# FOOD / a global history Canonical URL: https://shipslides.com/d/catalog-culture-food Raw viewer URL: https://content.shipslides.com/d/catalog-culture-food/raw Category: Cuisine Slides: 13 Updated: 2026-05-17T20:56:01.209Z Tags: catalog, culture, food ## Summary 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. ## Slide Outline 1. FOOD a global history 2. The Seven Hearths 3. The Big Three 4. Tame Companions 5. Pepper, Cinnamon, Nutmeg 6. The Columbian Exchange 7. Tin Cans & Cold Rooms 8. Bread from Air 9. Globalize the Plate 10. Too Much, Too Cheap 11. The Future Pantry 12. Why Food Matters 13. Further Reading ## Slide Transcript ### Slide 1: FOOD a global history - ~ a global history ~ - Agriculture · Trade · Taste - THIRTEEN COURSES · PRESS → TO BEGIN ### Slide 2: 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 3: 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 4: 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 5: 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 6: 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 7: 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 8: 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 9: 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. ## Related Decks - [GREAT CITIES / Ten that changed history](https://shipslides.com/d/catalog-culture-cities) - [FASHION / Garments and what they say](https://shipslides.com/d/catalog-culture-fashion) - [INTERNET CULTURE / forums, memes, attention](https://shipslides.com/d/catalog-culture-internet) - [Language / 7,000 voices](https://shipslides.com/d/catalog-culture-language)