Kurlansky's Tasty History

The Big Oyster: history on the half-shell by Mark Kurlansky
New York : Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2007, c2006.
xx, 307 p. : ill., maps ; 21 cm. 

What a fun way to learn about the history of New York City!  Kurlansky again finds a way to entertain and inform while presenting his discoveries about another item that humans put in their mouths.  He has tackled salt, and cod (which I reviewed here about a year ago).

Like his other books, this one is well-written, fascinating, and very informative.  In it you'll learn that for many years in the 1800s, New York City was the oyster capital of the world - but that in a short time ballooning population and industrialization led to the demise of the rich oyster beds of the New York harbor - due to pollution and and over-harvesting. Kurlansky does a great

There is a lot to The Big Oyster - it is a practical history of the early years of New York City, with a lot about the earliest European settlement of the area to the bustle of the 19th and 20th centuries.  But it is also a social history and a foodways history - including recipes from various eras.  Finally, it is both an environmental history and cautionary tale about the squandering of precious natural resources.

I would definitely recommend this book to anyone curious about the history and culture of America's most dynamic city, New York.

Yum

The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan
New York : Penguin Press, 2006.
450 p. ; 25 cm.

I've been wanting to read Michael Pollan's book for quite a while, probably since hearing him interviewed on radio (or TV) back in 2006 when the book first came out. I remember being most intrigued by his findings that, thanks to the industrialization of food, corn has become the basis for nearly all food in the US, and that what is sold as "food" is often a chemically assembled/reassembled mix of corn, fats, salts, sugars, and "natural" flavorings that are rarely healthy or nutritious.  Well, living in Illinois - the land of corn - (OK, coming in 2nd place to Iowa) and the home of the villainous "food" giant ADM and "food" behemoth McDonald's, I simply had to read Pollan's book.  I wasn't disappointed.

Pollan's book is an interesting read on many counts - as science, natural history, social history, and culture.  It is a book that offers a rare glimpse into the extremely destructive nature of agriculture/agribusiness as it is practiced in the US - and the many ways that the worst practices of agriculture (monoculture and complete dependence on fossil fuel) are encouraged and enforced by US law and policy.

His book also looks at agricultural practices that are beneficial to humans and the environment - including the importance of local foods.  As a mostly vegetarian eater, I really appreciated his interesting insights into what is good and bad about the "organic" food supply as it has evolved in the US, particularly as it has become a huge multi-billion dollar industry itself.  I also found a lot to think about regarding the positive benefits of having livestock on farms - livestock that are allowed to pasture and participate in a rich multi-cultured farm,  not livestock that are raised in large-scale confinement operations. 

For the leisurely non-fiction reader, the book is a bit on the long side and took me awhile to finish, but I was really pleased when I realized that our library also has an edition of the book for younger readers (still weighs in at about 300 pages) that is really excellent.  The young reader's edition has a lot of great photographs and graphics that frankly would have been wonderful in the adult version, so I can definitely recommend it as well.

Bitter Sweet

Sugar Changed the World: a Story of Magic, Spice, Slavery, Freedom and Science by Marc Aronson and Marina Budhos
Boston : Clarion Books, c2010.
ix, 166 p. : ill., maps ; 25 cm.

Just as Kurlansky's book on cod makes the case for the often overlooked importance of cod in world affairs and US history, so too Marc Aronson and Marina Budhos' wonderful book on sugar brings this common food item to life by telling its bloody & compelling history.  There is a painful irony that such a sweet substance is so inextricably tied into the immense holocaust of the African slave trade in the Americas - especially in South America and the Caribbean.

For example, in Sugar Changed the World we learn that in just over 100 years between 1701 and 1810 years, nearly a million slaves were shipped into just two "sugar" islands in the Caribbean - the British sugar/slave islands of Barbados and Jamaica. The book reveals that sugar slavery was an especially brutal and lethal fate for slaves.  Up to the time of Emancipation in the US, about 500,000 slaves were brought into North America, while more than 2 million were taken to the various "sugar" islands - and yet at Emancipation, the slave population in North American had risen 4 million, while the slave population of the islands was 670,000.  The sugar plantations of the Caribbean were places where most slaves were worked to death.

The book conveys the hell that was the sugar plantations of the Caribbean (and eventually of Louisiana in the US) in ways that are factual without being overwhelming for middle to high school readers. In detailing the workings of the sugar slave plantations the book would make an excellent pairing with The Poet Slave of Cuba by Margarita Engle.  A strength of Aronson and Budhos' book is that it not only chronicles the horrors of the the sugar slave world, but presents the culture and resilience of the people who lived and died as slaves in the sugar plantations and as workers in the sugar industry after slavery officially ended.

Aronson and and Budhos do an excellent job of giving the global history of sugar (where it came from, and how it became cultivated), explaining how sugar is processed, and revealing that sugar was an economic engine for the emerging imperialist states of Britain, the US, and France.The authors also devote a significant section of their book to the successful slave revolt in Haiti and the contradictions of the US relations with Haiti.

The book has excellent photos, maps and graphics which make the story interesting and very clear.  I would highly recommend this book for any student interested in the fascinating and brutal history of sugar. Lastly, for any teachers considering using the book in their classrooms, there is a great website for the book - including a Teacher's Guide!

Gone Fishing

Cod: a Biography of the Fish That Changed the World by Mark Kurlansky
New York : Penguin Books, 1998, c1997.
viii, 294 p. : ill., maps ; 19 cm.

Our library owns several books by Mark Kurlansky, and the last one I read by him was Salt: a World History - which was a great read. The great talent of Kurlansky is to chose a subject that at first glance might seem rather mundane (if not downright boring) and to reveal how it is a topic of great historical and cultural significance.  While he's doing this he spices (salts!) his narrative with fascinating facts, anecdotes, and asides. I recall finding Salt so fascinating for how humans around the world have developed cultural tastes for extremely fermented (some might say rotten) foods - such as the Roman favorite - garum - a sauce made from fish scraps and remains fermented for months in salt.

Cod doesn't disappoint either.  Whether Kurlansky is making the connections of how the colonial/early American New England economy was powered by the trade of plentiful/low-grade cod to the Caribbean (to feed the slaves being worked in the hellish sugar cane plantations) or explaining the connections between overfished cod stocks and international law of sea treaties, he manages to do it in a concise, interesting and clear way.

I would definitely recommend Cod (the book) to a student interested in US history, environmental studies, wildlife studies, or off-beat, non-fiction reads.