrition does.
  • The new villain is ultra-processed food — formulations of refined starch, oil, sugar, and emulsifiers, engineered for maximum shelf life and minimum chewing time. They make up over half of calories in the United States and Britain.
  • The body, evolved for scarcity, did not get a memo about cheap calories. Type 2 diabetes, fatty liver, cardiovascular disease — the diseases of the modern pantry.
  • By the numbers
  • ~ 2.5 bn adults overweight worldwide
  • ~ 880 m classified as obese
  • ~ 540 m living with diabetes
  • ~ 60% of US calories from ultra-processed foods
  • ~ 1/3 of food produced is wasted
Slide 11

The Future Pantry

  • No. 11~ what comes next ~
  • course ten
  • alternative proteins, vertical farms, lab-grown meat
  • Plant proteins
  • Pea, soy, mycelium. Beyond and Impossible took the burger seriously; the next decade takes the steak.
  • Cultivated meat
  • Real animal cells grown in steel tanks. First sold in Singapore (2020) and the US (2023). Cost still falling.
  • Vertical farms
  • Stacked LED-lit greens grown indoors with 95% less water. Promising for greens and herbs; harder for grains.
  • Food security
  • A warming climate, a growing population, and a stressed nitrogen cycle. The 21st-century farmer is also a climate engineer.
  • The question is no longer "can we feed everyone?" but "what should we be feeding them — and at what cost?"
Slide 12

Why Food Matters

  • No. 12~ in the end ~
  • course eleven
  • identity · ritual · community · memory
  • A meal is the smallest treaty between strangers.
  • Identity
  • Tell me what you ate as a child and I can place your village on a map.
  • Ritual
  • Passover, Eid, Thanksgiving, dim sum on Sunday. Food carries the calendar of belief.
  • Community
  • The hearth predates the house. Eating together is older than language.
  • Memory
  • Proust had his madeleine. You have your grandmother's kitchen. Flavor is a time machine.
  • Every plate carries 10,000 years of human decisions — what to plant, what to keep, what to share.
  • To eat is to inherit. To cook is to vote. To feed someone is, very quietly, to love them.
Slide 13

Further Reading

  • No. 13~ the kitchen library ~
  • course twelve
  • books, films & videos for the curious cook
  • Books
  • Cuisine and Empire · Rachel Laudan
  • An Edible History of Humanity · Tom Standage
  • Salt: A World History · Mark Kurlansky
  • The Omnivore's Dilemma · Michael Pollan
  • 1493 · Charles C. Mann
  • Catching Fire · Richard Wrangham
  • Watch & explore
  • YouTube · "history of food"
  • YouTube · "columbian exchange food"
  • Netflix · Salt Fat Acid Heat (Samin Nosrat)
  • Netflix · Chef's Table
  • BBC · A History of Food
  • Podcast · Gastropod
  • Bon appétit · pass the bread
  • fin.
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