Children participate in food education lesson. Credit: Nourishing Japan
Seasons have been celebrated in Japanese society for centuries through poetry and prose. During the Edo-period (1603-1868) this appreciation of nature codified in the creation of the saijiki, or, poetic seasonal almanacs. These almanacs, notes Columbia University Professor Haruno Shirane, “systematically categorize almost all aspects of nature and much of human activity by the cycle of the four seasons.” Without a doubt, food and food production are important seasonal markers.
In the modern era this appreciation of seasonality continues in new forms. Food knowledge has come to be combined with lessons of hygiene, food safety, food production, cultivation of healthy diets, and other teachings through food education, or shokuiku. Food education became law in 2005 which outlined the goals and provisions for local and national support of activities to foster an understanding of a healthy diet and appreciation of food and food production.
One of the biggest beneficiaries of food education are children, who learn about food and diet through classes and hands-on experiences in and out of school. One of the primary ways they learn about food is through their daily school lunch. School lunches use local and seasonal ingredients and serve as a way for children to taste and understand where food comes from, how it is produced, and how the food and themselves are connected to the environment.
Caption: A farmer who contributes to school lunch harvests cabbage in the field. Credit: Nourishing Japan
Food education as taught in schools almost serves as a de facto culinary saijiki. Children come to remember the seasonal or even monthly association to a certain food. The loquats of early to mid-summer will give way to the eggplants and figs of late summer. The month of March almost always include the na-no-hana, the edible rape blossom with a mustard-like taste that is often cooked into rice as part of the daily meal. The month of October is characterized by chestnuts, sweet potato harvests and wild boar. Eating according to the season – shun – has a long history in Japan, but one that is in danger of being lost as diets change and evolve in a globalized world. Even if cantaloupes may now be available in the grocery store year round, children in school experience teachings rooted in the cycle of the seasons.
Just as strict adherence to the saijiki in haiku composition does not offer much room for deviation, so too does the seasonal culinary calendar tend to keep ingredients in their time and place. Nevertheless, there seems a certain innate joy and comfort to see the return of specific ingredients again and again at a prescribed time every year.
While food education is itself a complex and nuanced topic, the cherishing of seasons and nature as viewed through food is an undeniable hallmark and one that helps to re-forge connections to nature and the world around us.
If you would like to learn more about food education and school lunch in Japan, visit Alexis’ web page to learn more about her documentary film Nourishing Japan.
References:
Shirane, Haruo, Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons (New York: Columbia University, 2013), xii.
The Editorial Team debated whether or not to join the digital #ClimateStrike. The team was divided: should we make a political stand at all? In the end, we compromised. Rather than shut down the site temporarily, we decided to have a banner supporting #ClimateStrike week (September 20-27) and a blog post to explain our position.
To pick up on a theme of ‘hospitality’ that is so often a part of the history of food, I chose a banner for the week that suggests a big party–but one that has gone very badly wrong. What can we do to be better guests? There is no Planet B for us to move onto for our next party once we trash this one.
Although we don’t often directly address it, many of us who work on recipes came to it through an interest in the natural world. What knowledge about plants’ medicinal properties have been lost over time as we became detached from our environments? How have modern agricultural practices reshaped what foods we can taste, and how we taste them? How can historical practices inform a need for agricultural sustainability?
Take, for example, work by Ryan Kashanipour that highlights the overlapping relationship between body, society, and nature. Or by Carla Nappi that describes the ways in which recipes encapsulate medical ingredients, embodiment, and time flows. For pre-modern Europeans, stewardship of the earth even had a religious imperative, as Marieke Hendriksen has argued. Religion was not the only reason, though; seasonality framed day-to-day experience. Our issue on seasonality from May 2017 has a range of posts that consider how seasons and availability affected foods, medicines, and artisanal crafts. I wonder how recipes of the future will be shaped by a hotter climate, fewer seasons, more deadly weather, and rapid change.
I will not hark back to the good old days (always bad historical practice), but we might consider how we can restore a sense of our human bodies and cultures as being part of nature rather than separate from it–or, masters of it. (Carolyn Merchant’s analysis in The Death of Nature seems more pressing than ever.) The work of some contributors offers, perhaps, more hope. Anne Stobart’s work, for example, encourages us to look around more carefully at plants in our daily life. Zara Anishanslin has a useful exercise for thinking about how things we use everyday have a global history: everything is connected. Sharing food helps to build cultural bridges and to build a sense of international community, as Megan Daigle describes. And one of our contributors, David Shields, is bringing back old crops, which expands our culinary AND agricultural possibilities.
There is, of course, no easy answer. But one starting point might be to think more about our interconnected world, whether we are looking at the relationships among humans, animals, and nature, or across geographical regions. It is only by acting together that we can stop the housewarming guests from completely wrecking our home!
Image from Athanasius Kircher’s Mundus Subterraneus (1678 edn.) vol. 1, p. 194.
Historians studying the relationship between climate and recipes (and yes, historians have good reasons to do so; see Jennifer A. Munroe’s post on seasonality and Katherine Allen’s articles on springtime in recipe books and the common cold) usually frame the question in terms of seasonality. In the pre-modern world, ingredients for recipes could often only be obtained in certain seasons or particular climates – the so-called seasonality of recipes. But the concept of recipe, provided one is willing to stretch its bounds, can also help us understand how our ancestors envisioned the role of God and Man in climate change and cosmic history. What if, for instance, one were to think of the Creation account of Genesis as a recipe? The metaphor is not as far-fetched as it may sound. Recipes entail not only ingredients and instructions, but also agency: isn’t God said to have made everything in measure, number, and weight (Wisdom 11:21)? Many early modern philosophers cherished this notion. Let us imagine, with one such philosopher, a page from God’s cookbook:
In the beginning, create the heaven and the earth. Everything should be in a state of chaos. Then, let there be light. Light will bring the world into sight by causing the formless abyss to sort itself out. Over a period of six days, let the sun, the moon, and the planets coalesce like bubbles, as celestial and terrestrial matter separate; on earth, concentric layers of air, water, and dry land will arise around a pulsing core of fire. In the process, bring forth minerals, plants, and animals. This is good, but not good enough. If the primordial light is left unchecked, all mixed and organic bodies will soon break down and dissolve into their elementary constituents; even beings endowed with seeds will stop propagating their kind. To prevent the cosmos from congealing, add Man to the mixture. Let him stir it, and it will be very good.
A caricature of Louis-Bertrand Castel’s “ocular organ” by Charles Germain de Saint Aubin (1721-1786).
The physics treatise that inspires my thought experiment appeared in 1724, when the boundaries between physical, chemical, and spiritual processes were still porous. Its author was the French Jesuit mathematician and natural philosopher Louis-Bertrand Castel (1688-1757), best remembered today for his ocular harpsichord (a musical instrument that played colors) and his quarrels with the likes of Voltaire and Rousseau. To be clear, Castel did not couch his interpretation of Genesis in culinary terms; but he did argue that God’s primordial “light” must refer to the fundamental, mechanical principle of nature, the force causing elementary particles to weigh against one another and to regroup according to their kind — like mercury, water, and oil mixed together end up settling into layers. What Moses called “light,” ancient philosophers like Empedocles, Parmenides, and Epicurus had known confusedly as “love and strife”, “sympathies and antipathies,” “attractions and repulsions.” Since Newton, moderns recognized it as “universal gravitation” — or as Castel would have it, “universal weighing” (pesanteur). Natural philosophy, just like the original chaos, was sorting itself out.
Yet universal weighing could only be half the story. Castel’s main contribution to science, as he saw it, was to demonstrate the need for another principle: a universal lightness, a kind of spiritual leaven or ferment that would counter the weight of nature and sprinkle a little chaos into the world’s regular march toward equilibrium. This principle had to be spiritual, as opposed to mechanical, because a constant mechanical counterweight would cancel out rather than interrupt the course of nature as needed. Now, God could intervene directly to do just that, but that would be beneath His dignity. A popular alternative — giving nature its own spiritual, vital powers — raised the specter of materialism; out of question for a Jesuit. Castel’s solution? God must have delegated the task of disrupting the world to Man, his troublesome steward. Endowed with free will, humans could bring about everything universal pesanteur could not. Local trouble, Castel reckoned, added up to all the meteorological, climatic, and geological changes needed to prevent the world from grinding to a halt and freezing over.
While this might seem to be a recipe for disaster, Castel trusted that God knew what He was doing. The curse of mortality, for one, ensured humans would not slack off, nor overreach their bounds. Since the Fall, Adam and his descendants felt the weight of nature; they had to sweat and toil to delay the hour of their death (death by gravity, that is). On the upside, tilling the land, breeding animals, cutting down trees, draining fens, building canals, mining the earth, manufacturing goods and transporting them for commerce—all this labor, along with the consumption and excretion of food, renewed the mixtures that nature constantly unraveled. Multiplied by the millions, local actions caused ripples: rain, winds, and waves to which Castel attributed weather pattern and climate change. When well concerted, human efforts made the earth compliant; when excessive or deficient, corrective backlashes ensued — storms, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions. On the whole, the world remained hospitable because man-made mixtures, combined with nature’s weighing and sorting action, preserved the planet’s internal circulation mechanism. Carried down by rivers, oceanic currents, and subterranean channels, the by-products of human activity fueled the central fire of the earth, the reservoir of heat for all living beings on the surface. Castel estimated that the sun only contributed a minute portion of heat compared to the earth’s inner furnace, hence the importance of keeping it alive.
Reproduced with kind permission from http://www.reverendfun.com/toon/20070907/
Fifty years after Castel published his treatise, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707-1788) hypothesized that the earth was once a globe of molten rocks, whose age he ingeniously estimated by measuring the cooling rate of molten metal spheres. Revisiting the notion of a “central fire” keeping the planet warm from within, Buffon warned his readers about the inevitable freezing of the world, but also suggested that human industry might counter the process. Framed by debates about climate, gravity, progress, and the place of divine and human agency in nature, the Enlightenment saw scores of new ideas about the history of the earth — some of which presaging in surprising ways today’s anxieties about climate change. Yet Castel his contemporaries also expressed more confidence in human stewardship. Humans were God’s special ingredient in a perfectly well-balanced recipe; their 19th- and 20th-century successors would not be so serene.
Sources:
Richard, Jean-Olivier. “The Art of Making Rain and Fair Weather: Life and World System of Louis-Bertrand Castel, SJ (1688-1757).” Ph.D. dissertation. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University, 2016.
Castel, Louis-Bertrand. Traité de Physique sur la pesanteur universelle. Paris: Cailleau, 1724.
Buffon, Georges Louis-Leclerc, Comte de. Les Époques de la nature. Paris: Imprimerie royale, 1780.
Color played an important role in the early modern world across a number of areas from arts and crafts to Christian religion to politics to natural history and philosophy. In recent years, scholars have begun to explore how early modern men and women engaged, produced and conceptualized colors within and across color worlds.[1] Just as in early modern culinary and medical recipes, seasonality is a recurrent theme in artisanal recipes. The art of preservation was highly valued for its powers to make flavors and healing properties of foodstuffs, plants and herbs endure well beyond their seasonal availability. In my contribution to the seasonality series I focus on recipes that celebrate the art of color preservation and on the mindful attention to seasons called for in color making recipes. I am particularly interested in the challenges that recipes for making natural dyes and pigments from seasonal products posed to modern historians trying to reconstruct them.
Today the symbolic significance of colors in early modern Europe is perhaps most readily associated with the compellingly colorful medieval and renaissance art works that have survived in sacred spaces and museums.
Figure 1, Caption: Giotto (1266-1337), The Scrovegni Chapel frescoes, Padua, Italy. ca. 1305. Image from Wikimedia Commons.
But in the pre-modern period a deep concern with colors was not limited to the arts: colors were associated with the four humors and close attentiveness to colors was of vital importance to practices of healing in the Hippocritean and Galenic medical tradition.[2] The perception and display of colors was also highly charged with political meanings: colors were a form of symbolic communication and played an important role in consolidating and displaying religious and secular power relations. European courts and courtly events were important sites of “chromatic politics” as contemporary witness accounts and meticulous historical reconstructions of ephemeral, yet splendid and compellingly colorful festive events have shown.[3]
Figure 2, Caption: Peter Paul Rubens, Design for state decorations for the triumphal entry of Cardinal Infante Ferdinand into Antwerp, on April 17, 1635, Hermitage, St. Petersburg. Image from Pubhist.com
The historical reconstruction of a sixteenth-century dress, originally created for the Augsburg Imperial Diet from 1530, is a particularly compelling example of the politicized use of brightly colored dress made from dyed textiles.[4] The owner of this dress and his contemporaries might have regarded its colors “as related to intrinsic qualities and powers”. Deep scarlet reds were regarded at that time “as carriers of life and heat, while a strong yellow was linked to gold as metal, which had given its powers by the influence of the sun”. Ulinka Rublack notes the challenges encountered during the reconstruction process. The yellow color obtained in their first dying trials “was just not quite vibrant enough” which was detrimental “as faded hues of yellow could have negative associations of weakness and coldness”.[5]
Other sixteenth century recipes for ‘yellows’ from organic sources, demonstrate that making natural dyes of this color depended on local seasonal knowledge. As Marieke Hendriksen has discussed, here in Utrecht, we are building a new database of artisanal recipes. A quick search in the Artechne Database yields several fifteenth- and sixteenth century German recipes for green and yellow colors that call for buckthorn berries (some with precise indication for picking times, like this one for “Green color” from 1543). Here an Italian one from the anonymous Padua Manuscript (ca. end 16th/17th century), translated and published in English:
To make giallo santo
Take the berries of buckthorn towards the end of the month of August, boil them with pure water, until the water is loaded and thick with color; add a little burnt roche alum and then strain it. You may boil the strained liquor to make the color deeper, mixing with it some very pure gilder’s gesso; then make the color into pellets, and dry them in the shade.[6]
In color recipes such as this one, seasonality and intimate knowledge of seasonal products sensitivities to additives play a key role. Berries had to be picked at specific times of the year to attain the right hues, and while the juice of ripe buckthorn, available in most of Europe, gives a greenish color, also known as sap green, one needs to get hold of unripe berries, fresh or dried, in particular a species imported from the Middle East, also known as “Persian berries”, to attain the deep golden yellow hue that the reconstruction team had envisioned for this dazzling sixteenth-century dress.[7] Only by patiently repeating the dye processes using the right berries picked at the right moment, can the desired vibrant hue of rich quality be achieved – both in the early modern period and during 21th century reconstruction.[8]
Thus, the commission of brightly dyed dresses for display at important events must have been a time-consuming affair that required planning long ahead of the political event and entailed a collaborative process of sourcing and experimenting that depended not only on seasonal knowledge and availability, but was also prone to risks of seasonal change. As Rublack’s work shows, reconstruction research makes us of acutely aware of the complexities and risks posed to those who aspired a part in the “chromatic politics” of the Holy Roman Empire in the sixteenth century. Moreover, as I will show in my next post, color recipe reconstructions allow us to experience the efforts and knowledge that went into the creation of early modern color worlds, which have become unfamiliar to our modern period eye.
[3] Ulinka Rublack, “Renaissance Dress, Cultures of Making, and the Period Eye.” West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture 23, no. 1 (March 1, 2016): 6–34. doi:10.1086/688198.
[6] Maria Philadelphia Merrifield, Original Treatises, Dating from the XIIth to XVIIIth Centuries, on the Arts of Painting, in Oil, Miniature, Mosaic, and on Glass; Of Gilding, Dying, and the Preparation of Colours and Artificial Gems (John Murray 1849), 708.
[7] Jo Kirby, Susie Nash, and Joanna Cannon, eds. Trade in Artists’ Materials: Markets and Commerce in Europe to 1700 (Archetype Publications, 2010) Glossary, 447.
