Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

Briefed to talk about the Columbian Exchange. But first, how do we choose vegetables.

1 What you can get. “In this climate, we grow grass, so we eat meat.”

2 Differentiating yourself from others. We used to eat quite a range of green things that we no longer eat, but that our anteriors would have known as they walked the lanes or gathered as they worked the fields.

3 Vegetarianism as an intellectual choice. You always find veg restaurants and wholefood shops in university cities. Falls into the need to feed the world, against the tide of those who want to eat meat. And meat-eaters win in battle. Ghandi, a vegetarian, knew that passive resistance was pretty much all you could do.

She grew up in South America so it “was sort of in my blood” understanding the vegetables that were there. In 1992, Expo Sevillia reconstructed the four little ships that went to the New World. She reads out the bill of lading.

Maize replaced chestnut woods back in Europe. The usual guff on the potato, being an acre of land and two weeks labour to feed a (large) household. “It was a pushover.”

Manioc, cassava, yam grow where neither maize nor potatoes will grow.

“Nebuchadnezzer ate grass. Is this an early reference to vegetarianism? No. It is a sign of madness.”

Ooops. I hadn’t fully checked my programme. Before the estimable Jim Godfrey there’s a panel discussion on Vegetable Culture, which I suspect will allow for a diversity of views.

The reason is that the planned speaker, Simon Schama, is unable to be here. Grave disappointment.

Ceremonials over — winner of the Sophie Coe prize sounds like a fascinating paper on the poppy in Anatolia, which I’ll try to obtain — the panelists are taking the stage. Paul Levy, Raymond Sokolov, Fuchsia Dunlop and Elisabeth Luard.

Ray Sokolov is restaurant critic for the Wall Street Journal. He sees not the depreciation of vegetables, but a tension in the west in which vegetables are a superior product, in addition to being the low-down food of the poor. He then goes through a series of quotations from classical sources. We’re on Jacob and Esau and the mess of potage; not very complex, but also a harbinger of the future, with famished Esau, the hunter, willing to sell out his future for something to eat. Hunting and gathering succumbs to agriculture and the settled life.

Homer, in The Iliad 13, “588 or so” talks about an arrow bouncing off the shield of noble Menelaus, “as when on a threshing floor black beans or chickpeas bounce off the winnowing fan”. War contrasted with peaceful harvest.

Virgil wrote a poem that is basically a recipe for salad.

Now we’re on Shakespeare, contrasting Falstaff as the gross meat-eating prole — “capons by the ton” — contrasted with Llewellyn promoting the virtues of the leek. “Will you not eat my leek,” he asks, which could be misconstrued.

Virginia Woolf “is completely anti-vegetable in a way, but not really”. Followed by a quote about the poorness of English cooking from To The Lighthouse.

This is going to be an experiment. I’m not sure how it will go. But as I am in Oxford for the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, and as the topic is vegetables, we thought it might be an entertaining wheeze to see if I can live blog it. I can foresee two problems.

One, sitting here typing will disturb people. That could easily make me stop. Two, I’ll run out of juice. Despite the wonderful facilities, there doesn’t seem to be an outlet anywhere nearby. And three (did I say two?) in addition to plenary sessions, there are parallel sessions and it might be awkward rushing from one to another.

But I’ll give it a go. So here I am, waiting in the plenary hall for Jim Godfrey, chairman of the board of CIP, the International Potato Centre, to do his spuddy thing.