The Fertile Crescent, the Yangtze basin, Meso America, South America: those are the places that spring to mind as birthplaces of agriculture. Evidence is accumulating, however, to strengthen eastern North America’s case for inclusion. Among the sources of evidence, coprolites, or fossil faeces. Fossil human faeces. And among the people gathering the evidence Kris Gremillion, Professor of Anthropology at Ohio State University. She was kind enough to talk to me on the phone, and I made a silly mistake when I recorded it, so please bear with me on the less than stellar quality. I hope the content will see you through. And I’ll try not to let it happen again.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 15:40 — 7.3MB)

Subscribe: Google Podcasts | Spotify | Android | RSS | More

A few words about the picture; after failing to come up with anything striking, I gave in to the inevitable and searched for coprolites. The guy in the picture is Dennis Jenkins, an archaeologist at the University of Oregon. In his forceps is a piece of dried human faeces dated to 14,300 years ago. The sample is not without interest, but it is also from way across the other side of North America. Still, it is a coprolite (or at the very least palaeofaeces), and it is the best I could find. In looking for it, though, I stumbled across The Cambridgeshire Coprolite Mining Rush. Wikipedia has the bare bones of the story – coprolites rich in phosphorus were discovered outside Felixstowe in 1842 and became the basis of a boom industry to extract the phosphorus as fertilizer. The man credited with discovering the coprolite deposits was John Stevens Henslow, the Cambridge botanist who gave up his place on HMS Beagle to his young friend and protégé, Charles Darwin. The coprolites came a decade or so after the Beagle set sail, and the company that extracted the fertilizer went on to become Fisons, a glorious name in British agrochemicals. Small world, eh?

Funnily enough, another account makes no mention of Henslow, and describes the coprolites as “phosphatised clay nodules”. I’m afraid that’s all the digging I have time for; I gave up just as soon as I struck this somewhat broken motherlode, which tantalisingly says coprolites were “thought by some at the time to be fossilised dinosaur droppings”. Thought to be? No doubt there’s a lot more to know.

Notes

1. If you know me from the other place, you know that I reviewed Kristen Gremillion’s book Ancestral Appetites there, and that’s what prompted this interview.
2. You want more coprolite stuff? And not just human? You need The Dung File.
3. Intro music by Dan-O at DanoSongs.com.
4. End music by Douglas Blue Feather, who might just possibly be from around the Kentucky area, which is a close enough connection for me.

Henry Hobhouse’s book Seeds of Change: Five Plants That Transformed Mankind (now six, with the addition of cacao) contains the remarkable fact that at the height of the slave trade a single teaspoon of sugar cost six minutes of a man’s life to produce. Reason enough to cheer the abolition of slavery, I suppose. But that doesn’t mean that everything is sweetness and light in the business of sugar. Or salt. A photo gallery in The Big Picture made that very clear, and inspired Rachel Laudan, a food historian, to write in praise of industrial salt and sugar.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 17:02 — 8.1MB)

Subscribe: Google Podcasts | Spotify | Android | RSS | More

One critic asked:

OK, I totally get why people should not live in poverty and desperation. But why does that translate into cheers for industrially processed foods? Don’t we actually consume more sugar and salt than we need to? How about something in between? Well made, fairly and sustainably produced. And consumed with reason.

Laudan makes a good case for industrial sugar and salt, although at the end she casually adds “rice, flour, wine, chocolate and many other foods we cherish”. Here, I think, is where we part company, because, unlike the critic quoted above, I want to distinguish foods from ingredients. On flour, for example, too right I don’t want to be grinding my own grain, as Rachel herself has made clear in much of her writing. But I also don’t want to be using only extremely industrial flour, and luckily I can afford to buy flour that is “well made, fairly and sustainably produced”. (“Consumed with[in] reason,” not so much.) At least I have the option. With very few exceptions, I cannot feel the same way about artisanal salt and sugar, although I confess that if I could get it easily, I would buy Maldon Sea Salt, and if I did, I would almost certainly eat more salt than I do at present.

I also feel, although I didn’t want to abuse my position as host and labour the point, that the very cheapness of sugar and salt does contribute to overconsumption. I’m pretty sure that the reason sugars, in all their forms, are cheap has more to do with subsidies and unpaid externalities than anything else, but whether getting rid of those would make a difference to consumption now, I have no idea. I doubt that it would make much difference to how much of either salt or sugar would be available for preserving.

Notes

1. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History, Rachel Laudan’s eagerly anticipated new book, will be published in September.
2. Sugar has been the focus for many wonderful books, articles and the rest of it. Reading around for this episode I came across Mike Rendell’s website, which has some interesting historical insights. And ‘The Dunghill of the Universe’ The Sugar Barons: Family, Corruption, Empire and War looks worth a read too.
3. The Food Programme, on BBC Radio 4, took a new look at Sugar: Pure, White and Deadly? — their question-mark, not mine — at the end of May. And pretty good it was too.
4. Barbarities in the West Indies by James Gillray, published by Hannah Humphrey, hand-coloured etching, published 23 April 1791, copyright National Portrait Gallery and used with permission.
5. Podcast cover image of Venezuelan cut sugarcane by Rufino Uribe.
6. Intro music by Dan-O at DanoSongs.com.

I did not know that that the famous Monty Python spam sketch was recorded on 6 June 1970. At least, that’s the claim of a Tumblr obsessed with Minnesota in the 1970s. (Wikipedia says only that “[i]t premiered on 15 December 1970”.) However, I need no encouragement to share a programme on Spam that I made for BBC Farming Today back in 1997, a programme that was both very well received and a blast to make. the people at Hormel couldn’t have been nicer, and the butterfly spam balls weren’t bad either.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 12:48 — 17.7MB)

Subscribe: Google Podcasts | Spotify | Android | RSS | More