"Cuisine and Empire" offers a global history of food and the way human beings have cooked it. Beginning with “Mastering Grain Cookery, 20,000-300 B.C.E.” (Chapter 1) and ending with “Modern Cuisines: The Globalization of Middling Cuisines- 1920-2000” (Chapter 8), Laudan aims for breadth of chronology and depth of analysis.
"The “middling cuisines” of the 20th century began to develop in the years after 1650, with the Dutch and the British pioneering the idea of government by consent of the governed. As more and more nations located political power in the will of the people, Laudan points out that “it became increasingly difficult to deny to all citizens the right to eat the same kind of food.” Eaters of middling cuisines could enjoy taste-enhancing sauces and sweets, plus more fats, sugar and processed foods than eaters of “traditional humble cuisines...”
"After listing the culinary advantages of grains, she points out a big disadvantage: Grains must be ground if they are to be turned into bread. Her farmer father experimented with turning some of his wheat into flour by hand, first with mortar and pestle, then with a mincer and then with a hammer. All of these tools failed. Despite having sacks full of wheat in their barns, Laudan says, her family might have starved without commercial millers.
"For even more personal experience, Laudan received a grinding lesson from a friend in Mexico, learning firsthand about the hard labor still practiced by women in remote Mexican villages: They must grind five hours every day to prepare maize to feed a family of five or six...
"The graceful writing of the personal observations in "Cuisine and Empire" may cause readers to hope that Rachel Laudan will write a shorter, less formal book summarizing the history that supports her arguments, especially her argument that everyone in the world should be able to enjoy a middling cuisine. She concludes the book by describing Mexican mothers and grandmothers shopping in her Mexico City grocery store. She exults in the huge variety of food available to them — foods for those with time to cook, for those who don’t want to cook, in all price ranges and from all parts of the world. Laudan notes that, not too long ago, many of these women would have been grinding for hours every day. Now, industrialized food processing has brought them what Laudan wishes for everyone — “the choice, the responsibility, the dignity, and the pleasure of a middling cuisine.”
