Our forebears bred, ground, soaked, leached, curdled, fermented, and cooked naturally occurring plants and animals until they were literally beaten into submission. They built granaries for their grain, dried their meat and their fruit, salted and smoked their fish, curdled and fermented their dairy products, and cheerfully used whatever additives and preservatives they could-sugar, salt, oil, lye-to make edible foodstuffs. In the 12th century, the Chinese sage, Wu Tzu-mu listed the seven necessities of life: rice, salt, vinegar, soy sauce, oil, tea and wood. Six of these were foodstuffs; five of them had been unrecognizably transformed from their original form. Sea water and salt springs had been boiled to make salt; rice had been fermented into ale and then soured to make vinegar; soy beans had been cooked and fermented to make sauce; cabbage seeds had been crushed to extract oil; and the leaves of a camellia plant had been killed by heat, powdered and packed into bricks of tea.

Happiness was a full storehouse. Only the uncivilized, the poor and the starving resorted to fresh and natural foods. When the author of the Confucian classic, the Book of Rites, said that wild and uncooked foods (that is fresh and natural) were what people ate before they took "advantage of the benefits of fire...[before] they toasted, grilled, boiled, and roasted... [before] they produced must and sauces."9 he was only saying what was commonplace worldwide. When the ancient Greeks took it as a sign of bad times when people had to eat greens and root vegetables, they too were repeating common wisdom.[10]

Processed and preserved foods, by contrast, not only kept well and were easier to digest, they were more delicious: risen white bread, thick, nutritious, heady beer, unctuous oil from the inedible fruit of an unprepossessing tree, milk, cream, cheese and curd and a tasty sauce from beans that eaten fresh gave you wind for hours, flexible fragrant flat breads from dry, chewy maize, not to mention wine, cheese, sauerkraut, marmalade, hundred-year-old eggs, Smithfield hams, kippers, crack seed, apricot leather, milk fudge, and fish sauce.

(2) So much for fresh, but what about local? Local foods were the lot of the poor. Unlike the rich, they could not escape the tyranny of local climate and biology, and the monotonous, often precarious diet it afforded. The rich, ready for a more varied diet, bought, stole, wheedled, robbed, taxed, and ran off with appealing plants and animals, foodstuffs, and culinary techniques from wherever they could find them. By the 5th century BC, Celtic princes in the region of France now known as Burgundy, enjoyed a glass or two of Greek wine, drunk from silver copies of Greek drinking vessels.[11] Meanwhile, the Greeks looked to the Persians, importing their peaches and apricots and citrons, as well as the habit of reclining to eat. Around the time of the birth of Christ, Chinese and Roman nobility snapped up spices brought from the distant and mysterious Spice Islands, as their descendants were to do for centuries thereafter. From the 7th century AD on, the Islamic elite sponsored a massive transfer of plants-sugar, rice and citrus among them-westward across the northern and southern shores of the Mediterranean. When the foreign stimulant drinks, coffee, tea and cocoa became the rage in seventeenth century Europe, the rich drank them in Chinese porcelain, imported or imitation, proffered by servants in Turkish or other foreign dress. The Swedes, who had no empire, found it hard to get hold of these drinks, so the botanist, Linnaeus, set afoot plans to naturalize the tea plant in Sweden.

We may laugh. Yet at the time, Linnaeus's proposal was not more ridiculous than other, more successful proposals to naturalize sugar cane across the tropical world, apples in Australia, grapes in Chile, and Hereford cattle across the world's grasslands. These were the activities we now euphemistically describe as 'spreads,' 'exchanges,' or 'gifts'. Whether forced or voluntary, without the expansion of culinary resources from the local to the global, our diets would be dull indeed.

(3) Long before soccer moms, fast food (food prepared outside the home to be eaten rapidly and away from home) was a fact of life. Hunters, fishermen, shepherds and soldiers all needed fast, portable food. Wheat flour was baked into hard tack or dried as pasta, maize toasted and ground into pinole, and barley roasted and ground into a meal (fit for the gods, according the Greeks). This meal could be consumed as it was or mixed with water, milk or butter. Plato and Aristotle would have eaten it frequently. The Tibetans still do, under the name, tsampa.

When fuel cost as much as the food it cooked, and when lighting fires in crowded city dwellings was a perilous thing to do, city dwellers depended on the noodle shop, the taco stand, and the bakery for a quick hot bite. Besides, lots of foods, deep fried foods in particular, are prepared more safely and cheaply in specialized facilities. Donuts, churros, andagi, and sev all fall in this category. To a way of eating that went as far back as we have records, Americans simply added the electric deep fryer, the heavy iron griddle of the Low Countries, and the franchise.

(4) And what about the idea that the best food was country food, hand made by artisans? That food came from the country goes without saying. That the best food was to be found in the country is very dubious. Few who worked the land were independent peasants baking their own bread, brewing their own beer, and salting down their own pig. They were serfs, slaves, indentured laborers, or rent and tax payers. Often barely part of the cash economy, they subsisted on what was left over. "The city dwellers," remarked the great Roman doctor Galen in the 2nd Century AD, "collected and stored enough grain for all the coming year immediately after the harvest. They carried off all the wheat, the barley, the beans and the lentils and left what remained to the countryfolk.["] What remained was pretty pitiful. All too often, those who worked the land got by on thin gruels and gritty flat breads. They were far too sensible to risk their paltry resources trying risky new ideas. Necessity is not the mother of invention, surplus is.

The surplus was in the city, not the country. Cities had the weapons, the money, and the network of roads, canals and sailing routes to draw on the resources of a large hinterland. Consequently city folk (except recent immigrants fleeing famine in the countryside) ate better than the country folk. Wealth was concentrated there, and people prepared to pay for rare ingredients, splendid new dishes, elaborate banquets. The great cuisines were not to be found in the countryside of Tuscany or the Punjab or Chekiang, but in Rome, Hangchow, Baghdad, Cordoba, Istanbul, Delhi, Mexico City, Naples, Tokyo, Paris, and Bangkok.

5) Because most people were country people without regular access to city markets, their diets, far from being diverse, were monotonous. In the late nineteenth century, during the winter the Mennonites of South Russia had, for their main meal, noodles, potatoes or rye bread, with a little salt pork three times a week, dried fruit soups or fitters, and watermelon pickle as the vegetable four nights out of seven.[12] They were the lucky ones, prosperous farmers with rich land. There were those who had the pease pudding hot, pease pudding cold, pease pudding in the pot nine days old of the nursery rhyme. Such diversity as there was, was to be found across wide areas or between cultures. But my strong impression is that even here, we see more diversity now than in the past.

(6) Which leads me directly to the notion of old, traditional dishes or cuisines. Ask Hawaiians about their traditional dishes, and immediately after listing poi and laulau, they will add lomilomi salmon. Lomilomi salmon is salted salmon rubbed together with chopped tomatoes and spring onions. Point out that there are no salmon caught anywhere in or near Hawaii and that onions and tomatoes were introduced only in the nineteenth century, and you will be met with disbelief, verging on hostility.

Examples such as this Hawaiian one remind us that most revered food traditions, including ethnic ones, are as likely to have been invented yesterday, historically speaking, as in the distant past. The French baguette? Invented in the 1920s when a change in baking regulations made it impossible to make traditional long-rising bread. Greek moussaka? Created in the early twentieth century in an attempt to Frenchify Greek food.[13] The English Christmas pudding? Dates from the late nineteenth century. Fish and chips? About the same time, when the working class took up the fried fish of Sephardic Jewish immigrants in East London. Fish and chips, though, will soon be a thing of the past. It's a Balti and lager now. Balti being a kind of stir-fried curry dreamt up by Pakistanis living in Birmingham. The bubbling Russian samovar? Late eighteenth century. The Indonesian rijstafel? Dutch colonial food. Indonesian padang food? Invented for the tourist market in the past fifty years.[14] Tequila? Promoted as the national drink of Mexico during the 1930s by the Mexican film industry.[15] Indian tandoori chicken? The brainwave of Hindu Punjabis who survived by selling chicken cooked in a Muslim-style tandoor oven when they fled Pakistan during the Partition of India.

When conquest, religious conversion, changing notions of health and migration, dishes get invented and dishes get forgotten. Whole cuisines get forgotten and invented too. Where now is the cuisine of Renaissance Spain and Italy, or of the Indian Raj, or of Tsarist Russia or of medieval Japan? Meanwhile we have Nonya food in Singapore, and Cape Malay food in South Africa, and 'Local Food' in Hawaii. How long does it take to create a cuisine? Not long, less than fifty years judging by the Hawaiian experience. The key question is whether, or balance, we are gaining or losing. Finding some clear measure of culinary loss and gain has yet to be attempted. But my impression as I assemble materials for a history of food is that we have gained far more than we have lost.

(7) Whether food was tastier in the past, or whether it would have tasted better to us (two quite different issues) is simply beyond our ken. Even today, authors of ethnic cookbooks, restaurateurs, resort hotels all systematically mislead by extolling the deliciousness of their chosen cuisine while suppressing mention of dishes that are not acceptable to our tastes: organ meats and insects worldwide, pounded rice desserts in Asia, gorditas in Mexico, strong fermented beans (natto) in Japan. Tourist luaus in Hawaii titillate their diners by daring them to eat poi, it is true. But they draw the line at beef liver poke, small chunks of raw beef liver, a little on the high side, seasoned with seaweed, even though no one would deny that it was tasty.

With the best will in the world we cannot recreate the taste of dishes of the past. With the exception of fish, our foodstuffs almost certainly taste different from those of even a hundred years ago. Our own taste expectations necessarily inform the way we interpret earlier recipes. And as psychologists and food scientists have shown, with certain exceptions such as sugar, taste preferences are highly subjective matter.

(8) As for health, our forebears were even more obsessed with staying well by eating well than we are, scarcely surprising given the state of medical knowledge prior to the twentieth century. The Chinese diet was calculated according to Taoist medical principles, the Hindu by Ayurvedic and the Islamic and European diets by the medicine of Classical Antiquity. Most people also, through no fault of their own, ate diets low in fat and sugar, though it should be noted that this was often not what their doctors recommended: butter was highly recommended in India, sugar was a medicine in India, Islam and medieval Europe. Yet by any measure, height and weight, longevity, our ancestors were much less healthy than us.

One possibility is that the diet itself was in large measure to blame. Certainly there were problems with earlier diets. Babies, even of the rich, often found it hard to get enough breast milk, the poor developed deficiency diseases such as pellagra or beriberi if they had to depend too heavily on maize or white rice, everyone suffered from the lack of fresh fruit and vegetables by the end of the winter or dry season, in western Europe alcoholic drinks were an important foodstuff so that alcoholism was common, and problems with adulterated foodstuffs were commonplace. Another possibility is epidemic disease and living conditions and the like were more important determinants of health than was diet. Historians are still trying to figure out which was the more important.

Whichever it was, though, no nostalgia for the pastoral foods of the distant past can explain away the fact that our ancestors lived mean, short lives, constantly afflicted with diseases, many of which can be directly attributed to what they did and didn't eat. We may have good reasons for wanting to change the contemporary diet, but trying to elicit what was healthy about diets of the past is a losing proposition.