Mostly about mechanical processing. Of course, the circulating epigram "don't eat something your great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food" refers to processing with additives: artificial flavors, colors, preservatives and conditioners of various kinds. Not to mention almost completely synthetic concoctions.
It doesn't mean, for instance, "don't use soy sauce that has been processed the same way by the same company in Japan since the 1600's"; that is a horribly strawman interpretation of the idea.
It's all about thinking about some idealistic past.
If great-grandma wasn't wealthy, she ate lots of tinned beef smothered in potassium nitrate, all sorts of stuff packed in gelatin/salt, etc over the winter. And lots of beans.
Most of my great-grandmothers were the daughters of Irish farmer. She probably shared a house with a cow and a dozen siblings, if they were lucky enough to own one. They had fresh milk with no anti-biotics, but also with no pasteurization or medical care for the cow. (Hopefully she didn't get sick.) No plastic bottles, but they drew water from a hand-dug well in a treeless landscape where cattle were the main farming activity. (ie. high probability of a contaminated water source) When you got to march, you didn't have to worry about pesticides in potatoes, but you did have to watch for worms.
>It's all about thinking about some idealistic past. If great-grandma wasn't wealthy, she ate lots of tinned beef smothered in potassium nitrate, all sorts of stuff packed in gelatin/salt, etc over the winter. And lots of beans.
Not sure in which parts of the world this holds true.
In my part of the world, and we're talking a really pour country, everybody had their patch with vegetables etc, people caught fish, had animals (chicken etc) and all that. Most of the things they ate were fresh. For the non-fresh staff, they simply preserved it in salt (like they did with cod), or brine (e.g. for goat cheese, etc), or they dried it.
No "tinned beef smothered in potassium nitrate" and no "gelatin".
I'd say most of the places in Europe were like this, and some were still like that up until the 60s or 70s. And maybe people in NY, a huge city without ways to have your own produce and animals, ate all the "tinned beef" stuff, but I can't imagine many people doing that in Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, etc.
>Most of my great-grandmothers were the daughters of Irish farmer. She probably shared a house with a cow and a dozen siblings, if they were lucky enough to own one. They had fresh milk with no anti-biotics, but also with no pasteurization or medical care for the cow. (Hopefully she didn't get sick.) No plastic bottles, but they drew water from a hand-dug well in a treeless landscape where cattle were the main farming activity. (ie. high probability of a contaminated water source) When you got to march, you didn't have to worry about pesticides in potatoes, but you did have to watch for worms.
That's how people lived even up to the '70s in large parts of European countryside (Span, Italy, Greece, France, etc). From everybody I've talked to who lived like that in several countries, it wasn't particularly hard or bad. Farm work could be intensive but only for specific times of the year, most of the year they didn't have to do much if at all. And living with several siblings in a small house was just what everybody did, so they didn't feel they miss out on anything. Most of the time they were out and around in the village anyway.
Basically all agricultural societies have historically been feudal, with a small minority of nobles, scribes, and clergy; a larger group of soldiers, merchants, and tradesmen; and a mass of peasant farmers (some such societies still persist today). The peasants, whether formally free or slaves, were almost everywhere treated as a disposable resource by the nobles, who stole, raped with abandon, killed on a whim, and believed themselves to be innately superior. For peasants, food was often scarce even in rich lands during prosperous times, and the majority of calories came from staple starches. Winter was hard. Peasants mostly lived in simple poorly insulated houses, cooked over indoor hearths (= much worse air to breathe than heavy cigarette smoking or modern industrial air pollution), lacked modern understanding and infrastructure for sanitation, had poor access to medicine or other healthcare (only healers with knowledge of local plants and religious figures to pray for them), had little if any formal education, etc. etc.
Pre-mechanized agriculture, along with completely decentralized child-rearing, food preparation, hauling water from a well or river, weaving and sewing, house construction, carpentry, etc. just takes an absurdly enormous amount of manual work, and when the local strong-men demand their cut in return for protection, there’s little left over for the peasants.
Life expectancy, health, median material wealth, gender/social equality, &c. were across-the-board dramatically worse in agricultural societies than in hunter/gatherer societies.
real simple googling points out what I've read in several preservation books. Per wikipedia: "In the process of food preservation, potassium nitrate has been a common ingredient of salted meat since the Middle Ages"
SaltPeter has been around for a long time. Given that nitrates/nitrites help with botulism and the age of discovery & uses, I'd be surprised if it was a modern (post 1800's) thing, and wiki backs me up. For sure by the time Europeans were heavily in north america it would be in wide spread use. I mean they were using it for gunpowder too :)
When using them, you don't use much, but you use it. It also means you can use less regular salt.
>she ate lots of tinned beef smothered in potassium nitrate //
The injunction is surely not to eat foods available now that your grandmother wouldn't recognise as food rather than to eat what your grandmother actually ate.
Taken that way it's not saying the past diets were ideal but that the completely new foods are generally less healthy than the progressively developed foods.
You seem to have made an logically erroneous negation of the assertion being addressed.
And, well, I don't really know what was meant by it. It decries Twinkies and Vitamin Water, but it also decries yogurt just because it's in a tube. Does shape matter for yogurt?
He exalts fresh produce as the pinnacle of health, yet my great-great-great grandmother would have had extremely limited access to it for most of the year, and probably would not recognize most of the stuff I'm able to buy in the store.
It's not a straw man when you legitimately don't understand what was intended.
This is a great point. My great-great-great grandmother lived in Martin County, Kentucky, most likely ate mostly cornbread and string beans in fatback her whole life, and never saw quinoa or kale so long as she lived before dying in childbirth. I'm not exactly sold on this as a model lifestyle.
Kale was in heavy use in the 19th century (re Wikipedia and other sources). Kale and Chard are also heartier plants and can be grown late in the year, giving you those fresh leafy greens way after other stuff gives up. Given that Kale gets it's name from the Scott's Irish... and that That area was 57% english, 25% scott, 9% irish... yeah they very likely ate kale. Fatback too. Probbably whole parts of the hog. The corn for the cornbread, however, most likely went into whiskey depending on the age of your great^3 as up until prohibition, thanks to Andrew Jackson, it was one of the most efficient ways to move corn around (in barrels of distillate), as ~10 bushels -> 1Bbl of Whiskey.
Quinoa, however, was much later, coming not from europe, but peru.
My data is generations of my own family living in the same place, where I have also lived functionally my whole life, about which I think I'm allowed a little introspection in this casual discussion without having to cite some manner of study you'd approve of.
Whether I'm off the mark about kale or not is far beside the point. The fact is that my great-great-great grandmother and my great-great grandmother and on down to probably no more than a couple of generations ago...none of them would have had reliable or easy access to the kind of fresh food I do today, and they wouldn't have been familiar with the bigger portion of what I can find in practically any grocery store anywhere. It's not about whether or not there was kale growing in East Kentucky.
I don't believe you have much idea what your great-great-great-grandmother did or didn't have access to, or what she was or wasn't familiar with. I'm sure you never met her. Did you read her diary or something? Have you tried cooking from her recipe book? Or are you just assuming, based on no evidence, that East Kentucky in 1810 was basically the same as East Kentucky in 1920, or whenever your grandparents grew up?
It's plenty likely that you and your own parents wouldn't have been familiar with the bigger portion of what your great-great-great-grandmother ate, either. And some of that was fresh food. East Kentucky had a lot more fresh plants in it back then than it does now.
I'm not very interested in what you believe, actually. My point—which is that the way people subsisted on the Kentucky frontier 200 years ago would probably not have been congruent with Pollan's idyllic notion of the good food granny ate in the old country—doesn't seem to be of anyone else's interest. I won't belabor it.
Well, the important part of that statement is probably epoxy-like which is probably meant to describe the consistency of the Go-Gurt. What makes go-gurt more epoxy-like than yogurt and what that adjective means elude me though
It's probably not worth getting bogged down in the details when it comes to Pollan's polemics, but in my (admittedly limited) understanding the whole point of GoGurt is that it's less thick than ordinary yogurt, so you can suck it out of the tube...I'm having a hard time believing he's ever actually eaten a GoGurt.
Gogurt is actually really thin, more like thicker cream. It's not the good spackley (and tasty) stuff like greek yogurt or my favourite redwood farms goat yogurt (YUMM!!!).
In this case, yes? Gogurt is full of sugar. Of course the same can be true for yogurt in tubs as well. I feel the straw-manning of Pollan's writing is usually achieved by taking what is meant to be general guidance, pretending it's quite specific and stringent, and then poking logical holes in it.
Generally, the more packaging and marketing that went into something to get you to buy it, the more horseshit you'll find in it too. Generally.
Again, if the guidance is so easy to misunderstood then perhaps it is the guidance's fault, not the fault of the people misunderstanding it.
Apparently there's some underlying meaning to "Don’t eat anything your great-great-great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food." that I'm not understanding. I'm not understanding it because my concept of what my great^3 grandmother would recognize as food, and the understanding of the person who wrote it, are extremely different. Yet the person who wrote it does not explain what he meant by it, and somehow this is my fault?
The past is not a region known for great nutrition. Taking food guidance from it doesn't seem very wise to me. I gather that this phrase is more along the lines of, "think of the idyllic, utopian, imaginary past that certain people believe is what it was actually like, and eat what they would have eaten," but that's not real helpful!
It's still a nonsense idea, and panders to the myth that people from a hundred years ago knew how to do things "right", and we've somehow forgotten. In actuality, food quality now is better than ever before, regardless of the fear mongering. People are healthier, live longer, and are larger of frame because of the better nutrition. In great-grandmother's time things like rickets were much more prevalent than today. Ye Olde Folks got things wrong left, right, and centre, and we get fewer things wrong today.
Far better than the throwaway "What Would Granny Do?" is "Understand How Food Works". Not to mention staples of alternative cuisines - for example, my great-grandmother would not recognise tofu as a food, yet would recognise Spam.
I sometimes wonder how many people in Europe are scared of additives because of the E-Number system that doesn't look natural at all and immediately makes you think that there are "chemicals" in your food. Who wants "E 300" in their food? Probably most random people you ask would say they don't want it without hesitation. Yet it's just Vitamin C.
IMO (I'm one of these Europeans) there's good reasons to avoid additives and there's bad ones. There seems to be a relationship between additives and the prevalence of obesity. That may not be causal, but at least when it comes to Artificial Flavours the mechanism of that happening seems pretty clear to me. Preservatives is something that seems to be much less needed in a typical European urban lifestyle (shopping for food at least 2 times a week). I like to differentiate additives in different groups:
Citric Acid. Should be just fine, apart from citrus allergy.
Other preservatives and nitrates. I'm weary about those, i.e. I try not to eat much. As an example, so far I haven't seen a good counterproof against the Hawaiian nitrate study [1]. If alternatives without such preservatives are available I will choose those (and instead take care to eat it quickly).
Artificial Flavouring. I try to limit these since it tricks me into eating more.
Vitamins. Don't care if they're in there, but I won't buy a product just because of added Vitamins - I'm eating enough fresh produce.
Things that make the product look/sell better but give me no benefit, e.g. food colouring. I'm trying to avoid those, it's probably fine but I don't see why I should eat something my body hasn't been exposed to during human evolution that doesn't have any benefit.
Food labeling seems to be getting excessively ambiguous, “spices,” “flavor”, “natural flavor,” and “artificial flavor” are all legal USDA terms. I'm not exactly sure what's legal or being used in food processing factories, but industrial solvents and other chemicals used to modify foods are not legally required to be listed as ingredients. Given the ambiguous black box of industrial food processing, it's only mildly disappointing to actively avoid processed foods like Girl Scout cookies and frozen foods.
Historically, it's often taken decades to discover the toxicity of chemical innovations thought to be safe like DDT, BPA, pesticides, asbestos, lead, & C8/Teflon [2] . Acrylamide is now suspected as carcinogenic [3] and forms from heating starchy foods, notably cooked potatoes.
"it's often taken decades to discover the toxicity of chemical innovations thought to be safe like [...] C8/Teflon [2]"
You appear to be conflating the toxicity of C8/PFOA (previously used in the manufacturing of PTFE (Teflon®) with that of Teflon itself. The article you linked to is primarily about the health risks to those involved in the manufacturing of PTFE through exposure to PFOA.
However, regarding the toxicity of PTFE itself:
American Cancer Society: "[...] there are no known risks to humans from using Teflon-coated cookware. While PFOA is used in making Teflon, it is not present (or is present in extremely small amounts) in Teflon-coated products.' [1]
US Environmental Protection Agency: "[...] consumer products made with fluoropolymers and fluorinated telomers, including Teflon® and other trademark products, are not PFOA. [...] The information that EPA has available does not indicate that the routine use of consumer products poses a concern." [2]
When BPA was added to plastics it was known to be toxic. The issue was that it was thought to be inert and encapsulated in the material. The revelation came when we found that extreme heat (e.g. in your microwave) or extreme cold (e.g. in your freezer) causes it to leach out of the material and into (e.g.) you food.
I remember reading a study in 2005 that said that cold had nothing to do with it (from Harvard). Just googled it now and now the same group says "even drinking cold water for a week resulted in increased levels in the urine".
acrylamide is a byproduct of cooking a
Starches, a practice which goes back centuries older than our grandmothers, and seems to be as dangerous as everything else, now that scientists at able to detect toxins at 100-1000x more dilute concentrations than are health threats.
There was a big hoopla surrounding Acrylamide some 13 years ago. It was a real bogey man for a while ("OMG, there is a deadly poison in anything you cook and fry; we are doomed!"). You don't hear about it much nowadays.
Then there is all the alternative naming. Some people don't want to buy crap loaded with MSG, so it gets called by names like "hydrolized vegetable protein".
And deceptive it arguably is. The clear issue is not that people are too dumb to realize that dehydrating cane juice results in sugar, but that when they scan the ingredients looking for "sugar", they may not always spot its disguised form.
And the less egregious "skimmed milk powder". Sure, it also has some protein in it, but it's definitely used a lot in baby/children's food as a sweetener just so they can say "no added sugar".
"Synthetic concoctions". Oooo, that's almost as bad as "chemicals".
There's no short-cut to figuring out whether food is healthful. Some processed food is quite healthful, some is not. Some fresh food is healthful, some is not. Some food your great-grandmother ate you should absolutely never put in your mouth, and idealizing her diet is not a smart thing to do.
I've read a fair bit of Pollan's books, and I think you're spot on here. He's not against processing food (heck, he'd probably argue that is a defining trait of humanity), but rather, as you point out, synthetic or heavily-processed foods.
I think that when my great-grandmothers were alive (from the late 1800s up to the 1940s) food additives in use that are now banned included red lead, white lead, diethylene glycol, fishberries, opium, cocaine, strychnine, sawdust, vermilion, toxic copper salts (including cupric hydrogen arsenite!), and hydrogenated vegetable oil containing trans fats.
To quote from a 1909 book about one of the pioneers:
The latter part of the eighteenth
and the first quarter of the nineteenth century were marked
by international strife, political upheaval, and suffering among
the toilers. Cobbett, Burdett, and 'Orator' Hunt in 1817
were agitating for Parliamentary reform. Agricultural depression
was extreme, and commercial probity was at its nadir.
For threescore years the food of the people had been poor
and dear. Contemptible and gross adulterations of all
conceivable kinds were everywhere the rule. The dough of
bread was mingled with alum, carbonate of lime, bone ash,
potatoes, and beans. By eking out his sugar with gypsum
chalk, and pipe-clay, the sweetmeat-maker derived unholy
gains; and the pigments used contained lead, chromium,
mercury, copper, sometimes even arsenic. The unwholesome
hues of preserved green fruits and vegetables were due
to boiling in copper vessels, or to the addition of cupreous
salts. Cayenne pepper and curry powder were beautified
by the scarlet oxide of lead. Vinegar was fortified with
sulphuric acid. Canistered fish were tinted red by
ferruginous earths.
Now, some of these are still in use; gypsum "chalk" is harmless and an essential ingredient in many foods; alum is safe up to a certain level, and is an important ingredient in some kinds of pickling; sulfuric acid is perfectly harmless in sufficiently small quantities (it's GRAS, but I think still illegal in vinegar, and dangerously prone to pick up heavy metals); and as far as I know you can still tint your canned fish red with ochre, which is GRAS too. And bone ash won't hurt you, unless maybe it's infected with Mad Cow Disease. The others, though, are dangerous, and now they have very strict maximum permissible levels.
The situation started to improve during my great-grandmothers' lifetimes.
Unfortunately, some of the less toxic preservatives are still in wide use, like nitrate and nitrite, even though these have been convincingly shown to cause stomach cancer.
My mother-in-law, who grew up in a Midwestern city in the 40s-50s, recently mentioned it is much easier to get fresh produce today, than when she was young. For her, growing up, canned vegetables were the norm, fresh greens were a treat.
For my own parents it is the opposite. Around the same time, they lived in an exurb, fairly rural environment, and ate with the seasons. They live a suburban area now, and eat more canned goods now than they used to.
I was surprised to hear that eating processed foods was so common already 60-70 years ago.
Canning and jarring your own food was also extremely common - my great grandfather had a basement full of stuff they had grown and then preserved themselves. The idea of buying canned veggies wasn't unusual or unhealthy at all - except perhaps being viewed as lazy or a waste of money.
Also, there weren't chemicals involved other than a lot of salt & vinegar.
My wife and I actually do this. It saves quite a bit of money (we can buy a bushel of green beans from a farm 45 minutes away for $15) and it's kind of fun to experiment with.
We do the same with meat, but that is mostly frozen.
The whole pseudo-science around "whole food" and "too much processing" is just that. Bunk. I spent my college and 20s years getting fatter because I ate a lot of fast food and restaurant meals (loaded with sugar and carbs), drank a lot of beer, and spent a lot of time sitting on my ass at work.
The McDonald's cheeseburger isn't bad for you because it's "processed", it's bad for you because it's 350 calories, served with another 300 calories of fried potatoes and at least 20 oz of sugar water. The seemingly healthier burrito at Chipolte is pretty much the same... although you can contemplate the more humane treatment of the pig/cow/chicken.
> The whole pseudo-science around "whole food" and "too much processing" is just that. Bunk.
The idea is that you want to get closer to the source. For example, getting produce from the store that was shipped from Guam is possibly laden with chemicals used to preserve it until it reaches your grocery store. On the other hand, buying direct from the farm cuts out the need for that.
Also, food that has been cooked and recooked several times, then blended with food artificial preservatives is probably less healthy than (on average) than the food you make yourself from scratch.
Combine that with the fact that many industries explicitly target the "bliss point" when formulating their recipes... and you're probably better off with a home-cooked meal than a frozen microwave dinner.
To add to jschwartzi's comment, what if there was a snack food that tasted good, but you could only consume two handfuls before you felt like you couldn't eat anymore?
Some people might find this situation perfect because it helps to limit consumption. In reality, snack food companies see this as a defect in their product and attempt to engineer the limitation away.
If you could continually get wonderful feelings just from eating a product, and the product never made you feel full, you might continue eating it until you've consumed an entire package. At that point, you read the back and realize that you just ate 3000 calories in a single sitting and have a little panic attack.
This sounds an awful lot like saying that food ought to taste bad so you don't eat too much of it.
I'd rather have food that tastes good but is still something I'm able to eat in moderation. I get that food makers have no incentive whatsoever to get me to eat in moderation, but that looks like a different thing from the "bliss point."
It doesn't have to taste bad to force you to eat it in moderation. There are examples out there. People complain that Pepsi is too sweet, and you can only drink a small amount before they can't drink anymore. You could also talk about the salt levels on certain foods (where after a certain amount they start tasting too salty, etc). Food makers want their food to never make you say, "Ok, that's enough this is getting too {sweet,salty,sugary,etc}". That's different from the food tasting bad.
You can do the same at McD's or any major resturant chain. It's not quite as easy as chipolte but it just takes asking. All major chains know their ingredient prices down to the serving and so will sell them that way. McD's just get side of lettuce and a chicken breast or get burgers sans katsup/bun. Rock Bottom will sell a blackened chicken breast and 2 sides of steamed veggies (broccoli/cauliflower) with or without butter for around $5. Slice and dice it. They've been doing this since 2000 at least when I lost a ton of weight on a low carb diet.
Too bad you can't get yogurt at McD's that doesn't have strawberry syrup laced through it and the fruit, or a salad dressing that isn't insane for calories (it's what happens when you add flour and sugar to ranch).
Here they'll do a bowl. Cheeseburger in a bowl (with lettuce), all the way minus mayo, plus steak sauce, is something like 800 calories. I eat two main meals plus a small dinner every day, so, works okay.
I'm only in my early fourties and I was quite late into my teens before I realized that almost no-one else did this like my family.
We grew up on a farm, dirt-poor and did it out of necessity but it was all delicious food: pickles, relishes, canned fruit, jams, jellies, home-made tomoto sauce.
We also laid in bushels of produce into cold storage - potatoes, squash, apples and cabbages.
Do I need to mention what we froze?
Blanched peas, green and yellow beans, corn (cut off the cob) and home grown lamb, pigs, beef and chicken (both kinds).
I am far more well off then my parents were at the same age, but my kids are not nearly as well fed (nutritionally) as I was at the same ages.
Now that we are in prime harvesting season for a lot of this stuff, I might have to rethink what we're eating and
preserve some simple, homemade foods.
Canned vegetables aren't very nutritious, because they have to be cooked so long to preserve them. Furthermore, canning vegetables and meat is potentially dangerous because of botulism.
Source: have been canning last few weeks, info straight from the 'Weck' bible.
Look, I'm not picking sides here, but let's not look at the past with rose colored glasses. When I tell my aunts that I'm canning, they look at me like I'm nuts. They lived much of their lives having to can on a farm, and they love the ease with which they can live their lives now, and the options they have.
The veggies were all frozen, except for the stewed tomatoes and pasta sauce (veggies only, meat added at meal preparation time).
The canning overall wasn't the primary source for the nutrition but it was a part of the overall strategy of prepare and store the food, outside of the "food industry".
And trust me, I remember the hard work clearly but I may be
looking at the past wistfully wondering how to get my kids to eat more vegetables.
There was a big dependence on canning, drying, salting, etc during the last hundred years as urbanization skyrocketed. Food preservation was still developing; the refrigerator didn't really become commonplace until mid-century.
Also of note, in recent decades refrigerated trucks and global shipping lines have enabled out-of-season availability for a lot of produce that, fifty years ago, could not be had fresh for any price nine months of the year.
Potatoes are quite toxic --- they're related to deadly nightshade. The versions we eat are heavily engineered so that the tubers produce survivably small quantities of toxin. (Wild potatoes produce it as a defense mechanism.) However it's possible to stimulate otherwise safe potatoes into producing high quantities of the stuff via mishandling. People have died.
In the 1960s some potato breeders accidentally produced a poisonous breed of potato by crossing two perfectly harmless versions, and some people (mostly the potato breeders themselves!) were quite ill before anyone realised what was going on.
Same thing with Zucchini, cucumbers and other pumpkin derivatives which originally produced the toxin Cucurbitacine. We just had a case where a man died after a pie made of home-grown Zucchini which tasted unusually bitter. Apparently the plants can start producing the toxine when under stress (e.g. heat wave).
There's a reason why children avoid anything bitter-tasting.
We taste a lot of different chemicals as bitter, including cucurbitacin, persin, quinine, solanine, strychnine, momordicin, cyanide, and benzaldehyde, and consequently amygdalin. Apparently we have 25 or more different bitter taste receptors sensitive to more than 500 different bitter chemicals. The lethal doses of these chemicals in proportion to their bitterness vary enormously, and of course they also vary according to the situation: the momordicins in bitter melons are fine most of the time, but bitter melons are an abortifacient (possibly due to an effect of the momordicins) so you shouldn't eat them if you're pregnant. (There are other inexpensive means of abortion, such as misoprostol, which have been carefully studied and shown to be safe in the first trimester.) And different chemicals extracted from bitter melons have been shown to be cytotoxic in vitro and might be useful against cancer; some hepatotoxicity has also been shown. https://www.mskcc.org/cancer-care/integrative-medicine/herbs...
So I would say, no, they're not bad. But don't go overboard.
Pretty great article. It really blows my mind how different the food we eat today is, as compared to 500, 100 or even 50 years ago.
For a long time, salt was precious and highly sought after. Sugar, at least the granulated form, has been "non-exotic" for only a few hundred years -- the article talks about sugar beet milling, and refers to the massive plantations of slaves used to harvest sugarcane. Even tomatoes are a New World crop -- imagine Italian food without tomato sauce.
Heck, I remember when some fruits or vegetables were strictly seasonal -- now, we can get everything year-round, for basically the same price.
Sure, there is a lot of chemically laden, industrially processed crap on supermarket shelves. But it is also easier to eat better now than ever before, not to mention the sheer variety of foods we have available.
I read in Fernand Braudele's "Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century Volume 1" that bread in many regions was only baked 2-3 times a year. Bread would grow mold or get that hard that people would chop it with an axe!
Very interesting! Another book that touches on food history is Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, which talks a bit about the domestication of agricultural crops. So much of what we grow today bears little to no resemblance to their wild varieties. Eg, cabbage, broccoli, kale, and brussels sprouts all come from the same wild plant. Organic and GMO fuss aside, humans have been very, very good at manipulating our environment and food sources for a long time...
It doesn't mean, for instance, "don't use soy sauce that has been processed the same way by the same company in Japan since the 1600's"; that is a horribly strawman interpretation of the idea.