Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat Read Free

mean you need no knowledge of how to get a fire going and keep it ablaze. Until around a hundred years ago, management of a fire was one of the dominant human activities. That has
gone (and a good thing, too, if you think of all the tedious hours of the day it consumed, all the other activities it precluded). The larger question is whether the existence of cooking technologies that entail only minimal human input has led to the death of culinary skills. In 2011, a survey of 2,000 British young people from age eighteen to twenty-five found that more than half said that they had left home without the ability to cook even a simple recipe such as Spaghetti Bolognese. Microwaves plus convenience foods offer the freedom of being able to feed yourself with a few pushes of a button. But it’s not such a great advance if you lose all concept of what it would mean to make a meal for yourself.
    Sometimes, though, it takes a new technology to make us appreciate an old one. The knowledge that I can make hollandaise in thirty seconds in the blender enhances the pleasure of doing it the old way, with a double boiler and a wooden spoon, the butter added to the yolks piece by tiny piece.
    The equipment of the kitchen can seem unimportant compared to the history of food itself. It is all very well fussing over the niceties of table settings and jelly molds, but what does this matter compared to a basic hunger for bread? Perhaps this explains why kitchen tools have been so neglected in histories of food. Culinary history has become a hot subject over the past two decades. But the focus of these new histories, with a few notable exceptions, has overwhelmingly been ingredients rather than technique: what we cooked rather than how we cooked it. There have been books on potatoes, cod, and chocolate, and histories of cookbooks, restaurants, and cooks. The kitchen and its tools are more or less absent. As a result, half the story is missing. This matters. We change the texture, the taste, the nutritional content, and the cultural associations of ingredients simply by using different tools and techniques to prepare them.
    Beyond this, we human beings have been changed by kitchen technology—the how of food as well as the what. I don’t just mean this in a “my dream kitchen changed my life” kind of way, though it is true that changes in kitchen tools have gone hand in hand with
vast social changes. Take the relationship between labor-saving devices and servants. The story here is one of technological stagnation. There was very little interest in eliminating the grind of cooking for the many centuries when well-off kitchens came with an abundance of human labor to take the strain. Electric food processors and blenders are genuinely liberating tools. Arms no longer have to ache to produce kibbe in Lebanon or ginger-garlic puree in India. So many meals that were once seasoned with pain are now trouble free.
    Kitchen tools have changed us in more physical ways. There is good evidence to suggest that the current obesity crisis is caused, in part, not by what we eat (though this is of course vital, too) but by the degree to which our food has been processed before we eat it. It is sometimes referred to as the “calorie delusion.” In 2003, scientists at Kyushu University in Japan fed one group of rats hard food pellets and another group softer pellets. In every other respect the pellets were identical: same nutrients, same calories. After twenty-two weeks, the rats on the soft-food diet had become obese, showing that texture is an important factor in weight gain. Further studies involving pythons (eating ground cooked steak, versus intact raw steak) confirmed these findings. When we eat chewier, less processed foods, it takes us more energy to digest them, so the number of calories our body receives is less. You will get more energy from a slow-cooked apple puree than a crunchy raw apple, even if the calories on paper are identical. Food labels,