Stories of Food and Poverty

The Food Programme

This episode explores the deep-seated connections between food and poverty through various historical and contemporary lenses. Drawing from

Key takeaways

• Neda Meheravi details how 14th-century Persian poet Bosak the Gastronomer elevated 'poverty foods' like millet and offal to royal literary status.
• Russell Fielding traces breadfruit's movement from New Guinea to the Caribbean, noting its historical association with the slave trade and poverty.

Main topics

• Historical Food Poverty
• Global Food Supply Chains

Notable quotes

Poverty is omnipresent now and throughout history and it shapes food cultures.

Conclusion

The episode serves as a powerful reminder that the foods we enjoy ofte

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Welcome to the Haunted Library. Have you come in search of a tale? This podcast invites you to browse the shelves and find stories that will linger long after you've left this place. From gothic masterpieces to pulpy penny dreadfuls, join me, Colin Morgan, with new episodes twice a week. Find The Haunted Library wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 3 (0:40) This edition is based around an important and difficult word, a word that can trigger discomfort, anxiety, even hostility. But I'm confident that in listening to this program, you won't experience any of those things. Speaker 3 (0:59) The word is poverty, a theme which in the context of food, we've covered many times over the years, but not in this way. What I have for you is a collection of food stories that will surprise, fascinate and hopefully make you think about history, food, world events and even your own experiences in new and different ways. For example, when it comes to history. When corn arrived in Europe and filled impoverished bellies, it resulted in a nutrient deficiency that led to the vampire myth. You Speaker 6 (1:36) become very light sensitive, you get aggressive, and then you go crazy and die. The Speaker 3 (1:41) connection between Dracula and poor diets coming up. Then there's the story of how an ingredient now labeled as a superfood first went global because sugar plantation owners in the Caribbean. saw it as a cheap fuel for people beyond poor, the Speaker 8 (1:59) enslaved. They wanted something that took very little space, required very little labor, and breadfruit really seemed to tick both of those boxes. Speaker 3 (2:08) We'll also be visiting the back streets of Edwardian England in search of a pioneering project teaching the London poor how to cook. Speaker 4 (2:18) For three months, the women made suet pudding, plain puddings, raisin puddings, ginger puddings, meat puddings, and every other variety of which a suet pudding is capable, until their pride in their intimate knowledge of suet became overwhelming. Speaker 3 (2:33) Did they steam their way out of poverty? We'll be finding out. And we'll get to imagine a future in which all of us might be experiencing acute food poverty. Say... following the eruption of a super volcano, or as survivors during a nuclear winter? How would you feed yourself? Speaker 7 (2:53) What if there is a lot of dust getting up into the stratosphere? Then you get a radically colder world for more than 10 years. And again, agriculture has to change, but now it has to change rapidly and in a very unexpected direction. The Speaker 3 (3:07) reason for bringing these diverse rifts on food and poverty together is an event that took place... earlier this summer. For almost 50 years, writers, academics, chefs and amateur scholars have been gathering at the annual Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery. Over a weekend, they present and discuss papers on a particular theme. Speaker 8 (3:32) In the 1700s, around the time of the American Revolution... In the Food Speaker 3 (3:36) Programme archive, you can hear previous editions from the symposium on seeds and also last year's on food and the elements. was poverty food. To Speaker 4 (3:47) provide for family on the narrow incomes quoted... A Speaker 3 (3:51) timely theme to explore. In recent years we've experienced financial crises, lived through a pandemic, seen the outbreak of wars in Ukraine and Iran, also trade wars. We live at a time of government cutbacks and a cost of living crisis. Poverty is omnipresent now and throughout history and it shapes food cultures. A fact we don't always consider, so in this programme, through a short selection of stories from the symposium, we'll hear accounts of how people have responded in the kitchen to experiences of poverty, along with questions of what needs to change, all explored through the lens of food. This is a theme we should be reflecting more on, says Cathy Kaufman, chair of the Oxford Symposium. Speaker 1 (4:38) So if you look through journalism, newspapers, academic literature, so many people are talking about food poverty as a political and social problem to be solved. We wanted to actually encourage people to think also about what happens in the kitchen, what is going on with foods that are considered poverty foods, how cooks deal with them, how cultures view them. For that reason, we wanted to put the emphasis on poverty as the adjective to describe food rather than poverty as the noun that is then described by food. Speaker 3 (5:25) Let's start by going back 700 years and travelling to the Middle East in search of a unique cookbook. Speaker 5 (5:32) To the best of my knowledge and the research and asking other historians around, this appears to be the earliest cookery text that explicitly talks about and dedicates a chapter to food for the poor. Speaker 3 (5:47) What is the name of the author and when was it Speaker 5 (5:50) written? So the name of the author is... The English translation of his name means, and he wrote the book, we believe, late 14th century to early 15th century. Speaker 3 (6:04) How interested was he in food? I mean, his name gives a hint here, but this was a personal interest of his? In fact, he was a poet. He Speaker 5 (6:12) was a very relatively famous poet. So he was not a cook. He was not a professional gastronomer. But his poetic work... All of his writings, all of his poems, is all about food. Speaker 3 (6:26) This is Persian food historian Neda Meheravi. The author he introduced to the symposium, Bosak the Gastronomer, was also an advisor to the royal household in Shiraz in southwestern Iran, which is still regarded as the nation's cultural capital. Because of Bosak's different roles as a poet and court consultant, he mixed with Persia's elite, but also its... poorest and his book captures the food experiences of both, starting with recipes from royal palaces. Speaker 5 (7:00) For example, dishes like a kofte, which is a traditional very large meatball that requires a lot of ingredients that might not have been available to people with not as much income. After the first eight chapters, he spends one chapter explaining what a typical grocery store might look like in that part of the world. Some of the experts... believe he did that because the audience that he wrote the first eight chapters for never walked in into a grocery store. Speaker 5 (7:38) And then suddenly in chapter 10, the tone of the book changes completely. He's writing about the food for the poor. And he gives an example of a particular ingredient. He writes and says, look, you guys, I know there's a lot of hungry and poor in your town. Don't forget that you can use millet, which at that time was a very cheap. ingredient to make dishes for them. And there is a particular line that he says, in the morning you should go and find the cheap cuts of meat in the butcher, and particularly the heads and the hoofs, and make a soup from it. Now, in contemporary Persian cuisine, the famous head and hoof still exist, and it's very popular. In fact, if you go to some restaurants and you find it, it's one of the most expensive items on the menu these days, unfortunately. Speaker 3 (8:43) What was going on here? Why does that chapter exist? Speaker 5 (8:48) So I have consulted with other culinary historians and Persian literary historians discussing that particular subject. Since he was consulting with the royals on a daily basis, we believe he wrote the entire text for them. And therefore we think his audience for chapter 10 was not the regular people on the street, but for the light. So he sets the stage where he's writing the book. He's writing to express that, hey, there are poor people in our town that we need to think about. The other, maybe even more interesting aspect of the chapter 10 is he writes poems like he did in the first nine chapters. He elevates the food of the poor to the same level of the food for the rich. Speaker 3 (9:45) Nader Maravari on Bossak, the gastronomer, perhaps the first recipe writer in history to launch a campaign against food poverty. In 14th century Persia, millet and offal were regarded as poverty food. Our next story features another, breadfruit, and it takes us from the Pacific and through the slave trade onto the Caribbean. Speaker 8 (10:09) My name is Russell Fielding. I'm an associate professor at Coastal Carolina University in South Carolina in the U.S. And as a geographer, I study the location and movement of people and things around the world. And what I've focused on for the last several years is breadfruit. I've followed it various places around the world, digging into stories of its use and its history. And I've never gotten tired of it yet. It's been a fascinating journey so far. Speaker 3 (10:39) Let's start with the basics, Russell. What is breadfruit? Speaker 8 (10:42) So breadfruit is a large, starchy fruit that grows on trees. The trees are large and beautiful. They have big leaves that are lobed. They blow in the wind. It's a really lovely tree to look at. The fruit itself is about the size of a... children's soccer ball. I compare it to a size four soccer ball or football. It's green on the outside and kind of a white or whitish yellow on the inside. In the kitchen, it seems to take the same role as potatoes in a lot of dishes. So it's nothing at all like a juicy tropical fruit that you might be picturing a mango or an orange. It's certainly more of a staple food, a starch. Speaker 3 (11:25) And its origins can be found in New Guinea. in the Pacific Ocean where around 7,000 years ago, along with the banana, humans on the island domesticated the wild fruit. Around 3,000 years ago, Polynesian explorers then planted breadfruit throughout the Pacific Islands, including Fiji and Hawaii. And that's where Europeans encountered it, including the one who gave it