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BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS ARTICLE Coal: A Human History Salt: A World History Spice: The History of a Temptation Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How it Transformed
Our World Next time you find yourself at a foundering dinner party, try throwing out one of these conversation kindlers: The word salad comes from the Latin sal, meaning salt, and refers to the Roman custom of salting greens before eating them. Or, perhaps over dessert: Each American consumes, on average, 10 pounds of coffee per year, far behind the world leaders, the Finns, who quaff 28 pounds per person annually. Or, another tidbit from our toga-sporting pals: Roman soldiers stationed in England frequently brought back jewelry made from polished coal, which, in addition to being fantastically opaque, was flammable. These harmless facts, and hundreds more like them, can be gleaned from a bounty of books being published annually by the major houses, books with solid, elementary titles like Coal, Salt and Spice. In a crowded pantry are books on the potato, tobacco, bananas, oak, corn, sugar and even the pencil. Commodity literature is nothing new, of course. The grandfather of the genre is non-fiction’s colossus, John McPhee, who in 1967 published Oranges. That thin volume grew from its original conception as a New Yorker article into a relatively comprehensive history of the fruit, from its origins on the islands of the South China Sea to a survey of the American orange industry’s use of red dye to make the citrus’ color more appealing. While none of the current crop of authors can turn a phrase like McPhee (“Blood oranges grow well in Florida, but they frighten American women”), their projects all surpass Oranges in scope. Each takes the decided approach that his or her commodity represents a fulcrum upon which the fate of civilization as we know it was moved; and in each case, to a certain extent, they are correct. Salt, for example, was one of the world’s first currencies, a far more practical bartering stock than gold and infinitely more portable than chickens. The word salary comes from the Romans of course, who paid their centurions in the mineral. What made salt so valuable? Before fast freezing and canning it was the critical ingredient to preserving foods, both meats as well as vegetables, which are pickled thanks primarily to salt solutions. People needed the preserved food to make it through the winter, or through droughts, or to move armies. Therefore, procuring enough salt was a matter of both survival and national security. During the Civil War the Union Army took great pains to destroy all Confederate salt works with the aim of starving the South into submission. By 1863, the same 200-pound sack of salt that had gone for 50 cents at the outbreak of the war was selling for $25 in Savannah, Georgia. In the case of spices, it was the search for cheaper access to pepper, cinnamon and ginger that launched both Vasco de Gama’s 1497 circumnavigation of Africa to India as well as Christopher Columbus’ 1492 voyage to the Caribbean, opening the age of European exploration and later, colonialism. In a world without supermarkets stocked with southern hemisphere produce, spices could make a winter diet of meat and porridge palatable to medieval Europeans. By the same token, the abundance of easily-gathered coal in England was the single-most important factor in thrusting that nation to the forefront of the Industrial Revolution. As for the coffee bean, after Incan gold, it has been the single most important item in determining Latin American history. What is chiefly interesting about Salt and Spice is that commodities once so central to world politics are now taken virtually for granted. Salt’s author, Mark Kurlansky, makes much ado about the importance of salted cod in the shifting of power from Southern to Northern Europe in the 15th century. (In 1997 he published a book called Cod, for those who need to know more.) As for spices, the Dutch, in particular based most of their colonial ventures on cornering the spice market, cloves especially. Cloves originally grew on only four islands in Indonesia, all Dutch owned, and much expense and cruelty towards native farmers was meted out to keep it that way. Of course, these days, cloves grow in many places, and our food, despite the recent popularity of chili peppers, is actually much less laden with spice than it was 600 years ago. Instead, freshness is the culinary watchword. Similarly, because modern industry can turn out sodium chloride much faster than we can use it, salt containers are no longer the sign of opulence they were at French court, where saltcellars were jewel-encrusted and set as near the monarch as possible. Instead, these days handfuls of paper salt packets are foisted on every drive-through window customer. Though much more ink—not to mention blood—is spilled these days on account of petroleum, coal is still a major political factor. Gone are the days of coal’s overt drama: strike-busting massacres of Pennsylvania coal miners and pollution so murderous that a single 1880 smog killed at least 700 Londoners. Rather, coal’s current menace is a much more insidious one: global warming. More than half of the United States’ electricity is still generated by the stuff, and the American coal industry spends millions of dollars each year fighting regulations to clean up coal plant emissions, not to mention lobbying against such progressive environmental efforts as the international Kyoto Protocol. Furthermore, China currently burns more coal than any other nation, and eager to catch up to the prosperity of the post-Industrial Revolution west, shows no interest whatsoever in laying off their vast reserves. The fact that China was exempted from the Kyoto Protocol was a big reason that President G.W. Bush refused to sign on to the agreement. As far as we can tell, the Romans had no access to coffee. The drink was unknown outside the Middle East until the 16th century. Uncommon Grounds differs from the other books here in both the conspicuous absence of Roman history and the fact that coffee is still visibly increasing as a popular commodity (just witness the amazing multiplication of Starbuck’s outlets worldwide). Most of us are familiar with coffee’s popular history, from “Joe,” its WWII G.I.-inspired nickname, to Juan Valdez, the fictional campesino created for television and print advertisements by Columbian coffee growers in the 1970s. Most people also have vague notions of the CIA’s involvement in sabotaging worker’s rights movements in coffee and banana-growing Central American nations, though they may not realize that during WWII, hundreds of Guatemalan coffee farmers of German descent were detained in internment camps in the United States. Reading history this way is akin to touring a city via its back alleyways. Instead of gazing at grand, symbolic edifices, you see the service entrances where trucks deliver office supplies and the caterer issues into the banquet hall. Instead of examining a culture manifested by its skyscrapers, you see the means, the day-to-day activity that drives every economic, and therefore political, decision. It’s a fun departure from the textbook standard of a connect-the-dots between famous men, armed conflicts and acts of Congress. It’s worth noting that despite its similarly item-oriented title, Jared Diamond’s 1999 runaway bestseller Guns, Germs and Steel is a different animal. Where Diamond’s book seeks to unify all of modern human history under a single theory of human behavior, the commodity books are content to stay on the micro level of their specific goods. Where Guns, Germs and Steel is controversial, these works are fairly predictable. Where Diamond’s writing breezes through the grand sweep of human behavior, these books often bog down in tedious recipes for ancient Greek fish sauces and literary excerpts on spiced medieval foods. Perhaps these books are better tasted than read. With a steady diet of, say, 10 minutes of Salt or Spice each night, wise readers could provision themselves with dinner-party trivia for years to come. |
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