Day 180

Thoughts: The evolution of food.

If I had created 'The Earth Diet' before the 1st century the human beings who occupied the earth at the time would have laughed at me. Eating purely foods naturally provided by the earth is not the 'Newest Thing'. In fact, it's the oldest thing. Humans started out eating only what nature intended. We began to create new recipes, pastries, white bread, milk shakes, jelly beans, hot dogs, tv dinners, sugars and processed foods only after we mastered the technology to create it. The natural foods like fruits, vegetables and nuts we eat are not invented; they evolve. If you have ever wondered about the history of food, you don't have to anymore, I did the hours of research for you! I found it fascinating to trek all the way back to BC (Before Christ) today and see how our food has evolved : (And remember I did not write history, I wrote this using all the resources available to me today)

Water, ice, salt, oysters, shellfish and fish, eggs, mushrooms, insects, rice and millet were all traced back earlier than 10,000BC.

10,000BC Agriculture begins
10,000BC Bread, beer and soup
10,000BC Almonds and cherries
9,000BC Sheep
8,000BC Wheat, apples, lentils
7,000BC Pork and pistachios, beans: old world & new world, walnuts
6,500BC Cattle domestication
6,000BC Wine and spelt, maize and tortillas, dates and broccoli
5,500BC Honey, chickpeas & lettuce
5,000BC Olives and olive oil, cucumbers and squash, chilli peppers, avocados, potatoes, milk & yogurt
4,000BC Yeast breads: pitta and focaccia
4,000BC Grapes, watermelons, oranges
3,600BC Popcorn
3,200BC Chicken domestication
3,000BC Butter & palm oil, barley, peas, carrots, onions, garlic, spices
3,000BC Ice cream
2,900BC Figs, soybeans
2,737BC Tea
2,700BC Rhubarb
2,500BC Duck
2,000BC Pasta and noodles, radishes, carob, marshmallows & liquorice
1,500BC Peanuts, chocolate (cocao bean) & vanilla, horseradish
1,490BC Raisins
1,200BC Sugar
1,000BC Pickles, peaches, oats
900BC Polenta
900BC Tomatoes
850BC Celery
750BC Cider
700BC Cinnamon
600BC Cabbage
500BC Italian sausages & artichokes
200BC Turkeys and asparagus
55BC Devon cattle
1st Century Fried chicken, French toast, flan & cheesecake, The Haggis, lobster, crab and shrimp, truffles, strawberries & raspberries, capers, turnips & kale, chestnuts
3rd Century Lemons
4th Century Beets and bananas
5th Century Vinegar, pastries & appetizers, Anglo Saxon foods, peppercorns and gardencress, pretzels
6th century Eggplant
7th Century Kimchi,
9th Century Halva & goulash, coffee, cod
10th Century Medieval food, Peking duck
11th Century Lychees, corned beef & cider
12th Century Breadfruit,
13th Century Ravioli, lasagne, pancakes, waffles, couscous
14th Century Scrambled eggs, guacamole, pie, Mexican limes, kebabs,
15th Century Coconuts, sushi & sashimi
1475 Pork and beans
1490 First stove built in Alsace, France
1493 Pineapples, cows in America
1495 Marmalade
16th Century Salsa, quiche, puff paste, teriyaki chicken, pecans, papayas, turkeys in Europe, cashews, Japanese tempura, brandy
1517 Sweet potatoes in Europe
1529 Vanilla in Europe
1544 Tomatoes in Europe
1554 Camembert cheese
1587 Brussels sprouts
1590 Shakespeares food
1596 English trifle, skim milk
1597 Potato salad
1599 Hasty pudding
17th Century Pralines & coffee cake, cream puffs & éclairs, maple syrup, modern ice cream, cranberries in America, doughnuts in America, corn bread, hoe cakes, spoonbread, cheese pie, shortbread, French onion soup, salad
1604 Raspberry Jelly
1610 Bagels
1615 Coffee in Europe
1650 Rum
1653 Pumpkin pie and lemonade
1686 Croissants
1690 Rice in South Caroline
1691 Lemon meringue pie
18th Century Crab cakes, English muffins & chowder, sticky buns, Dutch Cuisine, coffee in America, root beer, French fries & ketchup
1708 Casseroles
1740 Pound cakes & cupcakes
1747 Mashed potatoes
1750 Grapefruit
1775 Dried apples
1756 Mayonnaise & tartar sauce
1762 Sandwhiches
1764 Bakers chocolate
1765 The first restaurant (paris)
1767 Soda water
1769 Tofu in America
1781 Tomatoes in America
1784 Lollipops
1786 Deviled eggs
1787 Toad-in-a-hole
19th Century Wedding cake, shepherds pie and pickled peppers, canapés & hamburgers, Sally Lunn, Victorian Era, hotdogs, The history of the calorie began in the mid-nineteenth century.
1807 Ice cream cones
1811 Corn syrup
1817 Toffee and butterscotch
1820 Lady fingers
1824 Steak sauce
1825 First metal cans for canned food
1828 Macadamia nuts
1830 Softdrinks in America
1835 Worcestershire sauce
1847 Chinese food in America, vanilla extract, peanut brittle
1848 Pesto, commercial chewing gum
1849 Sourdough bread, Cadbury chocolate
1850 Modern marshmellows
1855 Boston cream pie
1856 Condensed milk
1857 Australian James Harrison developed the world first practical ice making machine and refrigeration system,
1859 Baking powder
1860 Fish and chips, ice tea, can opener
1861 Beef stoganoff
1863 Breakfast cereal, fruit salad
1867 Synthetic baby food
1868 Tabasco sauce
1869 Waffle iron
1870 Margarine, California raisins, Neapolitan ice cream
1872 Philadelphia cream cheese
1876 Heinz Ketchup
1877 Campbells soup
1879 Nestle Chocolate , Lindt Chocolate
1880 Passion fruit, French dressing, meat loaf, vending machines for post cards in London
1883 Christmas pudding
1885 Milk shakes and Dr pepper, evaporated milk
1886 Coca Cola, pecan pie
1888 First vending machines in USA, New York city selling tutti-fruity gum,
1889 Pizza
1890 Ice cream sundaes, lipton tea
1891 Cafeteria Kansas City
1893 Cracker jacks, fudge
1894 Hershey bars, eggs Benedict, chilli powder
1895 Peanut butter, shredded coconut
1896 Oatmeal cookies
1897 Jello, 1000 island dressing, cotton candy, chocolate brownies
1898 Jelly beans and candy corn, pepsi
1900 Oysters kirkpatrick
1901 Peanut butter & jelly
1903 Canned tuna
1905 New York pizza, submarine sandwiches
1906 Kellogg’s Corn Flakes
1907 Gum ball machines
1912 Oreos
1914 Anzac biscuits
1917 Moon pies
1918 Fortune cookies
1920 First vending machine to dispense sodas into cups
1921 Wheaties, zucchini
1922 Gummi bears, vegemite, girl scout cookies, blender
1923 Popsicles
1924 Frozen foods, Caesar salad
1926 Ice cream sandwich
1927 S’mores
1928 Health bars
1930 Twinkies, pavlova cake, banana bread, soufflé
1931 Tacos, dry soup mix, refrigerator biscuits
1933 Peanut butter cookies
1934 Hawaiian punch, Ritz crackers
1935 Sloppy joes, jagermeister, cheeseburger (Humpty Dumpty Drive-in)
1936 Dagwood sandwhiches, drive in restaurants Glendale California
1937 Spam & krispy kreme, chicken kiev
1938 Canned soda, chicken & waffles
1940 Vending machine for coca-cola and pepsi
1941 M & Ms, cherries
1942 Corndogs
1943 Irish coffee & nachos, Chicago style pizza
1946 Nutella, instant coffee
1948 Frozen French fries, ready to spread frostings
1949 Seedless watermelon, instant pudding, minute rice
1950 Smoothies, frozen pizza, Kraft process cheese slices, dishwasher, first metal lunch box, Oleomargarine Act requires prominent labeling of colored oleomargarine, to distinguish it from butter. (Yes, swindlers tried to sell folks cheap margarine in the guise of butter.
1952 Diet soda
1953 Tv dinners
1954 Ranch dressing, Mc Donalds
1955 Chex mic
1956 Panini
1958 Instant ramen noddles, Food Additives Amendment enacted, requiring manufacturers of new food additives to establish safety. Going forward, manufacturers were required to declare all additives in a product.
1960 Brown rice in USA, green eggs and ham
1962 Instant mash potato
1964 Buffalo wings & pop tarts, chicken sandwiches (fast food), pita bread
1965 Gatorade & slurpees
1967 High fructose corn syrup
1969 Creamed ground beef
1970 Tiramisu, soft drink bottles grew 20 to 24 ounces
1973 California Certified Organic Farmers (CCOF) is formed. Begins with 54 farmers mutually certifying each other’s adherence to its own published, publicly available standards for defining organic produce.
1977 Happy Meal at Mc Donalds
1980 Mud pie, pasta salad
1984 Red Bull energy drink
1990 Nutrition Labeling and Education Act (NLEA) is passed. It requires all packaged foods to bear nutrition labeling and all health claims for foods to be consistent with terms defined by the Secretary of Health and Human Services. As a concession to food manufacturers, the FDA authorizes some health claims for foods. The food ingredient panel, serving sizes, and terms such as “low fat” and “light” are standardized. This is pretty much the nutrition label as we know it today.
1991 Nutrition facts, basic per-serving nutritional information, are required on foods under the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act of 1990. Food labels are to list the most important nutrients in an easy-to-follow format.
1998 Grape tomatoes
2001 Omega 3 eggs
2002 The 2002 Farm Bill requires retailers provide country-of-origin (COOL) labeling for fresh beef, pork, and lamb. After repeated debilitation and stakeholder pressures, the law would finally go into effect only 6 years later, on Oct 1, 2008, and even then with many loopholes. AND The National Organic Program (NOP), enacted. It restricts the use of the term “organic” to certified organic producers (USDA).
2003 Announcement made that FDA will require food labels to include trans fat content. Labeling went into effect in 2006.
2004 Passage of the Food Allergy Labeling and Consumer Protection Act. Requires labeling of any food that contains one or more of: peanuts, soybeans, cow’s milk, eggs, fish, crustacean shellfish, tree nuts, and wheat. AND Baked Doritos in. Fried Doritos out.
2006 Deep fried coco cola
2009 Smart Choices launches formally with several hundreds of products labeled with the green check mark. Froot Loops becomes the poster child for everything wrong with an industry backed nutrition rating system.
2010 New product introductions like Wrigley’s 5 gum, Genetically Modified Foods

In the last 100 years, the choice of food, the food itself and human dependence upon it has changed more than in any other time in history. Now we have ‘pretend food’. It’s called Genetically modified (GM) foods, which are foods derived from genetically modified organisms. Genetically modified organisms have had specific changes introduced into their DNA by genetic engineering, using a process of either Cisgenesis or Transgenesis. The world population has topped 6 billion people and is predicted to double in the next 50 years. Ensuring an adequate food supply for this booming population is going to be a major challenge in the years to come. Genetically Modified foods promise to meet this need in a number of ways for example pest resistance, crop losses from insect pests can be staggering, cold tolerance and nutrition. Is it possible to continue living on the Earth without GMF?

A beautiful and intelligent friend of mine Leanne Bridges who is studying Anatomy and Physiology at Uni thinks it's dangerous ...

“So what does this mean when we look at genetically modified foods? When you modify the genes of a potato, you are introducing artificially created cells into your bodies cell environment and beyond. These genes attack our internal environment.”

Will we become genetically modified people?

Some call the 21st century ‘the end of living and the beginning of survival’.

In 1855 Chief Seattle wrote ‘Where is the eagle – gone’ to President Franklin Pierce .

“The whites too, shall pass - perhaps sooner than the other tribes. Continue to contaminate your bed and you will one night suffocate in your own waste. When the buffalo are all slaughtered, the wild horses are tamed, the secret corners of the forest heavy with the scent of many men, and the view of the ripe hills blotted by talking wires. Where is the thicket - gone - where is the eagle - gone - and what is it to say goodbye to the swift and the hunt.” - To read his full letter go to my blog Day 127.

The obesity epidemic arrived with astonishing speed. After tens of thousands of generations of human evolution, flab has become widespread only in the past 50 years, and waistlines have ballooned exponentially in the last two decades. In 1980, 46 percent of U.S. adults were overweight; by 2000, the figure was 64.5 percent. Childhood obesity, also once rare, has mushroomed: 15 percent of children between ages six and 19 are now overweight, and even 10 percent of those between two and five. "This may be the first generation of children who will die before their parents," Foreyt says.

Personal responsibility surely does play a role, but we also live in a "toxic environment" that in many ways discourages healthy eating, says Ludwig. "There’s the incessant advertising and marketing of the poorest quality foods imaginable. To address this epidemic, you’d want to make healthful foods widely available, inexpensive, and convenient, and unhealthful foods relatively less so. Instead, we’ve done the opposite."

We are awash in edibles shipped in from around the planet; seasonality has largely disappeared. Food obtrudes itself constantly, seductively, into our lives—on sidewalks, in airplanes, at gas stations and movie theaters. Humans can eat convenient, refined, highly processed food with great speed, enabling them to consume an astonishing caloric load—literally thousands of calories—in minutes.

Pumping up portion size makes good business sense, because the cost of ingredients like sugar and water for a carbonated soda is so small, and customers perceive the larger amount as delivering greater value. The French aren’t so interested in the amount of food; they are more concerned with its quality. The restaurant industry—which employs 12 million workers (second only to government) and has projected sales of $440.1 billion this year.

“A hundred years ago there was no such thing as a snack food—nothing you could pop open and overeat”, says Mollie Katzen, author of The Moosewood Cookbook

In 1978, they note, only 8 percent of homes had microwave ovens, but 83 percent do today. Food that once took hours to prepare is now "nuked" in minutes. The food industry’s major objective is to get us to intake more food, the restaurant industry’s major objective is to get us to eat there more often, the drug industry major objective is to get us to use more drugs - why would we do that? Because we are sick and have learned that taking these drugs it will make us better and we will feel great and live longer. Cities are designed for automobiles, not for healthier ways of getting about like walking or bicycling. "In fact, we’ve made it dangerous and unattractive to do so,"Our bodies were not designed to handle so much caloric input and so little energy outflow.

It's becoming so obvious and so easy for us to see these days, how our eating habits and sickness is linked to billions of dollars.

So... where to next people? What will the 21st century evolution of food look like?

And it's not good or bad or wrong or right, it is what it is, we have created the earth as it is, and we can re-create it however we want it. How do we want it?

References below.

Challenges: “Food is one of life's greatest joys yet we've reached this really sad point where we're turning food into the enemy, and something to be afraid of." Jamie Oliver

Triumphs:Jamie Oliver' - “We just need to re-discover our common sense."

What I Ate Today:

Breakfast: Water with lemon juice. A beet, carrot, celery and ginger juice! A chocolate ball!

Lunch: A avocado. Blackberries, strawberries and a chocolate ball.

Dinner: Basil Potatoes. With garlic, red chilli, onion, broccoli, zucchini, carrot and green beans! Oh it was so delicious! The vegetables and spice absorb each other and it is so rich in flavour!

Dessert: Chocolate balls and strawberries.

Snacks: 2 chocolate balls with 2 strawberries! Oh my have you tried my chocolate balls with strawberries! It is divine. I bite part of the strawberry and part of the rich chocolate ball (with peanut butter that is blended peanuts) and then whirl it around and push it to the top of my mouth where I absorb all the flavours mmm then I open my mouth a little to really taste the rich fruitiness!

Recipe: Recipe for Basil Potatoes will be in my book that is published in November!

Exercise: I exercised my body today and went for a beautiful walk and run in the sunshine and warm wind! Then I came home and danced to two of Travis's songs ... my favourite music! No rules, no dance 'steps', just abstract movin the body! ;)

185 days to go!!!

http://www.foodtimeline.org/
---A handbook of Anglo-Saxon Food: Processing and Consumption, Ann Hagen [Anglo Saxon Books:2992] (p. 69-70)
---The Rituals of Dinner, Margaret Visser [Penguid:New York] 1991 (p. 159-160)
---Siren Feasts: A History of Food and Gastronomy in Greece, Andrew Dalby [Routledge:London] 1996 (p. 12)
---Food and Feast in Medieval England, P.W. Hammond [Wrens Park Publishing:Pheonix Mill] 1993 (p. 104-5)
---Eating Right in the Renaissance, Ken Albala [University of California Press:Berkeley] 2002 (p. 112-3)
---Food in Early Modern Europe, Ken Alabala [Greenwood Press:Westport CT] 2003 (p. 231-4)
The British Housewife: Cookery Books, Cooking and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Gilly Lehmann (various references throughout the book; charts p. 385-6)
--Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America, Andrew F. Smith editor [Oxford University Press:New York] 2004, Volume 2 (p. 65-7)
http://inventors.about.com/od/gstartinventions/a/gum.htm
http://www.csa.com/discoveryguides/gmfood/overview.php
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_food
---Food in the Ancient World, Joan P. Alcock [Greenwood Press:Westport CT] 2005 (p. 136-8)
---America's Founding Food: The Story of New England Cooking, Keith Stavely & Kathleen Fitzgerald [University of North Carolina Press:Chapel Hill NC] 2004 (p. 178-180)
---Encyclopedia of American Food and Drink, John F. Mariani [Lebhar-Friedman:New York] 1999 (p. 41-2)
According to an article titled "Serving up chicken and waffles," Los Angeles Business Journal, September 22, 1997 (p.1):