Food history and the physical experience of place

Research, and food history, as an embodied practice

On the phone with a friend the other night, I began to dreamweave about Silphion.

This article about Taras Grescoe’s The Lost Supper caught my eye: And with it, a mention of Çatalhöyük in Turkey.

Grescoe and I have a similar approach to our work: History is not just abstract research. History is a lived experience we carry forward into our lived, sensory experiences today.

As I looked at images of Çatalhöyük, my mind began to wander in a way that’s familiar and exciting.

‘What would be be like to live there?’ I wondered. And I don’t just mean ‘how many people lived there, how many crops did they grow, and what kinds?’

But instead, what is the daily life, physical, embodied and sensory experience of living and moving in that space?

How would the ground feel beneath my feet as I wandered down the laneway between the buildings?

Would my feet come to know the exact undulations of the Earth on those roads, a sensory memory acutely aware of any change born by shifting sands pushed around by the collective movements of people and animals?

Would the sensory experience of the stones/bricks in the walls shape my expectations for the day, or my recollections of the night: Damp, cool stones coated with morning dew, or baked hot and dry from the day’s relentless sun? Their warmth, or lack thereof, a reminder and a portend of larger shifts in the landscape where we found our home?

These are the kinds of things I think about when I think about food history: And I think to be a historian these are the kinds of questions you have to ask, in addition to the ones that are more likely to appear in your papers. ‘How was the food prepared?’ is best met, and most deeply understood, by imagining how it feels to prepare that food. ‘How did food fit into village life?’ is best understood by situating yourself in that village.

Cliff dwellings

When I was growing up in Colorado, we visited a lot of historic sites in the Four Corners region. Cliff dwellings were one of my favorites, and it was in cliff dwellings that I first had this particular revelation.

I was maybe 5 or 6 years old, and while crawling up and down and around the dwellings at Mesa Verde, built by Ancestral Puebloans/the Anasazi people. I began to imagine the feeling of stone on my hands as it would have felt to the people who called this place home.

The fine texture of the sand, I noted, meant it shifted easily and kicked up dust: So if I were growing up there, I wouldn’t probably be running around inside the house, or (since I’m clumsy and slip on even the most sure-footed surfaces) close to the edge.

What would it feel like to shift my weight as I navigated carrying belongings and supplies and up and ladders? How would the heat of the air move and shift in this place in response to the weather, and the seasons?

As a kid, I didn’t have the language to really eloquently describe what was going on in my head (I think I just said “wow cool!” a lot), but what was going on absolutely changed my world, and how I think about history forever.

I’ve had this experience in many historical sites (and sites we don’t think of as “historical,” per se, but that are, like forests in the Appalachians), but I still trace this way of knowing back to Mesa Verde.

Food stories

I’ve been building a class called Finding your Food Story for a while, and as it progresses, I think about that act of finding in terms of the sensory experience of understanding history:

To find a food story is not just to locate it within texts, or within a logical or intellectual understanding, but also an embodied one. To understand history, deeply, in the ways I want to understand history, means also to embody.

Not just to think like a person in a time and place but to imagine the physicality of being that person: How do they move? What do they encounter? Do they adjust their motions to account for small doorways or tight spaces? Do they expand their bodies outwards, taking up a bit more space, after emerging from a smaller room into a larger one? Do their feet know the texture of the Earth beneath them, and how do they accommodate that knowledge with small and large movements? How does this shape their understanding and experience of the world? And how does it shape their understanding and experience of food?

Because it’s me, part of this reflection has resulted in journaling and even a guided meditation, which I may share at some point, but for now, I’m just luxuriating in having space again to engage in these kinds of reflections, that are nourishing to me and also to my writing.

What is a place you’ve thought about in this way? How did people move within it?

(P.S. if you want to visit Mesa Verde, they apparently offer guided tours still: though I don’t think you’re allowed to wander around unsupervised like I was. And there are many other historic sites worth visiting in the region, like Bandelier in New Mexico, Lowry Pueblo in Colorado, or Manitou Springs farther North in Colorado).