ColumnThe book “Provence, 1970′” documents a moment with America’s culinary greats; but how much has American food really changed since then?

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, America saw a culinary change. This was the time of people like Julia Child, advocating for mastering dishes at home, eating real food, honoring fresh ingredients instead of the canned phenomenon of the 1950s. It was also the time of the rise in food consciousness, with more and more people making links between what they ate and the effects on the environment. “The Whole Earth Cookbook,” and “Diet for a Small Planet” both came out in the early 1970s.

I recently finished reading “Provence, 1970: M. F. K. Fisher, Julia Child, James Beard, and the Reinvention of American Taste“, a book about a singular moment when some of the culinary greats were all in the same place at the same time, a time that also happened to be a turning point.

In the book there is a lot of talk about the changing of American food culture, shifting to better ingredients, more artisan practices and the push to more food consciousness. Reading it you feel as if there is hope for the future. And then you close the book and take a look at reality.

The book is a wonderful read, a moment in history captured in words, images and foods. But what struck me while reading it was how current all the topics in the book were. We’re still having these exact same conversations about food. We still deal with the same snobbery. There’s still a food media that’s largely separated from the realities of the everyday cook. Julia Child wrote a letter to James Beard in which she noted that her audiences on the West Coast “could care less about the East Coast and The New York Times. They have their own lives and own good papers, and we’re not reaching them atallatall if we stay put.” I can’t help but think of the recent response to Mark Bittman’s article on eating and shopping in California.

How much has American food culture changed since the 1970s? Read this book and you can feel the hopefulness. All these culinary greats who changed the way a lot of America thought about food excited about the possibility of better foods in the homes of their readers.

I wonder what they would think looking at food culture now. Processed foods, microwave dinners, factory farm meat. I felt a little despair while finishing the book, questioning really how far we had come from a few decades earlier. Are we any wiser? Have we learned from history? Or are we pursuing a deadly path, with high end gastronomy on one side, and processed food on the other? Have we really embraced the fact that what we eat affects the world that we live in? Or is it something we say while we look the other way and indulge our impulses? Have we found a balance where good ingredients are available to everyone?

Certainly, there’s a widespread push to better eating, but there’s also no denying that we live in a world of extremes, the Michelin stars who drive the food media on one end and the corporate, processed, fast food and food industry business on the other.

Do you have to be well off to eat well? No, but look at any food media these days with their glossy photos and complicated ingredients and it certainly feels like it. Watch your average cooking show and it’s a far cry from promoting anything healthy; there it’s just about being sensational. And look at large food businesses who can spend millions, even billions, getting people to consume their products, even though those food products are fueling the obesity epidemic.

How much has American food changed since the 1970s? It has changed enormously. But I can’t help but wonder if people like Julia Child and M.F.K. Fisher were here today, what they would think about our shopping and eating habits. I sure as hell think they’d be concerned about our sugar consumption.

We’ve evolved. We have moved past serving aspics at dinner parties. But are we really at a place where real food is accessible to everyone? We still have a lot of work to do. Maybe it’s time we turned around and looked backwards to pick up a few hints on how to do better. Smaller quantities, fresher ingredients, and a better enjoyment of food. Real food. That’s what Julia would want.

Related on EcoSalon

Do You Have to Be Well Off to Eat Well? Foodie Underground

Important Food Lessons from Julia Child

What if We Ate Like it Was 1990? Foodie Underground

This is the latest installment of Anna Brones’ weekly column at EcoSalon: Foodie Underground, an exploration of what’s new and different in the underground movement, and how we make the topic of good food more accessible to everyone. More musings on the topic can be found at www.foodieunderground.com.

Image: Classic Film

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In the last 150 years women have demanded (and gotten) the right to vote, chosen when and if to have kids, entered the workforce, taken leadership roles, and are no longer dependent on fathers or husbands for money or property. The rapid change in fashion styles is a direct reflection of the shift in societal roles. A look into how fashion history and how the representation of the female body has changed is a fun way to look at how far we’ve come, baby.

image: Wikicommons 

Anatole France was spot on when he said, to look into the future “I would take simply a fashion magazine in order to see how women will dress themselves… Their fantasies would tell me more  about future humanity than all the philosophers, the novelists, the preachers, or the scientists.”

image:  Wikicommons

We begin with the corset. Corsets date to antiquity, but their rise into normalcy can be traced back to the 1550s with Catherine de’ Medicini, wife of France’s King Henry II, who famously banned the ‘thick waists’ of women in court.  Her iron-fist rules ultimately led to the increase of steel caging corsets to please the eye.

image: Wikicommons

From then on, up until the 19th Century, corsets were circular and reached down to the hips for the illusions of a very curvaceous body. Throughout the next 350 years, corsets did change shape and length over time, reaching as high as above the bosom to as low as just the waists, caging the ribs–depending on the current’s fashion’s view of the desired shape of a women’s body. Women’s role in society was not active or functional but rather very ‘sitting pretty’ and the corsets reflect this trend. Corsets were often made of whale bones and steel caging for the ultimate squeeze effect. Difficulty to launder, women wore thin underdresses made of material like cotton underneath their corset to avoid rusting the steel. Although they weren’t running marathons in these, apparently the sweat factor was still quite high.

image: Wikicommons

At the turn of the 20th century, doctors began to question the health of the corset–after all the tighter you had it the better, and you could only breathe out of the top of your lungs causing mucus to build up in the bottom portion of lungs. So the S-bend (that’s one part breasts, one part butt for an S appearance) was introduced as a ‘healthier, fully breathable’ corset. The S-bend corset was popular from 1900 – 1910, but didn’t last more than a decade and was said to be the least comfortable of all silhouettes.

image: Wikicommons

The new century brought with it simplicity in dress, as less restrictions were placed on women and fashion history takes turns to reflect the increased freedom. During WWI, as women began to enter the workforce and took more active roles in society, and the corset begins to go out of style due to lack of functionality, women were no longer just sitting pretty. In 1917, post World War I, Coco Chanel’s famous two-piece knitted suit explodes in popularity. And, shortly after, in 1920, the 19th Amendment is passed granting women the right to vote. With this we enter the roaring 20s and the era of the flapper, symbolizing freedom and a carefree attitude.

image: Wikicommons

Vogue‘s May 1926 issue pictured Marion Morehouse wearing Coco Chanel’s black sequined drop-waist dress.  The little black dress becomes a symbol of modernism in its rejection of confinement, and individualism in its rejection to blending in with colorful masses, yet still feminine in its dignity.

image: Wikicommons

In the light of World War II, energy again is taken away from fashion design and put into war efforts. Women are re-entering the workforce and clothing is extremely practical, made using less fabric and less labor for construction. The shortage of fabrics like nylon allows women to do without pantyhose.

image: Wikicommons

Following World War II, the history of women’s fashion takes another turn, specifically in 1947 with Christine Dior’s first collection, ‘The New Look,’ energy shifts back to fashion. Although clinching the waist again, The New Look raises hemlines—shocking most, but restoring the fantasy of fashion post-war. With men back from war, women return back to the home and the construct of the ‘housewife’ takes form.

image: Wikicommons
The free love era of the 60s brings with it a complete shattering of popular dress codes. Women wear whatever they please–colors galore, bell bottoms, short dresses and mini skirts. Feminism is directly reflected in dress, and mass markets struggle to keep up with current trends being created as women express themselves more freely.

image: Wikicommons

From the 70s on, style is a choice. Women choose to wear pants, dresses, or skirts as they please. In the 1980s, the ‘power dressing’ such as the padded shoulder suit are popular as women are entering the workforce again, their styles represent their rise in the corporate ladder.

image: Thang Le Photography

Today, women are free to wear whatever we please, and our choices usually combine style with comfort. We can choose to stay home or enter the workplace, wear a corset, spanx, or no confinement at all. With our increase of rights and voice in society, we’ve gained freedom of self-expression. Our society supports who we are as individuals—and so do our wardrobes.

Want more on fashion history?

Now & Then: The History of Shapewear

Now & Then: The History of the Bikini

Now & Then: The History of the Cocktail Dress

Now & Then: The History of the White Wedding Dress

Now & Then: The History of Denim

Now & Then: The History of Platform Shoes

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VideoHistory condensed.

Made by a high school student for a class project, “Our Story in Two Minutes” is an impressive summary of pretty much every book about western history that you have ever read, and then some.

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Did ancient peoples live in a Golden Age of stewardship of our planet? From forest clearances to catastrophic soil erosion, it’s clear that past civilizations had the same conflicted relationship with their environment as we do. But when it comes to how they dealt with those crises, is it fair to regard them as technologically backward?

Enter the elegant piece of land management technology called the terrace.

Terraces are a remarkably efficient way of dealing with the problems of erosion and water retention. A bare slope is too steep to hold roots or hold rainfall? Then chop it up into a series of flat surfaces. Terracing keeps soil on hillsides, helps rainwater sink into that soil and ultimately eat at the underlying bedrock (which is how soil is made), and allows roots to take hold. And best of all? All it requires is  a lot of hard work and, ideally, a good supply of stone to bolster the sides. As inventions go, it’s a rock-bottom bargain – and so it’s accessible to everyone, whatever their budget.

It’s also possible to see them as a social empowerment tool, by the poor, for the poor. In places where level terrain is scarce, who gets the flat land? The people with the most money – leaving the peasantry to make do with barren hills and slopes. Since well-maintained terraces can gradually improve the fertility of soil, terracing could be a form of investment for less wealthy farmers hunting for a way to build some capital and status…

Terracing has existed for thousands of years and in many parts of the world it’s still going strong today – even as a source of tourism revenue, as with the incredible Banaue Rice Terraces of the Philippines. They’re environmental management on a sometimes colossal scale…and anyone can have a go (if they’re prepared to sweat for it). Backward? Not if you’re one of the 99%.

Images: Indrik myneur, TheFutureIsUnwritten and bigberto.

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Everything is not as ecologically sound as it looks.

How in tune were our ancestors with being good stewards of the planet? Things were better in the old days. People were more in tune with the natural world, the air was cleaner, the land less harassed by our demands upon it. The world was, in short, greener. We’ve all heard it before – but is it true? Of course it is – except when you start looking at the details. Don’t go putting our ancestors up on a pedestal of eco-friendly excellence before you know a little more history.

So we’ve looked at prehistoric forest clearances, Roman smog, Greek soil erosion and Byzantine plague.  Not a glowing picture – but it’s not universally bad. Consider the words of this man in the 5th Century BC:

Whoever wishes to investigate medicine properly, should proceed thus: in the first place to consider the seasons of the year, and what effects each of them produces for they are not at all alike, but differ much from themselves in regard to their changes. Then the winds, the hot and the cold, especially such as are common to all countries, and then such as are peculiar to each locality. We must also consider the qualities of the waters, for as they differ from one another in taste and weight, so also do they differ much in their qualities. In the same manner, when one comes into a city to which he is a stranger, he ought to consider its situation, how it lies as to the winds and the rising of the sun; for its influence is not the same whether it lies to the north or the south, to the rising or to the setting sun.

From these things he must proceed to investigate everything else. For if one knows all these things well, or at least the greater part of them, he cannot miss knowing, when he comes into a strange city, either the diseases peculiar to the place, or the particular nature of common diseases, so that he will not be in doubt as to the treatment of the diseases, or commit mistakes, as is likely to be the case provided one had not previously considered these matters. And in particular, as the season and the year advances, he can tell what epidemic diseases will attack the city, either in summer or in winter, and what each individual will be in danger of experiencing from the change of regimen. For knowing the changes of the seasons, the risings and settings of the stars, how each of them takes place, he will be able to know beforehand what sort of a year is going to ensue.

 – Airs, Waters and Places, Hippocrates

Hippocrates of Kos, known today as the “father of Western medicine” and from whom we get the famous Hippocratic Oath, was a man with an eye for the big picture. For him, everything was interconnected – and human beings were as deeply plugged into their environment as the crops and the animals the ancient Greeks relied upon to survive.

Is it a stretch to consider him the first ecologist? It’s true that Greek philosophers of the time had what we would now deem outlandish ideas – personal health being considered a matter of the balance of these 4 “humors” – but Hippocrates was well ahead of his time in considering the climate a vast, interconnected system of causes and effects, paving the way for the development of biological science.

Further reading:

On Airs, Waters And Places – provided by the Internet Classics Archive.

Image: a.drian

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How in tune were our ancestors with being good stewards of the planet? Things were better in the old days. People were more in tune with the natural world, the air was cleaner, the land less harassed by our demands upon it. The world was, in short, greener. We’ve all heard it before – but is it true? Of course it is – except when you start looking at the details. Don’t go putting our ancestors up on a pedestal of eco-friendly excellence before you know a little more history.

In 540 AD, the Eastern Roman Empire (better known as Byzantium) was set to conquer the known world, led by its dynamic Emperor of 13 years, Justinian I. Within two years that Empire would be in retreat, sending the course of European history in a very different direction – and the reason was Black Death.

Bubonic plague is Europe’s most destructive disease. The 14th Century incarnation reduced its population by anything from 30-60% (we can’t be sure because of the sheer scale of mortality at this time) – but Europe still emerged with 350 million survivors. What would have happened if it had hit a thousand years earlier? The answer is…it did. It’s now known as the Plague of Justinian, perhaps with good reason, because while he didn’t create the variation of Yersinia pestis that would prove so devastating to human life, he may have created the pandemic.

How? Overambition. Justinian wanted his Empire to return to its former imperial glory, and to do that, he needed expansion and a massive consolidation of resources, most notably grain. The capital, Constantinople, expanded rapidly to a point where it’s believed it could barely feed itself, and this put pressure on the existing trade routes of grain and cloth from Africa. A colder, wetter climatic period mid 6th Century fostered crop failures and famine, adding more impetus to trade and the maintenance of huge granaries to buffer the population’s food supply. In short – perfect conditions for the spread of plague-carrying rodents, believed to have originated in Ethiopia.

Thanks to Justinian’s far-reaching trade network, the plague was a worldwide pandemic, killing anything from 25 to 100 million people when the world population was probably less than 300 million. Constantinople would ultimately lose 40% of its population to the plague (an alleged 5,000 lives a day at its height) and the Eastern Mediterranean would lose a quarter of its people. Justinian’s Empire went into a decline it would not recover from until the 9th Century – and the world reeled under its first taste of the Black Death.

Image: Jane Rahman.

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The good old days?

How in tune were our ancestors with being good stewards of the planet? Things were better in the old days. People were more in tune with the natural world, the air was cleaner, the land less harassed by our demands upon it. The world was, in short, greener. We’ve all heard it before – but is it true? Of course it is – except when you start looking at the details. Don’t go putting our ancestors up on a pedestal of eco-friendly excellence before you know a little more history.

Greece is a land burdened by expectations. Not only do its current inhabitants have to deal with an economy so tattered it may even spark power cuts, it simultaneous has to carry the mantle of being the cradle of civilization for the Western World (further hammered home by the upcoming London Olympics). The ideas of the Greek philosophers guided the development of medieval scientific thought – particularly Aristotle – through the European Renaissance, before the physical sciences gathered momentum under the ideas of luminaries like Galileo and Newton. The Romantic period further reinforced Greece’s golden status – the term Arcadia, taken from the name of an administrative area in Greece, came to represent a perfect balanced relationship between humans and the rest of the natural world. Ancient Greece, it is implied, was where people got it right for a change.

You know what’s coming, don’t you? Classical Greece had an enormous problem, and it was this: it was a dreadful place to grow things. Greece is largely a land of barren, rocky hillsides thinly covered by nutritionally depleted soils. This agriculturally fragile state of affairs meant the land couldn’t support large, evenly spaced populations, and that led to the development of the famous polis city states of Greece – Athens, Sparta, Corinth, Mycenae and others. When these cities reached the land’s carrying capacity, its people had to expand, fueling colonial conquests and arguably all sorts of innovations to make the most of scarce resources.

It’s a stretch, but you could argue that democracy came about because Greece is a crummy place to be a farmer.

So the Greeks were simply unlucky to live on soil that couldn’t support them? Not so. As happened elsewhere in Europe, the prehistoric peoples of Greece chopped down a lot of trees – in such quantities that the soil simply couldn’t recover. Pollen evidence recovered from the bottom of a lake in the Argive plain told a story: the existence of deciduous oak trees until the 4th Century BC, at which point they were replaced with hornbeam, pine, scrub oak and heather – vegetation associated with cleared or disturbed land. If some colossal climatic catastrophe was at fault, all of Greece would have been similarly affected. But it wasn’t. These changes were localized.

Furthermore, archaeological evidence from settlement patterns across Greece show broken occupation, periods of settlement and abandonment – and these can be tied with environmental indicators of local soil erosion patterns. In other words, ancient Greek farmers appear to have cleared the land for crops or animals, and when the soil eroded away as a result, they abandoned it – and that was the environmental legacy facing Classical Greece, a largely barren land that had never recovered from early efforts to farm it.

So much for Arcadia.

Images: dominiqs, byrdiegyrl and Serendigity.

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The best of EcoSalon’s stories this week.

When walking is healthy, slimming and free, why does so much of America still see it as…well, pedestrian? (Look, even our own language is prejudiced).  If you’re looking for inspiration to drag your shoes on and get rid of that roof over your head, you might find it here.

France’s farmer’s markets are a timeless feature of the country. Alas, if only that were really true, as it seems Paris’s independent open-air vendors are under siege from wholesalers and internationally-shipped organic foods. Can local farming maintain a hold on the French dinnertable?

If our walking quotes didn’t get your feet twitching, you might be in need of some map decor. Earlier in the week we directed you to some inspiring map art over at Curbly, but if you’re looking for more widespread inspiration, Pinterest is your friend here.

Get in motion, stay in motion – it’s the key to success, happiness and some really terrific photography.

Lastly, spare a thought for the inhabitants of Rome 2,000 years ago – it didn’t matter whether they got out into the fresh air or stayed at home, their environment was out to get them.

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How in tune were our ancestors with being good stewards of the planet?

Things were better in the old days. People were more in tune with the natural world, the air was cleaner, the land less harassed by our demands upon it. The world was, in short, greener. We’ve all heard it before – but is it true? Of course it is – except when you start looking at the details. Don’t go putting our ancestors up on a pedestal of eco-friendly excellence before you know a little more history.

This week, we go back to Ancient Rome, take a deep breath – and splutter.

Get enough people in one place and air quality is going to take a dive. Get them living in one place and your real problems start. While it’s true that cities of 2,000 years ago lacked the intense urbanization that today crams people together and on top of each other in ways inconceivable to the ancient world, they also lacked our relatively cleaner energy-producing ways. Such was the case with Rome, a city housing not only wood-burning domestic buildings (including an estimated 800+ heated bath-houses) but many craft working industries. Statesman Seneca, the tutor of Emperor Nero, wrote of “the stink, soot and heavy air” hanging over the city, popularly known as gravioris caeli (“heavy heaven”). With air quality came the smells – the stink of garbage, of unrestricted industry (including leather tanning, a process often involving urine) and of poorly treated sewage.

How much have we ecologically evolved over the years?

How did the Romans tackle the problem? Like they tackled most of their other problems – with legislation and construction projects. The sewage designs first laid down by the pre-Roman Etruscan people in 500BC were expanded. The Empire’s Justinian Code laid down the first riparian rights – the legal process of allocation and access to water supplies – and defined both water and air as finite public property to be maintained for the benefit of all. New industrial laws pushed certain crafts to areas where they couldn’t pollute domestic air supplies (including, in one law, the cheesemakers – not so blessed in Roman times, it seems). To take the pressure off the sewage-fouled Tiber, the Romans built extensive aqueduct systems to bring freshwater into the capital.

It’s not known how well this alleviated problems in Rome, but it seems indoor pollution remained an issue right across Italy: the inside of the average Roman building became blackened with soot as time went on, as noted by poet Horatius, and recent analysis of skeletons of people buried by the eruption of Vesuvius show signs of anthracosis. Whether you stayed indoors or outdoors to get your 20,000 liters of air a day, life as an ancient Roman appears to have been hard on the lungs.

Images: kevinpoh and Rilind Hoxha.

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Everything is not as ecologically sound as it looks.

Things were better in the old days. People were more in tune with the natural world, the air was cleaner, the land less harassed by our demands upon it. The world was, in short, greener. We’ve all heard it before – but is it true? Of course it is – except when you start looking at the details. Don’t go putting our ancestors up on a pedestal of eco-friendly excellence…

Today we start a new series looking back into human history for traces of our enduringly complicated relationship with our planet’s eco-system, good and bad.

First up? Let’s talk about trees.

Assumption

In recent decades, human beings have so lost touch with our need for healthy forests (the lungs of planet Earth) that they’ve started destroying them, squandering the long-term health of the biosphere for short-term economic gain. This didn’t happen in the old days. It’s a sign that historic and prehistoric people understood the natural world in a way modern people never could.

Reality

Since the birth of agriculture, humans have been razing forests for all sorts of reasons. It’s a great way to free up super-fertile soil for crop cultivation. It’s how land is opened up for hunting – both by encouraging fresh vegetation for game to snack on and by allowing hunters to easily get at that game. It’s a way of controlling pests. It’s ideal for creating “no-man’s land” for dividing political territory. And on and on. Think this only applies outside North America, thanks to the benign, nature-loving impact of ancient Native Americans? Think again. Large-scale landscape alterations didn’t just come with the Spanish explorers and missionaries. There is widespread environmental evidence for the use of fire as a land-management tool. It’s even been argued that the savannah or prairie was the natural state of the land with an established Native American population, and so the spread of European settlers led to the growth of forestry…

The Great American Forest may be more a product of settlement than a victim of it.

– References on the American Indian Use Of Fire in Ecosystems, Gerald W. Williams, USDA Forest Service

But if you want to really see a smoking gun for prehistoric forest clearances, go to England. The heaths and moors so beloved of Emily Brontë and Thomas Hardy are Britain’s most extensive form of natural vegetation, with soils too acidic to hold forest growth. They’re rugged and beautiful – and in most cases the work of prehistoric human beings, fire-clearing huge amounts of land for hunting or agriculture and moving on when the soil couldn’t support them. Today moors and heaths are spectacularly diverse eco-systems that are carefully maintained by organizations like The Moorland Association. They’re a national treasure – but they’re also the remnants of Britain’s first environmental disasters.

How many of our modern forests are set to end up this way?

Images: James Whitesmith and *Micky

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