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Oh hey, it's your all, pop dad, flip and pancakes in a flannel robe. It's Alley Ward. We're back with another episode of Smologies. What is Smologies? I'm so glad that you asked. So we took full Ologies episodes and then we sliced and diced them up to make these byte sized, classroom friendly edits of our deep dive class. So we're about to fill your plates with a bunch of food facts this episode. But first let's feast on this my thank yous. Thank you to everyone supporting on Patreon.
As little as twenty five cents an episode gets you into that club and then you can submit questions for Theologists. Thank you to everyone who clothes your bodies and ologiesmerch dot com items, and thank you for rating and subscribing that keeps this podcast up in the charts. So if you leave a review, I read it. I'm a creep
like that. And this week, thank you to Heather Albrick, who left a review that said that they had a moment of deep relief and gratitude when their baby quote in the throes of a fantastic lunchtime tantrum stopped crying and smiled as the ologies theme song came on, and I hope they like the Smology's theme song and learning about oysters and squash. Heather, thank you for that. Okay, let's go so food anthropology it's the study of how we eat. And this week's guest is a food historian, Sorts.
I met her over a decade ago while we were both staff writers at the La Times and she covered food and she moved up the ranks to be the LA Weekly Food editor and the Kcet food editor, before she jumped into the podcast realm with this truly amazing food history podcast called Smartmouth, where she invites a guest
to talk about the history of their favorite foods. She's also written for Gawker Media and Serious Eats and Taste Made and just launched how to eatla dot com and for anyone who lives in La and has a mouth, that is a great site. We'll link that in the show notes. It's awesome. But pop that top button in your trousers and tuck a napkin into your collar and get ready for a buffet of information with Smartmouth podcast host editor of how to eatla dot com and food anthropologist Catherine Spires.
Hours Soology launches. Now let's talk about feasts. Yes, let's talk about winter feasts.
Yes, why do you think from an anthropological point of view, we just want to honker down and just get a little roly poly and have insulin comas in the winter because.
We need the warmth from the calories. And also it's boring because it's dark out.
Okay, I'm bored. Let's eat.
Yeah, exactly like you want to eat, and also you don't mind sleeping more. We are bears essentially, like we follow the bear lifestyle. I mean in the wild, our lipid stores are our bank accounts.
Yes. I feel like when you see when you see a Badonka donk bear, that bear is wealthy with fats. Yes, you know which I suppose in the winter we do need that, do you When it comes to feasting in the winter, what was it like historically in any part of the world. You can think of like did we eat things we'd put in the root cellar in the summer or did we just find what was available? Where's the food coming from?
So your point about lipids being wealth actually applies to humanity to like, if you're having a feast in the winter, that means you can afford sugar and salt, you are out of control wealthy, right, Yeah, So a lot of it. There's different kinds of feasting. And we like to think of feasting as being like celebrations and like we're all in this together and we're all celebrating and we're all
having a good time. But humans, being what they are historically, a lot of feasts are an opportunity to show off, basically, to stunt on your neighbors. No, and part of It could be as simple, depending on like the era that you're in in the place that you live. Sometimes it is as simple as being like, oh, I'm sorry you hadn't seen this fruit in six months. Yeah, I've got it whatever, Oh my god, Yeah it's preserved, but I've still got it and you don't. Because it means like that, again,
you have the ingredients to do it. You have the time when you're not out trying to do subsistence farming to like preserve things for later. You have time to plan ahead. Being able to plan ahead is also another rich person thing still to this day.
So did peasants not have winter feasts? Let them eat cake harder.
Too, And that's so that's part of the mixture of like celebration and stunting on people, is that lots of times, like the lord of the manor would throw a feast for the serfs, and that was partly to be like thank you, but also to be like, see how great I am to you, Like, don't deffect to another farm, because I've got the best feasts in town.
Bribing someone with baked goods. It is a tale as old as time. But how do we know it's interesting that the oldest evidence of feasts that we have actually comes from art rather than archaeology. Oh, because I guess it's not like chicken bones in a casseal dish wouldn't preserve.
I guess, yeah, yeah, that could well be.
It.
Feasts often comes from offerings to the go as well. It's like a party but also an offering. So they have like basically like pottery shards from like ancient China and Sumerio, which is Iraq.
Okay.
So when what's the history of American holiday season feasting?
So where do you even start with this one? Oh?
First, prefacing by the fact that we are talking about like Northwestern European traditions coming over to America and starting in New England and spreading out from there, that's probably a lot to unpack. It is a lot to unpack, and I wanted to do a little digging here. One publication, Indian Country Today, had a great article and interview from a few years back with Ramona Peters. She's the Mashpee
Wampanog tribe's tribal Historic Preservation Officer. Now, she said, in regard to the famed sixteen twenty one inaugural Thanksgiving feast, she said the following thing.
It was made up. It was Abraham Lincoln who used the theme of pilgrims and Indians eating happily together because he was trying to calm things down during the Civil War when people were divided. It was like a nice unity story for public relations. She said. It's kind of genius in a way to get people to sit down and eat dinner together because families were divided during the
Civil War. Ramona Peters was asked if she'll celebrate Thanksgiving anyway, and she said as a concept, a heartfelt Thanksgiving is very important to me as a person. It's important that we give thanks for me. It's a state of being. So that was a great article in Indian Country Today, and there are other wonderful first person experiences at Smithsonianamerican Indian Dot SI dot edu has some great articles as well.
But getting back to the food history, so much meat, basically any kind of meat you could get, which was turkey, wild turkeys, which don't look like the turkeys that we eat now, but it is the same animal. And then venison and seafood, which actually, even to this day, seafood is a bigger part of the new England Thanksgiving menu
than it is anywhere else in the country. Yeah, oysters and muscles are a big part of it, so you're saying the first Thanksgivings more meat, dear turkeys, oysters, mussels and.
All the other poul trees. They could find everyone's they could find and shoot before they flew away.
They were like, yes, let's do some of this and what I think you can like sort of see how things change for people, and like the changing Thanksgiving menu because for one thing, again, they didn't have a lot of herbs and spices back then because those were wildly expensive. They hadn't figured out how to use the new ones. They hadn't like figured out how to grow the ones they brought from Europe. Roasted flesh just tastes good on
its own. You don't have to do a lot with it, the way that you do have to do with side dishes. They need a lot of different ingredients. And again it's survival food. They had an abundance of meat, which is rare, but they weren't.
Like coming up with new recipes, right.
They were like, it's not alive, it's not wiggling, let's eat it. Exactly. The idea of having like flavored food. I think as Northern Europeans started traveling the globe, like this tastes good taste? Is that even a word?
What?
And now, when did let's say, like the Thanksgiving feast become a widespread American phenomenon, And what's changed just in the last at least decade of us like getting hip to the fact that it's all apocryphal.
Okay, So.
Thanksgiving for a long time was really only celebrated in New England. Oh, basically the people whose grandparents were there.
Mm hm, oh my god. It's like woodstock or something. Yeah, exactly.
So I really think it was until around probably like just after the Civil War that the rest of the country got into the idea. Okay, And you can still to this day see regional differences in what people consider necessary for a Thanksgiving dinner.
Oh my god, Like, is this going to be all about green bean castrole?
It's largely about green bean castrole. There was a phenomenon that started around the nine around nineteen hundred and lasted like probably until the eighties, and that is food companies, the ones that sell packaged food, processed food, writing their own recipes in house and sending them out both as recipe booklets, but also sending them to newspapers to be published in the newspapers. Oh yeah, and the recipes could be good, bad, and different, but it was mainly about
selling the products that these companies made. So green bean casserole was invented by this food scientist who worked for a food company as a way to use cream of mushroom soup.
So a big feast meal is made with love and propaganda. Now, what else is on your holiday table? What are some other dishes that are pretty regional? Are some people like, we're a canned smooth cranberry sauce a state and others are like chunky, and others are like we make it on stuff that one.
I think isn't regional necessarily. Okay, what is regional is sweet potato casserole. Okay, that's another southern one. That is Another company created recipe. It was a marshmallow company. I think it was called Angelus, and they hired a woman who like wrote a cooking magazine in like the nineteen twenties to find out how to convince people to use marshmallows more.
Oh my god, that was one of her inventions.
Did feasting like this really take off, you said, after the Civil War, but like after the night, like the turn of the century, nineteen hundreds, like industrial era, when did we see an explosion in this kind of eating. So it wasn't until the nineteen thirties that petitions to make it a national holiday really picked up. So it was Franklin Roosevelt who had to make the decision of which day to place it.
How'd they decide? It was such a huge fight, and one year there were.
Two Thanksgivings, Yeah, because they couldn't decide. So Roosevelt had said fourth Thursday in November, and then the Republican Congress together, Republican majority of Congress got together with like the Business Leaders Association of America or whatever it was, and they're like, no, make it the third one, because they wanted people to be able to shop for Christmas and feel okay about it for longer. But then Roosevelt's idea eventually went out.
But in the nineteen thirties there was like a lot of madness around where to place Thanksgiving.
What else has changed over the years, And that's.
The difference too, And like the way that Thanksgiving has evolved is that it used to be like eating meat was the fancy thing. But as America became more industrialized and wealthier, you see the addition of ingredients, like every dairy product that's something that only rich people can do.
I never thought of it that way.
Yeah, so you move away from meat being the special dish to like all the things that like take time and energy or you have to buy that you can't make yourself at being like the star of the show.
Why when we think of cartoon feasts, do we see a pig with an apple in its mouth? I think for maximum upsettingness. Okay, I always wondered what that was. It was always like, oh, this means we're feasting. You don't get that thing out of there.
Well, it is that sort of like English thing, which I think in our heads were like animal presented whole on the table. And if we're talking about like a European cultural influence, like that's what we think of for fancy. But if you think about Asian food, foods that are served family style obviously lend themselves more to feasting. That's a good point, which I think might be part of the reason why so many people who don't celebrate Christmas.
Now do Chinese food, oh, because you still got that same vibe.
And it's even more communal because everyone's like sharing from the same dishes, which we tend to do on Thanksgiving, same idea.
Because the idea of having a lazy Susan and a bunch of dishes at a round table where you can see everyone like that lends itself to not only the eating experience, but also the sharing of plates. Absolutely, and I feel like in Western culture we don't really have that. But before we spit ourselves into the questions that you submitted, patrons, let's take a quick break to raise some money for
a worthy cause. And Catherine just launched that new website, how to Eat La dot com, and so in her honor, we're donating to the La Regional Food Bank because one in five people in Los Angeles County experiences food insecurity and the food bank has been fighting hunger since nineteen seventy three. Just twenty five bucks provides the equivalent of one hundred meals for kids, seniors, and folks who need something to eat. So learn more at lafoodbank dot org.
And thanks to these sponsors for helping fund that donation.
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No, no, okay forward, oh no, no, please.
No, no, that's why they get covered from Ireland's soundest car insurance provider, Supervalue Insurance.
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Sure, I'm driving ten years and parallel parking still Battlesn't.
Me get a quote from Supervalue Car Insurance to get ten percent off online.
And we'll even throw in forty euroin vouchers. Teasncsupply vouchers include two tw forty eurospend.
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Okay, let's dive in. Let's digest your questions. Vincent wants to know why do traditions vary so much from country to country about what foods are feast foods? And are there any feast foods that are just seen all over the world and no matter what the local culture is.
So it's the issue of abundance which is going to change based on the flora and fauna of wherever it is that you are starches traditionally, well, just the plane searches like plain rice, plain noodles are never going to be a feast food because those are the easy.
Things to get.
It's when you start being like, I've got this potato, but I also have two pounds of butter. That's what makes something a feast food. So it is it's items that are scarce. So fruit, for instance, is considered very special. Any dairy product is considered very special. Meat used to be considered very special, but because of industrialization, it's not as much anymore. So these things will also change with just as the culture changes. So do like the considerations like what is special or fancy?
So it's the rarity. Yeah, I have always the rarity.
We want and we appreciate what we can't usually have. And what exemplifies that more than social media? And now Sarah wants to know how has Instagram changed food? Is it prettier now?
Yes?
Well it is absolutely prettier, and restaurants at the beginning would pretend like they didn't care. You actually can see it. I think for me the place where it's more obvious restaurant design, Like restaurants have bigger windows now and they have planer tabletops and walls with pops of color, so
they're thinking about what will be a good background. Yeah, and then you'll also see on the plates and on more casual places, on the piece of tissue paper that they put on the plate will now be stamped with the logo and the name of the restaurant on it.
Name plates. They're just a sign of the times. Oh and speaking of timing, Nicole Sauce wants to know why have so many holidays come to revolve around foods and feasts, Thanksgiving, Passoverhonica, Christmas. So, in a sense, why do the holidays? Is it gathering? Is it winter? Yeah, it's gathering, it's community, but it's also we saved up for this, which was a lot more obvious pre industrialization, where it's like we have one pig and we're not going to eat it until this holiday.
Marissa Burru wants to know why do some cultures fixate on food more than others, Like in France, lunches are two hours long and food is very important, but the US food breaks are like not even taken seriously.
So I actually think this totally goes back to what we were talking about earlier about feast days and how Americans can't.
Just like relax. We are totally.
Calvinistic in our society, even if no one even knows what that means anymore.
Here, let me read the dictionary for us.
Both Calvinistic marked by strong emphasis on the depravity of humankind.
So in other words, we do not believe in having a nice time. France is like you only have one life, enjoy it, eat a lunch.
And Calvinism side note, was the brainchild of a Protestant thinker, John Calvin, who was a theologian, which is someone who studies the nature of God or religious beliefs, which reminds me.
Okay, you are a religious dice.
Major Paula Harra wants to know is the Last Supper considered a historical feast or just theological? Like, assuming it did actually happen, would they have eaten anything other than bread and wine?
Oh God, this is actually so funny because I happen to know that Da Vinci's the Last Supper painted in the fourteen nineties. It's really muddied now by like years of existing and also bad restorations. But the food items depicted on the table and his painting of the Last Supper are oranges and eels.
Was a boy.
Not sure, but I did dig up that one of the reasons the meal depicted was pescatarian have been because da Vinci himself was a vegetarian, because he loved animals so much. So Leonardo da Vinci the first maybe vegan influencer. I find this cute and inspiring. Tina Roudio wants to know who was the first person to deep fry a whole turkey.
I'm gonna look into it.
I'm pretty sure that Southern so story goes that in the nineteen thirties a Cajun chef witnessed a deep fried turkey and was like, yep, that's gonna happen more.
I'm gonna start that. Don't undertake it lightheartedly.
And this is I'm gonna say something, and everyone listening is gonna be like, yeah, duh. Except for that, people don't think about it. Don't do it indoors. Oh god, no, it has to be done outside, and like, have your fire extinguisher ready. Yeah, things can go very very wrong. Apparently it's delicious, clearly that's why people keep doing it. But don't hurt yourself.
It's not worth it.
It's not so play it safe because it might save your life unless you're a turkey. Actually, speaking of sparing the bird, Todd McLaren wants to know what are some popular vegetarian feast main dishes other than the ones that mimic meats like tofurki. Can we what about like a like a stuffed portobello or like.
A Yeah, I've heard some vegetarians joke about how mushrooms are the meat for vegetarians.
Yeah, I think.
Mushrooms are really delicious and you can. I think stuffed portobello is a really good idea. Lots of times it just has to do with the seasoning that you put on tofu or tempe.
That makes it delicious. Oh.
The reason why tofu was used as a meat substitute was like a Chinese Buddhist thing where they would just they would actually like form the tofu into the shape of the animal and season it with the seasonings that you would use for that animal.
So this is true. As Buddhism spread from China to Japan, so did tofu. And the Japanese label of Chojin ryoti arrives in Japan via the founder of Zen Buddhism, a monk, and many Chojun dishes mimic meat and or called things like mock goose, which doesn't have quite the same ring as a toeferky, which is a loaf of roasted bean curd that has spared many a bird during its forty two years on the planet.
What do you love about your job the most?
What's the best thing about being a food anthropologist.
I like.
Finding out new stuff all the time, and I think it's been such a way in for me to understand more about the way that the world works, which is really cool and too. It's so easy for us to be knee jer it and be like, why did that person do that thing? But if you know why, you can empathize a little bit more, to the point where I actually think him too empathetic. I can see other people's points of view constantly and it's exhausted.
That's a good problem to have, it is, jeez.
So ask smart mouth people a heaping helping of questions because they love to spill the beans now once again. Catherine Spires has a food history podcast called smart Mouth. It's truly excellent. She also so owns the podcast network table Cakes, so check out that array of shows she just launched. Howdeatla dot com if you're on Angelino who needs to know what to eat?
Here?
And a link to the LA Regional Food Bank is in the show notes and she is at Catherine Spires on Twitter, Catherine underscore Spires on Instagram. We are at Ology's on Twitter and Instagram, and I'm at Aliward on both and thank you new Smologites for being here. New episodes are out every other Sunday. You can check the url Alleyward dot com, slash Smologies or the link of the bio for sixteen other Smologies episodes and counting for
your holiday drives. Thank you Mercedes Maitland and Jared Sleeper for working on those. Links to the original full episode are available on Alleyward dot com or in the show notes, and a full list of credits for this episode can be found in the show notes as well. Since we'd like to keep things small around here, and if you listen to the end, you know I give you a
piece of advice. And this week it's just that when you're shopping for holiday food and you have the option or ability to get a second can of whip cream, get it. No one ever turns down down a second helping of whipped cream. We all love it. Also, if you're not able to volunteer or to donate at all this holiday season to a soup kitchen or food bank, don't worry. They need volunteers and donations all year round and help is always appreciated, even more so after the
holiday cheer dies down. And if you're getting your food from a food bank or from a soup kitchen, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that, and that is what people are here for, to help each other out. So I hope that you have a big, good dinner because you deserve it. Okay, until next time, Smologites, Byebye knowledgesol Holurgy Milogy
Launchie Knowledges, A Many Feast