Matt Siegel

Food writer Matt Siegel reminds me a great deal of history writer Simon Winder. Winder’s surveys of different regions of Europe are organized roughly like travelogues. He accentuates factual accounts with droll observations and fascinating curiosities. Siegel does the same analogously with his heavily footnoted tour of food and eating.

The author begins by making the point that "it is the absolute biological necessity of food that makes it so central to cultural history and so inclusive of show more all peoples in all times.”

Next he provides a brief look at the history of a human being from pre-natal development onward, apprising us about the impact of choice and/or availability of food. He switches from the micro to the macro level by looking back at the history of civilization from the standpoint of how food and its production has affected it.

Then he goes into the details of what we have been eating all this time. The ten chapters of this book are short, but chock-full of interesting and often unexpected information.

Pie, he tells us, has an important place in history, and he documents how, segueing into a history of the apple in America. But first he gives us plenty of reason to appreciate apple pie, with details about pre-America pies in Britain, including eel pie, lamprey pie, pigeon pie, and swan pie. For example, he quotes from a 1737 London recipe for lamprey pie, according to which one must first “cleanse the well from the slime” before mixing their blood with cinnamon.

Pigeon pie included lamb’s testicles, and then there was hare pie, full of broken bones, but gussied up with lemon and butter. The English used apples mainly as vegetables.

Thank heavens the first apple seeds arrived in the colonies on the Mayflower in 1620. Apple pies, Siegel writes, quickly became a colonial staple.

Apples, by the way - you may be surprised, as I was, to learn - are not free of corn (more about that below) which is the subject of his fourth chapter on corn’s centrality and ubiquity.

In terms of corn's centrality, Siegel explains that “ . . . corn is right up there with fire in terms of anthropological game changers.” He adds “. . . up until roughly ten or twelve thousand years ago corn wasn’t a thing, and neither was farming." Before that point, everyone who’d ever lived had survived by hunting and gathering. Farming meant staying in one place and also developing systems of trading, defense, permanent lodging, developing irrigation systems, and dealing with more free time.

About corn’s ubiquity, Siegel reports that the average American consumes about three pounds of food containing corn or corn products every day, often unknowingly. Even apples, he points out, have a layer of food-grade wax derived from corn sprayed onto them.

[“Still (he notes), human consumption accounts for only around 10 percent of the corn supply, as it’s also an industrial ingredient in basically everything” from aspirin to cosmetics to batteries, crayons, plastics, paper, fuel, soap, wallpaper, and much much more.]

My favorite chapter was of course Chapter 6, because it dealt with ice cream (and, as with his other chapters, a whole lot of other things that he could manage to make in the least way related). He observes that vanilla is the world’s most popular ice cream flavor and second most expensive spice. But it is so accessible because up to 99 percent of vanilla flavoring in foods is artificial.

He writes about the importance of ice cream to morale in both world wars, and adds the most wonderful anecdote:

“In 1942, when Japanese torpedoes struck the USS Lexington, then the second largest aircraft carrier in the navy’s arsenal, the crew abandoned ship - but not before breaking into the freezer and raiding all the ice cream. Survivors describe scooping it into their helmets before lowering themselves into shark-infested waters.”

He includes a history of holiday feasting, a discussion of fast food, and the explosion of choices of food. (For example, he writes, “we can now choose from more than fifty types of Oreos.”)

There is so much more - too much to delineate in a review, but foodies and history buffs alike with find it all informative and delightful.

Evaluation: This quirky book is extremely entertaining, and full of factoids you will want to share with everyone around you. show less

The Secret History of Food - Strange But True Stories About the Origins of Everything We Eat by Matt Siegel is a book to tantalise the taste buds. Full of spiced and biting humour, it was an interesting read but certainly doesn't cover the origins of 'everything' we eat.

I was able to appreciate the author's punny sense of humour from the Table of Contents where I read Chapter 9 is entitled Forbidden Berries or Appetite for Distraction; a play on Appetite for Destruction, the title of an show more 1980s album by my favourite band Guns N' Roses.

Most illuminating was the section on corn, taking us through just how many products contain corn or corn products and how much of it is fed to livestock, making corn the most produced crop in the world.

A little more quote-worthy was the section about vanilla:

"Vanilla is second in price only to saffron, a kilo of which can sell for as much as $30,000 because harvesting it requires handpicking the stigmas of 150,000 to 200,000 flowers (at three stigmas per flower)." Page 93

Pollinated by hand, vanilla plants can take months to pollinate and then another six to nine months before the fruits are ready to harvest by hand.

"But at that point they don't have any flavour, so they need to be cured and conditioned through a process that involves hand massaging them, laying them in the sun to dry each morning, and wrapping them in blankets and tucking them in at night to sweat, which can take another nine months." Page 95

The author goes on to explain vanilla can be worth more than the price of silver, but that's with shrinkage and assuming you don't lose any of the crop from fungus, pests, disease or theft!

In medieval times, bread was baked once a week due to the labour required to mill the grain, make fire, wait for the dough to rise and the efficiency of baking larger loaves less frequently.

"And remember this was before modern preservatives, so six-day-old bread back then would have been much harder and staler (on average) than six-day-old bread today. In fact, there are accounts of peasant breads in France so hard that they had to be chopped with axes to slice them." Page 129

Sure makes me glad for the bread we enjoy today.

The chapter on feasting was full of fun historical facts. A helmeted cock involved crowning a roasted cock or hen with a helmet, tucking a silver or gold leaf lance under its wing and posing it on top of a roasted piglet so it looked like the bird was riding the pig into battle. In the same vein, a redressed swan was roasted and redressed in its skin and held upright with skewers as if it were still alive. Gross! The same thing was done with peacocks, however the finishing touch involved a ball of cloth soaked with alcohol in the peacock's mouth that was lit just before serving to make it look as though the peacock was breathing fire. Kind of makes the Bombay Alaska look a little tame doesn't it?

Loved the section on chilli:

"So eating a pepper isn't unlike, say, being stung by a bee, licking a nine-volt battery, or burning your tongue on scalding hot coffee - all sensations intended to warn the body of exposure to harm and if necessary trigger a series of protective reflexes to mitigate the effects and prevent further exposure." Page 165

Siegel outlines the body's physical reactions to spicy foods and what they're in aid of. The body sweats to flush your system, your nose runs to protect your nasal passages, your eyes water to protect your corneas, you salivate to purge your mouth and coughing and sneezing protects your airways.

I always wondered why cultures who live in hot and humid climates love hot and spicy food, but the author gives us the answer:

"...as chilies also happen to kill bacteria and mask the taste and odor of foods that aren't the freshest. This would explain why spicy foods tend to be more prevalent in hotter climates, where higher temperatures make food preservation more challenging, places like Central America, southern Asia, and Indonesia." Page 170

Siegel explains that chilies may have helped preserve food before the age of refrigeration, and the sweating that takes place when eating spicy foods has a cooling effect that helps regulate body temperature. Yeah, that doesn't work for me personally, but wow, I didn't know that.

While tidbits like this were interesting and informative, I wouldn't have said Siegel discloses many 'secrets' of food but the title is certainly more appetising than 'facts and history about some foods that you might not know'.

The Secret History of Food - Strange But True Stories About the Origins of Everything We Eat doesn't live up to title by containing the origins of everything we eat, but it does cover a lot of things we eat and was an informative read. It certainly made me hungry, although that's not hard! show less

This was a very enjoyable quick/easy read, I really wish there were more chapters. A well well written book with some great food history. I loved this book-

Chock full of intriguing facts and information about many of the common foods we eat. The history, changing faces of how they were used, where they came from and much more. Honey, corn, vanilla, and ice cream, etc. Loved the chapter on ice cream, never knew how important it was during the second world war.

The chapter on our first settlers provided a humorous visual I can't get out of my mind. When these settlers arrived in America, there was food a plenty, especially in the ocean, but they show more didn't know how to catch nor use what was available. "Meanwhile, civilized consists were attempting to fish with frying pans and eating their own dogs to keep from starving." Okay, the dog part is sad but cant you just see John Smith attempting to hit fish over the head with a frying pan?

Another fact I found astonishing and unfortunate, especially now when so many are considered obese, was found in the chapter titled, Choices of a new generation. "More than 36 percent of Americans consume fast food daily, increasing to 80 percent monthly and 96 percent annually." Makes one think.

Which is exactly what this book did, make me think, about history, food and what we put in our bodies. show less