American Staple

     Survivalists tout the recitation of the rule of three: three minutes without air, three days without water, three weeks without food. Food is an integral part of human existence, society, culture, and economics, yet as vital as vittles are, alterations to dietary patterns often attract little social comment. Practitioners of old patterns may remark upon differences from memories, but the majority of a collected social gathering will dismiss those claims as insignificant.
     In the previous two centuries industrialization has impacted travel, production, work, communication, farming, war, and every other facet of civilization. The Industrial Revolution has additionally impacted food stuffs, preservation, and availability from Napoleonic France's innovations with canned goods to the adoption of the electric oven.
     The Silk Road's prominence in Europe gained its name from silk and china but maintained relevance mostly for the spices that preserved and improved upon the winter stores of bedraggled Europeans. Black pepper was sold for over $50/lb (0.5kg) which today can be bought for $3/lb (0.5kg). Spices were used to improve the taste, but, importantly, spice was used to preserve quality and mask the task of rot. Meat and vegetables do not greatly endure intact from the harvest to the planting. Thus, with the revolution of agriculture from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, preservation technology shadowed production technology. Napoleon's canned goods allowed his soldiers to fight through the winter and carry rations long distances. Pasteurization purified and preserved milk from bacteria, and germ theory helped cleanse and preserve our food stores against the degradation of mold, fungus, and bacteria.
     Beyond preservation, the changing nature of the home impacted food. From the turn of the twentieth century, gas and oil increasingly replaced coal, and as World War I consumed a majority of energy reserves, Americans turned to electricity. As the century wore on, appliances that used electricity became integrated into the middle class household. By the Great Depression, nearly all middle and high class kitchens had replaced the coal furnace with a gas or electric stove. The replacement of the soot and coal dust with clean burning gas allowed the kitchen to become one of the cleanest rooms in the house, challenged only by the bathroom with its new indoor plumbing. Gas and electric stoves and ovens easily maintained temperature and removed the burdensome task of keeping the coal furnace stoked. Cooks and recipes adapted to these technologies.
     Industrialization also changed the types of foods that were prepared. Railroads in England allowed fish to be brought inland to become a dietary delight, and now, is one of the stereotypes of British foods: fish and chips. Americans were able to send fruits from the North like pears and plums in exchange for the tomatoes and peaches of the South. A wider variety of canned foods was also available, and refrigeration allowed for the development of new foods and techniques altogether.
     Food processing changed how traditional foods tasted and needed to be cooked. Cornmeal, a staple for the Midwestern and Southern diets of the American South, used to be ground by water-powered millstones and filtered kernels through a single-sized grate. The large chunks of corn in the meal provided a flavorful, richly-nourishing bread. As the South embraced industrialization by the Great Depression, steel rollers replaced the millstones and produced a very fine, kernel-free cornmeal. The new texture changed the taste and preparation of cornbread and had a net-negative impact on its consumption in the South in the decades since as it has been replaced with wheat breads and sugared foods.

     As farm work subsided to factory work which transitioned to office work, the dietary patterns changed as well. Family sizes shrank as did caloric needs, and the preparation time diminished as processed foods reduced the amount of labor for the cook. These new experiences facilitated the Joy of Cooking cookbook that has sold over eight million copies. While meals were easier to prepare, fewer were eaten at home. Restaurants allowed office workers to eat closer to work instead of returning home. Thus, as food became faster, the locations of its consumption increased in variety.
     Plastics and Teflon further impacted cooking as containers became disposable and hassle-less to clean. Plastics renovated the style of the kitchen, but changes were still incomplete, and microwaves, introduced in the 1950s, became household items by the 1970s.
     From the type and availability of wide variety of food year round to the preparation, storage, and clean-up of the modern diet, the Industrial Revolution's impact on the kitchen and waist-line of modern peoples is imperceptibly huge. While no recent changes have completely revolutionized diets or cooking in the last few decades, with the advent of microchips and personalized diet data, the future's renovations to America's favorite room may be as dramatic and startling as the one's witnessed in the last century.


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Agatha Tyche

Journey of Why: Brewing Hatred

     The animosity between England and France molded the course of European history as decidedly as Charlemagne, the Catholic Church, and the New World, but over the last century, the two perennial powers reached a cordial accord. Seven-hundred years the two kingdoms warred against one another. Battles were waged on French soil, across Europe, in every ocean, and touched every continent of the world. With a record stretching back to the turn of the first millennium, why was the chaos of war ignited?
     The birth of what Europe is can be credited to the boundaries of the Roman Empire, but Charlemagne became the ancestor of most European monarchs and established political boundaries for the disparate peoples. After the death of Charlemagne, his empire was weakened and split between his sons who divided the lands for separate rule. This division of strength allowed an already ambitious Scandinavian people to control the seas, coastlines, and rivers of much of Europe. Charles the Simple, king of what became France, secured his northern coast bordering the English Channel by giving land and title to Rollo, a viking warlord who vowed to defend against other Viking invaders. He took the title Duke of Normandy and was baptized as a Christian under the name of Robert.
     The descendants of Rollo maintained their holding along the coast for centuries and actively expanded their lands with William I's conquest of England in 1066. For a time, the kings of England remained Dukes of Normandy and held court in France. In 1204 King John lost his Duchy and barely held his throne, and his son, Henry III, finalized this cession with the Treaty of Paris in 1259. Under these contentious agreements, England and France both justified their rule over the coast of Normandy and excused countless deaths and centuries of hate.
     Essentially, the core of the dispute is that the French king felt threatened that one of his feudal lords controlled such significant holdings and sought to disperse that power. By removing the French-located seat of the English monarchs, the French kings allowed their English opponents an isolated realm to consolidate power and violently re-deploy forces in their historic mainland holdings
     Only a century after the Treaty of Paris, Edward III began re-asserting English claims within France and ignited the Hundred Years War. From that time on, the two kingdoms were in a state of tension with brief recovery periods disrupting the decades of war. With few exceptions, England and France fought against each other in every European War, trade agreement, and political alliance until the twentieth century. Feeling that their bloodlines, power, and rightful lands compelled a stronger case for the French throne than the incumbent, the English began raiding the coastal region of France in 1337. After a century of war and occupation of the French throne, Joan of Arc is credited with rallying the French forces in Southern France to begin the successful, permanent expulsion of English kings from French lands.
     The generations-long, bloody war destroyed relations between the two kingdoms. Between the Hundred Years War and World War I, the British and French Empires opposed each other's movements as a matter of political determination. If a nation sought to ally itself with France, by default, it sided against the British.
     In a period where Spain's naval dominance and New World wealth positioned her for an expansion of control through Europe, British and French forces formed a brief alliance to deter Spanish expansionist desires. This resulted in Henry VIII and Francis I meeting at the gloriously expensive Field of the Cloth of Gold where the two nation's knights jousted and feasted but failed to build upon their loose alliance and were at war again shortly after.
     As Britain developed her navy for New World trade in conjunction with the Spanish navy's slow decline from prominence, the British Isles became impenetrable since no nation could land an army on her shores. The monarchy remained less fortified and on two occasions was temporarily ousted from power. Charles I was executed and power was consolidated around Oliver Cromwell. Two generations later, James II endured the Glorious Revolution of 1688 that later inspired the American Revolution, another low point for the British crown.
     Of all the nations of Europe that traded alliances through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, France and Britain remained embattled through the Wars of Austrian Succession and American and French Revolutions.
     Despite that history of animosity, the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars aided the two nation's cooperation. With the victory at Trafalgar, the British Navy was the undisputed champion of the seas. The Concert of Vienna in 1816 formalized the Greats Powers' foreign policy with each other and established the peace of The Long Century. With British imperial might expanding globally and French imperial might re-solidifying new political movements domestically and abroad, the two empires became rough, tense political allies and opposed Russia's expansion into Ottoman lands in the Crimean War.
     As the Asian region became saturated by European influences and ignited the Scramble for Africa in the last part of the nineteenth century, tensions between France and Britain resided on the brink of war. Through compromise and careful negotiation, the two powers made effective use of diplomacy to avoid bloodshed. With the conclusion of the Fashoda Incident of 1898 in modern South Sudan over disputed land claims, Britain cemented its strength in controlling the area which mollified France and began the de-escalation of tensions that aided in the establishment of a more permanent alliance between the two nations.
     France sought a strong ally because of fear of Germany whose unification and rapidly expanding industrial production outpaced the French. Germany's naval arms race with the British fleet during the same period also worried Britain who agreed to more friendly relations with France to match Germany's new might and maintain the balance of European power.
     The crowning of Francophile Edward VII in 1901 invigorated the political interactions of two of the world's largest empires. Edward VII managed to secure the Entente Cordiale in 1904. English-French relations changed from five centuries of continuous war to peaceful co-existence through the nineteenth century and concluded with four decades of cultural exchange that created a special political relationship between the two nations and solidified desires for the maintenance of the status quo.
     After contention over the rightful king of France in the 1300s, millions of dead, religious zeal and spite, and political posturing as large of the Colossus of Rhodes, England and France made amends. After Napoleon's attempt to conquer Europe created a tense political stasis and after Britain's global empire reduced its insecurities, the threat of a nation stronger than either England or France forced them to conclude: England AND France.

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Agatha Tyche