Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Book review: Cuisine and Empire, published by eukaryote on January 22, 2024 on LessWrong.

People began cooking our food maybe two million years ago and have not stopped since. Cooking is almost a cultural universal. Bits of raw fruit or leaves or flesh are a rare occasional treat or garnish - we prefer our meals transformed. There are other millennia-old procedures we do to make raw ingredients into cooking: separating parts, drying, soaking, slicing, grinding, freezing, fermenting. We do all of this for good reason: Cooking makes food more calorically efficient and less dangerous.

Other techniques contribute to this, or help preserve food over time. Also, it tastes good.

Cuisine and Empire by Rachel Laudan is an overview of human history by major cuisines - the kind of things people cooked and ate. It is not trying to be a history of cultures, agriculture, or nutrition, although it touches on all of these things incidentally, as well as some histories of things you might not expect, like identity and technology and philosophy.

Grains (plant seeds) and roots were the staples of most cuisines. They're relatively calorically dense, storeable, and grow within a season.

Remote islands really had to make do with whatever early colonists brought with them. Not only did pre-Columbian Hawaii not have metal, they didn't have clay to make pots with! They cooked stuff in pits.

Running in the background throughout a lot of this is the clock of domestication - with enough time and enough breeding you can make some really naturally-digestible varieties out of something you'd initially have to process to within an inch of its life. It takes time, quantity, and ideally knowledge and the ability to experiment with different strains to get better breeds.

Potatoes came out of the Andes and were eaten alongside quinoa. Early potato cuisines didn't seem to eat a lot of whole or cut-up potatoes - they processed the shit out of them, chopping, drying or freeze-drying them, soaking them, reconstituting them. They had to do a lot of these because the potatoes weren't as consumer-friendly as modern breeds - less digestible composition, more phytotoxins, etc.

As cities and societies caught on, so did wealth. Wealthy people all around the world started making "high cuisines" of highly-processed, calorically dense, tasty, rare, and fancifully prepared ingredients. Meat and oil and sweeteners and spices and alcohol and sauces. Palace cooks came together and developed elaborate philosophical and nutritional theories to declare what was good to eat.

Things people nigh-universally like to eat:

Salt

Fat

Sugar

Starch

Sauces

Finely-ground or processed things

A variety of flavors, textures, options, etc

Meat

Drugs

Alcohol

Stimulants (chocolate, caffeine, tea, etc)

Things they believe are healthy

Things they believe are high-class

Pure or uncontaminated things (both morally and from, like, lead)

All people like these things, and low cuisines were not devoid of joy, but these properties showed up way more in high cuisines than low cuisines. Low cuisines tended to be a lot of grain or tubers and bits of whatever cooked or pickled vegetables or meat (often wild-caught, like fish or game) could be scrounged up.

In the classic way that oppressive social structures become self-reinforcing, rich people generally thought that rich people were better-off eating this kind of diet - carefully balanced - whereas it wasn't just necessary, it was good for the poor to eat meager, boring foods. They were physically built for that. Eating a wealthy diet would harm them.

In lots of early civilizations, food and sacrifice of food was an important part of religion. Gods were attracted by offered meals or meat and good smells, and blessed harvests. There were gods of bread and corn and rice.

One thing I appreciate about this...