How will the people of a future communist society eat? What will they eat? How will it be distributed? How has capitalism restrained the culinary arts?
/leftycuisine/
Bentley Campbell
Other urls found in this thread:
cdc.gov
cs.cmu.edu
leslefts.blogspot.com
medievalists.net
twitter.com
Gavin Foster
Definitely not the gastronomic decadent cuisines prepared by bourgeois chefs for the exploiting class, that's for sure, but rather the food consumed by the proletariat.
A socialist society on its way to communism may have to give up some of its liberties in culinary arts, but it's purely a pragmatic decision, not an intentional one, I'd argue that global capital has led to the destruction of culinary arts in other countries through corporate imperialism using westernization (McDonald's, KFC, stuff like that).
Julian Allen
soylent
Jackson Fisher
More cooking for ones self, less pre-prepared instant things, I'd think.
that can entail quick and cheap shit, fancy shit with endless tedious prep, or anything in between really.
there definitely wouldnt be fucking sugar added to absolutely everything like right now.
Josiah Taylor
This is quite literally the reason I can't stand the idea of being communal. I enjoy delicious, expensive food far too much.
Leo Sanchez
I always find it amusing that all the bad things that would supposedly come with communism have been developed by capitalism, including the flavorless, colorless nutrient paste.
Elijah Rodriguez
All the culinary arts you cry over were invented for royalty. Proles ate brown bread made with shitty grains they foraged from the countryside and could include toxins and pease pottage with ale that was more like soupy alcoholic porridge than anything we assume is modern or filtered.
Lincoln Moore
people didnt drink alcoholic beer except on celebrations historically, in europe.
The beer they drank normally was small beer, very calorically rich unfiltered stuff not fermented enough to be significantly alcoholic. more alcoholic than modern nonalcoholic beer but it wouldnt get you very drunk.
making it ensured the water they made it with got cleaned(when they didnt realize they could just boil it), and everyone liked it.
under socialism people would make whatever they felt like cooking for themselves with the ingredients available to them, though, just like they still can now.
Dominic Richardson
Small beer was an invention of the early modern period. There wasn't a distinction in the Middle Ages (the Wikipedia article on this subject quotes a bonappetit article. do not cite it).
Wrong. Even the strong ABVs in modern beers are not good enough to preempt the growth of pathogens. You need closer to 60-70% ABV to kill most bacteria. With viruses, you need closer to 90% ABV. The fermentation process of the medieval period did not include chemical disinfectants for controlling bacteria and it did not include boiling the wort which served as another source of pathogen control, resulting in a substance that fouled quickly and could not be stored for long periods of time. Hops were used initially not for their flavor, but because it prevented the beer from fouling as quickly.
cdc.gov
cs.cmu.edu
leslefts.blogspot.com
Moreover this is based on a fundamental fallacy people (and Wikipedia) misconstrues with pre-modern people: that they understood germ theory, and the application of distilled beverages to germ theory. This is a post-Pasteur thought bubble, and it is not accurate as to how medieval peoples perceived and understood freshness in water. Also, they did in fact know how to "boil water to make it clean". This comes from Hippocrates writing in 300BC. Stop believing in myths about these people.
And they consumed unfiltered water regularly through the annals. Rainfed cisterns were common as per the Roman period. They did not understand pathogens and believed disease was spread by the air interacting with imbalances within the humors, therefore water that was "clean" was more or less clean enough for them. Other prospective sources of drinking included diverting nearby streams like the Great Conduit of 1237 in London.
Medieval brewers were perfectly capable enough at controlling yeasts to produce reasonable ABVs (for beer, we have plenty of 'strong' recipes) but the end result was nothing like modern beer in texture or flavor and there was considerable variety in both between brewers. Boiling the wort was not innovated until the early modern period and this impacted significantly the fermentation and longevity process. Medieval beers were made to be fermented and drunk quickly, hence why I mentioned the soupy texture. Such a quick fermentation coupled with lack of proper filtration to remove the unfermented barley grist produces a far thicker texture to beers than anything modern. It's also quite a bit healthier, which is the real reason why medieval peoples drank beer so much: it's rich in B vitamins that were not in common supply to the peasant diet.
Beer, bread, and cheese coupled with peas pottage and fresh vegetables supply all the macronutrients a medieval worker needs to survive. It is not a coincidence these foodstuffs would be the ones to pass down culturally through to modern times.
Drinking water is attested numerous times through the annals and we even have period guides as to how Medieval peoples determined what sources of water were good for drinking ``and how to balance water with your humors``.
Nathaniel Murphy
that still implies 'strong' wasnt the default like it is today, doesnt it
thank you for that post though.
Christian Kelly
We had this same exact thread some time ago, kys OP and go read nutrionfacts.org
Levi Peterson
We don't know the ABVs for medieval "strong" and "weak" ales and it clearly varied by manor rather than small beer of the early modern period which was done as personal choice of the brewery.
Ian Smith
The old culinary traditions of my country have been erased by standardised teaching of shitty, tasteless cheap meals because anything else cost too much time and money to make, and you can't spend too much time or money if both spouses need to work 8+ hours a day.
Chase Cox
Lower working hours would incentivise people to cook and eat home.
In my opinion there should be communal mess halls or taverns around neighbourhoods for those who can't/don't want to cook.
Those places could organize to have international cousine days so people can try foods from other parts of the world.
Besides that, people in a comunity could always set up a culinary workshop to improve their cooking skills, and develop cooking in general.
Josiah Fisher
Parker Thomas
Anthony Scott
Tbh needs more jpeg.
Oliver Brooks
More locally available and native foods would be produced with the absence of shove-it-down-your-throat marketing of bananas, avocados and coffee, thus increasing the variety of foods from which to choose; this increased variety of foods would bring more people back in to the culinary arts as a hobby, as well as open the doors to much wider resources of nutrition. The wider variety of food grown would help to support biodiversity and thus ecological stability as various factors (construction, climate change, volcanos, ets…) threaten to change it.
Kayden Mitchell
would this entail crop breeding programs to make useful crops out of native plants hunter gatherers and lite-agrarians ate?
such as australian 'bush tucker', for example.
Thomas White
Good points. Cuisine and food-culture is more than just the ingredients alone. In a post-capitalist society there would be room for hobbies, time and resources for creativity, which would most certainly apply to culinary experiences, too.
I know a few kitchen wizards who have this tick of coming up with new meals out of nowhere and improvising nice portions out of what they happen to have at hand. They're curious and enjoy experimenting, with much success I might add, despite the budget and time constraints our current society places upon them.
Pic not related
Justin Wright
Probably mostly what can grow locally, supplemented by imports of important staples that don't grow well in those regions. I like a nice variety of food, but there's plenty that can be grown where I live. No more innumerable hectares of almonds grown for the sake of exchange value, all while dealing a significant blow to the bee population.
Isaac Walker
Meat eaters get life in Gulag
Lucas Russell
This has already been done with almost all suitable plant species across the planet. The absence of large scale agriculture in Australia before the colonists arrived makes it a bit of an oddity. Despite its ubiquity in modern times, it's worth remembering the potato is a Peruvian plant unknown in Europe before five centuries ago. That said, there used to be a far more varied range of food plant cultivars. The post-war green revolution sacrificed these to increase crop yields and the standardization demanded by large food retailers resulted in further constriction of food plant gene pools.