Do you ever look down at your favourite snack and think; how did we get here?
In just a few thousand years we’ve gone from hunting mammoth to arguing over pizza
toppings.
Take something like a cheeseburger, that seems like a pretty simple thing, right?
But think about everything that needed to happen in order for you to destroy your waistline
with bovine deliciousness.
We needed to make bread that rises, domesticate cattle, extract sugar for the ketchup.
And this is before we even get onto cheese; who worked out that squeezing a cow’s nipples
and letting it go mouldy would turn out to be one of the greatest joys in the universe?
Let’s be honest; food…is weird.
So let’s look at 6 things that completely changed how we eat.
Obviously the first major step was when we learnt how to control fire.
Despite what raw food enthusiasts may tell you, cooking is vital to our development as
a species.
The chemical changes that it creates enable us to absorb a far higher amount of useful
energy, which is how we were able to make the evolutionary jump to having such gigantic
brains, which gobble energy even if you’re just sitting there staring at the wall; you
know; like Friday nights.
To give you some examples, the body absorbs about 30% more energy from cooked oats and
wheat than when raw, and a whopping 78% more from a cooked egg compared to raw eggs, so
maybe stop drinking mayonnaise and just have a fry up instead, like a normal person.
The process of cooking, including things like chopping and grinding as well as heating,
means your digestive system does far less work to extract energy since you’ve already
broken down the meat’s connective tissues or softened the plant's cell walls.
You’re basically outsourcing that work so the little people inside you can take a bit
of a break and a finally have that meeting about what that weird lump on you shoulder
is.
After meat, one of the oldest cooked foods is bread.
The process of combining flour and yeast may seem an unlikely discovery but yeast actually
grows naturally on cereal grain that is left out, so it was one of those happy accidents,
like when someone dropped a pig in maple syrup and bacon pancakes were invented.
The next step we needed to work out was how to make food last a bit longer because chasing
mammoths and foraging for berries every day was tiring and we suspected that TV would
be invented soon, and we didn’t want to be too busy chasing deer to be able to watch
it.
There are numerous ways to preserve food and different climates gave rise to different
techniques.
The main aim of preservation is to kill microbes and to prevent them from having the moisture
they need to multiply.
In hot climates this could be done through drying but it wasn’t so easy for us damp
people far from the equator.
Those in more moderate climates turned to salting their food to preseve it.
Osmosis is where the water inside a cell tries to reach the same concentration as the water
outside the cell.
So when you salt a meat, the moisture outside the cells has more salt than the moisture
inside the cells, so the water is drawn out through the semi-permeable cell wall to try
and balance it out.
It’s a bit like communism, but with less furry hats and more water.
Other methods of preservation include smoking, sugaring, pickling, jellying or just hiding
you food somewhere were all the microbes can’t find it.
With the rise of electricity, the refrigerator became an everyday item for almost every household.
The great thing about a fridge is that you get the benefit of longer lasting food, without
having to dramatically alter its flavour or texture, which most preservation techniques
often do.
It also enabled us to plan ahead, rather than having to constantly buy things we needed
that day.
Scottish physician William Cullen is considered the founding father of the fridge since he
gave the first recorded demonstration of artificial refrigeration back in 1756.
The modern fridge works by pumping a coolant through a series of evaporator and condenser
coils.
Soon we will embrace the futuristic power of the smart fridge, where you’ll be able
to text your device on your way home to see if you’re out of milk and it’ll probably
start hiding the cheese if it thinks you’ve put on a few pounds.
You’re not the boss of me, fridge.
One of the most reliable and long-lasting ways to preserve food is with canning, an
invention that largely came about thanks to a game we like to play, called war.
Humans love war, we play it all the time, but it does make lunch rather complicated
when you’ve covered all the veg in mustard gas and blown the legs off your chef.
Frenchman, Nicolas Appert, won a substantial 12,000 franc prize for developing a way of
sealing food in glass jars, to help the troops in the Napoleonic wars.
Canning slowly developed, although the lead they used to solder the cans didn’t do people
much good, but it was about 100 years later, when WW1 started, that it really took off.
Unfortunately there weren’t enough tins to keep the Brits happy and by 1917, British
soldiers were issued with cigarettes and amphetamines to try to suppress their appetite.
Both world wars had a major effect on food, especially in Britain since we imported a
large percentage of our produce.
Rationing during WW2 greatly reduced the availability of a lot of products, so much so the many
children thought that fruit such as the banana were fairy tale inventions that didn’t actually
exist, since they had never seen one.
Rationing went on until 1954 in the UK and this is largely how the British ended up with
such a poor culinary reputation around the world; the food was incredibly boring because
there weren't many options and then it took a long while for us to get out of the habit.
Next up is not a technique but the one man who has had the biggest influence on food
all around the world is Auguste Escoffier.
His book Le Guide Culinaire (pron “Le Geed Killinaire”), published in 1903, broke down
the methods and techniques that make up classic cookery.
It forms the basis of classic chef training to this day.
In 1890, Escoffier moved to London to take control of the kitchens at the Savoy hotel.
His system of organising a kitchen had a huge impact on their safety and on the consistency
of the food.
By breaking the cooking process into sections, each chef became part of a team who oversaw
only a few small parts of the meal, enabling them to perfect it and repeat it.
Before him, it had all been a bit hectic and you’d be lucky to get a sandwich without
someone chopping off a finger and getting hair in the butter.
Dining at the Savoy became hugely popular and was what started London’s restaurant
culture, since before this, aristocratic families would have their own chefs and eat in their
grand houses.
But with the draw of great cooks, hotels began to get crowds of excited diners and so the
fine dining restaurants came after.
Without Escoffier, the Emperor of Chefs, there’d be no L'Enclume, no Gordon Ramsey and no cheeky
Nandos.
When your tummy is rumbling and you scroll through all the things you could have; pizza,
tacos, ramen, a kebab, a curry, sushi – you soon realise that the one thing that effects
what we eat today, more than anything else, is immigration.
There has certainly been a long history of ingredients being discovered and included
in national cuisines; just look at potatoes, sugar, rice.
But it is the people who bring the rich history of the food and new ways of preparing it that
really increase a countries eating vocabulary.
The Italians gave New York a lot of its famed cuisine and try taking a Californian to a
Mexican restaurant outside their own state, you’ll get more tutting than at a political
debate.
Curry is now one of Great Britain’s leading national dishes and the famous Chicken Tikka
Masala, one of Britians most eaten dishes, was something invented here as part of the
influence of immigrants, but it's not actually an Inidian dish.
So who knows what exciting new dishes will be invented in the next 10 years thanks to
the power of shared knowledge.
Food preperation has been rather basic up until now.
It's only in recent years we've started experimenting with how technology can shape our food, from
sous-vide to sperification.
Perhaps in the future we’ll be able to grow perfect steaks in jars and splice wheat DNA
with a deep-fat fryer so we can grow doughnuts in our own garden.
Well, one can dream at least.