Ahistorical, dontcha think? Under capitalism, change and disruption speed up per historical norms; things just change faster... much, much faster. How many Edwardians saw the end of the British Empire in their own--OK, maybe their child's--lifetime? socialismorbarbarism
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This change of sense of historical time is for me one the most fascinating phenomenon I've experienced. I think we can agree on the generalities of the causation chains, mass production, work speed up, etc, all social control systems within a capitalist economy.
So when I went back and started reading and thinking about ancient cultures and their evolution, it was interesting to see something like rate of change boost factors. I can't quite name them correctly. Basically these factors took place in the upper tier of Roman society within the political realm of law, wealth, power, and within the military systems as all these began to merge into something like a police state or military dictatorship by the power elite. Meanwhile the biggest cities were becoming multicultural open plazas, public spaces of great variety and cultural nuance and sophistication, Rome, Alexandria, Damascus, Athens, Syracuse, Jerusalem, Marseilles, and all along the north african coast. You can kind of get a picture of these places by studying the math, philosophy, science, medicine, food, art, ... the cultural mixes of these places.
Berkeley reminds me of these ancient cities, exactly because of all the people and languages you can see and hear, just walking around. All the different restaurants, small ethnic food stores from asia, the middle east, less so from Mexico and Latin America, Europe or Africa. You have to drive into Oakland and wonder around to find the latter. There is a whole two block downtown that is basically an open Chinese and SE Asian market. During my delivery days, I used to double and triple park in the streets, like everybody did, looking for small doorways to get to somebody's apartment.
I've been following the food as culture angle lately, instead of philosophy or art. So today I was in a gas station to buy cigarettes, and looked around for a snack munchy. I found a bottle of brown stuff called Veri Veri Teriyaki. I was thinking about how to make chicken tonight. On the back of the label, I read ``Our company came to be when a Jewish boy and a Chinese girl began talking about common interest: cooking ...'' When I bought this and cigs, the woman owner, asian (Taiwan, Korea, maybe Thai?) said, ``Oh, that's good, I use that myself'' So I ask steamed, stir fry, bbq? She said, ``It works good for all the ways to cook.
We started talking about curries and how long and hard they are to make, and make taste good. She said,``Homemade is better, cheaper, but lots of work.'' I was describing the traditional way to make curry with a mortar, pestle, from seeds and plants, not the spice mix you get in bottles. I've been fixing Thai green curried chicken and stir fry vegetables with steamed rice for dinner the last two nights.
All these diverse thoughts and experiences can be brought into the understanding of how historical time has changed. The mortar and pestle is a stone age tool that takes work, care, knowledge, skill, and time, lots of time. It takes about half an hour to forty-five minutes just to create the curry paste you will use as marinade and then later as cooking and serving sauce. All the richest oils and watery flavors come out in the greenish, yellow, gray mush. You can color this mix using red or green chiles, or give it a yellow look with more turmeric. The seed oils for cooking in a wok are made from a modernized pressing and grinding process to get peanut, olive, sesame, etc., as well as coconut milk the base thinner for most of SE Asian cooking.
So if you follow all this, you see that the speed up demands of economic life have destroyed the flavor of food and food cultures everywhere. You have to return to stone age methods, just to get a tasty meal. So I think of somebody like Alice Waters, not as a shopper, but as mimicking the ancient gathering parties in the grasslands and jungles at their borders. These where all places were food plants live in variety and abundance. Out in the swamp for rice, out in the dried plain for the other grains, etc. You can see the landscape and its ecosystems as a giant supermarket of goodies, and deconstruct the traditional cuisines from the land, and then modify them through the history of contact with other people, from other landscapes. I think of this as the cultural anthropology of food. Think about places like New Orleans for food, where everything from the jungles and swamps to the river, to the sea all comes together in a Marseilles Bouillbase or the Thai, Cambodian, Vietnamese versions at the confluence of the Mekong into the South China sea. These are also vast and richly diversified ecosystems of plants, animals, land, fresh and salt water that put the Sacramento delta system to shame.
In the larger extension, we can see something like a hippy culture of ecology, endangered species, and a plethora of philosophical and mystical understandings of the world merged with the most advanced sciences. These are the little noticed contributions the diverse movements of the 60s made. I can read E.O.Wilsom as an idiot savant sociobiologist or a luminary ecologist.
The cultures of food and cuisine can unravel all of these nuances and trajectories, if you have the creative trajectories in mind where the topologies of the real unfold the mysteries of the world as food, as landscape, as species, as cosmology, and as universe.
CG