What we eat depends on who controls the supply, where cities get their food, and the tools used to cook it. These curations look at how sugar built fortunes and slavery, how cities depend on food brought in from far away, and how kitchen technology changed what we eat.
Consider the Fork is Bee Wilson's witty account of how cooking changed around the world, revealing the history of everyday kitchen objects. The lessons answer how tools used for eating helped shape what people ate and how they ate it. They trace changing ideas about table manners and the place of utensils in everyday meals.
How sugar became a modern commodity and a question of power concerns the political economy of food commodities, studied by American anthropologist Sidney Wilfred Mintz, born in 1922, through historical and ethnographic studies. The lessons ask how sugar connects slavery and capitalist power. They trace the relationship between plantation systems, labor, and wider economic change.
Food security means ensuring the world's food supply, a concern because shortages can cause social and political problems. What makes cities depend on food brought from elsewhere, and how does that dependence connect urban diets to distant production? The lessons trace these connections through transport, trade and the inputs used to produce food.
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