According to history and biology. Why we are what we eatBy Gustavo Santiago

Among the phrases that seek to define the essentials of a human being, one of the most replicated today is “we are what we eat.” Now, when this expression is thematized from the hard sciences, it will say that the foods we consume, when metabolized, become part of our body and with their nutrients and micronutrients contribute to its proper functioning. The type of diet we eat will affect, for example, our intellectual performance, our sports performance, and our work capacity. If the phrase is interpreted, however, from the humanities, it can be said that the food we consume reveals who we are in relation to our economic-social situation, our geographical location, our era, our ecological positions.

Two recently published books fully represent these two perspectives: Basic manual of scientific gastronomyof Mariana Koppmanna graduate of the Faculty of Pharmacy and Biochemistry of the UBA, addresses the issue from biochemistry, while Food storiesby the French philosopher Jacques Attali He does it from the human sciences.

Organized in short and dynamic chapters, Attali’s book starts from the very origins of humanity, stops at the cultural differences of the main peoples of Antiquity to finally reach our present. It is not only about the history of food and its methods of preparation, but, fundamentally, about accounting for the food act in all its complexity.. Thus, for example, in relation to the first human beings, the mastery of fire will be key and, later, the consolidation of a sedentary lifestyle so that focuses of sociability are generated around the preparation of meals that will allow the development of language. This association between food and language will persist for millennia until it is put into crisis, according to the author, in the 20th century.

In the main cultures of Antiquity, they eat what is produced plus what is incorporated through travel or conquests. But not everyone consumes the same. Because, beyond the religious restrictions specific to each town – which all inhabitants abide by –, with the great empires there begins to be a marked difference between the foods that are available to the noble classes and those that are destined for the popular sectors. . With the great palace banquets, a relationship between food and power is established that will last, at least, until the beginning of modernity.

The great voyages by land and sea typical of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance gave rise to a notable refinement of gastronomy in Europe. Among the richest, abundance comes to be combined with taste, while the popular sectors usually have to settle for diets that barely go beyond mere subsistence.

Jacques Attali, author of Food Stories
THIRE / Gamma/GETTy – Corbis Entertainment

Towards the end of the 18th century, the first restaurants emerged in Paris. Until then, there were inns, in which food of dubious quality was served. The appearance of restaurants with “food menus” and with specialized cooks (who in many cases had abandoned work in noble houses to open their own businesses), gives rise to a new mode of sociability. A variety of diners gather there and spend hours talking: “One of the first restaurants, Le Procope, became the meeting place for the men of the Enlightenment, including Denis Diderot y Jean D’Alembert”. According to Attali, “the hunger of the people and the conversations around a table are going to trigger a revolution.”

Towards the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, the great protagonist of culinary events will be technology. New ways of cooking, preserving and transporting food; Technology applied to industrial production, added to the rhythm of urban life, completely transforms the eating process. The family table begins to disappear to be replaced by fast food in the workplace. He eats alone, in a hurry and badly. “If current trends continue – maintains Attali – food will lose its role as a shared meeting, hospitality, exchange, and generation of consensus. “The sociability of food, constant in the history of humanity for at least five thousand years, will disappear.”

In Koppmann’s book, for its part, there is little interest in what happens around food. What matters is what is inside them. Basic manual of scientific gastronomy It is an authentic journey into the interior of those. Knowing the structure of carbohydrates, proteins and fats makes it possible to understand the behavior of foods such as meat, eggs, vegetables, flours, sugars and starches when treated with cold or with various types of heat, as well as appreciate the specific effects they have on the functioning of the human body. It is explained, for example, that the sensation of pleasure that we experience when eating something sweet is produced by the release of endorphins: “Foods are sweet mainly due to sugars, a group of molecules with the peculiarity of being able to be easily ‘disassembled’. in our body and release large amounts of energy.”

Each chapter contains a series of simple recipes that allow you to experience some of the aspects developed in the more theoretical part, and a series of “curious” questions (with their corresponding answers), such as: Why do apples float? Why, even if they are in the refrigerator, do cooked vegetables rot faster than raw vegetables? Why does the flavor of meat vary if salt is added before or after cooking? What is the best oil for frying?

Perhaps it was the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach the first to maintain, in the 19th century, that “we are what we eat.” The truth is that, beyond the question of the authorship of the phrase, books such as those by Koppmann and Attali show that trying to answer the question “What do we eat?” can be as complicated as facing the old existential question “What are we?”

Food stories

By Jacques Attali

FCE. Translation: Horacio Pons

362 pages, $17,500

Basic manual of scientific gastronomy

By Mariana Koppmann

XXI century

288 pages

$ 19.590

Gustavo Santiago

Themes

Books

Other Books news

Review: A Faun’s Feast, by Ariel Magnus

Review: Silence breathes like an animal, by Belén Zavallo

Nunzia Locatelli. “In a moment of crisis, Mama Antula provoked the meeting between the President and the Pope”