March 22, 2014

What We Eat: Connecting the Dots - #113

March 22, 2014/ Guest User

BURT WOLF: What We Eat, the true story of why we put sugar in our coffee and ketchup on our fries.

Originally, all life that lived on land lived on one giant continent. Then forces inside the earth started breaking that land mass into the continents we have today and pushing them apart.

Slightly over 500 years ago a counter force appeared and started pulling everything back together. Only this time it wasn’t a geological force, it was the force of human culture and the point man was Christopher Columbus. During the ten years between Columbus’ first voyage in 1492 and his final trip in 1502, new forces totally changed the course of history.

Millions of people moved from one continent to another, governments changed and religions were exported. But surprisingly, the most important changes were not the result of politics or religion; they were the result of plants and animals being exchanged between two worlds.

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: We call them the Old World and the New World, but I think what we really had were two old worlds. After all, people have been living in the Americas for 35,000 years. Even to a man my age that’s a considerable length of time. I think what Columbus did was introduce the two Old Worlds and in the process create one new one. And the exchange of plants and animals that took place altered the way people ate and that changed everything on the planet. What our series does is look at those changes and how they continue to affect our lives everyday in ways you wouldn’t imagine.

CONNECTING THE DOTS

BURT WOLF: When Columbus first arrived in the Caribbean he entered a world with almost no domesticated animals. No cattle, no horses, no pigs. However, on his second voyage in 1493 he had a full complement of cattle and pigs. The animals did well because the local diseases did not affect them; there was an unlimited amount of feed, and few predators. They reproduced at an extraordinary rate and within 10 years they had taken up residence on most of the Caribbean islands.

Pigs were the first to take on the New World. Sailors would “seed” a remote island by leaving behind a family of pigs. The pigs would reproduce and be ready for dinner when the next group of Europeans stopped in.

On his second voyage Columbus also brought in both cattle and the plow which dramatically altered the landscape and the diet of the Americas. The oxen were strong enough to pull an iron plow across the plains. The plow transformed the grasslands into fields of wheat and corn. The cattle converted unfarmed grasslands into milk and meat. Native Americans had no animals that gave them this kind of protein. By the 1600s one of the least expensive foods in the Americas was meat.

Of all the animals imported into the Americas the horse was the essential element in the Spanish conquest.

DANIEL GADE ON CAMERA: You could go to the coast in your ship, but then you have to find a way to move up into the highlands in both those cases, Mexico and Peru, and so this is where the horse came into play. It provided that mobility. So that was one thing. Another thing was that a mounted horseman, could sweep down on a foot soldier with great efficiency and speed, and discombobulate that foot soldier so much that it left him vulnerable to being killed. So it was a very efficient way to kill the Indians. Thirdly, there was a psychological advantage here of having a horse, because native people of the New World had never seen an animal like that. And so to them, this was some kind of a mythic, supernatural being.

GRAPE EXPECTATIONS

BURT WOLF: By the time Columbus arrived in the Americas, wine had become the beverage of choice for the Spanish, it was what Columbus’ crew drank and he had dozens of casks on board.

Considering its importance the Spanish were surprised to find that the Native Americans, who lived in a land filled with grapes, did not make wine.

New Spain’s first attempts to make wine were in Mexico but they failed miserably. They had much better success in their South American colonies where a major wine business eventually developed. English settlers in the Americas were also interested in producing wine. Their new colonies were overrun with native grapes and it seemed obvious that with a little work good wine would be as near as the next harvest. Wrong! The wine they tried to make at Jamestown Virginia was dismal.

But within 200 years the Spanish missions in Mexico were able to make wine that was pretty good. In the middle of the 1700s, the Franciscans moved north to California.

CHARLES SULLIVAN ON CAMERA: In 1769, they brought wine with them. They needed wine, of course, for the mass. And there was no successful attempt to produce any vineyards in the early days. It was just too hazardous a life. They depended upon imported wine. But gradually, by the end of the '70s, Father Sera was able to get the officials in Mexico to get the southern missions to send cuttings to San Juan Capistrano. And by the early 1780s, you had vineyards all the way up to what is today Sonoma.

THE HAND THAT STIRRED THE POT

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: West Africa and the Atlantic Islands off the coast of Africa were the staging areas for Europe’s voyages of discovery. They used the Canary Islands and Madeira to test the plantation system and the use of slave labor. When Christopher Columbus planted the first sugar cane in the Mediterranean he also planted the idea of an enslaved labor force—a labor force that came almost exclusively from Africa.

BURT WOLF: In the areas where slaves were allowed to grow their own food, they planted okra, bananas, watermelon, yams, rice and peanuts.

The slaves came from many different tribes with many different gastronomic traditions. And when they were brought together on the boats and in the plantations they began to exchange those traditions.

JESSSICA HARRIS ON CAMERA: They didn't come from the same place. They didn't speak the same language. And so, what happens is, as they are juxtaposed within this New World environment, there is this trade-off, and A may come with B, and B may discover C, and so you get the evolution and the creation of what becomes, I contend, one of the world's original fusion foods, which is Creole food.

When you start to talk about the influence of black cooks in this hemisphere, on the food of this hemisphere, you almost don't know where to start….The soupy stews over starches…the gumbos…leafy greens. But all of those things are African. You'll find that the whole technique of frying in deep oil, and deep oil, deep fat frying, one of my preferred culinary methods, is arguably, African.

BURT WOLF: As our nation developed, much of the cooking was done by Africans and the hand that stirs the pot usually has a lot to say about what goes into that pot and how it’s cooked. To a considerable extent American cooking has been shaped by the contributions of African foods and African American cooks.

TAKING THE HIGH GROUNDS

MARK PENDERGRAST ON CAMERA: There was a French lieutenant named Gabriel Mathieu de Clieu who became obsessed with the idea that he wanted to take a coffee tree to the New World. He was stationed on the island of Martinique in the Caribbean. So, he got hold of a tree from the Paris Botanical Gardens, and he took it on a ship. And the way he tells the story, which is probably a little over-dramatic, you know, he had to give it half of his ration of water because there was a drought. There was a big storm, and it almost got swept overboard. There was an evil Dutchman who didn't want him to take it, and he ripped off one of the branches. But eventually, he brought it to Martinique and it flourished, and from that one tree, supposedly, most of the coffee in the Western hemisphere, has descended.

BURT WOLF: The British colonists in North America arrived with a taste for coffee. John Smith, who led the settlers at Jamestown, had traveled in Turkey and he loved coffee. The coffeehouse also crossed the Atlantic with the colonists; in 1689 Boston opened its first coffeehouse.

As The United States industrialized, coffee found a new role. In the previous two centuries, coffee and coffeehouses had brought thinkers, artists, writers, and politicians together for conversations that initiated social change and political change. But coffee soon became the fuel that powered the industrial laborer. For workers who had to be at the factory or office early in the morning, and often for round-the-clock shift work, coffee became a necessity.

Coffee is the world’s leading cash crop, the second most actively-traded commodity in the world, after oil, and the most widely used psychoactive substance on the planet.

SIMPLE PLEASURES
MEDITERRANEAN FOODS IN THE AMERICAS

BURT WOLF: The Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria were filled with biscuits, pork, beef, cod, anchovies, chickpeas, raisins, olive oil and fortified wine—typical provisions for Spanish ships of the period and typical of the diet of the people living on the northern coast of the Mediterranean Sea.

As Spanish and the Portuguese colonists settled down in the Americas the foods they brought with them from the Mediterranean were blended into the foods available in America and a new hybrid cuisine evolved.

ELISABETH ROZIN ON CAMERA: There are several, what I would call, true, long-lasting, forever marriages that occurred after 1492, when the foods of the Old World and the foods of the New World and the culture of both came together. These are, I think, marriages that occur with the aid, for one, of olive oil, and there is that instant union of olive oil and tomatoes which we know of, as course, primarily from the cooking of Southern Italy and the famous red sauces. But those red tomato sauces occur throughout the Mediterranean. The second one is the union of olive oil with the sweet peppers, which, occurs, of course, in the sofrito of Spain and occurs in so many composed and salad dishes and so forth. The third, I think, wonderful marriage, which occurs is that of the citrus fruits, lemon, lime, sour orange, with the chili peppers of Mexico. And there was an instant alliance formed. By the way, when you talk about the marriage of certain ingredients, there is one product that we all know and love. It's become a feature of our festive tables and occurs in every martini. And that is, of course, the little green unripe Spanish olive, stuffed with a little bit of red pimento. Now, how palpable a symbol of the union of two worlds can you get?

HOW SWEET IT IS
THE STORY OF SUGAR

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: Columbus was well aware that sugar cane was a very valuable crop. His mother-in-law owned a sugar plantation on the island of Madeira and Chris picked up a little extra change transporting sugar from there to the Italian port city of Genoa. On his second voyage in 1493 he planted sugarcane on the island that is now known as the Dominican Republic. It was the first sugarcane planted in the Americas.

BURT WOLF: The Caribbean islands were perfectly suited for the production of sugarcane. They have lots of flat land, plenty of water and a climate that is hot enough but not too dry. By 1640 sugarcane was the crop of choice in Haiti, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, and Cuba.

SIDNEY MINTZ ON CAMERA: It is said that there were over a million people in that region when it was first discovered in 1492, but certainly by the end of the 17th Century, that population had diminished to nothing, really to nothing. So it was a pioneer area. The one thing it didn't have was labor. And Europeans understood that if they brought in free labor to work on those plantations, that free labor would simply pick up and walk away. There would be no way to make those men work as long as there was land to be had for the asking. The only answer you have under those circumstances is somehow to tie down your labor force. To pin it down. And slavery was sort of the natural answer. And Africa was the nearest place from which to get large numbers of people. So there's an interesting kind of equilibrium between this sort of production and the enslavement of fellow human beings.

BURT WOLF: Columbus and the European explorers brought sugar, coffee, and the Mediterranean foods of olive oil, wheat, dates, livestock and wine to the Americas. And here’s what they brought back.

SOME LIKE IT HOT
THE STORY OF CHILI PEPPERS

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: When Columbus set sail from Spain one of his objectives was to get King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella into the pepper business. So when he arrived in the Caribbean and the natives gave him a taste of a pungent fruit, he decided to call it pepper. And he had two good reasons. First, it did something to his mouth that felt like pepper, and second, and much more important, he was getting paid to find pepper, and so he found it.

BURT WOLF: For thousands of years, hot peppers have been used in Mexico, Central and South America for their medicinal effects. The Aztecs rubbed hot peppers on sore muscles. The Maya made a drink of hot peppers, which they used to cure stomach pains. They also rubbed hot peppers on their gums to stop toothaches.

IRWIN ZIMENT ON CAMERA: Columbus was a magnificent neurotic-deluded neurotic. And I like to think that probably he also had bronchitis and had a strong personal interest in looking for a better cure for his bronchitis. And ideally finding the right type of peppers would have been an adequate treatment. And I don't say this entirely lightly because there’s good evidence from earliest history that peppers were not just used as food flavors they were used as medicines and one of the major things they were always used for in history as hot remedies they were utilized for treating cold diseases. Namely, the common cold and bronchitis.

BURT WOLF: It appears that one out of every five people on the planet eat hot peppers everyday. Most of the people say they do that because they like the taste but there may be an additional reason that’s even better. Scientists have discovered that people who eat hot peppers are generally healthier than people who don’t. Especially in hot climates. There’s something in hot pepper and also in garlic that helps kill the microorganisms that spoil food. So societies that have developed without refrigeration over the past three or four thousand years have incorporated hot peppers into their diet. And they’re healthier for it.

THE SEED OF LIFE
THE STORY OF CORN

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: On November 4th, 1492, Columbus came ashore on what is now the island of Cuba. The natives greeted him and gave him two gifts. One was tobacco, and one was corn.

BURT WOLF: His diary for the next day contained the following entry:

“There was a great deal of tilled land sown with a sort of bean and a sort of grain they called Mahiz, which tasted good. It was baked or dried and made into flour.”

On one day, the American plants of corn and tobacco were introduced to the rest of the world. The Indians presented their corn to Columbus because it was a valuable food but also because it was the basis of their civilization.

BETTY FUSSELL ON CAMERA: “They used it for every possible food and for every possible sacred ceremonial use because corn is at the heart of all the mythology, all the calendar, all the religions, all the rituals of Meso-America. The original word corn, mahaiz in Arawak, meant seed of life. Because life in the created universe began with corn, with the corn gods, but it’s really with the seed, the womb of life. Mother Earth was also Mother Corn, being fertilized really by the sun, by the heavens, by Father Sun. Out of that, the universe sprouts. But what sprouts? A corn tree, the corn tree becomes the axle of the universe. A corn plant, you know, and all the cobs on that tree are heads of gods. So the corn god is represented in the plant. Man was created from a dough of corn and blood.

TIME TO PLAY KETCHUP
THE STORY OF THE TOMATO

BURT WOLF: Between conquering and trading the Aztecs came in contact with many different cultures and were exposed to dozens of new foods. The Mayans introduced the Aztecs to the tomato, which they immediately accepted because it reminded them of something they were already eating — the husk tomato. They juiced them, added some chili peppers, ground up a little pumpkin seed, and had what we call salsa.

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: The Spanish were pretty good at conquering too and eventually conquered the Aztecs. The first Spaniards to see a tomato were with Cortez when he invaded Mexico in 1519. They called it a tomate.

BURT WOLF: Tomatoes did well throughout southern Europe—Spain, Southern France and Italy slowly incorporated them into their diets.

PAUL ROZIN ON CAMERA: It took a while to be adopted. You know, they're sort of bright and sort of frightening looking. It is hard to believe that Mediterranean cuisine didn't have tomatoes before 1600, but they didn't. It's like the essence of Mediterranean cuisine. They already had a pasta, they already had a well, of course the green pepper or the red pepper that goes with the tomato in the sauce was also coming over from the new world, so the basic sauce that is used in the Mediterranean, except for the olive oil, is actually stuff that is new. And it is in many ways like a meat substitute. It adds both the color and some of the taste and texture of meat to foods. So it is widely popular, particularly in cuisines, like in the Mediterranean which is not, which are not high meat cuisines.

THIS SPUD’S FOR YOU
HOW THE POTATO CHANGED THE WORLD

BURT WOLF: It looks like the potato was first cultivated in the Andean Mountains of South America about 7,000 years ago. The great centers of pre-Inca culture were high up, some as high as 12,500 feet above sea level and each night the temperature would drop below freezing. Edible crops were in short supply. But the potato was one of the few crops that could be grown at a high altitude. The Andean farmers came to rely on the potato. They also found an ingenious way of preserving them.

At first, Spanish settlers looked down on the potato and relied on corn. The potato, however, did catch on with sailors, who recognized that eating potatoes prevented scurvy. The first potatoes to reach Europe traveled on Spanish ships returning from South America.

As potatoes spread through Europe, a feedback process was set in motion: more potatoes produced more food, more food produced more people, more people produced more potatoes. The population of northern Europe grew as fast as the potato plants. In fact, the rate of population growth in northern Europe far outstripped what was taking place in other parts of the world.

All across Europe, the potato became the staple food of the poor and the new working classes. It contributed to a population increase that was big enough to provide Europe not only with extra farm laborers, but with the workforce it needed for its transformation into an industrial society.

The extraordinary healthful and nutritional value of the potato has made it a staple of American and European diets for hundreds of years. In one form or another, potatoes have become part of virtually everyone’s diet.

WHEN MONEY GREW ON TREES
THE STORY OF CHOCOLATE

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: In 1502, Columbus set sail on his fourth and final voyage. As usual he was trying to get to Asia. He believed that the islands of the Caribbean were just off shore from China and Japan. Poor guy—he never had a clue.

BURT WOLF: On this last voyage, his first landfall was in the Bay Islands about 30 miles north of Honduras. As his ship sat at anchor, the crew saw a tremendous dugout canoe.

It was a Maya trading canoe, about 150 feet long and carrying a cargo of cacao beans. Columbus was the first European to come in contact with the source of chocolate.

MICHAEL COE ON CAMERA: When the Spaniards first came to Mexico and they saw people drinking chocolate and were offered it and tried it. They'd have thought it was horrible. In fact, one of our sources who was an Italian traveling with him says it was only basically fit for pigs. It was so bad. It was bitter. They didn't like the color of it. It made your mouth black. Or if they mixed it up with a spice called achiote, which is red, it made your mouth look red and dyed your lips and they thought it was the most disgusting stuff. It wasn't until later that they realized how good it was.

BURT WOLF: So chocolate, tomatoes, potatoes, corn and chili peppers were what Columbus brought back to Europe. And in the end it was the exchange of plants and animals between the two hemispheres that totally altered the future of the world. Not politics, not religion, not gold, or silver--the events that changed our destiny were the changes in What We Eat. I’m Burt Wolf.

March 22, 2014

What We Eat: The Story of Wine in the Americas - #112

March 22, 2014/ Guest User

BURT WOLF: What We Eat, the true story of why we put sugar in our coffee and ketchup on our fries.

Originally, all life that lived on land lived on one giant continent. Then forces inside the earth started breaking that land mass into the continents we have today and pushing them apart.

HERE’S LOOKING AT YOU KID
THE STORY OF WINE IN THE AMERICAS

BURT WOLF: In the year 1001, Leif Ericsson pushed his Viking long boat off the Greenland shore, and sailed west. His landfall was on the northern coast of what we now call Newfoundland. Ericsson and his crew split up to do some exploring and at the end of the day, one of them, Tyrker the German, reported that he had found wild grapes.

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: Considering how far north Ericsson and his boys were, it is highly unlikely that they were looking at grapes. What they probably found were cranberries. You know there’s a funny thing about explorers, including Columbus, they have a tendency to find exactly what it was they were looking for, and so Ericsson named the place Vineland. And figured that within a few years they’d be doing great grapes and making fabulous wine. He wasn’t wrong, he was just off on his estimated time of arrival by about a thousand years.

BURT WOLF: Despite their differences, all of the “classic” wine grape varieties—from cabernet sauvignon to zinfandel—are part of a species that was domesticated about 7,000 years ago. And by the time Columbus arrived in the Americas, wine had become the beverage of choice for the Spanish. It was what Columbus’ crew drank and he had dozens of casks on board.

CHARLES SULLIVAN ON CAMERA: The Spanish were big time wine drinkers. They drank table wines, sweet wines, fortified wines. They drank red table wines and white. They were particularly enamored with wines which were fortified and had a little sweetness to them, like what we would call sherry today. When Columbus arrived in the Americas, there were grapes growing all over, even out in the Caribbean, South America, all the way up to southern Canada. But nothing that you could make very good wine with.

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: Considering the importance of wine to the Spanish they were shocked to discover that the Native Americans, who were living in a world filled with grapes, were not making wine. Conservative priests became concerned if God had not given the native Americans the ability to make wine, perhaps this was a part of the world where Christians were not supposed to live. Settlers less interested in these fine theological points just went ahead and made wine from the grapes and unfortunately the results were dismal.

BURT WOLF: New Spain needed wine. So in 1524, Hernándo Cortés, the commander of New Spain, imported vines from Europe, and ordered the planting of 1,000 grapevines for every 100 native laborers. But the plan didn’t work. The Mexican climate proved to be too harsh and the Spanish settlers never came up with a significant harvest.

The Spanish shelved their plans for the Mexican vineyards and concentrated on South America. A thriving wine industry developed in Peru, Chile, and Argentina. South American vineyards became big business and exported so much wine to Europe that the Spanish vintners back home felt threatened.

DISMAL DREGS

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: America’s first wine makers thought they were going to end up producing something dry and acidic and similar to the wines they knew from Europe. But they were using a grape called labrusca which is also called foxy because it has such a musty scent. It’s really much better for making grape jelly than making grape wine. If you’ve ever tasted the Kosher wine made from the Concord grape you have a pretty good idea of what they ended up with.

CHARLES SULLIVAN ON CAMERA: The early attempts to grow wine in the English colonies were not very successful, particularly as you move north. If you move north of Long Island, and into New England, you can forget it. They simply had no success whatsoever. But south of there, particularly in Virginia and the Carolinas, they tried, and they tried, and they tried. It wasn't very successful. It went on and on for 200 years. And by the time of the American Revolution, you've got to say that it had been a series of very admirable failures.

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: Prospects for American wine were bleak. But that did not deter the wine lovers like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson was a one-man committee promoting wine in America. We’ve become a nation of hard drinkers and our beverage of choice was whiskey. Jefferson saw wine as a more “democratic alternative” and throughout his entire life believed that his home state of Virginia was the perfect spot to grow grapes and make them into wine.

PRIMARY MISSION

BURT WOLF: The story of winemaking on the east coast was the story of people trying to make top quality wine in a difficult environment. The story on the West coast—especially in California—was very different.

In Mexico and the Baja, Spanish missionaries were cultivating European vines—without major problems. In the middle of the 1700s, the Franciscans moved north and found California equally hospitable.

THERE’S GOLD IN THEM THERE GRAPES

BURT WOLF: In 1848, the U.S. took California from Mexico and adventurers poured into the new territory. When gold was discovered, the majority of people arriving were prospectors. A few got rich and moved on, but by the end of the rush most of the prospectors were looking for new ways to earn a living.

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: Agoston Haraszthy, immigrated from Hungary to California. He worked as a Assayer of gold, County Sheriff and a State Representative. He believed that northern California was the ideal place to plant grapes and make great wine. So he imported thousands of vines from Europe. He started his own winery which is still in operation.

BURT WOLF: The California wine industry centered itself around the San Francisco Bay and became the leading wine producing area in the U.S. Much of the work was done by the Chinese laborers who had been building the railroads. California was developing a worldwide reputation for its wines and exports were beginning to grow.

THE FUNGUS AMOUNG US

BURT WOLF: During the 1840s, a North American fungal disease began to infect European vineyards. It reduced the grape yields and almost destroyed the chardonnay and cabaret sauvignon harvests. It took 20 years before French farmers learned to control the fungus and get back on their feet. But it was only a brief remission. During the 1860s, a far more serious problem appeared.

VINCE BONOTTO ON CAMERA: In the 1860s after they had solved the powdery mildew problem another disease occurred but they didn’t know what it was. The vines went into decline and after they investigated for number of years they realized that there was a root louse that had been attacking the roots of the vines.

BURT WOLF: The louse was named “the devastator,” because it fed on the roots of the vines and slowly killed them. It had probably been brought to Europe in shipments of experimental vine cuttings from North America—the French wine industry was on the brink of total destruction.

VINCE BONOTTO ON CAMERA: They traced it back to the fact that it came from The United States, the Eastern part of the country, and they looked around and they tried to understand what was causing it and how to combat it and then they realized that some of the American species of grapes that they had imported from the Eastern United States back to Europe were seemed to be growing rather well and hearty while the European varieties were in decline. They realized that they could put the European varieties on the roots of the American variety and have a resistant root and still have the same wine quality, the same Chardonnay and Cabernet that they had been growing from the European varieties. So that’s when the concept of grafting from the American variety to the European variety became a common practice.

Grafting is the art of taking one part of a vine and combining it with another part of a vine. For us in the wine industry, what we do is we combine the roots of a resistant plant and the top part or the scion as we call it of a European variety and to start this process we plant the rootstock in the ground and grow it for a year so it develops its root system. Then we come back in the fall and we will cut the top of it off and cut a notch in the side of the truck of this young plant and inject a bud that comes off the scion that we wish to use, wrap it up with a rubber band and cover it up and wait then for it to grow in the spring.

BURT WOLF: What you end up with is an American bottom with a European top. In the end, the entire continent and eventually much of the world, grafted their local vines to the aphid-resistant American roots.

THE DRY YEARS

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: During the second half of the 1800s, there was a wide spread anti-alcohol movement in The United States. It was pretty much limited to distilled spirits. Wine was thought of as less as a threat. The prohibition movement of the early 20th Century however, was much less selective, they saw wine as just another form of demon rum and when the 18th Amendment to the Constitution was finally ratified, and alcoholic beverages were outlawed, wine makers were not spared.

BURT WOLF: Prohibition began in 1920 and ended the careers of many winemakers, a few, however, were able to ride out the dry years as producers of sacramental or medicinal wines.

One of the wineries that shifted into the making of sacramental wine was the Beaulieu Vineyards of Rutherford in Napa Valley. During the early 1900s, Georges de Latour, a chemist from a French grape growing family, founded his own winery in Napa Valley. During Prohibition, Beaulieu prospered while other wineries were forced to close. That was because Georges was under contract to supply alter wine to the Catholic Church.

Accordingly, he shipped hundreds of boxcars of his finest wine to churches in the Midwest and along the East Coast. As those boxcars passed through Chicago many of them mysteriously disappeared. Somehow, the fine vintages that were being presented at the mass, were also showing up in the speakeasies.

When Prohibition ended in 1933, Beaulieu was producing quality wines, but Georges was always interested in improving his wines and so in 1938 hired Andre Tchelistcheff, a Russian born, French trained wine expert, who had studied in The Pasteur Institute in Paris. Tchelistcheff revolutionized wine making throughout California.

JOEL AIKEN ON CAMERA: Andre Tchelistcheff was the, a lot of us consider him the father of California winemaking. When he came to California and BV he was really the first trained winemaker, trained in the technical aspects. Everyone else here knew the practical aspects of crushing grapes and letting it ferment but he really understood technology and really helped turn the industry around when there were a lot of spoiled wines at the time, a lot of fortified wines were made at the time because it was easy to keep those from spoiling.

One thing that was great that he did at BV was he always pushed to have open top fermentation for our reds, which is a little bit unusual. Today everyone tends to have closed fermenters that once you finish fermenting red wine in them it can be a storage tank.

Basically when you ferment a red wine, all of the skins rise to the top and that’s what we call a cap and that’s where all your color and your flavor is. So that cap needs to be mixed to extract all of the color and flavor that we get in a red wine. It needs to be gentle so you don’t get too much harsh bitter tannin so these open top tanks where you can see the entire surface and as we punch the cap down or pump juice over the top we get every bit of that surface very gently and completely. If you have a tank that has a tiny opening in an enclosed top it’s really hard to see what you’re doing and get that full extraction. So it’s been a great thing that Andre really kind of brought to Napa Valley and some people finally now are realizing, “Wow, this is something that can help.”

GRAPE EXPECTATIONS

BURT WOLF: Charles Sullivan is the author of A Companion to California Wine which is the definitive work on the history of wine in California.

CHARLES SULLIVAN ON CAMERA: After World War II, if you look at the California wine industry, you see a fairly large institution that's producing huge amounts of dessert wine. Over three quarters of all the wine produced in California in those years was sherry, port, muscatel and such. But something happened. It’s a very complex thing. Something happened to American taste, at least the taste of Americans who were thinking about living a better life. And gradually you see the consumption of table wine with meals growing, and growing, and growing. From the 1940s up until the 1960s. This process took about 20 years. By 1966, 67, Americans had turned the corner, you might say, and were drinking slightly more table wine than they were dessert wine.

BURT WOLF: During the late 1960s and early 1970s hundreds of small boutique wineries were founded in California’s Napa Valley, and neighboring Sonoma County. In the process

California became synonymous with premium American winemaking.

Young winemakers—many of whom were educated at Davis and had started their careers at the larger California wineries became interested in growing premium grapes. They were joined by an increasing number of wealthy hobbyists, who had turned to serious winemaking as second careers.

These winemakers explored various European styles, and defined Napa Valley as the home of artisanal winemaking in The United States. By the mid-1970s, many of them believed their wines could compete with the best European wines. And soon they were able to prove it.

THE JUDGMENT OF PARIS

BURT WOLF: The new generation of Napa Valley winemakers had been a wealthy one to begin with, but during the 1970s and 1980s money poured into the area. Celebrities bought vineyards and wineries, and larger concerns hired star architects to design major new winery buildings. A perfect example is Sterling.

WAYNE RYAN AND BURT WOLF ON CAMERA:

WAYNE RYAN: Well Sterling was founded in 1969 by Peter Newton who was a very wealthy industrialist. He moved to California, he wasn’t in the wine business previous to this but he fell in love with the place, bought some vineyards and it was he built this fantastic structure here on top of the hill.

BURT WOLF: Unusual architecture

WAYNE RYAN: It is and I think it was considered more unusual back then. If you think about the fact that most traditional architecture for wineries, stone buildings, chateaux, and here’s this austere, white structure, Newton lived in Mykonos on the Greek Islands for a number of years, loved the whole architecture, the ambience and then when he moved to Napa Valley, our hot, dry Mediterranean climate reminded him so much of that he asked the architect to duplicate that style architecture and this was the result.

BURT WOLF: There was a tasting in Paris in ’76. Tell me about that.

WAYNE RYAN: The Spurrier Tasting. The Judgment of Paris is what you’re talking about and that certainly did put Napa on the world wine map than it was. We were making great wines here before that but it focused a lot of attention, so Spurrier, that was the gentlemen’s name, he had a blind tasting in Paris, all top ranked French wine judges and they’re going to be judging California wines. So these guys are looking down their nose at the California wines but what happens Spurrier also puts top ranked Bordeaux in the tasting as well. They don’t know they’re tasting California versus French. The end result of the tasting -- the top white wine was a Chateau Montelena Chardonnay and the top red was a Stag’s Leap Cabernet Sauvignon. So the French of course called foul -- saying we can’t do this. They hold the tasting again the next day, the same results come out, and when it hit the press, this was big news and great news for Napa Valley.

WAYNE RYAN: I’ve traveled all around the world and seen a lot of different grape growing regions but there’s no place that has the microclimates that we have here so there’s many different climates available from the cool area in Carneros all the way up here in Calistoga where it’s hot. And you just adjust what grape varietal you’re growing to that climate. It’s like nature’s gift.

BURT WOLF: Napa is one of the great wine making centers in America and the center for Napa’s winemakers is probably Meadowood. In 1979 Bill Harlan and a couple of his friends purchased a small country club and turned it into a place where local winemakers could get together.

BILL HARLAN ON CAMERA: I was looking for some vineyard land. A place to build a winery and through the 70’s I was looking never quite found what I was looking for but a friend brought me in here and he said, “Let’s just go sit on a deck and look around.” So, saw the place, drove in. It was absolutely beautiful and that was about 5 o’clock on a Sunday afternoon. By 5 am on Tuesday I had made a deal to acquire the land.

Our goal was to create a little country resort for people to come to the Napa Valley where they can really enjoy what goes on here in the Napa Valley, meet the people who live here and enjoy the weather and the wine and the food that goes along with it.

BURT WOLF: It was also important to Bill to make Meadowood a common ground to the Napa Valley wine growing community. Every year Meadowood hosts the Napa Valley Wine Auction.

BILL HARLAN ON CAMERA: There are between 1500 and 1700 people who come to the wine auction and they come to enjoy the wine country, to have some parties and to buy wine. And it’s really to raise money for the hospitals. It’s been a fantastic charity event.

BURT WOLF: Meadowood has also built a wine education program for its guests.

BILL HARLAN ON CAMERA: I’d been making wine for a while and all of a sudden I met this fellow--kind of curly haired guy--his head pops up behind some barrels. We started talking and his name is John Thoreen. He had been a humanities professor but he was really into wine, wine making and drinking the wine and enjoying the wine. And I said, “Well, John, you know we have this little resort, how would you like to come in and teach our guests about wine?” So it wasn’t long before John joined us. We call him the wine tutor and he just puts on wine classes for the people and they love it.

BURT WOLF: Bill Harlan’s a serious sportsman, but he limits his sports to those which don’t interfere with his wine drinking…croquet being a perfect example.

BILL HARLAN ON CAMERA: One of the things we learned is that croquet is a very highly competitive sport and it does not interfere with enjoying nice wine. Whether its sparkling wine or whatever you get to dress up in whites, you can play with friends. They can be young or old, male or female. It’s a level playing field out here and sipping a glass of champagne. It’s a wonderful sport.

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: saWe are not yet a nation of wine drinkers but we’re getting pretty close—we make wine in every state but Alaska and Wyoming. Ericsson would be pleased. Thomas Jefferson would be proud. And Columbus, who brought the first wine grapes to America, would undoubtedly have poured himself a glass. For What We Eat, I’m Burt Wolf.

March 22, 2014

What We Eat: Simple Pleasures - #111

March 22, 2014/ Guest User

BURT WOLF: What We Eat, the true story of why we put sugar in our coffee and ketchup on our fries.

Originally, all life that lived on land lived on one giant continent. Then forces inside the earth started breaking that land mass into the continents we have today and pushing them apart.

SIMPLE PLEASURES
MEDITERRANEAN FOODS IN THE AMERICAS

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: As Columbus was outfitting his ships, he kept in mind the possibility that he might end up in a strange land without any familiar foods. He had visited the Portuguese colonies on the West coast of Africa and understood that having foods that he knew might be the key to his survival.

BURT WOLF: The Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria were filled with water, biscuits, salt pork, dried beef, cod, sardines, anchovies, chickpeas, raisins, olive oil, vinegar and fortified wine—typical provisions for Spanish ships of the period and typical of the diet of the people living on the northern coast of the Mediterranean Sea.

The Mediterranean is the place where Europe, Africa and Asia meet—the place where people from different cultures come face to face and exchange ideas, goods and food. It was the center of the classic world—ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt, Carthage—they were all Mediterranean cultures. One result of this mixing of civilizations is that the food of the Mediterranean has become a blend of very different ingredients and cooking styles.

The Mediterranean is so large and encompasses so many cultures that it is difficult to talk about a Mediterranean cuisine. However, Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, and Greece share a history in which three foods have been constant—wheat bread, olive oil and wine. All were central to the diets of the ancient world and not one of them existed in the Americas prior to the arrival of Columbus.

PRESSING ISSUES

MARION NESTLE ON CAMERA: The traditional Mediterranean diet is what's been consumed in the Mediterranean for as long as we can tell. Two thousand years in the written record. Four thousand years in the archaeological record, based on bread, wine, and, of course, the olives, which grow mainly in the Mediterranean region, or regions like it.

The wonderful thing about the Mediterranean diet is that it was balanced in calories. It was extremely based on vegetables. A lifestyle that had a lot of physical activity in it, and then this olive oil, which, of course, is, as fats go, about as healthy as you can get.

BURT WOLF: The technological skills necessary to cultivate an olive tree, make the olive edible, and produce olive oil, are so complex that the ancient Greeks used “olive knowledge” as a criteria for judging a society’s development. If you could cultivate olives and use them to produce olive oil you were civilized, and your society was in a state of relative harmony. The activity and knowledge necessary to make olive oil were so demanding that in general they could only be undertaken during peaceful times.

Olive trees can live for hundreds of years, and their roots are so deep that even if the tree is cut down, its roots will survive and send out new growth. When people noticed this, the olive tree became a symbol of regeneration, immortality and dependability.

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: For thousands of years, olive harvesting and olive oil production was done by sailors during the winter, when rough weather forced them to stay at home. The picture of a sailor working at home reinforced the olive’s image as a symbol of security, safety and a peaceful society that was running well. When you take that and you couple it up with a bird coming back to Noah’s ark with an olive branch in its beak you’ve joined two symbols: one of safety and security with the other which is eventual regeneration. Pretty powerful stuff.

THE UPPER CRUST

BURT WOLF: The second food in the Mediterranean trilogy is wheat bread. Wheat, oats, barley and rye contain a complex protein known as gluten. When gluten combines with water it produces a sticky substance that makes it easier to knead bread dough and traps the gases that are released into the dough by the yeast. Wheat is the grain with the most gluten and therefore the choice of bakers making raised bread. It was bread made wheat a big deal.

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: For thousands of years, wheat bread has had an honored place in European cuisine. The ancient Greeks used the word “companion” to describe someone they shared their bread with. In medieval and Renaissance Europe what bread you ate told people where you were in society. The rich had a white crusty bread, the kind of stuff you find in Italy and France today. And the poor made due with bread that was produced from millet or oats.

BURT WOLF: Wheat bread was the only form of bread approved of by the Catholic Church for use in the Eucharist.

RUBEN MENDOZA ON CAMERA: Well the Eucharist, of course, is the Body and Blood of Christ. And, of course, in the sacrament that's done every week at Mass, essentially, the pastor tells us, you know, to accept the Body and Blood of Christ. And this was an invitation of Christ Himself. And, of course, Christ used bread to symbolize the Body and wine to symbolize the Blood, His Blood and His Body. And so, in that sense, it is literally a Holy Sacrament. And it was very central to the Catholic faith, to the Christian Tradition, and, of course, to the missions of California.

BURT WOLF: When the first colonists in the Americas were unable to successfully grow wheat in the Caribbean or the coastal parts of Mexico, more conservative members of the church became concerned that the New World was the Devil’s world. God would certainly not have created a place in which the essential elements of the Eucharist were not being produced.

WHAT WAS COOKING
WHEN COLUMBUS SET SAIL

BURT WOLF: When Columbus set sail on his first voyage Europeans along the Mediterranean were eating a diet that was primarily based on a small number of foods that had been cultivated by the ancient Greeks and Romans. During their conquest of Spain, the Arabs introduced a wide range of spices, taught the Spanish how to cultivate rice and shared the secret of how to distill alcohol.

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: The ancient Egyptians were among the first societies to distill alcohol, but they weren’t using it for Happy Hour. They were using it as a solvent to hold charcoal dust which produced the black eye makeup worn by Arab women of the time. The makeup was called al-cohol.

BURT WOLF: In essence, Elizabeth Taylor’s look in Cleopatra was the result of wearing vodka, not drinking it, and it was authentic.

The Moors took over Spain in the 700s, and introduced the distillation process to the local winemakers, who used it to fortify their wines and in the process came up with sherry. Even today, Spain produces and consumes more sherry than any other country. During Seville’s annual fair week more sherry is consumed by the residents of that single city than all the sherry poured in North America during an entire year.

FIRST EAT YOUR VEGETABLES

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: Upper class Europeans living in the Mediterranean valued cattle and game as much as their northern European counterparts, but Mediterranean cooking has always had a greater interest in vegetables than cooking in the north. It’s probably because the Mediterranean growing season is longer and that gives them a chance to produce some extraordinarily good stuff.

BURT WOLF: But it was also the result of the intense seagoing traffic within the area. Southern European ports had centuries of contact with the Ottoman Empire—Arab, Persian and Turkish cooking often favor vegetables over meat. Much of what we consider as Southern European cooking has its origins in the Arab world.

ELISABETH ROZIN ON CAMERA: European cooking is just tremendous not just in Spain but all along the rim of the Northern Mediterranean. Sicily, for example, is a country that has been heavily, heavily influenced by Arabic foods as well as, of course, the foods of Spain where Arabs came in and lived and influenced the culture in very significant ways. I think the most important feature that Arabs contributed to Mediterranean cooking is the rice and the composed rice dishes, those elaborate colored, flavored, assemblages of ingredients where the rice is presented with all kinds of little bits of meat and seafood and vegetables and wonderful spices like saffron.

BURT WOLF: Because of the easy access to the sea, Mediterranean communities had a greater appreciation of fish and seafood which was particularly important in Southern Europe.

The dominant religion in Mediterranean Europe was Catholicism. And at the time, the Catholic calendar had 166 fast days when meat was not to be eaten. If you could afford them, fish and seafood became the protein source during fast periods. The poorer groups in society turned to beans, peas, and chickpeas for their fast days.

THE IMMIGRANT TREE

BURT WOLF: As Spanish and Portuguese colonists settled down in the Americas the foods they brought with them from the Mediterranean were blended into the foods available in America and a new hybrid cuisine developed. The cooks of Mexico began making tortillas with wheat as well as corn. Olive oil, cheese, garlic and onions from the Mediterranean took up residence next to American foods like corn, chili peppers, tomatoes and chocolate. Today’s Mexican cooking owes as much to the Mediterranean diet of 500 years ago as it does to the kitchens of the Maya and the Aztecs.

North America’s interest in the olive goes back for hundreds of years. Franciscan friars had been cultivating small olive groves in Mexico and when they moved north into California they brought their olive growing technology with them. Their first successful harvest of “mission olives” in North America was in San Diego during the mid-1700s. From then on the Spanish missionaries along the coast of California were in the olive business.

RUBEN MENDOZA ON CAMERA: Olive oil was important for the missionaries because it served a variety of purposes. For one, it, of course, was part of the holy oil that was used to bless newborns. In addition, it was also used as a lubricant. It was used for lighting torches and candles, for maintaining lighting, heating and so forth. And it was, of course, used for food, which was probably one of the more important functions.

THE DATING GAME

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: There are ancient sculptures at least seven-thousand years old that show Mediterranean farmers cultivating dates. Some anthropologists believe that dates were the first fruit that we cultivated. The Arabs taught the Spanish about dates and Spanish missionaries brought them to the Americas. Eventually the missionaries brought them to California and planted them there.

BURT WOLF: Date palms come in male and female forms, which is great for their social life but doesn’t really work that well for farmers; because it means that half of their land would be given over the male trees that don’t produce any fruit. So date growers do their pollinating by hand and have done so for thousands of years. Because of their sweetness—a dried date can have 70 percent of its weight in sugar—dates have often been thought of as nature’s candy. Today, California is a major producer of dates.

Franciscans monks also experimented with citrus orchards, planting groves of oranges, limes and lemons. During the late 1840s, Anglo settlers rediscovered the mission orchards and by the end of the 1800s, southern California was a center for citrus production, exporting oranges to the rest of The United States.

HOW THE ITALIANS SAVED COOKING IN AMERICA

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: Even though West coast farmers were turning California into a second Mediterranean, most of the cooking in The United States was still under the influence of the British—very little seasoning, very few fruits or vegetables, lots of meat and potatoes. Any new foods were usually the result of fads, or what was going on in the health-food industry, or classes that were being taught in home economics. The sad truth was that most of the food in The United States was still excruciatingly boring.

BURT WOLF: The event that began to alter gastronomy in The United States was the arrival of millions of European immigrants—particularly those from Italy. At first nutritionists from federal, state and city governments tried to convince the Italians that their traditional diet was unhealthy. Cooking classes were set up to teach the immigrants how to prepare foods in the bland, uninteresting style that had become the dominant form in American kitchens.

MARION NESTLE ON CAMERA: When they Italians came, the Americans thought they were eating peasant food, not very healthful. They were eating all this funny bread, and they were eating all this… these funny tomatoes, and they immediately started talking to them about eating other kinds of foods, converting from olive oil to butter, for example, converting from pasta to steak. So, it's one of the great ironies of American nutrition tradition that what we now think of as one of the most healthful diets in the world was considered not to be very healthful at the time. Some of the Italians immediately converted to the American way and assimilated. But a lot of them started growing tomatoes and basil in their backyards or on their windowsills. The nutritionists complained at the time that they just couldn't get the Italians to give up their pasta.

BURT WOLF: Fortunately, the Italians held on to their diet and in doing so saved eating in The United States. They added a little more meat to their meals and even invented spaghetti and meatballs but for the most part they ate what they had been accustomed to eating back in Italy.

HASIA DINER ON CAMERA: The Italian-American food connection is much more complicated than just Italian immigrants coming to The United States, reproducing some of their new of their traditional food ways, or the food ways of the rich people they knew back home, and elaborating them with American ingredients, particularly meat, but as well as sugar and all sorts of other new ingredients. But the food exchange was actually much more complicated, because about one-third of all Italian immigrants who came to The United States actually went back and repatriated to, home towns or to other places in Italy. And they brought with them American ideas about eating. So that dishes like spaghetti and meatballs or pizza were in fact as much gifts from the Italian-American food culture back to Italy, as they were Italian dishes. Pizza in Naples, before the giant migration to The United States, was a disk of bread, a flat bread with a bit of olive oil and some herbs on it. But returned Americans, known as Americani in Italy, went back to places like Naples and they brought American style pizza. It needed tomato sauce. It needed cheese. It needed meat on it.

BURT WOLF: Pizza in one form or another has been part of Mediterranean cooking for thousands of years and could have come to America with a number of immigrant groups. But it didn’t. It came with the Italians. In 1905, Gennaro Lombardi from Naples opened the first pizzeria in New York City.

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: The ancient Romans had a type of pizza and they even served it from storefront shops. If Julius Cesar showed up in New York City today he would understand exactly what was going on and he’d probably go for the anchovies and extra cheese. At the beginning of the 20th century more and more Americanized Italian food was being made available to the general public and they loved it.

FERMENTING CHANGE

BURT WOLF: One of the more bazaar undertakings by our federal government was the introduction of the 18th Amendment to the Constitution, which tried to put an end to the use of alcoholic beverages in The United States. For 10 years starting in 1920, our federal state and local governments wasted millions of dollars and gave organized crime its first big chance to get organized.

However, it did have a few side benefits. A number of winemakers in California went into the cheese making business under the theory that if you could ferment grape juice you could just as easily ferment milk and today California is a major center for the production of top quality cheeses. And some are being made by the same families that made wine before prohibition.

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: The other positive result of prohibition was that it introduced many middle class Americans to Italian food. The story went something like this. In those days many police officers lived in the neighborhood they worked. And it was highly unlikely that a police officer, no matter how devoted he was to enforcing the law, was going to tell his uncle Tony that he couldn’t make a little home made wine or home made grappa to serve in his rooming house dining room.

BURT WOLF: Homemade wine and grappa were often available in small neighborhood Italian restaurants. Non-Italians started going to these restaurants because they knew they could get a few glasses of wine with dinner and a glass of grappa afterwards. And they ended up loving the food, too.

ELISABETH ROZIN ON CAMERA: The Italian influence on wine drinking in America I think is the best one. I like it because it is not so much a, quote, gourmet, or haute cuisine kind of tradition but one which like the Italians themselves says, "Let us enjoy ourselves. Let us be happy. Food and drink are to be enjoyed with family, with friends, in abundance." And this, I think, is what Italians brought to the wine drinking scene. After all, most of the Italian wines that were originally made by immigrants were made in their basements or their back yards or their garages and were probably not the highest quality. But they were meant to be enjoyed, to bring an added dimension to the joys of the table, which, I think, the Italians have always celebrated with abundance.

BURT WOLF: When prohibition ended many of the cooks in the small Italian neighborhood restaurants and rooming house kitchens opened more elaborate restaurants in non-Italian neighborhoods in order to cater to their old customers. Italian restaurants soon became the most popular restaurants in America. Even today, if you ask people what kind of restaurant they would like to go out to, they will usually answer Italian.

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: At the end of the Second World War tens of thousands of American soldiers who had spent time in Italy and had learned to love Italian food returned to The United States. By this time there were also large Italian communities in the northeast and in San Francisco. Good Italian cooking was easily available and throughout the 1950’s Italian food became more and more popular.

HASIA DINER ON CAMERA: One of the really remarkable phenomenon of history of modern cuisine is the way in which Italian food from the end of the 19th Century onward first became universalized, so that one can find something called Italian food on, I'd say, probably every continent, with the exception, I guess, of, you know, Antarctica and, who knows, it's probably available there also, but that is the Italian migration to South America, to Australia, to Britain, universalized this food and or these foods that came to be understood as Italian and developed a kind of world recognition as food of quality, Italians in a way capitalized upon this. They understood that this cuisine was something that set them apart from other people but in a positive way. So, most of the ways in which immigrants tend to feel stigmatized by food by social or cultural practices, and it makes them seem different and alien and not accepted acceptable to their host society, Italian food was sort of the opposite. Italians took pride in the fact that they had food that nobody else had. And they took pride in the fact that, as they understood it, they had food that was better than other people had.

BURT WOLF: During the 1970s, there was a dramatic increase in the number of Americans traveling to Italy—Rome had become the most popular destination for American tourists. In Italy, they were learning about dishes with complex flavors, real pasta, good wine, good bread, and the use of olive oil instead of butter.

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: So it was Christopher Columbus who introduced Mediterranean foods to the Americas. Without him this entire hemisphere might be forced to live without pizza, or pasta, or those wonderful little olives that go into the Martinis. Today some of the most popular foods in America come from the Mediterranean. For What We Eat, I’m Burt Wolf.

March 22, 2014

What We Eat: Africa Foods in America - #110

March 22, 2014/ Guest User

BURT WOLF: What We Eat, the true story of why we put sugar in our coffee and ketchup on our fries.

Originally, all life that lived on land lived on one giant continent. Then forces inside the earth started breaking that land mass into the continents we have today and pushing them apart.

THE HAND THAT STIRRED THE POT
AFRICAN FOODS IN AMERICA

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: West Africa and the Atlantic Islands off the coast of Africa were the staging areas for Europe’s voyages of discovery. They used the Canary Islands and Madeira, to test the plantation system and the use of slave labor. When Christopher Columbus planted the first sugar cane in the Mediterranean he also planted the idea of an enslaved labor force—a labor force that came almost exclusively from Africa.

JESSICA HARRIS ON CAMERA: I believe, that a lot of what happened happened because one of the things that we don't realize is that the slave traders really did understand, however peculiar that may sound, African cultures and, certainly, the cultures of West Africa, in ways that we do not today. I mean, and if you read the logs, you realize that they knew that people from this region ate yams and they would not eat corn mush or rice or other things, even on the voyage. And other people ate rice. And they knew what those civilizations and cultures were. So, as they came, and as the people were brought, things to feed the people were also brought.

BURT WOLF: In the areas where slaves were allowed to grow their own food there was the question of what they wanted to plant. And what they wanted to plant was okra, bananas, watermelon, yams, rice and peanuts.

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: The adaptation of African foods to the Americas took place in two different stages. The first was the result of the fact that the slaves came from many different tribes with many different gastronomic traditions. And when they were brought together on the boats and in the plantations they began to exchange those traditions.

JESSSICA HARRIS ON CAMERA: They didn't come from the same place. They didn't speak the same language. And so, what happens is, as they are juxtaposed within this New World environment, there is this trade-off and A may come with B, and B may discover C, and, so you get the evolution and the creation of what becomes, I contend, one of the world's original fusion foods, which is Creole food.

BURT WOLF: The next stage in the adaptation of African foods to the Americas involved the process of substituting readily available American ingredients for the foods of Africa that were no longer at hand. In the process, Africans played a major role in the creation of American cuisine, particularly in the Caribbean and the southern United States.

What We Eat: The Story of Coffee - #109

March 22, 2014/ Guest User

BURT WOLF: What We Eat, the true story of why we put sugar in our coffee and ketchup on our fries.

Originally, all life that lived on land lived on one giant continent. Then forces inside the earth started breaking that land mass into the continents we have today and pushing them apart.

TAKING THE HIGH GROUNDS
THE STORY OF COFFEE

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: The most famous story about the discovery of coffee tells of an Ethiopian goat herder who noticed that when his goats ate the berries of a specific bush, they became highly energized. He tasted those berries and found that they excited him, too. Then a local monk stopped in and joined the experiment – had the same effect on him. The berries became a regular part of the diet at the monastery and were considered a gift from God because they helped keep the brothers awake during late night prayers.

BURT WOLF: The word coffee comes from an Arabic word for wine and Islamic law forbids the consumption of wine. So in many ways the Islamic world has chosen coffee to take its place. The first serious cultivation of coffee as a cash crop took place in Yemen during the 1400s. Religious pilgrims visiting Mecca spread the news about coffee throughout the Arab world, and coffee houses soon became part of every Islamic community.

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: At first, the acceptance of coffee was questioned by conservative scholars; they felt it was like wine and should be outlawed. But a much larger group of scholars liked it. They felt its effect was the opposite of wine. It opened your mind, it loosened your tongue, it kept you awake during long hours of prayer. By the early 1500s, there were shops that sold coffee and made it for you to drink, all over Arabia.

BURT WOLF: A Dutch traveler described Middle Eastern coffeehouses as “large halls, with floors covered with straw mats. At night the rooms were lit with lamps. The customers are served with smoking pipes and cups of coffee. Scholars sit in these establishments and tell tales, deliver speeches on various subjects and receive small contributions from the audience for their efforts.” A French traveler pointed out that “the guests mingle without distinction of rank or creed” — everyone talking to everyone else. The caffeine in coffee is a stimulant, and in these ancient Arab coffeehouses it stimulated original thought, a sense of freedom, and a desire to discuss politics and social change. But by the early 1500s things were getting out of hand.

MARK PENDERGRAST ON CAMERA: The coffee houses were sort of centers of prostitution and gaming and writing fantastically funny, satirical verses about the Governor of Mecca, whose name was Cayar Beg. And he heard some of these things. And he didn't like it. So, he decided he was gonna close the coffee houses. There's too much stuff goin' on there. Seditious literature, et cetera. And so, he got his advisors to say that coffee was like wine, which is illegal for Muslims, and, so, he banned it. It didn't last very long. The guy in Cairo, who was above him, said, "Forget that. I like coffee." And so ... but it was the first time that they had closed the ... a coffee house. But it wasn't the last time, by any means. It kept happening over periods of time, because people tend to become irreverent, when they drink coffee.

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: The Ottoman Turks controlled the trade between Europe and the Arab world and they were very careful to protect their coffee monopoly. It was against the law to ship a fertile seed to their customers in Europe or Asia. During the 1600s, however, a Muslim pilgrim from India was able to get his hands on a couple of seeds, tape them to his chest, and return home without them being discovered. He started a coffee farm. He didn’t have much commercial success, but he did prove that it was possible to grow coffee beans outside of the Middle East.

HOUSES OF EXCITATION

EDWARD BRAMAH ON CAMERA: Coffee houses in London is a very exciting story, because... a traveler, a business traveler, came back with his servant, and brought coffee back, and was making coffee in his home. And all his friends came round to taste the new drink. But he said, oh dear, I can't have this anymore, we'll ... and he asked his servant to open ... a chap called Pasqua Rosee, to open up a little bar, which he did, off Corn Hill, in Saint Michael's Alley. And it was called Pasqua Rosee’s coffee house. That was 1652. More coffee houses were opened, and between Corn Hill and Lombard Street, in that area, between 1700, or by 1700, there were over 20 coffee houses, which were, of course, the kingpin of the social and the commercial life of the city of London.

They were the intellectual aspect, of course, of coffee houses were ... that they were called the penny university. You paid your penny, and you could listen to the main orators of the day, holding forth on their pet subject. But, you know, there was no television in those days. There were no cinemas, there was no where to go, except your coffee house. They met a demand of the time. And the traders, the stock brokers, were in one coffee house, the medical men in another, the estate agents in others, the shipping people in the Baltic, and so on. And so you had coffee houses to cater for particular trades, and of course they were absolutely essential. And, you wanted also to know what on earth was happening in the capital. You know, if you'd recently chopped the king's head off, you wanted to know whose head it was next.

BURT WOLF: Up until the 1600s, most of what we think of as big business was done by governments—most small businesses were run out of people’s homes. The coffeehouses provided homes away from home for a new breed of capitalists, who were busy building private industry. In England, the coffeehouse became known as the place where businessmen did business. And slowly, coffee houses began to percolate in Europe.

MARK PENDERGRAST ON CAMERA: Oh, there's a great story about coffee coming to Vienna also. That was in 1683. The Turks were besieging Vienna. They needed to have somebody sneak through the lines, the enemy lines, to get reinforcements, and there was a guy named Franz George Kolschitsky who had actually lived in Arab countries, and, so, he dressed himself up to look like an Arab, and he snuck through the lines, and he was the great savior, and the Polish troops came and drove off the Turks and drove them off very quickly, so they left everything, and among the things they left were many bags of unroasted coffee beans. Nobody knew what these things were. They thought they were camel fodder, or something. So, they were burning them, and Kolschitsky smells it and says, "Ah! it's coffee. Stop. What are you doing? Don't burn that. If you don't want 'em, I'll take 'em." And he started the first coffee house in Vienna, and since then the Viennese, as you know, have really taken to coffee.

Coffee houses have always been a place where people can come to talk, to gather, to plan. Because coffee is a social beverage that sort of makes people have bright ideas, the American Revolution was planned in a coffee house. The French Revolution was planned in coffee houses. They've always been breeding grounds for trouble of one sort or another. During the Vietnam War, there were GI coffee houses that were set up outside Army bases where people were protesting the war. So, it has continued to this day.

SEEDS OF SEDUCTION

BURT WOLF: Eager to capitalize on the demand for coffee, European entrepreneurs were always on the lookout for new sources of the bean. The Dutch, like the Turks before them, did their best to prevent other interests from getting their hands on live coffee plants.

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: The story of how coffee got to Brazil is equally stimulating. The Brazilians wanted to plant coffee, but they were having a hard time getting their hands on a live coffee plant – that was something that nobody wanted to share. Then in 1727, there was a land dispute between French Guiana and Dutch Guiana and a Brazilian official was sent in to broker the problem, which he did, and at the same time conducted an extraordinary secret love affair with the French governor’s wife. As he headed home to Brazil she gave him a gift of a huge bouquet of flowers—in the center of which was hidden a live coffee plant. When he got home to Brazil, he planted the plant and that was the beginning of the Brazilian coffee industry.

BURT WOLF: The British colonists in North America arrived with a taste for coffee. John Smith, who led the settlers at Jamestown, had traveled in Turkey and loved coffee. Coffeehouses also crossed the Atlantic with the colonists; in 1689 Boston opened its first coffeehouse.

COFFEE IN THE COLONIES

MARK PENDERGRAST ON CAMERA: Ironically, the British who had become fanatical coffee drinkers during the late 17th Century eventually switched to tea by the late 18th century. And ... a lot of that is because of economic factors. They wanted to ... they had ... were doing quite well with the British East India Company. So, the British were getting a lot of their money by taxing the goods that they were selling to the American colonies. The colonies objected. The British withdrew most of their taxes. But they left the tax on tea, and, of course, the Americans were ... they were British. They loved tea. They weren't into coffee particularly. But they were very upset about this tax, and in 1773, there was the very famous Boston Tea Party, where they threw all the tea overboard. Now, from that moment on, it became very unpatriotic to drink tea and very patriotic to drink coffee. And that was really the origin of the American obsession with coffee.

BURT WOLF: When the United States of America went to war with England for a second time in 1812, the supply of English tea was cut off again. Americans went back to drinking coffee, but this time the coffee came up from Latin America rather than Asia or Africa. Its source was nearby, it was inexpensive and the quality was top notch.

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: The choice was very simple: bad, very expensive tea or good, very inexpensive coffee. In the end, politics plays a very small role in what people eat or drink. Price is the determining factor.

BURT WOLF: Turning to Latin America and the Caribbean for its coffee, the United States became the world’s largest consumer of coffee, and South and Central America its biggest suppliers. Coffee became a major crop in the Western Hemisphere.

MARK PENDERGRAST ON CAMERA: During the Civil War, the South couldn't get any coffee at all. There was a blockade, and, so, they went nuts. They had to make fake coffee out of everything conceivable from acorns to figs to little roadside weeds, and, so, the effect, after the War, was that everyone in the South wanted coffee more than you could possibly imagine. I mean there's a story how an Atlanta jeweler got hold of a real coffee bean and set it, because it ... during the Civil War ... because it was so valuable. Meanwhile, the Union troops were getting as much coffee as they wanted. They got 36 pounds per soldier per year, and it was a very valuable commodity. They would have coffee. Every time they stopped, they would start fires, and they would grind their little coffee beans and divide them all up within their company. There are innumerable stories about what coffee meant to the Union soldiers, and, so, again, it really implanted this idea that Americans should drink lots of coffee. It should be strong, black, boiled, ruined. They made terrible coffee.

TAKE A BREAK

BURT WOLF: As the United States industrialized, coffee found a new role. In the previous two centuries, coffee and coffeehouses had brought thinkers, artists, writers, and politicians together for conversations that initiated social and political change. But coffee soon became the fuel that powered the industrial laborer. For workers who had to be at the factory or office early in the morning, and often for round-the-clock shift work, coffee became a necessity.

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: On March 17th, 1930, at three-thirty in the afternoon, the owners of the Mississippi steamship company called their employees together for the first company-sponsored coffee break in the history of America.

BURT WOLF: Executives of the steamship line had seen something like a coffee break in Brazil, and they liked the effect it had on the morale of the workers. It also improved the morale of the workers in New Orleans, so they made the coffee break a permanent part of their operations. Even without corporate sponsorship, the coffee break has become a central part of the American work day.

Edward Bramah has one of the world’s largest collections of antique coffee brewing devices.

EDWARD BRAMAH ON CAMERA: When it comes to coffee-making machines, the first coffee pot was Ethiopian. They call it the Jabena; it’s a combined coffee-maker and pouring pot. And the coffee is pulverized and held in the palm of the hand and you just feed the coffee into the top with the water and when it’s on the fire, it froths up. But because it’s frothing, you can see it coming out the top; you can take it off without any…wasting any coffee in the fire. This is where the tall height of a coffee pot came from. From Ethiopia, in Africa.

Rumford, an American – he made a coffee pot in 1812. The French were very active with their drip pots. But before long, that word again, “steam,” comes into the story, because they realized that perhaps if you could use the steam power to force the water up a tube and maybe through the coffee, and so you’ve got hot water coming up through the coffee, and then it hits the under side of the lid and you can see now where the beginnings of the percolator came from. Well, what can I say about the cafetière locomotive? I mean, it’s the pièce de résistance of the coffee-maker. It goes back as early as 1840s. The railways were going out of Paris to the suburbs. I think it was 1832. But this particular machine wasn’t automatic too much, except that water, hot water, was in the central tank; coffee was put in the funnel, here, in the usual way of a coffee filter machine; and then there’s a spirit heater underneath which will create the pressure to force the water up this tube, over the coffee. So it was a drip filter into the coffee compartment, here, so that you could then turn the tap and have…and coffee, made coffee, coming out of there.

FEDERAL ESPRESSO

BURT WOLF: By the turn of the 20th century, Europe was a hotpot of coffee innovation and the city of Trieste on the shore of the Adriatic Sea in the northeast corner of Italy became one of the world’s epicenters for great coffee. It was once part of the Austrian Empire and supplied Vienna with its coffee. A perfect place to look at Trieste’s balancing and blending between the traditions of Italy and those of the Austrian Empire is a coffee company called Illy Caffe.

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: The founder of the firm was Francesco Illy, an Austrian accountant who had been drafted into the Austrian army during the First World War, and stationed in Trieste. At the end of the war he decided to stay on here and go into the coffee business. In 1935 his analytical mind led him to the development of the first automatic espresso machine that used compressed air instead of steam. And that was a big deal, because up to that point most of the coffee in Europe had been made by boiling water and coffee together and holding it in a huge urn. Very often when you got your coffee, it had been sitting in that urn for hours.

BURT WOLF: At the beginning of the 20th Century, Italy introduced the idea of made-to-order coffee and called it “espresso.” The word “espresso” means fast, as in “Federal Espresso.” But in terms of coffee it means “a single cup made for you when you order it.” In the beginning espresso was only made in coffeehouses. Unfortunately, the early machines used steam, which extracted negative flavor elements from the beans.

At the end of the Second World War, Illy was taken over by Francesco’s son Ernesto. Ernesto is one of the leading chemists in Italy and his passion is the science of coffee. He knew that he could make a great cup of espresso, but he wanted to understand the scientific principles that caused the flavor. And he wanted to be able to calibrate those principles so he could produce the same level of excellence every time. So he built a lab and is figuring out how to get DNA fingerprints from coffee beans.

DR. ERNESTO ILLY ON CAMERA: Espresso, contrary to regular coffee, is mainly olfaction; maybe sixty percent is the nose, and only forty percent is the taste. In regular coffee you have eighty percent taste and only twenty percent olfaction, if the coffee is freshly-brewed. So the slightest defect is perceivable. Because if something is in a bean, it has been expressed by a gene that is in the DNA of the plant. We will be able to understand the excellence of a cup by looking to the DNA.

BURT WOLF: Espresso and the espresso bar, manned by a knowledgeable barista, became popular throughout Italy, and after the First World War, quickly spread across the Continent.

DECAFFEINATION

BURT WOLF TO CAMERA: By the late 1800s, coffee had become an established drink throughout the world, but because of its caffeine content, people were becoming concerned about its effect on good health.

BURT WOLF: They saw what caffeine did to some people and were very worried.

MARK PENDERGRAST ON CAMERA: Decaffeinated coffee actually began with a guy named Ludwig Roselius in Bremen, Germany. His father was a coffee taster and died at a relatively young age, and Ludwig blamed coffee. He thought it was bad for you, and, so he developed the first decaffeinated coffee. And he called it dekaffa, and in France, when he sold it, he called it Sanka, sans café. And so, that was the origin of decaffeinated coffee. In the early 1980s, in the United States, people actually were predicting that 50 percent of our coffee would be decaffeinated because there was this huge health scare. At that time, people thought that coffee caused pancreatic cancer, breast lumps, birth defects, all kinds of horrible things. Those studies, none of them have stood the test of time, and now coffee has a fairly clean bill of health, as long as it's ... you have moderate consumption. But it really did push the consumption of decaffeinated coffee, and it's still quite popular with some people.

CUPPA JOE

BURT WOLF: Soldiers serving in World War I had a great thirst for coffee. But transporting the beans was a logistical nightmare. G. Washington, a New York-based coffee roaster, responded to the problem by developing the first successful instant coffee. Washington’s crystallized coffee was a huge success with the troops, and by 1918 the U.S. Army had requisitioned the firm’s entire output. During the First World War they consumed over 75 million pounds of coffee. And coffee was equally important during the Second World War.

MARK PENDERGRAST ON CAMERA: During the war, there were all kinds of names made up for the coffee that the GIs were getting in their foxholes. Many of them, pejorative, such as mud, but it was also known as a cuppa joe because G.I. Joe, this was his coffee, and that's the origin of why coffee is called cuppa joe. I thought one of the funniest things that I found from World War Two was that the British decided that they would break the morale of the German people by bombing them with coffee beans, and that they would show them: Look! if you would only give up, you could get real coffee. I thought it was ingenious and devious. But it didn't work.

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: Currently coffee is the world’s largest cash crop, the most actively-traded commodity, after oil, and the most widely used psychoactive substance on the planet. For What We Eat, I’m Burt Wolf.

March 22, 2014

What We Eat: The Story of Cheese - #108

March 22, 2014/ Guest User

BURT WOLF: What We Eat, the true story of why we put sugar in our coffee and ketchup on our fries.

Originally, all life that lived on land lived on one giant continent. Then forces inside the earth started breaking that land mass into the continents we have today and pushing them apart.

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: We call them the Old World and the New World, but I think what we really had were two old worlds. After all, people have been living in the America’s for 35,000 years. Even to a man my age that’s a considerable length of time. I think what Columbus did was introduce the two Old Worlds and in the process create one new one. And the exchange of plants and animals that took place altered the way people ate and that changed everything on the planet. What our series does is look at those changes and how they continue to affect our lives everyday in ways you wouldn’t imagine.

MILK’S LEAP TOWARD IMMORTALITY*
THE STORY OF CHEESE IN CALIFORNIA
*with thanks and apologies to Clifton Fadiman
BULLION FOR BUTTER

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: When Columbus arrived in America, there were no cows, no goats, no sheep, no cheese—the pizza, the cheeseburger, even the nacho was yet to evolve. He dropped off the first cattle on the island of Hispaniola. And the settlers who followed him soon began using the cattle’s milk to make cheese.

BURT WOLF: At the end of the 1600s, Dominican Friars set up a mission in Lower California. It was their first settlement on the California coast and they stocked it with cattle brought up from Mexico. During the middle of the 1700s, Franciscan missionaries moved part of the herd to northern California and used them to breed hundreds of thousands of cattle which they used to supply hides and tallow for a large export business.

The first significant demand for dairy products came along with the prospectors who arrived in 1849. Many of the families who rushed west searching for gold traveled across the country with their family cows. When they reached California the men started prospecting; the women started milking the cows and making butter and cheese. Finding gold was an “iffy” business; trading dairy for gold was very reliable. Successful prospectors paid big bucks for fresh milk, butter and cheese. These early farmers became the nucleus of the California dairy industry

Today California has the largest dairy industry in the United States, producing nearly 4 billion gallons of milk each year. And almost half of that milk goes into the making of cheese. Most of California’s dairies are located near the cheese makers. The milk that makes the cheese is usually less than 24 hours old, which gives many of the cheeses a fresh milk flavor. The state has about 65 cheese makers —some are small artisan operations that make only 50 pounds of cheese a day.

Other California cheese makers have major facilities. Hilmar is the largest cheese making complex in the world. It was put together by 12 local dairy producers in 1984. The founders were simply trying to find a use for the milk they were producing on their farms.

Hilmar makes Cheddar, Colby, Monterey Jack and Mozzarella — and they make one million pounds of these cheeses every day.

One hundred and twenty-five thousand cows have joined together and are presently devoting their entire careers to supplying Hilmar with 9 million pounds of milk each day.

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: Historians tell me that people have been making cheese for over 5,000 years. There are even drawings of cheese-makers on the walls of ancient Egyptian tombs. It's pretty easy to see the advantages of cheese over milk. First of all it lasts longer; it's also easy to travel with; and it takes up much less space -- about a tenth of the volume of the milk that was used to make the cheese.

NORTH COAST

BURT WOLF: The counties just above San Francisco make up the oldest dairy district in the state with an environment that is perfect. The cool ocean air and fog that come in off the Pacific Ocean give the region an even temperature throughout the year and the soil is ideal for the clovers and grasses that dairy cattle feed on. And the long rainy season lengthens the time that the cattle can feed on natural pasture.

The mother of the California cheese industry was Clarissa Steele. Originally from New England, she came West with a family recipe for making cheddar.

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: The recipe had traveled across the Atlantic with Clarissa's ancestors but it was based on milk from the easy-going English cows. The cows that surrounded Clarissa’s farm had come up with a Spanish herd from Mexico and were really not into being milked. She had to figure out how to capture the cow and then how to milk it. But the cheese she made from that milk was so good that it convinced her husband and her three cousins to go into the dairy business. And in the 1850s Steele Brothers became the first successful cheese-making operation in California.

Just one more thing. I wouldn't want to cause any dissention. But I'm curious. If it was her recipe and she figured out how to capture the cow and how to milk the cow and she made the cheese, why was it called Steele Brothers Dairy? Just curious.

BURT WOLF: Cheese and butter makers along the coast had been sending their products to San Francisco by boat. But the unreliable schedules, temperature changes, salt air and shipboard moisture made the operation a tricky one. So most dairy products stayed in the neighborhood where they were made.

The exception was the cheese made by David Jacks. During the 1870s, Jacks acquired over 60,000 acres of land in Monterey and Salinas Valley. He also bought 14 dairy farms in Monterey and Big Sur. In partnership with Swiss and Portuguese dairymen, he dominated the dairy business throughout Monterey. Jacks was able to get his buddies in the railroad business to run a line from Monterey to San Francisco so he could make regular cheese shipments by train. Jacks' cheeses were soft, white and based on an old California Mission recipe.

NANCY FLETCHER ON CAMERA: When David Jacks shipped the cheese, he put it in a box, he stamped his name, David Jacks from Monterey, California. So that's where Monterey Jack got its name. And many people think it's the most important cheese that's been created in the United States and it was created right here in California.

BURT WOLF: During the First World War Monterey Jack took on a second form. A San Francisco cheese wholesaler, had left a surplus shipment of Monterey Jack sitting in his warehouse. When he finally opened the crates, he discovered that the cheese had aged quite nicely. It had lost most of its moisture and was as hard as Parmesan or Pecorino Romano. It had also acquired a nutty flavor--but that was all just fine. The war had cut off the supply of cheese from Italy and the large Italian community in San Francisco needed a replacement. Dry Jack was quickly accepted by Italian-American cooks.

CLASSIC CHEESE MAKING

BURT WOLF: The process of making cheese starts when the cheese-maker adds a starter culture. The culture causes the lactose sugar, which is found naturally in milk, to turn into lactic acid.

Rennet is added which causes the proteins in the milk to clump together, forming curds.

The solid curd mixture is cut up and the liquid whey is drained off. Larger curds usually produce a softer and moister cheese.

If the cheese being made is a cheddar-style cheese, the curds will be cheddared, which means that blocks of curd will be piled on top of each other and pressed together, then piled on top of each other again and pressed again. The cheddaring process releases the liquid whey; the result is a semi-firm, dry cheese with a fine texture.

To get a totally different type of cheese, the curds are cooked and stirred, which turns the clumps of protein molecules into strands. The texture of a string cheese or Mozzarella is the result of being cooked.

The curds are put into a form that gives the cheese its shape. Some are pressed to take out more whey which will give you a firmer cheese. Some are not pressed at all which will give you a softer cheese.

At this point, the cheese is ripened in a storage room where the temperature and the humidity can be controlled. The butterfat in cheese tends to sink to the bottom, so the cheeses are turned regularly to redistribute it.

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: Letting wine sit around in wooden barrels is a form of ripening-- controlled aging. Letting cheese sit around in a ripening room is also a form of controlled aging. I myself am ripening, but with very little control.

THE DAIRY MAIDS

BURT WOLF: The traditional division of labor in dairying goes back for thousands of years. Men would herd the sheep, goats and cows, while women did the milking and made the butter and cheese. In Colonial America, making cheese became a skill that was passed from mother to daughter and selling their cheese gave farm women an independent source of income. Rural women also set up small factories to produce cheese for urban markets. The profits from these enterprises helped cheese-making families educate their daughters.

In the last thirty years, American women have started small cheese-making companies that offer a superior product. And that tradition is taking hold in California. In 1997, Sue Conley and Peggy Smith started The Cowgirl Creamery in Point Reyes, just north of San Francisco. There are two parts to their business.

The first is Tomales Bay Foods which is a retail shop offering locally made products—jams, mustards, chutneys, and produce from nearby farms. They also age and sell cheese from small local cheese makers.

PEGGY SMITH ON CAMERA: Let me give you a taste of this Dry Jack. This cheese is 18 months old and he's become really famous for this cheese. As you get close to the rind, you can really taste the cocoa and the black pepper.

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: Oh I like the rind.

PEGGY SMITH ON CAMERA: It gets a little bit spicy.

BURT WOLF: The second part of the business is The Cowgirl Creamery

SUE CONLEY ON CAMERA: The cheeses we make here are primarily fresh cheeses and that's because in Europe, in France and in England, the cheese shops always make their own fresh cheeses on site and then they bring in the aged cheeses and take care of them in an aging facility.

BURT WOLF: All their cheeses are produced in the most traditional way. Conley realized that people coming in to shop would have a better understanding of what they were eating if they saw the cheese being made. So they built the cheese making room behind a glass wall. Shoppers can now see how fresh milk becomes cheese.

SUE CONLEY ON CAMERA: We chose the name Cowgirl Creamery because we realized we're out here in the most Western point of California. It's really like the Wild West. We thought, well, maybe we're just a couple of cowgirls tryin' to make cheese. Even though we're really kind of afraid of horses. But we like the outfits very much.

BURT WOLF: In the same general area north of San Francisco, is the Point Reyes Farmstead Cheese Company. Bob Giacomini wanted to reduce the size of his dairy herd. But he didn’t want to reduce his income. He was also looking for a way to bring some of his daughters back to the family farm. He accomplished both objectives and, in the bargain, produced California’s first blue cheese.

The herd is smaller now and his daughters, Karen, Lynn and Jill are working at home again. Actually, Karen is out selling cheese today, but Lynn and Jill are still here.

LYNNE GIACOMINI STRAY ON CAMERA: My sisters and I, we were never really interested in the actual dairying end. But when we started talking about cheese and expanding the business, we all love food and to cook, and so we got very excited about it.

JILL GIACOMINI BASCH ON CAMERA: Also, coming into the family business was a way to really kind of carry on our parent’s legacy. They built this farm from scratch and it's our way to deliver it to the next generation.

We did leave the cheese-making up to a true expert, and our cheese-maker, Monte McIntyre, came to us with over 15 years of cheese experience, specifically in blue cheese. And when he came on board we said, this is the kind of cheese we want to make. We want it to be very full-flavored and creamy, very reminiscent of some of the French Roqueforts, and he nailed it.

We start with pumping our morning milk into our cheese plant. And then into that we add our starter culture, our penicillium roqueforti, which is the blue mold, the salt, and rennet, which is the coagulant that helps to separate the curds from the whey, the solids from the liquid matter. After that process is complete, the curds are separated from the whey, the curds go into cheese forms, and that's where the actual wheels of cheese are set up.

The following day, we begin a salting process where we hand salt the wheels three days in a row and then we actually punch the wheels with needles to introduce oxygen into the body of the cheese. That's really where the magic happens. That's with the oxygen mixing with the mold; it activates the blue veining process that creates the beautiful blue color inside of the wheels of cheese. Then following the curing stage, we actually age the cheese for about 6 to 8 months in our aging room.

LYNNE GIACOMINI STRAY ON CAMERA: It's easy 'cause we know each other so well. We know our personalities. We know how to deal with each other. And it can be a lot of fun. Especially because it's something we all love. But then it's always just the dynamics of it-- and it gets loud -- especially with my father around.

JILL GIACOMINI BASCH ON CAMERA: Yeah. I don't know what's worse: working with your sisters or working for your father!

BURT WOLF: The tradition of women as the pioneers of cheese making has continued. Laura Chenel loves goats and goats love Laura Chenel. So, during the 1970s, they combined their mutual affection in a goat cheese business.

LAURA CHENEL ON CAMERA: I was experimenting with different cheeses at home with my goats milk and every one of them turned out to be inedible. And I tried many, many different varieties. Cottage cheese and jack and cheddar. And then I was lucky enough to taste some French goat cheese. And when I tasted that I knew that that was the highest and best use of my goats' milk.

BURT WOLF: She spent three months in France learning how to properly make goat cheese and then returned to a nation that had no interest in goat cheese and no facilities for manufacturing it. Fortunately, both goats and goat lovers have a tendency to be stubborn.

LAURA CHENEL ON CAMERA: Initially, I made the cheeses in my home. I lived in a large house and there was a basement I could convert to a small fromagerie. So it was a month of making cheese every day and having it fail everyday and having to throw out that failure. And then finally a batch took and then it just got better and better. What I really wanted was, I wanted to live the way I lived in France. I get to be with my goats, that was my goal. To keep them in my life. And I have more of them than I every dreamed would be in my life. When I first started experimenting with cheese I had about 20 goats and now I have close to 500. There are many, many people making goat cheese now. I never would have dreamed this. This went way beyond anything I would have thought. And now there's a goat cheese industry.

BURT WOLF: Laura taught stainless-steel manufacturers to make the equipment she needed; then she taught Americans to appreciate goat cheese. She became a pioneer for today’s artisan cheese-makers.

THE SPANISH INFLUENCE

BURT WOLF: The cheese-making tradition in California goes back to the early Spanish and Mexican settlers. Today California is the country's largest producer of Hispanic-style cheeses. The restaurant Maya in San Francisco is named after the Maya Indians who were the great eaters of Mexico and Central America, before the arrival of Columbus.

The owner and the chef is Richard Sandoval who got his first taste of the kitchen working for his parents, who owned two restaurants in Acapulco. He uses Hispanic cheeses in many of his dishes. These cheeses are usually not table cheeses. You wouldn’t eat them on their own — they were developed to be cooked. The cheeses themselves add salt, and a milky flavor to counterbalance other ingredients that add heat, and texture.

A signature dish at Maya is Chile Relleno—A roasted poblano chile is split and filled with a mixture of scallops, squid and shrimp. Oaxaca cheese is added and the stuffed chile is baked.

RICHARD SANDOVAL ON CAMERA: I like to compare this to a regular mozzarella or a string cheese. It pulls apart very nicely, it's not too overpowering, and it also melts very well.

BURT WOLF: Chile Rellenos is an excellent example of Europe meets the Americas. The chili is indigenous to Mesoamerica; the cheese is Old World.

THE CENTRAL VALLEY

BURT WOLF: California’s great valley region runs between the foothills of the Sierra Nevada on the east and the Coastal Range on the west. It’s about 400 miles long and 40 to 60 miles wide. During the 1870s, William Chapman, one of the largest landowners in the state, sold 80,000 acres of the Central Valley to a group of German settlers and encouraged them to grow alfalfa. The crop was so successful that it became the primary feed for the dairy industry in central and southern California. After the railroads arrived, the central valley became the state’s largest dairy region.

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: Wisconsin was traditionally thought of as the dairy-making state. But during the early 1990s, in an upset victory, California became the state producing the most milk in the country. In order to improve their profits, the milk men began making artisanal cheeses. Their objective is to do for milk what Napa did for wine. [TO COWS] How do you feel about that? Let me get a nice Pinot for you. I think that's where you'd start.

BURT WOLF: A good example of a small farmstead producer is the Three Sisters Farmstead Cheese. The sisters are Marisa, Lindsay and Hannah Hilarides. Marisa and her father Rob decided that they needed to do more with their milk from their herd and started attending classes at a State University. With their formal training completed they began production.

MARISA HILARIDES ON CAMERA: The aging process is what amazes me and what I'm really learning about right now. As you can probably see behind me we've got lots of cheese and its always -- it needs constant care. It takes a lot of oiling to keep from forming cracks, and Hannah likes to help with that. We also, when we have the cheese on our wooden racks, they need to be turned constantly and Lindsay helps out a lot with that. So they've been a big help to me.

BURT WOLF: Within a year their Serena Cheese, which is a cross between Parmigiano and aged Gouda, won a Silver Medal at the World Cheese Awards.

MARISA HILARIDES ON CAMERA: It's really neat to be able to see the end process when people are actually tasting the cheese and we're getting compliments on it. That -- it really makes you feel like your work is worth something -- it's paid off.

THE SOUTHERN COAST

BURT WOLF: The southern California coastal region starts in Los Angeles, runs south to San Diego and has a couple dozen cheese makers.

For several decades, Jules Wesselink has been a successful dairy farmer with a herd of Holsteins. In 1996, he decided to begin making cheese from his herds’ milk. He’s of Dutch descent and went back to Holland to learn the traditional Dutch techniques for making Gouda cheese.

JULES WESSELINK ON CAMERA: When I was in Holland and I saw them make the cheese, then I decided that was it. I saw the beautiful cheeses and I tasted the good cheese and I thought, this is it. If I can do that, then it'll be fine.

BURT WOLF: When he returned, he convinced his daughter and her husband to become cheesemakers.

JULES WESSELINK ON CAMERA: I thought I knew how to make it. But when I came back here in the United States and I started it wasn't all a success at the beginning. It became later on. But it -- you have to make some changes. It is when you make it then you find out what is right and what is wrong. You have to learn it. It's different every day.

BURT WOLF: They produce a farmhouse gouda that is offered at several stages of ripeness as well as goudas flavored with cumin, jalapeno peppers or herbs.

JULES WESSELINK ON CAMERA: There is nothing greater than having your family around, having your kids and your grandkids around to work with. Maybe one day I can retire and just watch from an easy chair and see how things are going.

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: The cattle that Columbus brought to the Caribbean introduced the idea of dairying to the Americas. And today, The United States is producing cheeses that are up to the quality of the great cheeses of Europe. But perhaps more important, without Columbus’ cattle and the development of the dairy industry we might never have had the cheeseburger and I, for one, would feel the loss. For What We Eat, I’m Burt Wolf.

March 22, 2014

What We Eat: The Story of Corn - #107

March 22, 2014/ Guest User

BURT WOLF: What We Eat, the true story of why we put sugar in our coffee and ketchup on our fries.

Originally, all life that lived on land lived on one giant continent. Then forces inside the earth started breaking that land mass into the continents we have today and pushing them apart.

THE SEED OF LIFE
THE STORY OF CORN

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: On November 4th, 1492, Columbus came ashore on what is now the island of Cuba. The natives greeted him and gave him two gifts. One was tobacco, and one was corn. His diary for the next day contained the following entry:

BURT WOLF: “There was a great deal of tilled land sown with a sort of bean and a sort of grain they called Mahiz, which tasted good. It was baked or dried and made into flour.”

BETTY FUSSELL ON CAMERA: “They used it for every possible food and for every possible sacred ceremonial use because corn is at the heart of all the mythology, all the calendar, all the religions, all the rituals of Meso-America. The original word corn, mahaiz in Arawak, meant seed of life. Because life in the created universe began with corn, with the corn gods, but it’s really with the seed, the womb of life. Mother Earth was also Mother Corn, being fertilized really by the sun, by the heavens, by Father Sun. Out of that, the universe sprouts. But what sprouts? A corn tree, the corn tree becomes the axle of the universe. A corn plant, you know, and all the cobs on that tree are heads of gods. So the corn god is represented in the plant. Man was created from a dough of corn and blood.

BURT WOLF: The Indians of Meso-America showed the Spaniards how to grow and store corn. It was a strong plant; it traveled well, grew fast, provided plenty of food and quickly spread throughout the world.

BETTY FUSSELL ON CAMERA: Corn is amazing in that it changed the way the world eats instantly, that it went around the world, which was after Columbus. And it - with great speed it developed everywhere it went, because it grows every place. Every place but the North and South Poles. So it has this capacity to adapt itself to all kinds of climates and ecologies and, damp, dry, high, low. So first of all, it could grow everywhere. Secondly, it could be eaten by both men and animals. That’s enormously important. Corn has ended up with this kind of double purpose, as the world’s best animal feed.

JOHNNY CAKES, SPOON BREAD AND POLENTA

BURT WOLF: During the 15 and 1600s, European farmers used oxen to clear their land and then planted their fields by scattering handfuls of grain over the earth. The grains started growing wherever they fell. Farmers waited for the weeds to come up with the crop, then pulled up the weeds.

Native Americans had a very different approach. Before the arrival of the Europeans in America there were no draft animals to help with the farming. Land was cleared by hand using a technique called “slash and burn”. The only tools available were axes and sticks and hoes with blades and points that were made of wood, sea shells, deer antlers, and the shoulder-blades of large animals.

MARGARET VISSER ON CAMERA: When Europeans got to North America and Central America and South America, they were astounded at the way the Indians did al ... agriculture. They found the Indians had made little mounds, like a ... they had a checkerboard design. Huge fields, miles and miles and miles in extent. And each little mound was in its ... exactly in its mathematical place in rows. And in the mound the Indians would plant a few ... always sort of a religious number, four or six grains in the mound. So this is all immaculately done, everything clean and clear.

BURT WOLF: Corn, beans, and squash were always planted together and eaten together.

BURT WOLF TO CAMERA: The natives considered them three inseparable sisters, like the Supremes when they first got started. The corn would grow up; the beans would grow up around the corn stalk; and the squash would sit in the land between the corn, helping to hold down the weeds. In some places, they would plant a fish into the mound. It was considered sacred. If you didn’t put in the fish, the corn refused to come up. Somehow the natives had figured out that the corn plant needed an enormous number of nutrients and that the fish would supply those nutrients.

BURT WOLF: The Indians always ate corn, beans and squash at the same time and they always added a little burnt wood, or burnt shell during the cooking.

MARGARET VISSER ON CAMERA: And we now know that this is an incredibly intelligent thing to do, that if the Indians had not done that, corn would never have been their staple, because corn is lacking in various nutritional ingredients, you know, things that human beings need. Some of the things it hasn't got and beans and squash add those. And other things, one particular thing, niacin, is in corn, but human beings can't digest it. So, the Indians used to add ash to every pot of corn that they cooked. It's recently been discovered that that lime, which is what it is, alkali, that alkali loosened this essential vitamin, niacin, so that human beings can digest it. And it's extraordinary because the Indians used to offer corn to the gods, their sacred food. And they never added ash when they offered it to the gods. They somehow knew that it was human beings who needed the ash. The gods didn't need it.

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: If you try to live on corn alone without the addition of beans, squash and ash you’re going to end up undernourished and eventually develop a disease known as pellagra. In spite of the nutritional advantages of corn, however, it was never really accepted by the Europeans and very few countries got it into their national cuisine. The French still think it’s only fit for animals, and the Irish ignored it until they were almost starving.

BARBARA WHEATON ON CAMERA: The story of corn coming into Europe. It ricochets around the Mediterranean and it gets carried up the rivers, and it… it finds the habitats where it can be happy. It displaces a grain that had been in very wide use, since at least Roman times, and that's millet, which now survives in this country, I think largely in birdseed mixtures. Though you can get it in whole food stores, and I like to throw a handful of it into a soup sometimes, just for old times sake. But in Northern Italy, where they had been making polenta for centuries, they'd been making it with millet. And, and one of the rules, really, for, for new foodstuffs coming in is, if it looks like something you know, then try cooking it like the thing you know. And quite often, that works.

I think one of the things that has made it hard for Europeans to get used to the idea of eating corn is that they have absolutely no understanding there, that there is a difference between field corn and sweet corn. And again and again, they would plant field corn, and it worked fine if they ground it, but when they would try eating it, they would say it's fit only for animal fodder.

BURT WOLF: European settlers to North America quickly incorporated corn into their diet. It was easy to bake corn on a griddle. The result was a firm disc that could be carried on a journey — which is how they came to be called journey cakes, which eventually became Johnnycakes. Pone was the Indian word for corn batter cooked on hot stones. Whipped egg whites were added to produce a corn soufflé called spoon bread. And coarsely ground white cornmeal was called grits. In Mexico, Central and South America corn that had been ground into fine flour was baked into tortillas or fried to make enchiladas.

PAUL ROZIN ON CAMERA: The corn that the Mexicans use that was brought to Europe is very bland. It isn't like our sweet corn. It isn't that tasty. The corn tortilla was a way of making it a little more tasty and more palatable and, of course, making into a bread basically. Only women in Mexico know how to make tortillas in villages. And the interesting thing is that Cortez did not have a woman with him when he went to Mexico. So what happened was that none of his guys learned how to make tortillas. So they brought back the corn, they brought back the world's stalest tortillas after, I don't know, a month on the sea. But they didn't bring back the magic formula to make their corn into such a tasty thing that the Mexicans have.

So, I don't think this is the whole account, but I think part of it is that the Europeans didn't get corn the way Mexicans were eating it. Because of the absence of a culinarily-oriented person, i.e., woman.

THE SEX LIFE OF CORN

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: If you look up the word corn in a dictionary, you will find that it is used to describe the primary grain of a country. If you make a daily bread in wheat then wheat is your corn. Rye is the corn of Sweden. Oats are the corn of Ireland. When the first English-speaking colonists arrived in the New World they realized that the native American Indians were using maize. And so they called maize “Indian corn.”

BURT WOLF: Maize is a giant grass which produces very large seeds. Each kernel is really a fruit with an oily seed surrounded by starchy nutrients that are held in a hull. The corn cob and its seed is covered with a husk which makes it easy to harvest, easy to feed to livestock, easy to transport, and easy to store. It could be considered as one of the original packaged foods.

BETTY FUSSELL ON CAMERA: Of the three staples of the world, wheat, rice and corn, they're all from the same family of grasses; that's what we mean by cereal grains. The reason they are staples is that they can be dried, and then you can eat them in the winter time, so it's not just spring. But corn is the only one that you can eat also fresh, as a vegetable. Because you eat those seeds from the seed bud, which is the ear of corn. We’re the only country in the world who really developed sweet corn; we're the only people who want corn on the cob, consider that a delicacy…a treat, a necessity for summer.

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: Corn sounds like the most perfect plant on the planet, so what’s the problem? As is so often the case in relationships — it’s sex. The husk on corn is so strong and so tight that it can’t seed itself.

MARGARET VISSER ON CAMERA: We have this unbelievable plant which has all these soft kernels side by side stuck in a cob with a sheath covering them all. They are close together, they are tightly held to the cob, and the sheath cannot be removed by nature. If you let it lie on the ground, it would just simply rot and that's the end of it. Even if you took the sheath off and threw it on the ground, it would not grow. So corn absolutely and totally depends on human beings to survive.

LOVE AT FIRST BITE

BURT WOLF: Today there are six major varieties of corn — the oldest is popcorn. Popcorn has a hard hull. When it’s heated, the starch inside the skin of the kernel fills with steam until it bursts. With other types of corn the steam leaks out which is why they don’t pop. Some historians believe that the accidental popping of a hard grain in a fire gave ancient man, or more likely ancient woman, the idea that cereals were edible.

ANDY SMITH ON CAMERA: You have the popcorn beginning as an important American product in New England about 1820, 1830. And it becomes the celebrity product of this time, with-- with Henry David Thoreau popping corn and writing about it in his journal. And Emerson saying it’s a wonderful thing to give to the kiddies at Christmastime; it gets them away from the adults. And you have all these other great Americans talking about the importance of popcorn, which they all considered to be something new and exciting. So it enters into America from the top down.

When the Depression comes all of a sudden movie owners are confronted with going out of business, or establishing a new revenue stream. And by far, you make the most amount of money as a snack…out of popcorn. And the price of admission was decreased so that they would get people in so that they would buy popcorn so the theatres could make money.

ORVILLE REDENBACHER ON CAMERA: Hello. I’m Orville Redenbacher. If you’ve got forty….

BURT WOLF: The superhero of popcorn, however, was Orville Redenbacher. Orville was an agricultural extension agent in Indiana who came up with a kernel that popped bigger than any kernel had ever popped — fifty times bigger than the kernel. Until then, kernels had only popped up to thirty-five or forty times their size.

ORVILLE REDENBACHER ON CAMERA: I’d suggest you start with a corn patch. You want to try about 500,000 cross-pollinations…

ANDY SMITH ON CAMERA: Popcorn is one of the few foods that’s purchased by weight. So if you increase the volume, you increase your sales. And consequently Orville Redenbacher concluded this was something that was going to revolutionize the popcorn business. He decided that he needed some marketing help, hired a public relations firm in Chicago, paid them $18,000 and said, “I need help with a name for this.” And after considering this very carefully for about two and a half hours they said, we have the right name for your new popcorn. And Orville said “What is it?” And they said, “Orville Redenbacher Gourmet Popping Corn.” And Orville kind of scratched his head and said, “Well, my mother thought that was a good name, so therefore it should be a good name for my product, too.” Now, there were not gourmet foods at that time. But in one way, Orville Redenbacher created the market for gourmet food.

KERNELS OF TRUTH

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: Corn is the plant with the ultimate shelf life. Scientists have been able to pop corn kernels that are over a thousand years old. Native American Indians would hide corn kernels under mounds of earth for use during the winter or during periods of war. As a matter of fact, the English colonists who where starving to death during the winter of 1620, were able to survive because they came upon hidden hoards of Indian corn.

BURT WOLF: The world’s largest corn crop is called dent, which is a reference to the dimple in the top edge of every kernel. It’s sweet and starchy. Native Americans thought of it as a prime symbol of the female and maternal aspect of the goddess of corn.

In a healthy cornfield, the plants grow slowly during the day but fast at night. Under ideal conditions a corn plant will grow four and a half inches within 24 hours.

MARGARET VISSER ON CAMERA: A lot of American farmers have said that they heard their corn growing, and people sort of say, "Oh, come on." It's a plant which is very large... its growth involves unfurling leaves. So if it's growing, a leaf will suddenly unfurl, and it makes a sound, and it scrapes the stalk. And if ... you can hear it. And in fact I actually have heard it. It has to be the peak growing season, and you've got to have patience as well. You've got to sit there for a while. But you can hear these unfurling leaves, it's really quite eerie.

SHE WHO SUSTAINS US

BURT WOLF: During the 1930s and 40s, farmers in the United States and Canada began to alter their operations so that much of the work could be done by machine. The United States started producing more than half of the world’s corn, over 250 million metric tons per year. And eighty percent of that crop was grown in the Corn Belt, an area of 350,000 square miles that runs from western Ohio to eastern Nebraska, with the largest tonnage coming from Iowa and Illinois.

American chicken and beef are fed on corn and cornstalks which means that both meat and milk are part corn. Even the stamp on meat that marks its grade is made with corn oil. In fact, 85 percent of the corn grown in the United States is used to feed animals.

BETTY FUSSELL ON CAMERA: Columbus’s discovery of corn in the New World changed the diet of the world. Because when this kind of fodder became available to animals, it really tipped the balance in America, where we have all this space for animals - it tipped the balance toward a diet of meat, replacing grain. Meat and dairy. So we became the giant meat eaters, and that became the model, in a way, for the rest of the world.

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: It’s almost impossible to buy anything in an American supermarket that hasn’t been affected by American corn.

The golden color that we associate with our soft drinks comes from corn syrup. Almost all of our frozen foods contain corn starch or corn oil. Candies are formed in corn starch. Soap contains corn oil. Everything that goes into a can, or almost everything that goes into a can, is given a light coating of corn oil to keep it from sticking. Beers, vodka, gin often contain corn. And all the packaging, the plastic bags, the boxes that our pasta go into, contains corn.

BURT WOLF: A key corn product is corn starch. A white, odorless, tasteless powder, it’s used in the production of thousands of products —toothpastes, detergents, match heads, charcoal briquettes.

MARGARET VISSER ON CAMERA: Corn is useful when you want something to stick. You make glue with corn. It is also useful when you don't ... when you want something not to stick, so molds use it to prevent it from sticking. You know, you dust candies with it to prevent them from being sticky. You add it to instant coffee to help it pour. It ... you know, it ... it does everything. It sticks, it doesn't stick, it's thick, it holds, it ... it lasts. It's the dream stuff.

BURT WOLF: During the early 1800s, a Russian chemist name G. S. C. Kirchoff, accidentally over- heated some corn starch and invented corn syrup. Sweet, easily available and inexpensive, corn syrup began to replace sugar. The power of sweetness which had belonged almost exclusively to cane sugar was suddenly being shared. Today, corn syrup is used in more products than sugar — from soda to ketchup, corn syrup is the source of our sweet life.

MARGARET VISSER ON CAMERA: Everywhere you look you have corn. You ... you're not aware of it, but underneath it all, it's a driving wheel of the entire American economy. Now, Americans could have used something else for their starch, turning starch into modern technological uses of starch. But in fact, they turned to corn, because they had corn. Therefore, corn becomes essential to modern technological societies all over the world. This technological revolution that took place enabled America to be way out ahead. It gave them a fantastic advantage.

BURT WOLF: In the 1700s, Jonathan Swift, the author of Gulliver’s Travels wrote that “Whoever could make two ears of corn grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service than the whole race of politicians put together.”

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: What would Swift have thought about the scientists who gave us American corn? In four months a single grain can multiply itself eight hundred times. It’s easy to plant, easy to grow, easy to harvest and easy to sell. For What We Eat, I’m Burt Wolf.

March 22, 2014

What We Eat: How the Spud Changed the World - #106

March 22, 2014/ Guest User

BURT WOLF: What We Eat, the true story of why we put sugar in our coffee and ketchup on our fries.

Originally, all life that lived on land lived on one giant continent. Then forces inside the earth started breaking that land mass into the continents we have today and pushing them apart.

THIS SPUD’S FOR YOU
HOW THE POTATO CHANGED THE WORLD

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: On two occasions the potato changed the course of world history. The first time was when it supplied the primary source of energy for the great Inca Empire and the Spanish colonists that conquered them. The second time was when the potato fed an expanding population in Europe, which allowed a few small Northern European nations to dominate the rest of the world—which they did for over 200 years.

BURT WOLF: It looks like the potato was first cultivated in the Andean Mountains of South America about 7,000 years ago. The great centers of pre-Inca culture were high up, some as high as 12,500 feet above sea level and each night the temperature would drop below freezing. Edible crops were in short supply. But the potato was one of the few crops that could be grown at high altitudes. The Andean farmers came to rely on the potato. They also found an ingenious way of preserving them.

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: Raw potatoes don’t store very well, but by squeezing out their moisture and exposing them to the cold night air, Andean farmers were able to produce freeze-dried potatoes, and they stored them in giant underground vaults where they held their nutrients for many years. Now potatoes are packed with nutrients and, except for calcium and vitamins A and D, they’ll give you enough stuff to live on for quite a few years.

BURT WOLF: The Inca government collected the freeze-dried potatoes as tribute, kept them in warehouses and distributed them to workers who were employed on official projects.

In 1545, Spanish colonists discovered silver in what is now southern Bolivia. Thousands of Incan laborers were forced to work the mines. An inexpensive food was needed to keep them alive—so the Spanish adopted the Inca’s use of the freeze-dried potato. The potato fed the workers who, in turn, fed the world’s appetite for precious metal.

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: The silver that came out of the South American mines flooded the world. In Europe, it allowed Philip II of Spain to pay for his imperial fleets and his imperial armies that sailed on them. The windfall lasted for about a hundred years; and then the ore ran out and so did much of Spain’s power. A second effect of all of that silver floating around was massive inflation. Without an Alan Greenspan around to control the situation, prices began to rise and both the moral and economic standings of the countries began to change. People who were fabulously wealthy became incredibly poor, and people who were incredibly poor became fabulously wealthy.

BURT WOLF: But in the end, it wasn’t the silver that would prove most valuable to Europeans—it was the potato. At first, Spanish settlers looked down on the potato and relied on corn. The potato, however, did catch on with sailors, who recognized that eating potatoes prevented scurvy. The first potatoes to reach Europe traveled on Spanish ships returning from South America.

Spain introduced the potato to the rest of Europe. For most of the 16th century, parts of Northern Italy and the Netherlands were under Spanish rule.

The route used by Spanish troops to connect these two imperial provinces became known as the “Spanish Road.” Potatoes took root in peasant gardens all along its path.

In those days armies were expected to supply themselves with food from the countryside in which they were operating. Stores of grain piled up in barns were easy pickings. Wherever the local population depended on stored grain for their survival, starvation was the usual and expected result of any major military campaign.

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: One of the reasons that potatoes were so popular with peasants along the “Spanish Road,” was that they realized that the potato growing underground could help protect them from the ruthless requisitioning of the soldiers moving above-ground. During the 16th and 17th centuries soldiers loved pillaging— I mean, it was in keeping with their sense of who they were—it had style. But digging potatoes out of the ground with a shovel—I mean, after all, that’s embarrassing; there’s the image of the uniform that has to be upheld.

BARBARA WHEATON ON CAMERA: The story of potatoes arriving in Europe is a very interesting one. They were taken up early in Germany. And in the British Isles, not just in Ireland. The French were very loathe to try them. It didn't look like anything they were used to eating. And, in the late eight, seventeen hundreds, when people were trying to get the French away from their fixation on bread as the staff of life, the French scientist and agronomist, Parmentier, tried to substitute potato starch for wheat flour in bread, and it was a complete failure. He got around this eventually, by planting a great field of potatoes, setting armed guards around it, and then, when the potatoes were ready for harvest, he removed the guards, and of course, the peasants had all been watching this thing, which was obviously so valuable. And they all raced in and stole the potatoes and took them home and planted them.

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: In spite of its slow start, the potato eventually got out of the kitchen gardens and into the open fields. And as it reached those open fields, it once again changed the course of world history. Only this time it needed a little help from the governments. Somewhere around 1750, the ruling powers in Europe teamed up with the landowners and began pressuring the peasants to plant potatoes. They realized that, in spite of constant warfare and re-occuring famine, the potato would keep the peasants alive. And, quite frankly, what is the point of being a King if you don't have peasants?

THE POTATO IN IRELAND

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: At least a hundred years before Columbus wandered into the Caribbean, Basque fishermen were harvesting cod just off the coast of Canada. On the way home, they would usually stop on the west coast of Ireland to dry their catch. As soon as the potato was introduced to Spain, the Basque fishermen began to put it aboard their ships. Sometime in the late 1500s, or early 1600s, they introduced it to the west coast of Ireland. During the middle of the 1600’s, when the Irish were fighting the English and were forced back to the west coast of Ireland, they learned to live on the potato.

DAVID DICKSON ON CAMERA: The potato really thrived in the very maritime ecology of Ireland. It needed seaweed or it needed the animal dung. It fitted into a pastoral society, a society that had previously been very much dependent on things like butter, milk for the diet, at least in ... in winter time. This is a society that has always boiled its food more than baked its food, and the potato slipped into that almost seamlessly in the 1600s. And I think this early success of the potato was because it didn't require a revolution either in cultivation methods or certainly in cooking habits. In other words, the pot inside which the potato was boiled had been there before the potato.

BURT WOLF: In 1650, the English, under the leadership of Oliver Cromwell, sent troops to Ireland to put down a rebellion. Storehouses, mills, and fields were burned. It was in this setting that the value of the potato stood out. Potatoes grew underground, in small wet plots that were difficult to burn. They stored safely and in concealed places within a farmer’s cottage. They didn’t need to be milled or processed. Planting didn’t even require a plough—a family could plant an adequate crop using nothing more than a spade. The Irish were eventually defeated, but they weren’t starved out. They were, however, forced off their land, which was given to Cromwell’s veterans. The new English landlords concentrated on raising beef cattle and growing grain for export to Europe, and they used cheap Irish labor to get it done.

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: As the 17th century wore on, speculators, who were only interested in making a buck, ended up buying almost all of the land that had previously belonged to Cromwell’s veterans. Raising cattle had always been a safety net for Irish farmers; but the speculators realized that the fastest way for them to make a buck was to raise cattle. They put an end to this kind of general farming and went for the beef. They’d raise it, ship it to Cork or Dublin for slaughter and then for export. By the beginning of the 18th century, Ireland was Europe’s largest exporter of beef.

BURT WOLF: The underpaid Irish labor force learned to make do on a diet of potatoes and milk. A single acre of potatoes and a single cow could feed an entire Irish family. And given the small amount of land still available for rent, it wasn’t uncommon for an Irish family to find itself with only a single acre. And often that acre was owned by an English landlord.

DAVID DICKSON ON CAMERA: The land owners and the land holders, the cattle owners, did relatively well and indeed Ireland becomes a very successful food-producing economy for Britain in particular. And in which it was dependent on a vast army of cheap labor. That cheap labor lived on the potato, but it did an awful lot of the work, producing the food surpluses, pastoral, cereal food surpluses that fed its industrial neighbor. Perhaps upwards of half the population by the 1830s, 1840s, were agricultural laborers dependent on insecure employment and on a potato which turned out to be viciously insecure. But it is important to know that up until '45, up until the Great Hunger, the potato was probably more reliable year on year than other types of foodstuffs like oats, rye or wheat.

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: During the first half of the 19th century, tension between the English and the Irish continued to grow. The English passed a series of trade laws and tariffs that favored English industry and agriculture over the Irish and Irish wages continued to drop even further. Trapped by both economics and politics, the Irish began living exclusively on potatoes. And when the potato crop failed in 1845, a famine followed that was truly disastrous.

DAVID DICKSON ON CAMERA: The Great Hunger or the Great Famine is the largest event in modern Irish history, certainly up to the twentieth century, in that one eighth of the population, inside of six years, died. We have an excess mortality of about a million or a little over a million, and more than 1 million of Ireland's 8 emigrate between the beginnings of that famine and the early 1850s. An extraordinary artist-cum-reporter, who was working in London and working for the Illustrated London News, produced a series of quite extraordinary images in 1846 and '47. And really he was a kind of CNN of the Irish Great Hunger because his images were coming through very quickly. They're quite small, but they bear very close examination and there is extraordinary pathos in some of those faces. By the third or the fourth year of the famine, there’s hardly a social group in Ireland, even among the very wealthiest, who weren't directly affected, partly because the diseases that associated with the famine did not recognize class barriers. But I think for the very poor, who depended entirely on the potato, the crisis was very real by the end of year one; in other words, by the fall of 1846.

BURT WOLF: The battle against potato blight is still going on and Irish potato farmer, Jerry Flynn, is in the trenches.

JERRY FLYNN ON CAMERA: In the 1840s and 50s, if this was a field back then, there would be nothing left, it would be totally gone.

And this is what the people were digging back in the Famine. They had no sprays to combat the blight, and this was what they found when they dug up. There. And that’s…that’s what blight—actually the spores aren’t there now—that’s what blight will do to a perfectly good crop of potatoes. In two days.

Today’s blight is black leg. And we have no problem finding black leg in this field, because 60% of this crop is…is full of black leg. These potatoes might look good, but because of the infection—there’s one of the potatoes there at you infected with black leg—that will run through the plant. When that damp part hits off another potato, that infected area would hit off a perfectly good…that’s not infected yet…perfectly good potato. Once that hits off that, it transfers the bacteria from that onto that.

There’s no chemicals, there’s no cure, there’s no seed treatment. There’s absolutely nothing we can do about black leg. Only sunshine. It’s like a cancer. Everybody has it, but in a wet year, it comes out.

We’re still fighting this battle against blight. And we’re still losing.

THE IRISH IN AMERICA

BURT WOLF: English tariffs of the 1840s prevented the emergency importation of substitute grains. Relief efforts eventually got underway, but they were too little, and too late. For many, there was no choice but to emigrate. By 1850 over a million people had left Ireland, with most immigrating to the United States.

One of the distinguishing aspects of the immigration of the Irish to America is that there were almost the same number of men as women and that allowed the immediate formation of families. The Irish American community developed a strong identity from the moment they arrived in America.

EDWARD T. O’DONNELL ON CAMERA: Now, the Irish, of course, have been coming for… since the Colonial period. But their biggest wave was certainly in the 19th century, and their contribution, one of their biggest contributions, was that they arrived in such huge numbers, and really shocked America—forced America to really think about what it meant to be an American, and kind of expanded the definition. America was not particularly pleased with the arrival of the Irish and gradually, over time—it took a couple of generations—accepted them as Americans.

And you could look at something like the St. Patrick's Day Parade. It's held all across the country now. Every year on March 17th. It's a celebration of Irish identity. But it's been copied and replicated by every immigrant group since.

Other contributions by the Irish, probably the most evident one, is in the role that they played in building the American economy as laborers. They came with very few skills, with almost no money for the most part, but they did arrive with the need to work and the willingness to work…

…and if you look across America, the great infrastructure that was built, that made America the greatest economy in the world by the early 20th century—the railroads, the canals, the great projects like the Brooklyn Bridge—all were built overwhelmingly with Irish labor. Many other groups too, but Irish really were the key contributors to that development.

FRENCH FRIES & ENGLISH CHIPS

BARBARA WHEATON ON CAMERA: The potato doesn't make it into the upper class until after the French Revolution in the early 1800s. After they have fled France, and their cooks have fled France, because people like them were having their heads cut off, which is something nobody much cares for. And, they fled to parts of Europe where potatoes were already the ordinary fare for every class of society. Switzerland, and parts of Germany, and the low countries, and the British Isles. And so when everybody returned, the upper class knew how to eat potatoes, and were used to them, and the chefs had learned how to cook them. One little clue that I have found is that the great chef, Carème, has a recipe in his cookbook, which he publishes in Paris, I think in 1815, for what he calls, in his beautiful English, “mesha potatas,” which I take to be mashed potatoes. You know, so it had everybody's blessing. And then it was all right, even for the middle class to eat, because the upper class was eating them.

BURT WOLF: During the 1800’s street vendors in Paris started offering slices of fried potato. They were shaped like a quarter moon and called New Bridge Potatoes after one of the bridges that crossed the River Seine.

By 1870, they had made their way across the channel to England, where they were put together with fried fish to create England’s national fast food. At about the same time, they probably came over to the United States. What Americans call French fried potatoes are known as chips in England and what we call chips in America are called crisps in England, which of course makes perfect sense when you remember that George Bernard Shaw pointed out that the Americans and the English are two peoples “divided by a common language.”

THE POWER BEHIND THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: But the most important worldwide impact of the potato during the last 250 years is the way it allowed a small number of northern European countries to build a military, political and industrial base which allowed them to dominate the planet.

BURT WOLF: Take a look at a large scale potato operation and you can see what was happening. Potatoes yield two to four times as much nourishment per acre as grain.

All across Europe, the potato became the staple food of the poor—and the new working classes. It contributed to a population increase that was big enough to provide Europe not only with extra farm laborers, but with the workforce it needed for its transformation into an industrial society.

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: The expanding European population also filled the ranks of the imperial armies and navies, and their successes allowed Europeans to emigrate all over the world. The potato also fed the Russians and the Germans and, without the potato, it is highly unlikely that either of those countries would have become the industrial and military powers that they eventually became.

THE POTATO IN AMERICA

BURT WOLF: Fries, however, did not become very popular with Americans until the end of the First World War when American troops returned from the French front with a love of French fries. Americans eat most of their potatoes in the form of the French fry. Each year, Americans consume over thirty pounds of French fries per person.

They became even more popular during the 1930s when people started driving around the country in their own automobiles. Roadside restaurants began to serve fries because they were easily eaten in a car.

At the end of the Second World War there was a fantastic growth in the use of frozen foods, and the French fried potato became a major item in the new frozen food cases that were being introduced in supermarkets.

They also became the most popular food item in the restaurant business—for decades they have been the most profitable offering in fast food.

The extraordinary healthful and nutritional value of the potato has made it a staple of the American and European diets for hundreds of years. In one form or another, potatoes have become part of virtually everyone’s diet.

This lesson has not been lost on the developing world. Today, the potato is catching on in Africa and Asia, where nations struggling to feed hundreds of thousands of hungry people have been turning to the potato. In South Asia and in some parts of Africa, potato consumption has replaced rice and millet. These days, Rwandans eat more potatoes than the Irish.

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: So there you have it—the story of the potato. It fed the great Inca Empire and the Spanish who conquered it. In Ireland, it tried to keep a starving population alive. In northern Europe, it fed an expanding population, which allowed a handful of countries to dominate the world for 200 years. It became a staple in Asia and Africa and the most profitable item on American restaurant menus. For What We Eat, I’m Burt Wolf.

March 22, 2014

What We Eat: The Story of the Tomato - #105

March 22, 2014/ Guest User

BURT WOLF: What We Eat, the true story of why we put sugar in our coffee and ketchup on our fries.

Originally, all life that lived on land lived on one giant continent. Then forces inside the earth started breaking that land mass into the continents we have today and pushing them apart.

TIME TO PLAY KETCHUP
THE STORY OF THE TOMATO

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: When the first Spanish explorers arrived in Mexico it was being ruled by the Aztecs. The Aztecs had controlled Mexico and Central America since 1325. The Aztecs loved conquering their neighbors; it was a great way to spend the day— out in the fresh air, lots of good exercise, tons of looted treasure. But if they couldn’t conquer you they had a great fall back position. Let’s do a little business. Want to trade something.

BURT WOLF: The earliest published description of a tomato in Europe appeared in Italy in 1544. It was called a pomidoro, which means golden apple and suggests that the first tomatoes in Italy were yellow. Yellow tomatoes were associated with the yellow fruit of the mandrake plant, which was described in the Bible as an aphrodisiac. In many European countries the tomato became known as a “love apple”.

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: The English first encountered the tomato in Jamaica and corrupted the Spanish word for it into tomahto. But Noah Webster, who compiled Webster’s Dictionary, thought the word should rhyme with potato; so Americans call them tomatoes while the English still call them tomahtoes.

THE TOMATO CONQUERS EUROPE

BURT WOLF: Tomatoes did well throughout southern Europe—Spain, Southern France and Italy slowly incorporated them into their diets.

PAUL ROZIN ON CAMERA: It took a while to be adopted. You know, they're sort of bright and sort of frightening looking. It is hard to believe that Mediterranean cuisine didn't have tomatoes before 1600, but they didn't. It's like the essence of Mediterranean cuisine. They already had a pasta, they already had a. well, of course the green pepper or the red pepper that goes with the tomato in the sauce was also coming over from the new world, so the basic sauce that is used in the Mediterranean, except for the olive oil, is actually stuff that is new. And it is in many ways like a meat substitute. It adds both the color and some of the taste and texture of meat to foods. So it is widely popular, particularly in cuisines, like in the Mediterranean which is not, which are not high meat cuisines.

BURT WOLF: The tomato was around but no big deal. That changed however during the 1700s when famine swept through Italy. Suddenly they were hot stuff.

ANDY SMITH ON CAMERA: When famines occurred, they needed foods quickly and the tomato has the interesting characteristic that you put it in the ground, and three months later you have a plant bearing fruit. And so therefore, the southern Italians very quickly found out that one, they liked the tomato, and in addition to that, it was a famine food and in addition to that it could be used in so many different ways.

BURT WOLF: But tomatoes weren’t popular in northern Europe. The English had a particular dislike for them. They were different from the other fruits and vegetables that grew in Great Britain. And they didn’t match up with the diet recommended by most physicians.

For centuries doctors had practiced Humoral Medicine. All foods were divided into two groups—hot and cold. Doctors used these foods to balance the humors of the body. If you were having a hot time, doctors prescribed cool foods to bring you into line. If you were too cool, then hot foods were given to warm you up. In general, the more water a food held the cooler it was. Tomatoes were very cool.

ANDY SMITH ON CAMERA: And for the humoral system of medicine, what you do not want to do is eat a cold food in a cold country. And they identified England and northern Europe as cold countries, and so therefore you wouldn't want to eat them. But it was perfectly all right for an English man to go to Italy or to Spain and eat a tomato, because then they were in a hot country, and so therefore the balance between the hot country and the cold product was one that was good.

BURT WOLF: The English often took their holidays along the Mediterranean coast where tomatoes were part of the everyday menu. When they returned home they brought back a taste for the tomato. And by the mid 1700s, the tomato, as an edible plant, was being cultivated in England. Within a few decades most other Northern European countries added the tomato to their ingredient list.

THE TOMATO PILL

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: Back in America, the acceptance of the tomato was pretty much divided along the Mason- Dixon line. In the South, it was a regular part of the daily diet. In New England, however, it was not very important. They didn't grow well, took a long time to mature, and didn’t remind the New Englanders of anything they were already eating. Who needed it!

DEB FRIEDMAN ON CAMERA: Most people would find them something that were difficult to grow, and don't know how to use them readily. One of my favorite stories is of a girl named Susan Blunt, whose father brought tomato seeds home, grew the tomatoes, her mother used the tomatoes to make a pie. The family didn't like it. They fed the pie to the pig. The pig didn't like it. So, they decided not to grow tomatoes any more. For the most part, you find that, people knew what they were, but they weren't willing to put the time and effort into them, to grow them, because they don't last long. They have to be processed into something. Whereas a carrot buried in a bin of sand will last for several months, a tomato has to be made into a preserve, into a catsup, into a pie, pretty soon. And so, it demands a lot of attention very quickly

BURT WOLF: But the tomato’s hard time came to an end in 1834 when Dr. John Cook Bennett declared that the tomato would cure just about everything from dyspepsia to cholera. His claims were published in newspapers and magazines throughout the country. Bennet took a bunch of theories that had been circulating in the medical community and created a popular craze.

At one point Dr. Bennett met Dr. Alexander Miles who was busy selling a patent medicine called the “American Hygiene Pill”. Bennett suggested to Miles that he change the name of his pill to “Extract of Tomato.”

Miles began advertising his extract of tomato and virtually every newspaper in the country began publishing articles about miraculous tomato cures. They used the slogan “Tomato Pills Will Cure All Your Ills.”

A media wave surged through every region of the nation and all Americans--lower, middle and upper class--were infected with tomato mania. Even those who did not believe in tomato miracles believed that the tomato was a wholesome and delicious food.

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: In 1840, the medical Community decided to investigate the tomato pills and find out what was really inside them. After an exhaustive period of research they concluded that in fact there were no tomatoes in the tomato pill or in the liquid medicine. But that wasn’t important. What was important was that Americans were eating more and more tomatoes.

THE QUEEN OF AMERICA’S VEGETABLES

BURT WOLF: Tomatoes became even more important in North American cuisine when thousands of southern Italians immigrated to the U.S. after the Civil War. They planted tomatoes in their gardens, ate them raw, cooked them, and introduced them to their non-Italian neighbors. Many Italian immigrants worked in grocery stores and restaurants and continued to spread the tomato. But it had to be in a form that was acceptable to mainstream America—Italian-American cuisine was born.

By 1900 the first pizza parlors opened in New York City and the tomato hit the top of the charts. And the grocer’s shelves

PAUL ROZIN ON CAMERA: Pizza is the, probably the most popular food in the United States. It's not an American food. It’d be hard to know that. Any anthropologist who came and studied the globe would assume that pizza was the great native American food, and after all it's even made with tomatoes which are from our half of the world.

BURT WOLF: The tomato had become the “Queen of American Vegetables,” which was very bizarre because the tomato is a fruit not a vegetable. The definition is very straightforward. If the part we eat does not have a seed used for reproduction, it’s a vegetable — carrots, celery, lettuce, beets— no seeds. If the part that we eat has a seed used for reproduction, it’s a fruit — apples, pears, grapes, watermelon, all come with seeds. We eat the tomato and its seed; therefore, hence, ergo and accordingly, the tomato is a fruit.

Tomatoes are still the “Queen of America’s Vegetables” and although they won’t cure all your ills, they can help. They are full of vitamins A and C and contain an antioxident called lycopene. Lycopene is what gives tomatoes their vibrant red color and is found almost exclusively in tomatoes. Since 1995, research has shown a correlation between the intake of tomatoes and tomato-based foods and the diminished risk of certain forms of cancer, as well as heart disease.

California and Florida are the top two tomato producing states in the U.S. Each year, Florida dedicates approximately 42,000 acres of prime land to growing them.

In California there are nearly 200 farming families growing tomatoes.

About 3.7 billion pounds of tomatoes are produced in the United States each year.

Florida and California tomatoes grow up in a warm and sunny climate, and they like that kind of environment. So, don't put them in your refrigerator. Once a tomato is brought below 55 degrees Fahrenheit, it permanently loses the enzymes that create the flavor. The water inside begins to expand. The cell walls burst, and the texture becomes mealy. And store them stem side up. That's the way they grew. And like many of us, they don't enjoy standing on their heads.

HOW A FRUIT BECAME A VEGETABLE

BURT WOLF: Before the Civil War most commercially grown tomatoes were raised in Florida and transported to northern cities. During the war that supply was cut off so farmers in the Bahamas and other parts of the Caribbean started planting tomatoes and exporting them to the States. After the war, the Caribbean tomato trade expanded and began to threaten the profits of many U.S. growers. To protect American growers against this competition, Congress passed the Tariff Act of 1883. It levied a ten percent duty on imported vegetables.

In the spring of 1886 John Nix imported a shipment of tomatoes from the Caribbean to New York City, maintaining that they were a fruit rather than a vegetable. Nix paid the duty, under protest, and then brought suit to get his money back.

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: After six years of winding its way through the court system, Nix v. Hedden ended up being argued in front of the Supreme Court of the United States. And with its supreme knowledge, it decided that even though the tomato was botanically a fruit, it disguised itself as a vegetable as it moved through commerce and, being a tender vegetable, it needed to be protected. A ten percent duty was its protection. And so the Supreme Court of the United States turned a fruit into a vegetable. And isn’t that what justice is all about.

TIME TO PLAY KETCHUP

BURT WOLF: The word ketchup comes with an image of a thick, sweet, tomato-based condiment, which is poured, spooned and squirted on many of our foods. While it’s standard op for restaurants in the United States to have bottles of tomato ketchup, Americans neither created ketchup, nor, in its origin, was it a thick, sweet or tomato-based food.

ANDY SMITH ON CAMERA: The word ketchup is originally Chinese. And it's cats-y-ap is the original word. And it originally meant, fermented fish sauce, or fermented soy sauce...a very thin liquid-y sauce that was used mainly in cooking. It was not used as a condiment.

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: An ingredient.

ANDY SMITH ON CAMERA: It was used as an ingredient in the cooking and migrated from China into Southeast Asia, and into what's today Indonesia. And the Indonesians fell in love with this product, and which is now called ca-chop. And is available in all sorts of different variations in Indonesia today.

BURT WOLF: British explorers, traders and colonists moving through Asia came into contact with cachop. And when they got home they attempted to recreate the recipe, which became ketchup. Soybeans did not grow easily in Europe, so British cooks substituted other products, like anchovies, mushrooms, kidney beans, and later in the eighteenth century, walnuts. British colonists then brought their ketchup recipes to America.

ANDY SMITH ON CAMERA: And it's really not until about 1800 that Americans start fooling around with other products, just like the British did, and created a whole series of other ketchups ... all the fruit ketchups, apple ketchup, cherry ketchup, peach ketchup, and somebody went around and, and found that tomatoes made good ketchup, too. And up until about the Civil War, the three main ketchups, which were all gourmet foods--- you would have walnut ketchup, mushroom ketchup, and tomato ketchup. And at the bottom of menus from this period, they proudly announced that they had all three of these ketchups would be available if you went into the best restaurants of America at that time.

BURT WOLF: After the Civil War, the price of tomatoes dropped dramatically. What was originally three and a half dollars a pint for tomato ketchup became ten cents for a quart. The price of mushrooms and walnuts however remained the same. By 1896, The New York Tribune declared “Tomato Ketchup: America’s National Condiment.”

ARCHIVAL CLIP OF NEWSPAPER BOY ON CAMERA: EXTRA, EXTRA, read all about it…

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: Emily Aronson has been my producer for almost 30 years. And we get along pretty well. But we differ on ketchup. First of all, we do agree that it's the best sauce in the world. But she feels it has to be stored outside the refrigerator, where somewhere I came upon the idea that it should be stored in the refrigerator.

ANDY SMITH ON CAMERA: Emily is a very wise woman. You can just determine that not only by her love of ketchup, but in addition to that, ketchup does not need to be refrigerated. And in fact, I think cold ketchup is not as tasty as, as ketchup that comes in right at room temperature.

SOUP’S ON

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: At the end of the 1800s ketchup was only one of the foods being mass-produced. The War Between the States had created an enormous demand for foods that would stay fresh and travel. The American canning industry came of age and one of their most successful products was canned soup.

BURT WOLF: Tomato soup would have been just one soup among many had it not been for John T. Dorrance. In 1895, he began producing condensed soups. He sold five flavors in his first year: tomato, vegetable, chicken, consommé and oxtail. By 1904 however his company was making 21 different flavors and selling 16 million cans a year. The business of canned soups flourished and tomato soup was by far the most important.

When the Depression hit in the early 1930’s, soup became the main meal. At twelve cents per can, canned soups were healthy and inexpensive. Even if you bought fresh tomatoes and made your own soup you couldn’t do it as cheaply. During the 1930’s tomato soup became the most consumed canned food item in America.

SOME JUICY TOMATO

BURT WOLF: During the summer of 1917, Louis Perrin, was the French-American chef at a resort in French Lick Springs, Indiana. One day he started serving his guests tomato juice.

It was just an experiment but Chicago businessmen loved it and spread the word: Tomato juice was great stuff.

By the 1920s, tomato juice was being promoted as a health drink. Canned tomato drinks were getting more popular, but none of the products yielded the juice with just the right color and flavor. And the tomato solids settled to the bottom of the can, or glass—not what the public wanted.

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: In 1924, Ralph Kemp of Frankfort, Indiana started looking for a way to break up tomato pulp into tiny little particles that would float in tomato juice but not an easy thing to do. It took him four hears of experimentation. Finally ended up using something called a viscolizer which had previously been used in the making of ice cream. Then in 1928 he introduced the first true tomato juice with a national ad campaign and it became an instant success.

BURT WOLF: One reason tomato juice was so successful was that it arrived as prohibition left. A cocktail made of tomato juice and vodka was probably introduced by Ferdinand “Pete” Petiot at Harry’s Bar in Paris. During the 1930’s, Pete moved to New York and introduced his new creation to America. Eventually, he added Worcestershire Sauce and called it a Bloody Mary.

Ernest Hemingway claims that he personally introduced the Bloody Mary to the bars of Hong Kong. He spent his evenings going from bar to bar teaching the bartenders how to properly prepare and serve the Bloody Mary. Hemingway was a founding member of the Inebriationists, a non-profit society devoted to the cross-cultural exchange of recipes based on distilled spirits.

BURT WOLF: During the late 1940s, tomato throwing became an organized event in Bunyol, a town 25 miles west of Valencia, Spain. The Tomatina festival, held on the last Wednesday in August, has been officially sponsored by the city since 1979. More than 30,000 people pelt each other and the city with tomatoes.

Throwing tomatoes is a good old American tradition that dates back to the middle of the 1800s. It started in rural areas at the end of the season when the price of the tomato had dropped so low that they weren’t worth picking. People just tossed them at each other for sport.

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: Eventually it moved into urban theaters where it became the critical counterpart to throwing flowers. In recent years, target acquisition has expanded to include politicians, famous figures and cameramen.

OFF CAMERA: NICE SHOT!

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: For What We Eat I’m Burt Wolf.

March 22, 2014

What We Eat: The Story of Livestock in America - #104

March 22, 2014/ Guest User

BURT WOLF: What We Eat, the true story of why we put sugar in our coffee and ketchup on our fries.

Originally, all life that lived on land lived on one giant continent. Then forces inside the earth started breaking that land mass into the continents we have today and pushing them apart.

DOMESTICATED BLISS
THE STORY OF LIVESTOCK IN AMERICA

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: When Columbus arrived in the Caribbean he entered a world with almost no domesticated animals. No cattle, no horses, no pigs. In the entire Western Hemisphere, there were only four domesticated mammals and two domesticated fowl.

BURT WOLF: Columbus made a note in his diary reporting that he had not seen any sheep or goats or any other beasts. And though he’d only been there a half a day he certainly would have seen them if they were there. He did see dogs that never barked and noted that all the trees were as different from those in Spain as night from day, and so were the fruits and the rocks and all things.

The llama, the alpaca, the guinea pig and the Muscovy duck lived in South America. Turkeys could be found in parts of Mexico. But only the dog was widespread.

And that was it. No large animals to ride or help with the farming. The New World was filled with wild game and fish, but it was the domesticated animals of Europe that changed the way people ate, how they lived and traveled, and even the very surface of the land itself. In the spring of 1493 Columbus made his triumphant return to Spain. Ferdinand and Isabella appointed him to start a mining company and an agricultural colony on the island of Hispaniola. These days that island is known as Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

In May of that year he set sail from Spain. Instead of just the Nina, and the Pinta, and the Santa Maria, he now had 17 ships, 1200 men, 10 mares, 24 stallions, burros, sheep and a full complement of cattle and pigs. The animals did well on Hispaniola because the local diseases did not affect them, there was an unlimited amount of feed, and few predators. They reproduced at an extraordinary rate and within 10 years they had taken up residence on most of the Caribbean islands.

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: Strangely enough, the first colony in the Caribbean was considered a failure because the explorers didn’t find any gold. But the domesticated livestock that they brought in ended up insuring the success of all future Spanish colonies in the Americas.

BURT WOLF: The domestication of animals began about 10,000 years ago with the reindeer and the dog. It wasn't until someone decided to stay put, grow crops and live in one place that animals were bred in captivity and put to use. Most people assume that we domesticated animals for economic reasons - cattle as a source of meat and milk; sheep as a source of wool. But that may not actually be the case.

DANIEL GADE ON CAMERA: If you go back to the archaeological record, on some of these animals, you realize that they had very important cultic, religious associations. So that, for example, the cattle. Cattle were very strongly associated in their early stages of domestication with the lunar goddess cult, because of the lunar or moon-like arrangement of their horns, and so they became symbolic for the cult purposes, and as a result of that then they were bred in captivity, as a way of getting more animals for the cult.

HOME ON THE RANGE OR IN THE OVEN

BURT WOLF: Southern Spain was the only place in Europe where open range cattle ranching on horseback was a tradition. Herding on horseback, branding cattle and driving beef to market were all developed during the Middle Ages by Spanish cattlemen.

The huge open rangelands in the Americas were just what the Spaniards understood, and they covered them with their cattle and horses. In a world with few natural predators and an endless food supply, their livestock multiplied at rates unimaginable in Europe.

The Spanish produced breeding herds in the Caribbean and Mexico, and by 1565, on ranches in Florida. Scottish Highlanders and black slaves from West Africa set up open cattle ranges in the Low Country of South Carolina. The low country farmers kept the cattle penned in-in small common pastures. They herded the animals on foot, using rawhide whips and dogs. In fact, the word, "cowboy" is the British word for a cattle herder.

DANIEL GADE ON CAMERA: Remember that song, "get along, little doggie?"

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: Yes.

DANIEL GADE ON CAMERA: Well, that word doggie is believed to have come from West Africa. In Texas, it's used as a name for a small orphaned calf or a steer. That's what that word doggie means. Its origin goes back to the Carolina low country, and then ultimately to West Africa, because that is a word that means, in the Bambara language, of West Africa, small. So that was brought to the New World, and then to Texas, where it was used also.

BURT WOLF: Throughout the history of raising cattle most people weren’t concerned with owning the land, they just needed to use the grass on the land. The right to graze was the important thing. In northern England grazing land was not owned by individuals - it was set up as a common public area. The English carried that practice to the new world and in 1634 laid out the Boston Commons for pasturing cattle.

Following the Civil War, some cattle owners had thousands of animals, but not one acre of land. In fact, in the western U.S. today, most ranching is done on public lands.

With the cattle came the plow, a tool unknown in the Americas. Farmers in the Middle East and Europe had used the plow since its invention in Mesopotamia some 5,000 years ago. It was pulled by oxen and allowed farmers to cultivate huge areas of land.

By contrast, the Native Americans used a digging stick for farming. It was an efficient tool for planting small plots of corn or beans but it was useless to turn over the matted, grassy sod of the plains.

ALFRED CROSBY ON CAMERA: American Indians developed some very high civilizations but they simply didn't have a power source. They didn't have gigantic animals to pull and haul things all around. And Peru and the Andean civilization that we think of as being the Incan civilization. They had a llama but you cannot ride a llama. And llamas are very unhappy if you try to pack more than a 100 pounds on them. In the Mesoamerican civilization the Aztecs, and the Mixtecs and all those people when they wanted to move anything a hundred miles, they packed it on somebody's back, and the person took off with it.

BURT WOLF: Bringing both cattle and the plow to the western hemisphere dramatically altered the landscape and the diet of the Americas. The oxen were strong enough to pull an iron plow across the plains. The plow transformed the grasslands into fields of wheat and corn. The cattle converted unfarmed grasslands into meat and milk. Native Americans had no animals that gave them this kind of protein.

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: In South America, cattle ranching was essential to the colonial expansion. The enormous amount of beef that came from the ranches made it easier for the Spanish and their workers to concentrate on getting the silver out of the mines. They weren’t concerned about a dependable food supply. They never asked, “Where’s the beef?” They knew it was just down the road.

BURT WOLF: Cattle ranching was perfect for the self-image that Americans were building. A cattle rancher was an entrepreneur, open to new technologies, attracted by upward social mobility, challenged to make life more efficient. The cowboy, free and independent, became an icon in American folklore. But he picked up his vocabulary and his style -- everything from bronco to rodeo -- from the Spanish. The cowboy that John Wayne made part of American culture, turns out to have been imported from Spain, the Scottish Highlands and West Africa.

Today Bud Adams is raising cattle on the same Florida grasslands where North American ranching began almost 500 years ago.

BUD ADAMS ON CAMERA: We’ve raised these Braford cattle here now for about 50 years. And about ten years ago we began to evaluate our business and try to determine what kind of cattle would produce the meat that the public would desire in the year 2000. So, in the early 1990s we produced hybrids. And these hybrids, we can tailor make ‘em to provide a more marbling or a little more red meat. And so as the quality of the beef is improved, why the consumption of beef has gone up.

EVERYONE SADDLES UP

BURT WOLF: It is one of those inexplicable twists of fate that sent the Spanish to conquer the Americas. They were the only people likely to show up with horses and of all the animals imported into the Americas the horse was the essential element in Spain’s conquest. For over 700 years, parts of Spain were under the control of the Moors who had come across the Mediterranean from North Africa. They were some of the most skilled horsemen in the world and they passed on their equestrian knowledge to the Spanish.

By 1492, the horse had become part of daily life in Spain and Portugal — and that held for all levels of society—not just the nobles. Horses were easy to get, inexpensive and the most efficient mode of transportation known to Europeans, which is why they were part of the cargo during Columbus’s second voyage.

BURT WOLF: The natives of the Caribbean thought that a horse’s favorite food was a Caribbean native. And the Indians of Chile were terrified of the Spanish horses —they believed that the horse and its rider were one animal. The horse changed the battle odds.

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: The horse first evolved in the Americas, about 55 million years ago, and existed continuously since then in the wild, until about 8 to10,000 years ago when they disappeared and nobody really knows why. They were reintroduced into the western hemisphere by the Spanish conquistadors who brought them to the Caribbean and Mexico. Now some of those horses escaped and went back to the wild. And by the time the Spanish got to Argentina there were hundreds of thousands of wild horses covering the grasslands.

BURT WOLF: Contemporary accounts from the 1600s claim that there were so many wild horses in the Americas that when a herd crossed a road it was necessary for travelers to wait an entire day or more. If they didn’t, the wild horses would carry off the tame stock.

By the end of the 1500s, horses were grazing throughout the Western hemisphere — everyone, including the Native Americans, were "saddling up". If you could catch a wild horse you could own one.

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: In North America there were many wild horses and the only visible connection between them and human beings was often a collar that hung around their neck with a hook. And when they’d try to jump a fence to get to the crops the hook would hold them back. In our early Colonial period, fences were used primarily not to keep livestock in, but to keep wild animals out.

BURT WOLF: Early settlers tend to live on isolated farms —they had to travel large distances for everyday needs. Being able to have your own horse in exchange for the simple act of catching it was a great gift to the frontiersman. The horse became the common carrier for the common man. There were more horses both wild and tame in the western hemisphere than anywhere else in the world. Their numbers shaped early European societies in the Americas more firmly and more permanently than the discovery of gold.

THE NEW LANDSCAPE

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: European settlers changed the balance of nature in the western hemisphere. The greatest impact came from the livestock. They ate all the plants and destroyed the root structure. Then the farmers came along with the oxen, plowed up all the protective ground cover.

They ended up with huge tracks of land covered with weeds and coarse grass.

BURT WOLF: As early as the1580s, overgrazing in Mexico was apparent. Cattle were starving in certain areas. Scrub palms took over the open grasslands. When the riches of the grasslands were gone, the increase in herds slowed and in some cases stopped completely. The history is best known in Mexico, but evidence suggests that during the 16th and 17th centuries similar problems occurred throughout the Americas.

HOG HEAVEN

BURT WOLF: The pig was first domesticated from the wild boar in Southwest Asia about 10,000 years ago. They have been raised in Spain and Portugal for at least 2,000 years. After the bull, the pig is Spain's favorite cult animal.

To a great extent the pig's special place in Spanish society comes from its role as a symbol of Christian resistance. For over 700 years, Muslims occupied Spain, beginning in 711 and ending with their expulsion in 1492. Christians ate pork. Muslims didn't. Eating pork was a way for Spanish Christians to assert their identity. The enormous selection of pork products in Spanish cuisine reflects this historical importance.

Hundreds of different sausages, suckling pigs, dried and cured ham.

In rural America the pig was a poor man's bank. The farmer could bank on the fact that the little piglet he bought in the spring would be large enough to butcher in late autumn and feed his family during the winter. The remaining pork meat earned enough money to purchase another piglet for the spring, which continued the cycle. This may have been where wee got the idea of the Piggy Bank.

DANIEL GADE ON CAMERA: There were some domesticated animals here in the Americas, but in fact, most people didn't have much protein. And so one can argue that the introduction of all of this livestock across the ocean benefited not just the Spanish colonists or the American colonists, the Europeans, but also the native people, and so this you can say enhanced their health, because the human body gets its protein, most efficiently through animal protein.

The other thing here is food security. Livestock on a farm presents an alternative, so that if you're a farmer whose crop is attacked by insect pests, or drought, you can depend then on the livestock that you've got. Selling them in the market for cash, or slaughtering them and eating them. So that was a form of food security, that I think also has to be seen here as an advantage of the introduction of livestock to the New World.

PORK TO BEEF

BURT WOLF: In the Americas, pork was popular from the beginning. Marooned sailors, pirates and castaways living on the northern beaches of the island of Hispaniola used a native cooking technique, which consisted of a grating of green twigs, placed over a pit of burning wood that had been dug into the sand. Their pork was cooked on top. The grating was called a boucan, and the men who used it were called buccaneers. Their life style gave us the word buccaneer and their cooking technique gave us the word barbeque.

CHRIS SCHLESINGER ON CAMERA: The differences in barbeque - let’s start with North Carolina - where they’re primarily known for shredded pork right? In the eastern part of the state with a little vinegar - in the western part of the state with a little tomato sauce. Then we go down to Memphis where we still have the shredded pork and we start picking up some ribs and then we come up to Kansas City where we kind of leave the shredded pork, we stay with the ribs and we pick up some beef brisket and then down to Texas where it’s primarily beef brisket. So it’s a little “s” that starts with pork and ends with brisket.

BURT WOLF: During our colonial period southern hospitality was more about barbecuing pork than serving tea. Farmers raised as many pigs as they could because pigs took very little time away from their main crops of cotton and tobacco.

But eventually beef started to replace pork as the meat of choice. In Europe, steak was expensive—a sign of wealth. Successful immigrants to America ordered strip steak over pork chops as proof of their new status. Beef was also touted as a healthy food.

Because of successful cattle ranching, steaks, filets, ribs, roasts and stews, all became an inexpensive part of the daily diet . Beef also fit into the American concept of efficient food preparation. A chopped beef patty cooks in minutes. Hamburgers became an American phenomenon.

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: By 1600s one of the least expensive foods in the Americas was meat. The Spanish colonists probably ate more meat than any other group in the world. For over 500 years Europeans in the Americas have been the best-fed people, a fact that has led more people to immigrate here than all of the religious and ideological forces combined. For What We Eat, I'm Burt Wolf.

March 22, 2014

What We Eat: The Story of Chili Peppers - #103

March 22, 2014/ Guest User

BURT WOLF: What We Eat, the true story of why we put sugar in our coffee and ketchup on our fries.

Originally, all life that lived on land lived on one giant continent. Then forces inside the earth started breaking that land mass into the continents we have today and pushing them apart.

SOME LIKE IT HOT
THE STORY OF CHILI PEPPERS

BURT WOLF: The small round dry black pepper that we grind in a mill is native to India and was brought to ancient Greece and Rome by Arab traders. It was so valuable in Europe that both the Spanish and the Portuguese spent fortunes sending out expeditions to try and break the Arab monopoly

BARBARA KETCHAM WHEATON ON CAMERA: The king and queen of Spain were anxious to get a new route to the, spice islands of the East Indies, by sailing West. Because, due to political disruption in Asia, the traditional spice routes were breaking down, and it was getting increasingly complicated to get spices from the West.

BURT WOLF: Columbus made an entry in his diary that described the chili pepper as more valuable than the black pepper and pointed out that the natives constantly used it and thought it had health-giving properties. He estimated that each year, 50 ships filled with chili peppers could be sent back to Spain and they would prove to be exceedingly profitable.

BARBARA KETCHAM WHEATON ON CAMERA: The spices were used more, because they fitted in with the, that period's idea of what was proper nutrition. People had four different temperaments. Choleric, sanguine, melancholy, and phlegmatic. Ideas we're still familiar with. And, they, if you were melancholy, or phlegmatic, more spices would sort of "ginger you up," so to speak. I mean, in fact we still sort of think of that, and people are now eating ginger and thinking they're doing healthy things. No ideas in food ever go away.

BURT WOLF: The birthplace of the hot pepper was probably central Bolivia and over the centuries it became the spice most used by Native Americans. You can usually tell how far down the evolutionary line a particular pepper is by looking at its size—the smaller it is the closer it is to its wild ancestor.

Today Mexico raises the largest variety of peppers. There are over 1600 different varieties of pungent pepper with new forms constantly being developed. Annual rainfall, soil chemistry, and daily temperature patterns affect the development of each species. The peppers grow on plants that are two or three feet high. They start out green and color as they ripen.

In general the hotter the climate a pepper grows in, the more pungent it will be. But it’s not just the annual temperature that counts. Long hot nights are necessary to really give the pepper a pungency. And if it’s stressed by lack of water or bad soil it will get even hotter.

MAYA THESE HOT

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: Archeological evidence indicates that the natives of Mexico have been using chili peppers for 7,000 years. At one point they were used to pay taxes, probably in a building just like this. And even after the Spanish conquest of Mexico, they were used as a tribute. Antonio de Mendoza, the first viceroy of what he liked to call New Spain, demanded chili peppers from the people he conquered.

BURT WOLF: These are the ancient buildings of the Maya, who have lived on Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula for centuries; they eat one of the hottest peppers of all—the habanero.

Amal Naj, who wrote an excellent book titled PEPPERS, believes that the habanero is a symbol of Maya independence within Mexico. The habanero is the pepper of choice for the Maya who were never completely subjugated by the Spanish. They see their pepper as a badge of their self-determination. At the same time they feel that the jalapeño— which is more popular with mainland Mexicans—symbolizes the European invader.

PEPPERING THE WORLD

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: A key moment in the history of hot pepper came with the signing of the papal Treaty in 1494.

BURT WOLF: At a point that was 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands; the Pope took his magic marker and drew a longitudinal line that divided the world in two. The Spanish had the right to explore and trade in the area to the west; Portugal got everything to the east, which included Africa and Asia.

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: But they didn’t get around to drawing a second line in the Far East. So in 1529, the pope had to come all the way back and construct the Treaty of Zaragoza, which gave Spain the Philippines and Portugal the Spice Islands. As a result the Portuguese and the Spanish spread hot peppers around the world.

JESSICA HARRIS ON CAMERA: The transatlantic journey took months, certainly, weeks, and yet and still, by the 16th Century, there ‘re chilis in India. And people are not only using them but adapting, adjusting and loving them. And much of that gets attributed to the Portuguese. I sort of have this mental picture of those black-robed Jesuits with deep pockets and sort of seeds and things coming out of these pockets. And part of it was the whole virtual mandate after Prince Henry the Navigator. The Portuguese were the world explorers. I mean, they're the ones who circumnavigated the globe. The whole idea of the Treaty of Tordesillas and East and West in that division and who owned the East, and of course that line is the line that makes Brazil speak Portuguese.

BURT WOLF: African slaves were the primary source of labor in the Portuguese and Spanish colonies. The Portuguese ended up traveling around the world looking for new sources of slaves and as they traveled they brought along their hot peppers. By the time the British came to dominate the slave trade in the middle of the 1600s, American peppers where so important to Africans that the British included them in their rations onboard the boats that carried the slaves to the Americas.

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: But strangely enough, when Columbus brought hot peppers back to Europe they were not well accepted except in Hungary. At the time Hungary was controlled by the Turks who had learned about hot peppers from Arab and Indian traders and brought them back to the Hungarians. The Hungarians loved the flavor but not the heat. So at harvest time they would cut out the seeds and the veins where the heat was concentrated and dry out the rest of the pepper. They’d grind it into a powder which was called paprika…the flavor of Hungary.

BURT WOLF: The micro-climate needed for growing the pepper used to make paprika is so specific that only Hungary has been able to produce the highest quality on a commercial scale. But even without the ability to produce paprika the rest of the world is doing quite well with pungent versions of the chili pepper.

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: It appears that one out of every five people on the planet eat hot peppers everyday. Most of the people say they do that because they like the taste but there may be an additional reason that’s even better. Scientists have discovered that people who eat hot peppers are generally healthier than people who don’t. Especially in hot climates. There’s something in a hot pepper and in garlic that helps kill the microorganisms that spoil food. So societies that have developed without refrigeration over the last three or four thousand years have incorporated hot peppers into their diet. And they’re healthier for it.

BURT WOLF: In general, poor people eat more hot peppers than the rich. If a diet is based on plain and bland foods, which is often the case in poor communities, hot pepper will bring flavor to the meal because it has the ability to open the mouth’s flavor receptors and make your taste buds more sensitive. Almost everything you eat will taste better with pepper.

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: Hot peppers actually came late to North America kind of late. Mexican colonists brought them up into the American southwest; slaves and immigrants brought them from the Caribbean into the American South. But by and large North Americans got along without them.

BURT WOLF: These days, however, pungent peppers in the United States are becoming a hot business. They have the greatest profit of any legally grown cash crop.

NASA ANNOUNCER: Three - Two - One - and we have lift off of the space shuttle Columbia on an international life science and micro gravity mission.

BURT WOLF: The United States is becoming a nation of pepper lovers. People who had no interest in pungent foods are beginning to try them and those who are already into the hot sauce want it hotter. In 1982, hot sauce was part of the basic rations for American astronauts in space, but astronaut William Lenoir took a fresh jalapeno along just to play safe.

TABASCO

BURT WOLF: The most popular branded use of chili peppers in the world is probably Tabasco Sauce, which is sold in over 100 countries. It’s made on Avery Island which is a twenty-two hundred acre cap that sits on top of a giant salt dome that rises up from an ancient seabed about 140 miles west of New Orleans.

Since 1862 the family that owned the island has been quarrying the salt in the dome. During the War Between the States they supplied it to the Confederacy, which led to the Union Army invading the island and destroying the salt works.

When the war was over the family went back into the salt business. At this time Edmund McIlhenny, a prominent local banker who had married into the family, began to experiment with a pepper sauce. Edmund had been introduced to Tabasco Peppers which had been brought up from Mexico or Central America. Edmund planted the peppers in his garden and used them to add flavor to the monotonous food that was available after the War.

Around 1866, he started using the peppers to make a hot sauce. The peppers were crushed, mixed with Avery Island salt and aged for thirty days in jars or wooden barrels. At that point, French wine vinegar was added. The final blend was aged for another thirty days and regularly hand-stirred throughout the period in order to blend the flavors. Edmund poured the finished sauce into small cologne bottles which he corked and sealed with green wax. And that’s just about the way it’s made today -- except today the pepper mash is aged for three years instead of only two months. And a McIllhenny examines the mash and decides when it’s ready for processing and bottling. A member of the family still walks the fields and marks the peppers that are ready for harvesting. The pickers spot a ripe pepper by comparing its color to a stick that has been painted with the color of a perfect ripe pepper.

THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON CAPSAICIN

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: In 1877, a British scientist working in India discovered the substance in a hot pepper that makes it hot. Inside the pod and concentrated in the seeds and the white pith is a substance called Capsaicin. But it’s not the amount of capsaicin in the pepper that makes it hot, it’s its molecular chain. The shorter the molecular chain the more powerful the pepper.

PAUL ROZIN ON CAMERA: Capsaicin produces an irritation response in the mouth, burning sensation, and also in the nose, and if you happen to get it in the eyes, it's very, very irritating. And it is interesting because people eat it. And, what are they doing eating something that causes so much distress. Little infants don't like it, little children in Mexico, where it comes from, don't like it. And yet it's now probably the most popular spice in the world if you don't count garlic as a spice. And it's eaten by, probably, a billion to two billion people every day. So it's one of those remarkable turnarounds.

PAUL ROZIN ON CAMERA: When you continually get pain, there's reason to believe your body mobilizes its own opiate system called endorphins in the brain which modulate the pain. Now normally, if you do something painful you'll stop doing it. But in the peculiar case of chili pepper, or by the way smoking, where there's a lot of social pressure to keep it up, you keep inflicting pain on yourself. It's not a normal event. And in that case, it's possible that the body's endorphin response builds and builds and builds, and even overshoots what it has to do and ends up producing a pleasure experience, even though it was originally there to simply modulate the pain.

PAUL ROZIN CONTINUED ON CAMERA: So, it's pretty clear that people get to like the very same thing that they originally don't like. That is, their mouth doesn't change, they're just become ... the same ... the same message goes to their brain. It was originally get this out of my mouth, and now it's boy, that tastes good.

BURT WOLF: In 1912, the pharmacist Wilbur Scoville developed a technique for measuring the heat of a pepper. The Scoville scale ranges from zero for the green bell pepper to 210,000 for the habanero.

IRWIN ZIMENT: It’s one of the hottest peppers known and people who are not used to taking it could probably suffer a terrible choking sensation. I certainly would not advise anybody to indulge lightly in peppers if they’re not used to them. On the other hand, if somebody is used to pungent peppers and they’re building up their need for the bigger thrill then habanero is up at the top along with a few other Asiatic peppers nowadays. It’s quite probable that people who get that incredible sensation of burning, that firey feeling are releasing all sorts of hormones in response and maybe the pepper high is equivalent to the bungy jump.

BURT WOLF: Different peppers impact different parts of the mouth. Since each part of your mouth is sensitive to different tastes, where you get hit is important.

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: Which brings me to the question of first aid. Capsaicin does not dissolve in water, so if you’re mouth is burning and you drink a glass of water all you do is spread out the pain. It does however dissolve in alcohol. So when you’re in pain, you get a glass of vodka and use it as a mouthwash but don’t forget to spit it out.

DR. PEPPER WILL SEE YOU NOW

BURT WOLF: For thousands of years, hot peppers have been used in Mexico, Central and South America for their medicinal effects. The Aztecs rubbed hot peppers on sore muscles. The Maya made a drink of hot peppers which they used to cure stomach pains. And they rubbed hot peppers on their gums to stop toothaches.

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: When Columbus first sent hot peppers back to Spain they were treated more as a medicine than a spice. During the 1500s, doctors recommended them for an assortment of illnesses. Sailors took them on board to prevent scurvy. They were also thought to improve eyesight.

BURT WOLF: Dr. Albert Szent-Györgyi was the first scientist to discover the hot pepper’s medicinal value. Albert’s wife loved peppers; and Albert didn’t. One night he took his plate of hot peppers to his lab so he could not eat them and not offend his wife. Out of curiosity, he studied the peppers and found them to be a great source of vitamin C. In 1937, he got a Nobel Prize for his work.

Recently, scientists in the United States have been studying hot peppers as a possible cure for a number of diseases. Dr Ziment has become a leading authority on the subject who may end up as the ultimate Dr. Pepper.

IRWIN ZIMENT: Almost all the expectorants that are in popular use today are old herbal remedies. When I looked into these remedies I was amazed to find that there’s very little evidence that they work. And yet to me it was common experience that if I take horseradish or hot pepper in my mouth it made me cough, it made my nose run. And so I recognized a long time ago that the routine medications utilizes expectorants of the treatment of cough were unproven and hard to demonstrate as being effective. Whereas peppers and other pungent spices are extremely effective.

BURT WOLF: When you have a cold mucus becomes thick and stops flowing, coughing begins and breathing problems develop. The medicines prescribed for these conditions, like Robitussin, Sudafed, and Vicks Formula 44-D, are designed to thin the mucus and get it flowing again. The capsaicin in hot peppers acts in the same way as the medicines.

IRWIN ZIMENT: And it’s interesting to know that the Food and Drug Administration approved the use of Capsaicin for the purpose of treating pain and arthritis and it’s available as a prescription drug. I think I’m right when I say that chili peppers are the only spice which have given rise to a drug which has been approved by the FDA for prescription by orthodox physicians.

BURT WOLF: Dr. Ziment thinks that Columbus may have suffered from a respiratory illness which might explain why Columbus made such a strong pitch for hot peppers. People are often interested in anything that has to do with their own medical problems.

(COLUMBUS SNEEZES)….”Salute”.

IRWIN ZIMENT: Columbus was a magnificent neurotic-deluded neurotic. And I like to think that probably he also had bronchitis and had a strong personal interest in looking for a better cure for his bronchitis. And ideally finding the right type of peppers would have been an adequate treatment. And I don't say this entirely lightly because there’s good evidence from earliest history that peppers were not just used as food flavors they were used as medicines and one of the major things they were always used for in history as hot remedies they were utilized for treating cold diseases. Namely, the common cold and bronchitis.

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: It appears that chili peppers were the first spice used by human beings and they changed just about every cuisine on the planet from Indian curry to Texas chili. Looks like Columbus discovered a spice that was more valuable than the one he was looking for and one that might turn out to be an important medicine. For What We Eat, I’m Burt Wolf.

March 22, 2014

What We Eat: The Story of Sugar - #102

March 22, 2014/ Guest User

BURT WOLF: What We Eat, the true story of why we put sugar in our coffee and ketchup on our fries.

Originally, all life that lived on land lived on one giant continent. Then forces inside the earth started breaking that land mass into the continents we have today and pushing them apart.

HOW SWEET IT IS
THE STORY OF SUGAR

BURT WOLF: Twelve thousand years ago in New Guinea, people started chewing on sugar cane to satisfy their sweet tooth. About 10,000 years later, in India, people learned to make solid sugar from the cane juice. A skill that traders eventually brought to the Middle East.

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: Starting in the 600s, Arab armies began marching out of the Middle East, and conquering parts of North Africa and southern Europe. When they invaded Spain, they introduced the Spanish to sugar who slowly adopted it. Slowly is the operative word here. Six centuries later and only a few Europeans could afford the stuff.

BURT WOLF: But during the 12th century things began to change. The knights who went to the Middle East during the Crusades came in contact with sugar. It was a basic part of Middle Eastern medicine and gastronomy. They loved it. When they returned to Europe they spread the word.

But the Crusaders did more than just introduce Europe to the idea of sugar. During the early years of the Crusades they conquered large parts of the Middle East; in one area, called the kingdom of Jerusalem, they oversaw the cultivation of sugar cane and the production of sugar.

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: The mills are still visible at a site near Jericho. The Knights of Malta got into the business and so did the merchants of Venice. As a result of the Crusades, Europeans were able to turn sugar production into a small but highly profitable business.

SUGAR-COATED PILLS

BURT WOLF: From the tenth to the eighteenth century sugar was considered a wonder drug. Every medicine used during the Black Plague contained sugar. Sugar had become so much a part of medicine that people used the expression, “like an apothecary without sugar” to describe a state of total helplessness or desperation.

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: During its extraordinary history sugar has had five major uses: as a medicine, as a spice, as a material for making sculptures, as a preservative and as a sweetener. And during most of that history those functions have overlapped. Over 2,000 years ago, an ancient Greek visitor to India reported that he had came across a hard honey, with a consistency of salt, called saccharon, which people mixed with water and used as a medicine for stomach aches.

SUGAR ON DISPLAY

BURT WOLF: Sugar has the ability to combine with many other ingredients. One result was the introduction of marzipan, an edible blend of sugar and almonds that could be used to form sculptures.

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: During the 1200s bakers in England and France began making sculptures out of sugar. They were very elaborate, brought to the table, admired and eventually eaten.

They were called subtleties and because of the enormous expense of sugar at the time they were only available in the homes of the nobles and leaders of the church. The most outrageous description of a subtlety that I ever saw was one that was made in Egypt, it was a full sized mosque and it was made to celebrate a religious event. After the ceremonies were over, beggars were invited in to eat the building.

BURT WOLF: During the 15th and 16th centuries, subtleties were all the rage. Costly and precise replicas of important buildings and works of art were shaped by bakers who were considered artists in their own right.

The idea of using sugar to embody feelings was so powerful that subtleties have survived into modern times. Decorated wedding cakes, birthday cakes, anniversary cakes, they all commemorate important events and mark their significance. Even the yellow marshmallow chicks sold at Easter are modern subtleties.

FROM NAPLES TO NASSAU

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: During the 13th and 14th centuries sugar consumption was increasing in Europe and by the 15th century the governments of Portugal and Spain were encouraging entrepreneurs to set up sugar plantations on the Atlantic islands off the coast of Africa. Spain took the Canaries and Portugal took Madeira.

BURT WOLF: On Madeira the Portuguese wanted to produce something that would be in great demand in the cities of Europe — something they could produce cheaper, better, faster, and in greater quantity than anyone else. Honeybees were producing honey and wax for export. Wheat and wine were doing well but nobody was getting rich. They needed something that would bring in the big bucks… and that turned out to be sugar.

The colonists devoted themselves to the production of sugar and by the end of the 1400s, they were exporting almost four million pounds of sugar to London, Paris, Rome, and Constantinople.

RAISING CANE

BURT WOLF: The production of sugar is a difficult process. It starts with the cultivation of the cane — a tall grass with sweet, juicy stalks that grows to a thickness of two inches and a height of twelve to fifteen feet. It takes nine to eighteen months to ripen. As a rule, sugarcane produces more calories per unit of land in a given time than any other crop in its climate.

Cane looks like bamboo but instead of a hollow center, it’s filled with a sappy pulp. The cane must be cut as soon as it’s ripe or it begins to lose some of the sucrose in the juice. And as soon as it is cut the juice must be extracted or it will ferment and rot.

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: The sugar cane was brought from the fields to the milling operation where it was crushed and pounded to extract the juice. Then in a complicated series of operations that required both heating and cooling, the sucrose in the juice was crystallized.

To pull this off was a time sensitive operation and it required a great deal of coordination between the workers in the fields and the workers in the mills. To find a labor force that could do this was always an economic challenge to the plantation owners.

SIDNEY MINTZ ON CAMERA: So the plantation necessarily involved two kinds of labor force. Unskilled, to do the cutting, and hard labor. And skilled to do the … if you will, quasi- chemical processes involved in manufacturing the sugar. Because it takes this particular form, it's an enterprise in which time matters. And so we have an enterprise very early in human history that involves two kinds of labor force. Factory and field. And an element of time ... time discipline. This made these enterprises really quite exceptional in the history of industry. You’ve got some of the main features of modern capitalist enterprise, but the real sticking point here is that the labor force for a New World plantations at least, was almost entirely enslaved, and this was true really almost from their very beginnings, until the middle of the 19th Century.

BURT WOLF: African slaves brought to work in the fields provided a continual supply of free labor. During the 400 years of African slavery, at least 10 million people were shipped to the Americas.

THE BRITISH ARE COMING

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: During the 1500s Spain dominated the Caribbean, but the 1600s belonged to the English. They fought the most, conquered the most colonies, sailed the fastest, and basically dominated the entire area. They were also the primary designers of the plantation system. Plantations produced tobacco, rice and cotton; but the most important thing to come out of the plantations was sugar. And as the sugar supply increased so did England’s sweet tooth.

BURT WOLF: Sugar production in the Caribbean became a key to England’s economic development. To process the sugar, they built mills and then factories to make the milling machinery. They needed to feed and clothe the slave population, so a salt cod business developed and then a textile industry.

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: The English built ships to transport goods up and back from their colonies. They also put together international trading companies which gave them worldwide economic leverage.

BURT WOLF: International trading companies moved goods and people across the Atlantic Ocean in a pattern called the Triangular Trade. Ships filled with manufactured goods — tools, weapons, and textiles, sailed from Europe to West Africa where they traded their cargo for slaves. The slaves were shipped to the West Indies where they were sold. The profits bought sugar, coffee, cotton and tobacco, which were sent back to Europe.

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: The merchants involved in moving these goods -- and people -- from place to place made a profit on every transaction. The triangular trade became the basis for all British international commerce. The British were becoming the most powerful businessmen in the world--and in the process, sugar was pouring into their homeland.

ONE LUMP OR TWO?

BURT WOLF: By the end of the 1600s, the English in the Caribbean were sending home over fifty million pounds of sugar in addition to the sugar they were shipping directly to their North American colonies.

SIDNEY MINTZ ON CAMERA: Up until around 1680 it had remained pretty exclusive. It was for the elite, for the rich and the privileged. But, from about 1700 onward you begin to see sugar percolating downward in the British social system to poor people, to ordinary people, to everyday people. And this is the same time when tea becomes important in British life. It's... we have to keep in mind that tea, coffee and chocolate are all new for Europe in the 17th century. All of them are stimulants, all of them are bitter and all of them are drunk in hot forms or they can be drunk otherwise, too. And a cup of black tea, which provides a terrific kick in terms of stimulus, with a hell of a lot of sugar in it to provide lots of calories to a population generally undernourished, was very important in British history because it meant to the ordinary working man that a cold lunch of cheese and bread is turned into a banquet.

EDWARD BRAMAH ON CAMERA: The Leisure Gardens are very exciting, because after the plague, when one hundred thousand people died in London, in the big fire, people were only too pleased to go out, on a nice summer's day, and walk, and play games in the leisure gardens, and listen to music, and dance and sing. And of course it was in the gardens, that they asked for the new drink from China. Which of course was tea. And everybody knew that to make tea, you needed boiling water. And therefore it was a safe drink. There were eight-five gardens around London. A great social institution of their day.

BURT WOLF: Hot sweet tea quickly became a popular drink throughout England. British business interests pushed tea rather than coffee or chocolate and tea’s victory over the competing drinks had nothing to do with taste. Unlike coffee or chocolate, the teas that were promoted in England were grown in China and later in India.

The British had two million acres of tea-producing plantations in India. They built roads and ports, brought in tools and equipment and imported managers. Within a few decades, they had occupied large areas of the Indian subcontinent. And Indian tea started as a business but ended up as the basis for ruling a colony.

At the end of the 1800s tea was also promoted by the English temperance movement. From a moral point of view, abstinence from alcohol protected the family, and encouraged thrift, reliability, and honesty. From a business point of view, temperance was essential. You couldn’t really have an effective capitalistic culture if the factory was dependent on a bunch of absentee drunks. The major instrument for securing temperance was tea.

SIDNEY MINTZ ON CAMERA: What the tea Temperance Movement in Britain gave to working people was a place to go. Because they really did not have places of recreation, in their home which were mostly mean and small. They were provided with tea parlors and with tea gardens and with afternoon teas. All of these devices built around this particular stimulant which, when heavily sweetened, really made a difference in diet as well. And I see that movement as closely connected really to labor and also to religion. Because sobriety was touted, was sold, by the church and it was bought by the British working man in connection with a family activity because tea was a drink that everybody could drink, not just the mother and father but the children as well. It brought people together whereas alcohol was seen as driving them apart.

BURT WOLF: During the 1700s, sugar developed a more everyday character and became the basis for English sweets — sweets that became treats. It included everything from candy to pastries and puddings.

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: In 1760, Hannah Glasse, the Julia Child of the time, published a cookbook for the middle class. It was filled with recipes that used sugar and clearly indicated that sugar was no longer a medicine, or a spice or something that was only used in the kitchens of the wealthy.

BURT WOLF: There is no biological reason to have sweet foods at every meal. The idea of a final sweet course came into fashion at the end of the 1700s but only among the richest level of European society. A dessert course, usually a pudding, only became part of the common meal during the late 1800s

DEB FRIEDMAN ON CAMERA: For the most part, sugar consumption between the 1790s and the 1830s doubles. Most of our sugar is coming from Cuba. And is coming in, in a variety of different ways. The most expensive sugar would be white sugar. Very refined. Comes in a solid cone. And it's labor intensive. Because you have to pound it, and sieve it before you use it. Your next most expensive sugar would be brown sugar, which is coming in as cones as well, but not all the molasses has been removed. Molasses, as a sweetener, is just a by-product of sugar manufacturing. The least expensive type of sugar available. And probably most used commonly for family food.

THE SECOND PAUSE THAT REFRESHES

BURT WOLF: When the price of sugar dropped during the mid-1850s sugar became the preservative of choice for jam manufacturers. Suddenly their products could be mass-produced and were inexpensive enough to attract a large audience.

They became extremely popular with the lowest economic groups in England; bread and jam fed working class children for two out of three meals.

The English factory system promoted the use of jams for a number of reasons: it was ready to eat so it didn’t take time away from work, it did not require heating so no money was spent on fuel, and it provided a large number of calories at a very low price.

SIDNEY MINTZ ON CAMERA: As more women went out to work the need to develop foods that would be available to the children in particular who might be home without their parents and to speed up food production at dinner became important. One of those products was the factory production of jam. Because jam, unlike butter, doesn't go rancid. You can leave it on the table. A kid can get home and buy store brought bread and smear it with jam. In no time at all there was hardly a Scottish youngster that could eat bread without jam smeared on it. And this was important, again, in helping to develop a schedule, a time schedule, that suited the factory rather than the family, that suited the industrial work day, in the same way that tea was the first pause that refreshed. So jam on bread became the second pause that refreshed.

EDWARD BRAMAH ON CAMERA: You needed a hot drink in the middle of the day, and tea, with the milk, and the sugar, gave them the energy to complete their jobs during the course of the day. And of course, it became fashionable for the women in the homes to use sugar, coming in from the West Indies, in all their culinary skills, and their baking, so there was a great interest in sugar.

SUGAR AND CAPITALISM

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: Many authorities believe that the sugar plantations that developed in the Caribbean were an early form of modern capitalism. It required a great deal of investment, much of which came from Dutch investors. They operated on borrowed money which came from big city banks. The managers were not the owners, the criteria for their success was not their size but their true profitability, they established a system of international trade and they did away with feudalism which had been the economic system in Europe for hundreds of years. They did, however, have one major problem, they operated with slave labor and that was very confusing to economic theorists, especially guys like Karl Marx.

SIDNEY MINTZ ON CAMERA: The fact that the labor force of these enterprises was enslaved, is a really difficult issue, and it was one that if it didn't baffle Marx at least it puzzled him. He was very doubtful about whether sugar plantation owners were in fact capitalists, and he indicates his doubts in what he writes. So it's a kind of contradictory feature. But I would say yes, they were capitalist enterprises, because I think what matters is what capitalists were doing. Not whether or not their labor force was enslaved. Because surely the money that was made from the sugar plantations of the West Indies eventuated in support to capitalist banks in England and France and the Netherlands.

DEB FRIEDMAN ON CAMERA: You don't find a black influence in the diet here in New England. Partly because we don't have a slave population that is doing the cooking for us. Interestingly enough, we have an influence on the diet because of anti-slavery. Slaves are the ones that are producing the sugar. So, if you were involved in abolitionist society, you would be looking at foods that don't have sugar or alternative sugar, to use in your cooking. Because of your very strong beliefs in abolishing slavery. So when you look at prescriptive advice books, and prescriptive cook books, starting in the 1830s and '40s, you can find a very strong influence of abolitionists by an increased use of things like honey and people that are using honey to a great extent are abolitionists.

BURT WOLF: For centuries, no other commodity on the world market wielded as much political influence. Sugar affected almost every aspect of government policy from wages to wars in much the same way that oil does today.

Sidney Mintz also points out that:
“In many ways sugar is an ideal substance. It serves to make a busy life seem less busy; in the pause that refreshes it seems to ease the change between work and rest; and it provides a quick sensation of fullness and satisfaction. No wonder the rich and powerful liked it so much and the poor learned to love it. It is symbolically powerful.”

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: Today, one out of every ten calories is taken in the form of a sweet and the number’s increasing. Looks like the good life is still the sweet life. And we owe it all to Columbus or maybe to his mother-in-law. After all she was in the sugar business before he was. For What We Eat, I’m Burt Wolf.

March 22, 2014

What We Eat: The Story of Chocolate - #101

March 22, 2014/ Guest User

BURT WOLF: What We Eat, the true story of why we put sugar in our coffee and ketchup on our fries.

Originally, all life that lived on land lived on one giant continent. Then forces inside the earth started breaking that land mass into the continents we have today and pushing them apart.

WHEN MONEY GREW ON TREES
THE STORY OF CHOCOLATE

BURT WOLF: On this last voyage, his first landfall was in the Bay Islands about 30 miles north of Honduras. As his ship sat at anchor, the crew saw a tremendous dugout canoe.

Columbus’s son Ferdinand reported that he saw a ship as long as a Venetian galley with a cargo of almond-like beans, which the natives valued so highly that when one dropped, they all stooped to pick it up as if an eye had fallen. It was a Maya trading canoe, about 150 feet long and carrying a cargo of cacao beans. Columbus was the first European to come in contact with the source of chocolate. And as usual, he had no idea of what he was looking at.

The Maya dominated the east coast of Central America from 250 to 900 AD. Their culture, art and architecture were on a level with that of ancient Greece and Renaissance Italy. And they were great chocolate masters.

The Maya had a written language and often wrote about chocolate. In a Maya book which pre-dates the arrival of the Spanish there are seated gods holding cacao pods and dishes filled with cacao beans. The text states that cacao is to be offered during the New Year celebrations.

Cacao pods also appear on carved vessels that were placed in the graves of important members of Maya society. An illustration on an 8th century vase from northern Guatemala shows a Maya king seated on his throne, below him a vase for chocolate drinks.

Women poured chocolate from one jar to another creating a foam on top, which was the most desirable part of the beverage.

Chocolate drinks played an important part in Maya gatherings and celebrations.

MICHAEL COE ON CAMERA: The Maya, we have some evidence for this, used it to cement marriage relationships where they were negotiating for a bride, let's say. A major Maya king or ruler or chief or a big cheese of some sort or another would throw a feast at which cacao in the form of frothy chocolate was brought out and they drank this and that cemented this particular relationship. So it was used during negotiations of all sorts among the Maya.

CHOCOLATE COVERED AZTECS

The Aztecs picked up the use of chocolate and cacao from the Maya. And they worshiped the god who gave chocolate to the world.

MICHAEL COE ON CAMERA: I think the Aztecs had the same approach to chocolate as the Mayas did. It wasn't a drink for ordinary people. It was a drink, for the elite, as it became later on in Europe for the top echelons of society. This included the nobility, the king and his retinue, the palace, the great warriors that also were allowed to drink chocolate. It was only in a drink. Not in solid form. They had some really good reporters there in the way of Spanish priests who told us, all about their lives and we know that among them chocolate had a really almost a sanctified aspect to it. In fact, it was conceived symbolically as human blood. And so it really was like Communion wine in many respects.

BURT WOLF: The Aztecs flavored the chocolate drink with allspice, vanilla, honey, chilies, corn, and flowers.

In the Mexican State of Tabasco, I found a family still using the ancient recipe. They started by grinding corn with an almost-modern hand grinder. Cacao beans are ground on a stone metate; this method of grinding has been around for over 5,000 years. The ground corn and the ground chocolate are mixed together. Water is added and the mixing continues. Then the solids are sieved off; the liquid is poured up and back a dozen times and the chocolate is ready to drink.

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: The first person to call the Americas “the New World” was an Italian living in Spain. In 1516, he wrote a book called “The New World.” It described the events that were taking place in Mexico and the Caribbean including the use of cacao beans as currency.

BURT WOLF: He called their money Happy Money because they did not pull the earth apart searching for gold and silver the way the Spanish did. Their Happy Money grew on trees. The Spanish adopted cacao beans as currency to trade with the Maya. But the beans traveled back to Spain for a different purpose.

CHOCOLATE AS MEDICINE

BURT WOLF: European medical theories of the 15th and 16th centuries were primitive. The Native Americans had a much more advanced system based on their extensive knowledge of plants and their use to affect real cures. When word of the New World’s pharmacy reached King Philip II of Spain, he sent his Royal Physician, Francisco Hernandez to Mexico. And even though cacao was not used by Native Americans as a medicine, Hernandez included it in his bag of cures.

Hernandez, in a letter to the king, pointed out that the Cacao seed is nourishing and good in hot weather to cure fevers. When pepper is added it has an agreeable taste and warmed the stomach and perfuming the breath. It would combat poisons, and alleviates intestinal pains. He also mentioned that it excites the sexual appetite.

CHOCOLATE CONQUERS EUROPE

BURT WOLF: The cacao bean finally made its debut and was presented to European royalty in 1544. The Dominican Friars who were among the first and most energetic missionaries in the Americas, took a delegation of Maya nobles to visit Prince Philip in Spain. Among the gifts they brought were bowls of chocolate. This was opening day for chocolate in Europe. But it would be forty years before regular shipments started to arrive.

PAUL ROZIN ON CAMERA: The original problem was that chocolate beans come from Mexico. They're bitter, they don't have such a great smell, and they don't have any of the obvious potential that the Europeans developed in it…when they brought it back from Mexico. They learned to dry it, to ferment it, to roast it, to mix it with various things, including vanilla, and then, of course, to bring out that fat by by heating in a complex way. And then, of course, it was a little bitter but when they got the sugar from the sugar cane they added that and then, of course, sometimes later milk. So they created, through a very complex technology, a food that appeals ideally to humans, and is totally different from its origin. So it's basically designed in its texture, in its taste, in its aroma, and in its caloric load, to be an ideal food.

CHOCOLATE IN FRANCE

BURT WOLF: In 1660, Maria Teresa, daughter of the king of Spain, married Louis XIV, king of France. The new queen loved chocolate. But the king did not and so she sipped her chocolate in private. Within ten years though, in spite of Louie’s opinion, drinking chocolate became popular with the French upper-class. Louis XVI granted a royal monopoly for chocolate. In France, chocolate was tightly controlled by a centralized authority and was only available to the aristocracy.

In pre-Spanish times, the Mesoamericans poured the chocolate liquid from one jar to another in order to produce the desired foam--a time consuming process. In the 16th century the Spanish colonists introduced the molinillo --a wooden utensil that they placed into a pot and twirled between their hands.

SUSANA TRILLING ON CAMERA : She’s making a chocolate con leche.

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: Hot chocolate milk.

SUSANA TRILLING ON CAMERA: Well, it is. It’s ... it’s actually considered the most ritualistic, the most incredible drink you can give somebody here. It’s Mexico’s gift to the world.

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: And it’s milk.

SUSANA TRILLING ON CAMERA: Milk with chocolate.

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: Chocolate melted in it and then whipped up.

SUSANA TRILLING ON CAMERA: And the foam is considered the most important part of the drink.

BURT WOLF: The French covered the pot with a lid and made a hole in the top for the molinillo. It quickly became the preferred way of making the foam.

Chocolate traveled from one royal court to another as a medicine. But it soon became appreciated for its taste and its stimulating effect on the nervous system. A medicine with a curative power converted to recreational use.

CHOCOLATE AND THE CHURCH

BURT WOLF TO CAMERA: So chocolate became a health food. But there was still one more barrier it had to pass before it became fully accepted, and that was ecclesiastical. The problem was the Catholic Church couldn’t decide whether chocolate was a medicine which could be taken at any time, or a food, which would not be allowed during periods of fasting.

BURT WOLF: The Society of Jesus— the official name of the Jesuits — was founded in 1534 and was the militant arm of the church — zealous defenders of the pope’s supremacy. They maintained a tightly controlled worldwide organization.

In 1650, they prohibited Jesuits from drinking chocolate, but quickly rescinded the decision when students started leaving the seminary.

MICHAEL COE ON CAMERA: Once it had been decided by the ecclesiastical authorities that chocolate did not break the fast, in other words, during lent and times like that you could take chocolate because it was not considered a food. Once that was done then the Jesuits went into high gear and they had a big commercial operation with cacao, growing cacao commercially through much of Latin America where, you know, the Latin American tropics where the stuff would grow. They drank a lot of it themselves, too. They were big chocolate imbibers. But they definitely shipped a lot of chocolate back and made a lot of money from the New World into the Old World.

A big shipment came into the main Spanish port, which was Cadiz in Spain. And it was so heavy, these crates that supposedly contained chocolate that the porters could barely carry them. And finally the authorities demanded that they be opened up and this ... this so-called chocolate inspected. And they looked at these huge bars of chocolate which weighed a tremendous amount. It turned out that there was about a finger's width of chocolate on the outside of that coating, solid gold bars. This was smuggling of the first degree because all gold belonged to the crown, not to the Jesuits or the church or anybody else. So they had been breaking crown law. And the upshot of that was that it was confiscated, the gold was, and they gave the chocolate to the porters.

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: Chocolate’s rich and intense flavor made it an ideal medium for poison and assassins put it to regular use. My favorite story in this regard is about a group of Spanish noble women who lived in Mexico in the 1600s. They would bring chocolate to church, the bishop was infuriated and threatened to excommunicate anyone who drank chocolate in church. The women were unhappy but equally unrepentant and they had the bishop poisoned. Of course, the poison was delivered to the bishop’s lips in a cup of chocolate.

CHOCOLATE AND THE ENGLISH

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: In 1655, English troops took the island of Jamaica from the Spanish. Cacao beans had been a big business on Jamaica and the English quickly realized both the gastronomic and economic significance of the crop. Jamaica became England’s primary source for the cacao bean.

BURT WOLF: Chocolate, coffee, tea and sugar all entered England at the same time and at the highest social levels, but that soon changed. Unlike France, England was a nation of shopkeepers. And when chocolate came into the country anybody who could afford to buy a cup of chocolate could have it. The rising middle class began to drink chocolate in houses that were hotbeds of political debate.

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: During the middle of the1600s, Dr. Henry Stubbes was England’s leading authority on chocolate and in fact regularly prepared chocolate for King Charles II. Like most of his contemporaries in England and on the continent, Stubbes thought that chocolate was an aphrodisiac. At one point he published an essay on chocolate’s erotic properties which of course sent chocolate sales through the bedroom roof.

FIELDS AND FACTORIES

BURT WOLF: Chocolate comes from the cacao tree, which is difficult to grow, uncooperative and moody. It refuses to bear fruit unless it’s growing inside a narrow strip of land near the Equator. It demands moisture throughout the year and the temperature must never fall below 60 degrees Fahrenheit. Among the short cacao trees you will find large shade trees that protect the cacao from too much direct sun or wind.

The cacao tree is one of the worlds’ most inefficient biological systems. Each tree will produce hundreds of flowers but only one to three percent of them will bear fruit and the tree will take about three years to get around to that. The small flowers are pollinated exclusively by little bugs that live on the forest floor.

A worker moves between the trees, cutting the roots of any plant that might compete with the cacao. Disturbing the leaves on the ground also increases the activity of the bugs that pollinate the leaves.

After four or five months, each pollinated flower will produce a large pod containing thirty to forty almond shaped seeds or beans surrounded by a sweet pulp.

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: The plant can’t even open its own pods — it depends on squirrels, small monkeys and large monkeys also known as human beings to disperse its seeds. The squirrels and monkeys steal the pods and open them up because they love the white, sweet connective tissue. They throw away the bitter beans.

BURT WOLF: Workers split the pods to get to the seeds and the surrounding pulp. The two are allowed to sit and ferment together for five or six days. The pulp becomes liquid and drains away.

Sacks of the seeds are sent to ferment for about four days. Each day they are turned. When they arrive, they were still covered with some of the white connective tissue from the pod. As they ferment they begin to turn brown.

To stop the fermentation, the seeds which are now called beans, are dried. They can be dried in the factory in long concrete bins. Often hot air is blown over them by machines.

Or they can be dried in the traditional way by being spread out on canvas mats in the sun.

Either way, after they’re dried they are bagged and shipped to a chocolate factory. When they arrive at the factory, they are roasted and toasted. Then the outside shell is removed. What remains is called a "nib."

The remaining “nib” is ground to a paste in a machine that works like a giant food processor. The liquid that comes out is called “cacao liquor”. The Cacao liquor goes into a cylinder where it’s put under enormous pressure. The liquid that comes out of the press, is called cocoa butter and is separated from the solids, which are called cocoa. In 1823, Coenraad Van Houten a Dutch chemist invented this process. It’s called “Dutching” and it removes most of the fat from the chocolate solids.

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: The old, thick and foamy drink was replaced by a much more digestible and easier to make cocoa. And thanks to Van Houten’s invention, manufacturers were able to produce an affordable chocolate.

MODERN CHOCOLATE

PAUL ROZIN ON CAMERA: One of the special things about chocolate is that it's the only natural fat that melts at body temperature. So it gives you that experience that it's solid in your mouth and then it just melts into velvet in your mouth. And nothing else like that. There's a lot of people trying to get a non- nutritive fat that does that, but at the moment chocolate is the queen of fat.

BURT WOLF: In 1848, an Englishman blended cocoa powder, sugar, and melted cocoa butter and produced a paste that was poured into a mold. The world’s first formed chocolate.

JOËL GLENN BRENNER ON CAMERA: Up until World War I, there was really no such thing as a candy bar. So how did this happen? Well, when the soldiers were drafted to fight in Europe during the war, the military realized that they needed some kind of energy food to give to the warriors to help them fight, to help them stay, you know, battle ready, and, it needed to be light and small and easy to carry, but it had to pack a lot of calories. Well, they turned to the candy industry, and they said what can you come up with? And before you knew it, during that first war, every candy company in America was churning out bite-sized individually wrapped pieces that the soldiers could take with them into the battlefield.

BURT WOLF: Since the end of the 1800s, Switzerland has dominated the world of chocolate. Today its citizens are the number one consumers averaging almost 12 pounds of chocolate per person per year.

Now, the only thing the Swiss enjoy as much as money and chocolate are the cows that give them some of the world’s finest milk. In 1879, Henri Nestle, a Swiss chemist, who developed powdered milk, combined forces with Daniel Peter, a Swiss chocolate maker and they produced the world’s first milk chocolate.

JOËL GLENN BRENNER ON CAMERA: Milk is a water-based substance. Chocolate, a fat-based substance. We all know that oil and water don't mix. So getting milk and chocolate to blend together in a way that was smooth and edible was a very, very difficult process. But Mr. Peter was an expert in milk products. And he realized that if he took dried milk, having removed the water, then added it to the chocolate liqueur and the cocoa butter, and then introduced the water again later in the process, he could get a smooth and creamy chocolate. All of a sudden, you have a product that not only tasted better, but more and more people could afford.

BURT WOLF: Chocolate is an alkaloid and like all alkaloids it will stimulate the nervous system. It also contains small amounts of caffeine, but how the caffeine will affect you is a function of your individual tolerance as well as your cultural beliefs. If you think a cup of chocolate will wake you up it probably will.

BURT WOLF ON CAMERA: If you believed it would be soothing it probably will be.

A chocolate drink with foam on top --- just the way the Maya served it a thousand years ago. The Latin word for the cacao tree translates into English as “food of the Gods”. That’s pretty good because a lot of us believe that chocolate is heavenly. For What We Eat I’m Burt Wolf.

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BURT WOLF

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What We Eat: The Story of Cheese - #108

What We Eat: The Story of Corn - #107

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What We Eat: The Story of the Tomato - #105

What We Eat: The Story of Livestock in America - #104

What We Eat: The Story of Chili Peppers - #103

What We Eat: The Story of Sugar - #102

What We Eat: The Story of Chocolate - #101

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