[Sca-cooks] new food history show

[Stephanie Ross]

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I saw this article in today's paper, but I watched Enterprise and missed the show. I will try to catch the show on Saturday. Check your local listings for it. It will be interesting to see how acurate it actually is.

Aislinn

A culinary history lesson
  Burt Wolf's new series, What We Eat, traces how food has affected history in the past 500 years.
By JANET K. KEELER, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published October 9, 2002


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      Burt Wolf
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Burt Wolf eats up trivia like it's a big bowl of pasta and still leaves room for a slice of sinful pie.

It was the Swiss who figured out how to make fine chocolate from the cacao bean.

Szechuan food wasn't spicy until Portuguese traders brought chili peppers to China.

Potatoes were responsible for the population explosion in northern Europe that led to the Industrial Revolution.

These are some of the food history tidbits that the TV food and travel journalist dishes out on his new 13-week PBS show, What We Eat, debuting tonight. The show explores how the Old World and New World were linked through the exchange of plants and animals during Columbus' voyages from 1492 to 1502. This year marks the 500th anniversary of the explorer's fourth, and final, voyage to the New World.

Wolf marvels at how Columbus' voyages changed the course of history and he never really even knew where he was. When Columbus first made landfall in 1492, he thought the crew had made it to the East Indies. They were likely in the Bahamas.

"He had no clue at all," Wolf says by phone from Napa, Calif., where's he working on episode No. 12, "The Story of Wine in the Americas."

The series, shot on location in the United States, the Caribbean, Europe and Mexico, shows how food has affected history in the last five centuries.

For instance, sugar cane, native to India, was introduced to the Middle East and then to medieval Europe as a medicine and rare spice. In the 18th and 19th centuries, sugar heavily influenced British government policy, from wages to wars. In those days, sugar held the cache that oil does today.

Wolf traces the history of sugar cane in next week's episode, "How Sweet It Is: The Story of Sugar." Part of the episode was filmed at a South Florida sugar plantation. Florida is also featured in episode No. 4, on livestock.

"The first cattle ranch was in Florida," Wolf says. "No one in Europe knew how to raise cattle (except) a small group of people in Spain. And by 1530, they had big cattle ranches in central Florida."

You'd think Wolf, who has reported on the global food scene for years, would know everything there is to know about food. Every episode, though, held some surprises.

"It was amazing," he says. "Every day I was walking around saying 'I didn't know that, I didn't know that.' " He learned the most, he says, about chili peppers.

"Capsaicin, the ingredient that makes chilis hot, is also the active ingredient in Vicks 44 and Robitussin," he says.

Wolf relied on historians, anthropologists, journalists and professors to assist him in his research.

"Many were people in their late 70s and 80s, out of the politics of university life and open to talk about their feelings," he says. If that sounds dramatic, so is food history. For instance, one of his sources explained how Columbus' mother-in-law had a sugar plantation in the Canary Islands, off the coast of Spain. She planted cane along with small pox.

Tonight's episode, "When Money Grew on Trees: The Story of Chocolate," follows the cacao bean from a Mexican plantation to a chocolate bar in the United States. After watching the show, you'll come away with great respect for the Swiss chocolate houses. Taking the tiny, hard cacao bean from finicky plants grown only near the equator and figuring out how to extract cocoa butter to make creamy chocolate is an amazing feat.

Wolf says that food events happening today will be studied in years to come.

"There are still enormous shifts in what people eat or don't eat today," Wolf says. "There is extraordinary starvation in Africa and Asia right now, and they'll have to shift their food base to survive."

That means returning to crops that worked well for them in the past, he says. And they'll need help from other nations to accomplish that.

"Everyone is talking about self-sustaining agriculture," Wolf says. The danger is relying too heavily on one food source, he says. He sees that happening in the United States with corn, the topic of episode No. 7.

"Corn is amazing," he says. "There are 2,000 items in the supermarket, and 1,900 have corn in them. Corn is what drives American industry; it's the biggest food in America. But it's very scary when we narrow what's available to us."

To prevent the devastation that would occur if disease wiped out corn crops, scientists have developed bioengineered strains. The results of these experiments might be studied by food historians 100 years from now.

Wolf's culinary history lesson is worth a watch, especially for food lovers who want to know more about what they eat.

TV preview
What We Eat, hosted by Burt Wolf, debuts at 8:30 tonight on WUSF-Ch. 16. The show repeats at 3 p.m. Saturdays.


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