 I want to welcome everybody. Thank you all for coming out this evening. I'm Harry West, a lecturer in the Department of Anthropology here at SOAS, and also chair of the new Food Studies Center. We're very privileged tonight to have with us Professor Sidney Mintz. It's a particularly apt moment for Professor Mintz to address us as we are launching with this event two new centers of study at the school, both of which focus on areas of study in which Professor Mintz has played a pioneering role. The first of these centers is the Center for Migration and Diaspora Studies. And shortly, I'll introduce my colleague Parvati Raman, who will say a few words about that center in her capacity as chair. The second center is the SOAS Food Studies Center, about which I'll say a few words myself. The Food Studies Center was formed earlier this year, and it's located in the Department of Anthropology here at SOAS. It is, however, a multidisciplinary center, and it includes members from nearly all of the departments at SOAS across the three faculties. The center approaches food studies as the economic, political, and cultural, through its economic, political, and cultural dimensions. And while it builds upon the expertise of SOAS academics in the geographical areas of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, it also looks at food studies issues elsewhere and, indeed, focuses on global dynamics, both in its teaching and in its research activities. The center was created in order to foster teaching and research in the area of food studies at the school, both within the school and at the interface between the school and other institutions, be they academic, be they policymaking, nongovernmental organizations and associations, and the private sector. Teaching under the rubric of the Food Studies Center is focused around the new MA program in the Anthropology of Food. And you may have seen brochures about the new MA program on the table in the entryway on this floor. If you're interested, there should be some brochures left over after the end of the talk, and you might pick one up. In the area of research, the Food Studies Center will be actively supporting the formation of networks and the organization of workshops and conferences that focus on food-related themes here at SOAS. In between the teaching and research activities of the Food Studies Center is what we call the Food Forum. The Food Forum has several different dimensions, but I'll mention two of them. One of them is a weekly seminar and film series. And the other one is a series of occasional distinguished lectures. I might mention at this point that we have a distinguished lecture coming up next month. Francis Moore LePay will be speaking to us on Monday, November 12th, at 6.30 in this theater. And if you're interested in that, you should book a place in advance. There should be details available on the brochures that are up on the walls in the entryway to this room. We have another event, a roundtable discussion, which is entitled The Justice of Eating, which is actually a book launch at the same time. Sorry, the book launch, the title of the book is The Justice of Eating. Am I right? And right. OK, thank you. And the theme of the panel discussion will be food and dignity in recent humanitarian crises. Do I have that right? Thank you. That will be held on Monday, the 15th of October. That's next Monday at 5.30 in the Brunei Suite, which is the former Brunei Cafe on the ground floor of this same building. The Soas Food Studies Center now has over 40 Soas academics affiliated with it, with various regional and topical specializations. And information about the center and its members will soon be available on a center website, which is under construction and should be up and running in about two or three weeks time. Associate membership in the center is also available to people outside of the school. And if you're interested in joining the center and being put on the mailing list to be kept informed of events and activities, you can send an email to us at soasfoodstudiesatsoas.ac.uk. Finally, I want to take this opportunity to thank a few people who have played a key role in helping us get the food studies center up and running and also in organizing this event this evening. The director of the school, Paul Webley, has been very supportive of our activities, as has the faculty of arts and humanities here at the school. In particular, the former dean, Tom Tomlinson, and the current dean, Ian Brown. We also thank the Department of Anthropology and the head of department, Richard Fardon. And finally, the folks in the Office of Centers and Programs, Jane Savry and Rahima Begum have done extraordinary work in helping us to organize the event tonight. So thanks very much to them. I want to introduce now Dr. Parvati Raman, who's chair of the Migration and Diaspora Studies Center. And she'll say a few words about that center. And then finally, we'll introduce our speaker. Hi, it's great to see such a fantastic turnout. Thanks all for coming. I'm just going to say very few words because virtually everything Harry has said sort of applies to the Center for Migration and Diaspora Studies as well. About three years ago, we started a new MA course in the Anthropology Department on Migration and Diaspora. And this is what has been the bedrock, if you like, what's grown into the development of a center from which we hope to do many things. I'd also like to take this opportunity to introduce my co-chair, Tanya Kaiser, from the Development Studies Department, who has worked quite closely with me on these issues. We do a joint film series and a number of things. And we have got a lot of initiatives in the pipeline. What we're hoping to do is to foster a culture of research across the faculties within SOAS. What strikes me is there's so many people in SOAS that do research that is migration and diaspora based, but it's not necessarily the case that we've been talking to each other in the past. I think this has provided a moment in time when we can set up collaborative research networks. And I've also been struck by how many new members of staff have actually got expertise on migration and diaspora who've newly arrived at SOAS. I think this offers us an excellent opportunity not only to make networks across the school, but also other colleges in London, nationally and internationally, and those sorts of things are in progress, okay? I'd also like to say that some people have said to me, well, why another center for migration and diaspora, they seem to be springing up all over the place. I think SOAS has something unique to offer. If you look at the other migration and diaspora centers that are across the nation, they tend to be quite focused in either development studies or in literature, et cetera, et cetera. I think at SOAS we have a real opportunity to build on our expertise and offer a center which is far more trans and interdisciplinary, okay? And I also think it actually, we start from a certain position of advantage given the fact that we have regional specializations, okay? Given the problem with describing the world in national terms, in terms of national borders, for example, SOAS has a head start because we've also always thought regionally and I think some of the things we're going to be trying to do from the center is to have trans-regional studies in these issues. Those are just the few of the things that we're going to develop and we also have a website where you can get information about forthcoming seminars, occasional lectures, et cetera, et cetera, and we'd like you to keep in tune with those and I'm not going to say much more, but I will just say I'd also like to thank my colleague, Jacob Klein, because he has been quite instrumental in actually persuading Professor Mintz to come and speak to us tonight and it's been particularly important to me when I was a not-so-young undergraduate a few years back when I came to the anthropology department, I was doing a joint degree in history and anthropology and I have to admit, I'm saying it in front of my head of department, that I struggled with the anthropology. I couldn't quite get the hang of it at first. I found problems with it and it was really when I discovered Professor Mintz's book, Sweetness and Power, that really I saw a way of marrying my interest in history and anthropology and actually sort of using it in very productive ways that it was also some sort of critical intervention into these studies. And what I'd like to say is diaspora and migration, they've been through quite a few permutations since the 1990s. The term diaspora did try to act as a critical intervention at a period when anthropology was finding difficulty in actually having a voice or finding a language with which to speak. And although it's been through many permutations, I would like the centre to sort of carry on that sort of notion of having, being a critical intervention onto the growing debates on diaspora and migration which tend to use these terms sometimes from a very uncritical stance, an ahoy historical perspective and I think that's where Professor Mintz can really help shed light on some of these issues. So that's all I want to say, thank you. Right, I want to introduce now my colleague Jacob Klein who also is a lecturer in the Anthropology Department and deputy chair of the, so as food studies centre. And Jacob will be introducing our speaker today. All right. Sydney W. Mintz is a pioneering scholar in the study of both diaspora and food. And his work has indeed explored the historical relationship between the movement of peoples and the production, distribution and consumption of foodstuffs. Mintz has been at the forefront of Caribbean studies for decades. He conducted his first fieldwork in Puerto Rico in 1948 and 1949. And this was followed up by numerous field research trips, not only to Puerto Rico, but throughout the Caribbean, in particular Jamaica and Haiti. Employing both historical and ethnographic methods, Mintz has published a number of influential studies of Caribbean peasantries and rural proletarians, marketing systems, Afro-Caribbean culture and identity and plantation economies during and after slavery. His books in these areas include Worker in the Cane, A Puerto Rican Life History, first published in 1960, Caribbean Transformations, first published in 1974, and The Birth of African American Culture from 1992, which was co-authored with Richard Price. A recurring theme in Mintz's research has been the expansion of global capitalism and Euro-American colonialism on the one hand, and the local cultural responses to these wider forces on the other. This was most famously, most famously I should add, for those of us who are not Caribbeanists, this is most famously explored in Sweetness and Power, The Place of Sugar in Modern History, which was first published in 1985. In this book, Mintz traces the historical relationship over several centuries between the production of sugar in plantations in the Caribbean with the changing and increasing consumption of sugar in Europe, in particular Britain. He provocatively argues that sugar plantations in the Caribbean, although employing slaves rather than free labor, not only developed industrial forms of time management and divisions of labor centuries before the Industrial Revolution in Europe itself, but also fueled the emergence of industrial capitalism in Britain by supplying the proletarian classes here with consolation in the form of sweetness for their tea, and especially from the mid-19th century with an abundance of cheap calories in the form of sugar for jams and other prepared foods. Sweetness and Power established in Mintz as a central figure in the anthropology of food, and in 1996, he published a collection of essays entitled Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom, Excursions into Eating, Culture and the Past. Since the 1990s in particular, Mintz has turned a great deal of attention toward East and Southeast Asia, and together with Tanty Bang and Christine Dubois, he's recently completed an edited volume on soy foods, which will soon be in press. Professor Mintz has had a long and distinguished career in American anthropology. He was on the faculty at Yale University from 1951 to 1974, and was a co-founder in 1974 of the Department of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University, where he is currently a research professor. He is taught at a number of overseas institutions, including the École Practique des Autitudes and at the Collège de France, both in Paris, of course, and at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. It gives me great pleasure to introduce Sydney Mintz, who will be talking to us today on the topic of food and diaspora. Thank you. Thank you very much, Jacob. Good evening. I would like to begin by expressing my thanks to the School of Oriental and African Studies for having made it possible for me to take part in the proceedings tonight, and also my colleagues in the relevant disciplines and institutes for cooperating in bringing me here. Personally, it's a very great pleasure, a heartwarming pleasure, because it gives my wife and me a heartwarming opportunity to see old friends, and I hope to make new ones while we're here. When I was a graduate student, now more than half a century ago, we were accustomed to think of anthropology as a unitary discipline, comprised of four subfields, physical anthropology, archaeology, linguistics, and cultural anthropology. Cultural anthropologists were interested in species-wide, arguably universal features of Homo sapiens on the one hand, and on the other, and much more so, in whatever features, whether physical, linguistic, or behavioral, that were used by laypersons, or that might serve scientifically, to distinguish one group of modern humans from another. So American, a view of the field, was surely marked by many faults, and you are free to treat its unusual breath and its quaint Yankee optimism as cavalierly as you wish. All the same, this view had its virtues. Its target of study has been known for more than a century now, as the animal that cooks, and the work of Professor Levi Strauss and others has further enshrined that conception of us, even in popular discourse. So broad and deep a view of our field is convenient as background, in view of the very large subject on which I was invited to speak. The near simultaneous creation of the SOAS program, which has brought us all here, and the Institut européen d'histoire et des cultures de l'alimentation across the channel, suggests that powerful gastric, but surely not only gastric forces are at work. That the French, who seemed not to talk much about food, presumably because theirs was so good, and are now studying food academically, is at least as remarkable as that the English, whom I do not remember as talking about food at all, are also studying it. I suspect that the motives in these two cases must be quite different. Even before we became the animal that cooks, we were, like all of the rest of life, animals that had to eat. Our history as eating animals changed profoundly when we became cooking animals. But long before that, we had first to become fire-using and then fire-controlling animals. As you know, a huge consequence of our mastery of fire was the conversion of substances into edible foods that could not have been food for us without cooking. Many millennia later, humans began the domestication of plants and animals. It happened independently in many different places, stretched over thousands of years, and involved large numbers of individual plants and animals. The great Russian geneticist Nikolai Vavilov pioneered the global documentation of the history of plants and pinned down five major centers or hearths of domestication, out of which treasure troves of diverse foods would subsequently flow to other species. Vavilov's work showed how universal had been the application of human genius to the desire for stable subsistence. There were centers in the Mediterranean, in the Americas, in Africa, and two in Asia. As a form of energy capture, nothing human beings have ever done could match the importance of domestication. I would not accept here even achievements such as the mastery of fossil fuels or nuclear power. In this connection, too, you were free to take exception and to see domestication as an enormous step backward, some have so thought. But it happened, and if it was a slippery slope, sure to lead us to our destruction along the path of hubris, it has turned out at least so far to be quite unstoppable. I point out here parenthetically that since plants and animals can be classified taxonomically, while those who use them classify them in culturally specific ways, tied instead to cultivation or husbandry or preservation or processing or to taste. I touch here on a rich sphere of human sensibility to which I will try to return. Because of the consequences of transformations which humans have effectuated by producing their own subsistence, I think it is fair to argue that truly natural foods for our species have by now been so thoroughly whittled away that all we probably can still claim is natural is mother's milk. Our first experiments with fire go back at least 40,000 years and probably far longer, while our experiments in controlling other living things began at least 12,000 years ago. Active interference with nature by our species is not a hormonal or instinctual matter, it is or it became conscious and deliberate. I offer these remarks as introductory to an enormously broad pair of subjects, food and diaspora. But having done so, I would like to interpose a disclaimer and tell you what I hope now to do. In what I have to say, I want to mention three human movements of which only one really corresponds to James Clifford's definition of diaspora. I shall try then to relate these human movements to those of food plants, animals, substances, cooking methods and cuisines, but more as examples of diversity than to provide any kind of global picture. The human movements I have in mind are first the movement of enslaved Africans to the Americas, which perhaps comes closest to Clifford's schema. Second, the global picture of 19th century movement, which embraces many different migrations, but which can I think be quite defensively divided into just two for my purposes here. And finally and briefly, the movement of Chinese immigrants to the new world. If I were asked my intentions, I would say it was to offer examples of what can happen with food when people have to move, as well as of what can happen when food moves without people. As part of the recent immense interest in the rise of a global food system, I think that many people have reacted in at least two quite different ways, neither of which seems to me entirely adequate. First, they have tended to forget just how ancient the trans-oceanic intercontinental movement of both plant and animal foods has actually been. Second, though they have made themselves newly aware of the importance of locality in food history, the image of endless movement seems much more seductive. In fact, both the antiquity of movement of humans or foods and the importance of place deserve to be kept firmly in mind. The rise of a culturally specific food system, characteristic of a human group, occurs within other parameters. A territory with its own seasons, specific flora and fauna, techniques of processing and means of storage, typical of that place, a system of production that includes a division of labor, at least along lines of sex and age, and so on. One could add other things. Though more could be said, for tonight suffice it to say that toward anthropology, the discipline which first afforded us rich detail on truly non-Western culinary systems, we have a special debt of gratitude. In the course of the last century, and on both sides of the Atlantic, anthropology made huge contributions, generally unrecognized outside our discipline, to our understanding of how human groups, no matter how modest their material culture, successfully fed and reproduced themselves, often in spite of terrible pressures, including those imposed by forbidding or meager environments. What we know about the Khoisan peoples of the Halehari Desert and the Inuit peoples of the Far North, for example, supports the anthropological assertion that what distinguishes our humanity is not so much what people have, but what they do with what they have. That aphorism still carries great ethical weight, at least with me, but not all human groups were pushed so hard by circumstance and by nature. Descriptions of the salmon fishing peoples of the American coast, North from California to Alaska, give us an image of rich food security, even splendor. Though they were hunters and gatherers, these folk prospered in a marine environment that let them harvest fish as if they were farmers. It was in documenting as precisely as they could how these many food systems, both generous and parsimonious, functioned that anthropologists developed their views of the way culture grew upon and was imposed upon nature and how nature yielded to or constrained human exertions. I think such studies of the food quest were the birthplace, so to speak, of the paired concepts of locality and culture. So crucial to our understanding of patterned behavior has locality been that the concept of culture itself, dear at least to American anthropology, arose in intimate relationship to the meanings of locality. Now that some people think of locality as disappearing, we may unfortunately be encouraged to forget how humans successfully made new culturally specific realities out of the resources they grew to know best. Anyone familiar with mucklucks or snow goggles or igloos or kayaks or harpoons or the tailored clothing of the Inuit peoples can see how the environment became for them not only where they lived and what they lived on but also who they were. We should not let talk about the seeming decline of locality permit us to forget how those places, many of them hugely inhospitable, were transformed into homes and hearths by human toughness and ingenuity. From place on the one hand and food on the other, there arose the anthropological idea of culture area. Anyone who has bumped into this very North American idea probably knows that culture areas really began as food areas. Almost the first anthropological maps of North America were of the major subsistence zones of native peoples, maize, manioc, salmon, acorns, potatoes, and so on. And how could it have been otherwise? Once the physical nature of a region is known, what comes next if not the way people there rest their daily sustenance from it? I interrupt myself and parenthesize here to provide an example. Some of you may have heard though probably not many of a minor principality in Germany called Vied Neuvied. But Prince Maximilian, his name was Maximilian Vied von Neuvied, Prince Maximilian wrote a book quite famous called Travels in the West. He was a naturalist, enthusiastic naturalist who came to the United States to collect zoological specimens. And he went up the Missouri from St. Louis on a flat boat in the 1830s to visit peoples up there and to collect snakeskins and bird skins and other trophies to carry back to Vied Neuvied. And he describes for us in this book how he stopped in a place to visit people called the Hedotsen, the Hedotsen that were peaceable village dwelling farmers who grew maize, beans, squash, and tobacco. They lived in semi-subterranean house. It's not very comfortable and pretty smoky but they were half underground because the weather in that part of the coat is terribly cold in winter. And he was with them and one day he was nearly run down by a man on a horse, the Hedotsen are not horse people. And this fellow he says, sat astride his horse half naked and across his saddle he had a mountain lion skin. He carried a lance in his right hand with red streamers hanging from it. And he galloped past and nearly threw Prince Maximilian to the ground and he turned to his Hedotsen host and said, who's that? And his host said to him, he's a crow. They're the crow people. They're our cousins. And then he learned about the crow. The crow had been Hedotsen at 150 years earlier. They had given up their life growing maize, beans, and squash and they'd taken to the horse. The horse had moved upward from Mexico. And the Spaniards did everything they could to keep the horses out of the hands of the Indians. Indians were forbidden to make saddles. But the Indians learned how to steal horses and how to make saddles. And the notion that's common in American westerns that Indians like to ride bareback, of course no man in his right mind would like to ride bareback. Indians learned how to make saddles, perfect copies of the Spanish saddles at the ones that they saw the Spaniards riding on. And they became of course marvelous equestrians. And why did they want the horse? Because the horse was the way to the bison. That's why they wanted the horse. And once they had the horse, they rode west from where they were with the Hedotsen, all across the plains as far as northern Montana. And they became horse people, equestrians, plains Indians. And this man who rode by with these blocks of colored wood in his hair and the eagle feathers stuck down and the mountain lion skin and the lance, he was a real crow. But he was a cousin of the Hedotsen. Now 150 years earlier he'd been a Hedotsen. And when these people, these crow left their houses with the Hedotsen and became crow and equestrians, they were no longer peaceable but warlike. The two words we use for primitive people, some were peaceable, some were, they became warlike. And they began no longer to eat vegetable food, but to live on meat and fat. And they're women who'd been equal when they had been Hedotsen were demeaned by the work they were, the drudgery they were made to do in treating the buffalo flesh to preserve it for winter. They gave up pottery because you can't make pottery and be equestrian people. And they gave up the longbow and replaced it with a short compound bow because you can't carry a longbow on a horseback and use it. And so their entire lives, their system of sexual division of labor, the food that they ate, the places that they lived, the igloos that replaced their semi-subterranean houses, all of these things changed because they changed their food. So locality and what people use their environment for is fundamental to understanding who they are. That is when people still produce their own food. We must eat if possible every day. And as that great British anthropologist, Audrey Richards, told us long ago, the impulse to seek food is, after all, a desire that cannot be inhibited or repressed at any rate beyond certain limits. Unlike the drive of sex, it is a periodic urge recurring regularly every few hours. As I used to tell my undergraduates long ago, if they think that the sex urge is more powerful than the urge to hunger, that's because they're young and definitely overfed. The North American anthropological obsession with place, food, and culture in that cluster even reached across the ocean as in the work of the late Darryl Ford, whose wonderful introductory text, habitat, economy, and society disturbed some of his colleagues over here when it first appeared. Ford's book makes much of the specific adaptations of people to local conditions. Food getting, preparation, preservation, and use are understandably central to their successes in adaptation. It was in the context of such adaptive successes that the concept of cuisine and the symbolic alloying of belief and identity through common insality was achieved. I begin in this manner because I sense some ambiguity between talk about our endless movement and the end of culture which such movement supposedly be tokens on the one hand. And on the other, the idea that those who are in diaspora are dedicated to regain or reclaim some particular locality to which they collectively think back. As I see it, locality is still very much with us and so is culture. As students of food, I think we can profitably keep both those subjects in mind. Let me begin by setting forth some basic evidence on the movement of foods as opposed to the movement of peoples. I think a good place to begin is with two consonants first occupied by migrants from Asia, discovery of which is credited especially to Columbus. Other than one or two quite startling possible exceptions that I will not discuss, the foods of the old world and the new were absolutely separate and independent in 1492. Thereafter, however, a quite amazing exchange of food plants, animals and food substances took place between the two worlds, the old and the new. The Colombian exchange as it's called is surely familiar to you already at least in outline. New world achievements in agriculture included potatoes and tomatoes and maize and most of our beans and manioc and all of the peppers sweet and hot and they would spread across the globe in the ensuing five centuries but first of all in Europe. Though foods from everywhere were carried to the new world by migrants, nearly every bit of the spread away from the new world happened because of diffusion, that old anthropological term, not migration. In my list above, I mentioned only a few of the principal items here. I omitted for instance spices and flavoring such as chocolate and vanilla and annatto and allspice and fruits like papaya and guava and naceberries and sweet sops and sour sops and pineapples and the squashes, the yellow, the acorn, the patty, the spaghetti, the butternut, pumpkins, triotes and what we Americans now call zucchini. They're all domesticated by the American Indian. They didn't need any labs, they didn't need white coats, they didn't need any test tubes. They domesticated them all with the beneficiaries. But what happened to these things once they left the Americas? Of the potatoes history in Ireland, of course we know a great deal. We may also know how popular paprika would become particularly in Spain and even more in Hungary because in Europe may spread without the knowledge, the aboriginal knowledge, that it had to be cooked with lime in order to make its limited niacin digestible by humans, there were in Europe terrible outbreaks of pelagra, what the Germans call mycin conchite. And these happened in much of Europe. So the food consequences of New World contributions to European cuisine were great. But most of us are, I think, as ignorant as I about what happened with New World foods in China. And because of China's immense long culinary history, often thought to be built entirely upon autochthonous agricultural techniques and cultivars, it's a good place for us to look at how foods are received without people in new places. Historian Bertold Laufler wrote an impressive work at exactly 101 years old now. He wrote it in 1906 entitled Sino-Iranica. And if you don't know it in your antiquarian, it's a book worth a look. In which he details the introduction of a great many foods to China, but in this case from a region centering on nearby Iran. I won't list, numerate all the things that were introduced this way, but he discusses in precise historical terms the introduction into China of carrots, sesame, sugar, broad beans, cumin, coriander, and the grape, all coming mostly from China's Southwestern borders, principally the gifts of Persian agriculture. Though some of those attributions have been elaborated during the last 100 years, it's surprising how few have been disproved or for that matter even seriously tested. That there could be important diffusion from a nearby neighboring region is easy to understand, but what about foods coming from far away? The New World introductions to Asia were more unusual not only because of distance, but also because the two worlds old and new had been for so long entirely shut off from each other. Roland Dixon, a sharp early critic of extreme diffusion, the diffusionism that had made Egypt into the center of the universe is worth citing here. He wrote this of the old world. Eurasia and Africa and the long looped archipelagos and continental islands of the Pacific forms one great unit along which peoples and cultures have been free to drift at will. Here the rise of Rome to greatness could enrich the silk merchants from far off China, send Roman guards to add brilliance to the courts of South Indian kings, build Roman baths in Britain, but behind its barriers of 3000 miles or more of open sea, the New World lay immune in violet. After 1492, however, that remoteness became less and less a barrier. New World plants reached China by sea and eventually overlanded as well. Their use is documented in a remarkably substantial Chinese literature, though the chronology is often contested and some authors of course are more reliable and others and expert knowledge of many languages is a prerequisite for serious research so it means I'll never get there. Foreign origin in those foods which reached China from the New World is attested to among other things by the names that are used just as the potato was pomme de terre in France and cibes amigny in Farsi. So words that came into China came in with appended labels or indications of what they were. The first arrivals were always characterized by the Chinese character for barbarian. So it's a barbarian juju bean, it's a tomato, it's called a barbarian lemon and it turns out to be bananas. The later arrivals were treated more gently. They often acquired instead the Chinese character for southern or western or ocean or in some cases, western ocean. But all of these things on reaching China of course got local names. I'd like to make several points quickly about such introduction, but I'm not gonna dwell on them. First most, though truly not all, such foods remained on the edges of Chinese regional cuisines. With most exceptions, any deeper penetration of the cuisine would be local or regional. It would not affect national cuisines across the country. So an example is the capsicums, the peppers in Hunanese cooking. There you can see deeper penetration but it's special in particular, we can point to it. Capsicum is simply the genus of all of the peppers. The sweet peppers, they're all New World. There's no, the red, green, yellow, orange, all those things, none of them were here before. They all came from the New World. To my knowledge, there's little in the acceptance of New World foods in China to compare for instance to what happened with the potato in Europe, in Ireland or for that matter in Europe as a whole because the potato went right across. There were places where it was objected to but everybody finally went right across. And just as the potato went right across Europe in the north, where it's cold, maize went right across Europe in the south. So you get polenta and mamaligan. So those two things planted from west to east across Europe without interruption. Nor is there anything in the food borrowing history of China that I could find that compares to how the Americas would affect Italian cuisine where you see this intensively creative integration of tomatoes, sweet peppers, hot peppers, potatoes, maize, squashes, and most beans in local diet. And it's almost unprecedented how what a wholesale borrowing the Italian people did of New World foods. Most of the New World borrowings into China would be more like, some of you may know the thing that the French quote, topi nambour, Jerusalem artichoke, it's not from Jerusalem it's not an artichoke with that particular root. Helianfus is famous because people say it's the food that gives people most flatulence of any in the world. I don't know if that's true but the French liked them. They were being touted to the French by Parmentier as early as the end of the 18th century and they really have stuck. In the US they're called sun chokes and some Americans eat them but some Americans also recognize them as American Indian food. They're an odd kind of choice but they've done very well. But that's the kind of thing you're more likely to find in China. Some one thing being picked up by one region they like the way hot peppers were picked up in Hunan in Sichuan. Scores of American plants entered China. They included such foods as a tomato, the papaya, peanuts, you may call them ground nuts, cashews, both the fruit and the nut, the fruits are quite good though we don't get them maize, the capsicums both sweet and hot. The hikama, I don't know if you know that one but we saw some in Lester Square last night we were looking at a hikama called the yam bean. It's a legume. Many of the true beans like lima and naveli and frichole and yellow, the string and the chayote. We didn't talk about chayote but chayote some of you may know if you're from Australia, New Zealand haven't they call them choco? They're small and they have lime green outside. They're good and you can cook them or you can also eat them raw. All of those things got to China but they all ended up on the culinary margins. None of them penetrated the cuisine deeply. I think that the difference between Europe and China in this regard was not a matter of distance nor of the disdain with which so many Western things were regarded in China but actually the high nutritional quality and diversity of Chinese regional cuisines at the time. And yet it has always mattered in diffusion of plants when one or another new crop could be used strategically by local farmers. And Chinese farmers were quick to capitalize on questions of different growing seasons, plant resistance to drought, the use of land that couldn't be used for traditional crops or to counteract fears of famine, which were reawakened of course in the 1960s. We all I think tend to think of taste coming first when there's a diffusion of new foods but in countries that are full of dirt farmers, new plants to be grown at all have to fit into existing patterns of production or they will not be taken up. Though I've suggested that most such introductions were not very significant, largely because of these practical concerns, here are two of the important such new world to China borrowings. The first has been noted by Ping Tee Ho and by Anderson, who's a genuine expert on food in China and more recently by the very competent young historian of sugar in China, Succeda Mazumdar. And this is the sweet potato, the pomea batatas. Sweet potatoes are very old in China, so old that at one time they were actually thought to have predated the Colombian discovery. There's pretty much unanimity now that they are not, that they reached China first from Manila with the Mexican galleons, Spanish galleons that sailed westward across the Pacific. And they'd been brought from Mexico then to the Philippines they jumped to China. Sweet potatoes have had a special impact due to a number of factors. Sweet potatoes don't grow in difficult soil conditions. They're resistant to insect pests. They don't need much moisture. They'll grow in substandard soils. In other words, the kind of crop that ends up being a famine crop, the kind of crop that ends up being what people eat when they haven't got anything else. Partly because of that, their status as human food has declined in China. At least in some parts they're a mark of rural poverty. But they have a very high caloric value and they mixed well into Chinese food patterns. So for example, an ethnographer of Chaoshan in Suato, Chen, describes how people there flavor their congee with shredded sweet potato. Historically, in China, the sweet potato was often categorized as fun rather than Thai, not as a green but as a basic food. Probably because they became an important famine food early after their arrival. And I think they played an important part in population increases in South China. The story of maize has been different but also important. Maize hardly surfaces in the Chinese restaurant food known to most of us. I don't know if you ever have crapsoup, definitely in your crapsoup, you get a few corn craps. It's always like they're letting you know that they knew what corn was. It doesn't play much of a role. But in China now, it has become a common food in the form of cornmeal, which is either baked into flat cakes or served in a cornmeal mush. And Anderson says corn is also used in making noodles, but it has very little gluten. And the hybrid corns that are being grown in China are not of high quality. So it results, he says, in coarse food. All the same, maize has probably now supplanted sorghum as China's third most important grain because it can be grown in dry upland terrain. It's a staple, or nearly so, in the mountain regions of the west, south, and central north. These two new world additions, maize and sweet potatoes are among the very oldest and probably the most significant such diffusions from the new world. As I'm sure you all know, when food objects or processes or even food ideas spread from one society to another, the receiving society modifies and sometimes misunderstands what it receives. And when using this new item, it usually redefines and so to speak, indigenizes it, makes it their own, appropriates it. Witness the history, if you must, of American sushi. We now have such things as California rolls and rock and rolls and other barbarisms. And we can see in this some of the uses to which new world foods have over time been put in China. They're taken, they're rethought, they're redefined and they're stuck in somewhere and that's generally where they remain. Peanuts are a good example because peanuts, of course, are legumes, they're not really nuts. They come from the new world, all of them come from the new world. They're used in China in many cooked dishes, they're occasionally used to create a sauce and peanuts themselves are often turned up in Chinese hors d'oeuvres, so they are used, they found a place for them, but they're not that important. What's important is peanut oil and peanut oil is now the most used cooking oil in China. And this is interesting since China is where the soybean was domesticated, but the cooking oil that's most popular is peanut oil. Having said all of this about China and food borrowing, I want to speak about human movement. You may have noticed my point that foods out of the new world move mostly without people. Near the end of my talk I'll return to the new world to talk about incoming food and incoming people. I said that I wanted to refer to two human movements in all, the first dealing with Afro-America and the second with the 19th century. In fact, those two movements overlapped. The first enslaved Africans to reach the new world were taken there within 10 years of the discovery that is probably by 1504. The last enslaved Africans were smuggled into the new world by European and North American slavers around 1850, perhaps a bit later. Considerable research of good quality has gone into documenting that trade, which is of course a separate matter from issues of the reproduction by the slaves in the new world. The latest work I've seen suggests that if we assume a mortality rate of 15%, which is reasonable of people who died in the course of the traffic from enslavement to the arrival of the ships in the new world, if 15% is the figure, this means that the slaves for the period from their capture until their landing, the total would come to about 13 million persons over a period of 350 years. This is surely the largest and most terrible diaspora in world history. I can't dwell here in a short talk on the economic and political context for the trade, its abolition, and the eventual abolition of slavery itself. I did get over to the British Museum to see the little room where they have a show, I guess celebrating Wilberforce. But I do want to say a little at least about food in this connection. In spite of the conditions under which the slaves were carried across the ocean and then sold and put to work, there were important food and culinary connections between old world and new that survived all of it. There were also, of course, enormous changes in considerable improvisation, but it is thrilling all the same to discover both lexical and culinary evidence of continuity. The second edition of the Dictionary of Jamaican English by Cassidy and LePage, for example, is heavily laden with English words though, of course, with changed phonology or meanings. Yet probably half of the nouns, I haven't counted them, probably half of the nouns originated in African languages and many of those words, hundreds of those words, are food words. Such African domestics as the sorghums, yams, plantains and bananas, watermelon, okra, malagata pepper, and trees such as the oil palm and the ackee reached in the world. Some probably with the slaves or in the course of the trade. Recently, Judith Carney's book, Black Rice, which deals with rice cultivation in Africa and South Carolina, sets forth convincingly the thesis that South Carolina's great rice plantations were more the product of enslaved African rice cultivators than of their white masters. And it is hardly new to so-called southern cooking of the U.S. with much more of the work of black cooks than of white bells in their crinoline dresses. My remarks on the 19th century will be equally brief. Nobel laureate Sir W. Arthur Lewis of the tiny island of St. Lucia, the same one that Walcott comes from, talked about world migration in his book on international trade, now 30 years old. During the 19th century, he tells us, around 100 million people left their homes to make journeys across oceans, primarily in search of gainful employment. Note that 100 million between 1800 and 1900, which by my primitive arithmetic comes to one million a year. Some people are saying globalization began in 1988 with the year they were born or whatever. It's been around a while. Now, I said I was going to discuss this movement and divide it into two parts and that's what I'm gonna do. 50 million of those people were Europeans. They went mostly to European colonies or former colonies run by people of European origin. Canada, Argentina, Uruguay, South Africa, New Zealand, Australia and the United States, among others. We know a lot about them. They became citizens of the societies they joined because the societies they went to were social democracies. Their cultural identities changed, some more and some less, but all in a manner we do know something about because the grandparents who got here sent their children to those three schools and those children grew up and became college professors and wrote books about their grandfathers. So we know a lot about those people and it was practically the same book in every one of those countries. We know a great deal about their food. Indeed, my first observation would be that their foods mostly took on their ethnic character only after they arrived and when they found out that they were ethnic. As Joan Vincent said a long time ago, you can't be ethnic unless someone else to you is different from you culturally. In the case of the US, there's a familiar pattern in which the first generation loses or deliberately forgets its ethnicity, but soon enough its children are complaining bitterly because their parents failed to retain their ethnic identity. Ethnic foods in a country like the US have a special potency. Until they begin to be eaten by everybody, they're ethnic. Once everybody has begun to eat them, they're American. I've also observed that when an ethnic food in my country loses its ethnicity and becomes American, like the bagel or pasta, which we used to call spaghetti, when something like that becomes American, somebody of that ethnic identity usually gets appointed to our Supreme Court. Now what that means is, what that means is that pita bread and falafel, their day will come. I'm not able to say whether the emphasis on becoming American is as true for Brazilians say or Argentines, but certainly the American nations can be joined by newcomers in a way that most European ones cannot. And I believe that does enter importantly into the retention loss or modification of food habits. But let me now talk briefly about those other 50 million migrants of the 19th century. The non-Europeans considered non-white by Europeans. These blackbirds, Cooleys, Chinks, and Canacas went to a different set of European colonies. Most of them still colonial, most of them without any social democracy, most of them without the secret ballot, and most of them without public education. They came from colonies such as parts of Africa or India or from ancient politically weak states such as China. The lands which received them included islands and the Indian and Pacific oceans, such as Mauritius and Fiji, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. The Caribbean colonies such as French Guadalupe and Martinique and British Jamaica and Trinidad, along with their neighboring mainland's including British French and Dutch Hiana, some parts of South America and Africa, especially East and South. Of the non-white migrants though, hardly any got to such places as Canada and the United States or Argentina and Chile or New Zealand and Australia, though there were some temporary exceptions. Students of the food present can try to understand what happened to the food habits of the half million or so Indians who migrated on contract to the Caribbean islands and their nearby shores. To those of the 150,000 Chinese who reached Cuba or to the more than 80,000 Chinese who reached Peru. Large numbers of those original migrants did carry their food habits with them. They brought plants and spices when they could and their new homes they added new foods to their own food systems, meanwhile introducing strangers to their ways of cooking and eating. But it was particularly difficult to maintain continuities when migrants were unable to bring their families as happened particularly to Chinese laborers for instance in Cuba. We know less about them than we do about white migrants because of where they went and the circumstances of their migrations. But the current success of curries in New York City had a precedent in Trinidad and British Guiana more than a century ago. While Chinese restaurants in Lima and Havana at the end of the 19th century, if we only had their menus and their recipes might usefully be compared to those that entertain New Yorkers on the Upper West Side today. For the most part, the 19th century non-white migrants came from poor rural settings elsewhere and moved into equally colonial settings where economic advancement was difficult and public education inferior or nonexistent. Clearly, the opportunities available to the average migrant in a colony such as Trinidad or Malaysia in 1850 would be microscopic when compared to those for the average migrant in Canada or the United States if indeed the average Indian or Chinese had been able to get there at all 150 years ago. Yet by what look now like strange miracles those migrants were often able to recreate many of their food practices. Let me conclude by returning to the question of Chinese food, Chinese migrants in the New World. I argued earlier that foods which started in the New World and ended up in China diffused that they moved mostly without people settling in new places. Now I return to the New World, but this time to talk about new migrants from China. As I've suggested, the larger movements of the Americas before the recent post-1965 migrations were of male laborers who came to the US, to Cuba, to Peru and several other countries almost always with great difficulty, sometimes under coercion, and most important for issues of food usually without women or their families. But in the present situation, Americans are now busily opening fast food restaurants across China and at the same time thousands of Asian immigrants including Chinese are opening restaurants everywhere in the US. There is here I think a provocative even an illuminating contrast having to do with food that helps us to see how culture inflects capitalism. It has to do with two different manifestations of capitalist growth, one in the US and the other in China. The first is the expansion of American corporate fast food enterprises in Asia led by KFC, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and McDonald's. But also including Wendy's and other firms plus a certain number of Asian look-alikes such as Coral in Hong Kong, which is a Hong Kong version of McDonald's. Though these fast food outlets, most of them North America, make much of their use of local labor, local products and local food preferences such as McDonald's tabooing beef dishes in India and now inventing buns flavored with Chinese pepper. In fact, they're perceived by their Asian overseas clientele as foreign enterprises, no matter who manages them. For many customers, part of their appeal is precisely that quality of foreignness. The general characteristics of these establishments are well known. They're locally managed, they're aimed at children, they're clean and uniform and all the rest. But these food purveyors provided dramatic contrast to the endless thousands of mom and pop Asian restaurants that now dock the American landscape from Maine to Florida and from New York to California and which could never have come into being without basic changes in US immigration policy. If there'd be something special about these restaurants, I think it is exactly how much they share in spite of their culturally variegated natures. Chinese, Malaysian, Cambodian, Thai, Laotian, Vietnamese, Japanese, Indian, Indonesian, Burmese and so on. I believe that larger-scale establishments are in the offing but these are still predominantly small family-run enterprises. Sociologically, they exhibit features that surmount or nullify cultural differences. They capitalize heavily on family labor. They stay open on usually long hours. They adjust their cuisines to their patrons and usually have takeout food as well as interior seating. Commonly, the males cook, the females wait table and tend register and the daughters complain bitterly when they come home from college and have to wait in the restaurant on weekends. They turn up in university neighborhoods and towns, offer fixed lunches or buffets and business districts, provide takeout meals in black neighborhoods. Consistent with a non-competitive problem avoiding tradition of Asian service purveyors in foreign lands, particularly the US, they give very high value in food relative to their non-Asian competition. Consistent again with that tradition, their Caucasian clientele customarily think that it is right to pay significantly more for a badly prepared main course in a Caucasian restaurant but wildly inappropriate to make more than half the same amount for a fine Chinese or Thai dinner that actually tastes much better. The contrast between the highly modern fast food franchise is now peddled by Americans abroad and the mom and pop quality of the typical new Asian restaurant in the US, so reminiscent of an earlier era in American life, strikes me as one of the more dramatic aspects of global food marketing. I've tried here to sketch in some of the major movements of foods and of peoples that are of interest to me and have marked a coalescent global food system. I've painted this picture in admittedly very broad brush strokes because I think we still know only a little of what we need to know in order to understand fully what is happening. I'd like to end by reminding you again that you should try to keep locality and culture in mind. The drumbeat for perpetual movement and globalization should not distract us from understanding how local food systems began, what made them good, and for me at least, most of all, why we would like them to come back even stronger in the future. Thank you.