Makes you wonder how they lost them because horseradish and mustard, while a different type of spice compared to something based on chili, was quite popular and is still commonly found in supermarkets. But using something like a really strong mustard as a condiment seems to be exclusively the deal of people of the colon cleanser 9000 type
The consensus in Food Scholarship is that it’s a product of the enlightenment, colonialism and nationalism combined with remnants of galenic medical theory. Summarizing really hard, these required to construct colonized peoples as backwards and worthy of subjugation by characterizing everything they do as nocive or outside the European character, like: “their” food is spicy and bracing, while ours is balanced and delicate, effectively racializing certain ingredients/tastes. What we know about European food pre-enlightenment, people liked mustard, brassicas, and spice, but then the political economy of food and empire changed, and with it, the culinary superstructure.
There’s a great book about it I just finished reading: it’s called The Coloniality of Modern Taste
Fascinating, is there a reason it didn’t just play out as “their barbaric tongue burning chilis” vs. “our noble nose burning mustard”? Given the context I feel like there’s a lot of that stuff going on which seems easy enough to do here to both be racist and eat mustard
There was some of that, especially in places where Slavic peoples (very mustard and horseradish-centric) came into contact with Turkic ones (more spice oriented), so central and Eastern Europe, Western Asia. But as with most value judgements rooted or supportive of racism, their origin isn’t isolated to the thing itself, but rather a product of the tensions and fears that the food of the “other” would do, or to what national aims it serves. Slavs didn’t hate chilis/spice because they considered them barbaric, but because they associated them with the Turks they had been at war for centuries with. Racism was born as a consequence and a tool of empire, and it shouldn’t be understood otherwise, at least in that historical context.
The opposite happened when Chinese people came into contact with European gastronomy, too. There’s a famous book by a chinese noble in the 18th or 19th century, where he goes over all the rules Europeans have for food, and that they use to justify their food being “better”. Then he applies them to Chinese cuisines, and concludes that Chinese people do them all better than Europeans themselves. Except for desserts, he gives Europeans that win. These comparisons were useful to China, because it helped it find its place in a world so different from what it used to think it was the center of. So he was doing a “by your logic…” to Europeans, even though before the comparison wasn’t even necessary.
Also, from pre-modern times and all the way til around the late 1800s, European people saw food as something that became a part of your body and soul as you digested it, so it had the power to change fundamentally who you were. There are reports of imperial metropole communications warning colonizers not to eat too much of local crops or dishes, lest they become “as” the natives. So to them there was a very real existential fear that eating too much spicy food would have them lose themselves, and therefore becoming susceptible to the same conquest/weakness they had subjected the natives to.
Makes you wonder how they lost them because horseradish and mustard, while a different type of spice compared to something based on chili, was quite popular and is still commonly found in supermarkets. But using something like a really strong mustard as a condiment seems to be exclusively the deal of people of the colon cleanser 9000 type
The consensus in Food Scholarship is that it’s a product of the enlightenment, colonialism and nationalism combined with remnants of galenic medical theory. Summarizing really hard, these required to construct colonized peoples as backwards and worthy of subjugation by characterizing everything they do as nocive or outside the European character, like: “their” food is spicy and bracing, while ours is balanced and delicate, effectively racializing certain ingredients/tastes. What we know about European food pre-enlightenment, people liked mustard, brassicas, and spice, but then the political economy of food and empire changed, and with it, the culinary superstructure.
There’s a great book about it I just finished reading: it’s called The Coloniality of Modern Taste
Fascinating, is there a reason it didn’t just play out as “their barbaric tongue burning chilis” vs. “our noble nose burning mustard”? Given the context I feel like there’s a lot of that stuff going on which seems easy enough to do here to both be racist and eat mustard
There was some of that, especially in places where Slavic peoples (very mustard and horseradish-centric) came into contact with Turkic ones (more spice oriented), so central and Eastern Europe, Western Asia. But as with most value judgements rooted or supportive of racism, their origin isn’t isolated to the thing itself, but rather a product of the tensions and fears that the food of the “other” would do, or to what national aims it serves. Slavs didn’t hate chilis/spice because they considered them barbaric, but because they associated them with the Turks they had been at war for centuries with. Racism was born as a consequence and a tool of empire, and it shouldn’t be understood otherwise, at least in that historical context.
The opposite happened when Chinese people came into contact with European gastronomy, too. There’s a famous book by a chinese noble in the 18th or 19th century, where he goes over all the rules Europeans have for food, and that they use to justify their food being “better”. Then he applies them to Chinese cuisines, and concludes that Chinese people do them all better than Europeans themselves. Except for desserts, he gives Europeans that win. These comparisons were useful to China, because it helped it find its place in a world so different from what it used to think it was the center of. So he was doing a “by your logic…” to Europeans, even though before the comparison wasn’t even necessary.
Also, from pre-modern times and all the way til around the late 1800s, European people saw food as something that became a part of your body and soul as you digested it, so it had the power to change fundamentally who you were. There are reports of imperial metropole communications warning colonizers not to eat too much of local crops or dishes, lest they become “as” the natives. So to them there was a very real existential fear that eating too much spicy food would have them lose themselves, and therefore becoming susceptible to the same conquest/weakness they had subjected the natives to.