In A World Of Abundance, Let’s Eat Like Peasants.
As Americans, were we ever peasants? No of course not. Not even our poor, who left the cities or colonies for a new life out west, weren’t called peasants. They were called frontiersmen. Peasants are given a bad name, a name that has a disparaging connotation for a class of people that have enhanced our cultures across the globe tenfold. The peasants across history should be given unyielding praise for their contribution to our cultures, none more significant than their contributions to food and the way we eat, i.e our cuisines. I think that in our modern times we should look back to our peasant ancestors (sorry royal families of the world) and the way they cultivated their cuisines as we in America continue to develop our own.
Peasants aren’t known for much; a revolt here and there, perhaps a revolution or two, but not much. However, they are known for one thing, almost universally, their dishes. No, not their ceramics, their cuisines.
Dan Barber writes, “ What does whole farm cooking look like? The more I thought about it, the more I realized that whole farm cooking is what peasants around the world figured out thousands of years ago. They did not choose their dietary preferences by sticking a wet finger up to the prevailing winds, as we do today. They never had that kind of freedom. Instead, they developed cuisines that adhered to what the landscape provided.” — The Third Plate.
This strict relationship to the land offered a limited pantry in which the peasant populations had to survive off of. Yet over time, these dishes created cuisines and in turn, turned the most meager of meals into delicacy sought after by the rich and royal.
To bring this a little closer to home let’s use a dish from the south lands of the United States, Hoppin’ John, as an example. Barber highlights this southern delicacy in The Third Plate he writes,
“the dish is an ode to soil fertility; the cowpeas provide the soil with enough nitrogen to grow rice, and the collards usually took up whatever salt was left over from the seawater that flooded into the basin”.
To be a farmer of the land wasn’t to bend the land to the will of your choosing. Rather learning how to work with the land to produce the calories needed for you and your family to survive, and make a little money as well, but mostly to survive. Practicality in concert with innovation leads to cuisines, not abundance. To which Barber states about Hoppin’ John, “all of them took their shape and form from what the local landscape could offer”. This is applicable to peasant dishes the world over.
It begs the question, why doesn’t America have a cuisine of its own beyond a few nationally recognized dishes? The answer is simple and is usually the cause of most things American, opportunity.
More specifically the opportunity that lied within the Western expansion. Unlike the French farmers who were limited by Germany or Italian farmers who were limited by their surrounding countries, Americans weren’t limited (or at least weren’t concerned with any mandated limitations). American farmers simply had to look west to Ohio and then to Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, Kansas, the Dakotas, Nevada, and California until they reached the coastline. The point being is that for the first time in human agricultural history an abundance of unseen and perhaps unimaginable proportions was available to the Americans, and the American farmer was ready and willing to exploit it. This fact working in tandem with the invention of the American railroad laid the seeds to what would become modern agriculture and as a consequence stunted the development of whatever American cuisine would have developed without it.
Why you may ask? Why would a grand cuisine not flourish under an abundance hence not seen in human history?! Well, there are two lenses in which you can focus in on this with, the first being timing and the second being economy.
A large part of it has to do with timing, America is still very young as a country, only 242 years old. We are still in our adolescence comparatively to say France or England. This is an important point for two reasons. First, because we are still in our developmental stages as a country believe it or not. Secondly, these stages are being experienced during a period in which human technology has been an enormous benefit to our growth. Weigh that against French or English history which both had hundreds of years of negligible growth and innovation when it comes to almost all aspects of life, except maybe warfare. This allowed for recipes to be handed down from generations to generation each time becoming more unique and important to the countries in which they reside. America, just simply missed out on that time. In fact, America's relationship with its food economy and culture is a direct result of the times in which America has been and continues to be a country.
A quick crash course on the history of American agriculture.
America not so long ago in the grand scheme of things was a handful of colonies, 13 in fact. Being a colony the majority of crops were being sent back to the mainland. This type of economy, although not completely dissimilar to the feudalism of Europe, had its effect on how Americans saw their crops worth. Yes, some were meant for the baker in town but a lot more was meant for the bakers elsewhere either in neighboring colonies or back in Jolly Ole. Let’s fast forward to 1776 the year America was born. 55 years later in 1831, the railroad was invented. This drastically changed the landscape of America. Towns became more rural and centered around grain elevators. Grain, with the help of refrigerated train cars, was now being transported back to New York rather than staying in Ohio, and as a result the interconnected American supply chain started to develop. Around this time, nearing closer to 1840, across the globe in Germany a chemist by the name of Justus von Liebig published his idea in Chemistry in Its Application to Agriculture and Physiology that stated adding three key nutrients to the soil would bolster its productivity: nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium (also known as N-P-K). This finding will have a further lasting effect down the road. However, in 1892, just 61 years after the invention of the railroad John Froelich invented the tractor. This allowed for larger scale agriculture, less labor, and you didn’t have to feed it. The invention of the tractor alone was evolutionary; however, no invention has had as much of an effect on our foods than the invention of chemical fertilizer.
In 1909, 17 years after the invention of the tractor another German chemist Fritz Haber succeed in inventing “fixed” nitrogen, “a handy and highly concentrated chemical form that farmers could simply feed to their soil” writes Barber. Haber’s invention now made Liebigs NPK model affordable and accessible to average farmers, prior buying the minerals was prohibitively expensive. Haber's invention was improved on 4 years later by a man named Carl Bosch who is credited for upsizing Haber's invention to a factory scale in 1913. The newly named Haber-Bosch process produced liquid ammonia, the raw material used to make nitrogen fertilizer. With the ending of World War II in 1945 many American factories which produced materials for the American war machine had an excess amount of ammonia (which helps make bombs) and seemingly overnight were converted into fertilizer factories. Barber writes, “suddenly our attention turned from winning the world war to winning the war on nature…Natural limits on crop growing became irrelevant”. The growth continued from there, refrigeration got better, transportation more efficient, we created larger grocery stores, brands and science replaced chefs and cooks, everyone was eating wonder bread and McDonalds, and then Earl Butts told the American farmer to “get big or get out” in the 70s; farm policies haven’t deviated much since. The American food system had become and still is completely industrialized, all within less than 200 years. I ask within that time and under that mentality where is there time for a cuisine to be created? We weren’t creating dishes off of the land to survive, we were commoditizing our fields and buying Big Macs. Although I think in our most recent history we may be turning that around.
Remember France? The country caught between the Germans and the sea. Its great cuisine was made because those peasants had no Ohio or Indiana to continue on to. Nor did they have a railroad or chemical fertilizer that encouraged commodity farming.They had the land and nothing more. (Of course this is an oversimplification as to prove a point, there were many social and cultural variables that were at play as well, nonetheless). So they had to garner their cuisine from the land, knowing there was no other land in which they could harvest from. Barber reflects on the grand cuisines and writes, “all of them took their shape and form from what the local landscape could offer.”
Now to come full circle, we as Americans should try eat in the mindset of peasants again. We should endeavor to use only foods from the immediate land in which we live. Let’s go back and find the ingredients that not only grow in our local communities but flourish in our communities. Let’s try to develop local cuisines that are made from the local farms not the industrial ones. In time and with effort perhaps we will find ourselves eating in an America made up of an abundance of cuisines, all which make up the American cuisine.
