Ologies with Alie Ward - Smologies #18: FEASTS with Katherine Spiers

Episode Date: November 22, 2022

Kid-friendly and quick! It’s another Smologies G-rated cut of a classic episode. Loosen your belts and tuck a napkin under your chin because feasting season is here. Katherine Spiers -- journalist, food anthropologist, editor of HowtoEatLA.com and host of the culinary history podcast Smart Mouth -- lets Alie belly up for a buffet of questions about winter gatherings, Thanksgiving myths, green bean casseroles, the hazards of deep frying, holy eels and more.Follow Katherine Spiers on Twitter and InstagramHer new food review site HowToEatLA.com and podcast network TableCakes ProductionsFull length Food Anthropology (FEASTS) episode + links hereA donation went to: Los Angeles Regional Food BankMore Smologies episodes! Sponsors of OlogiesBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, masks, totes!Follow @Ologies on Twitter and InstagramFollow @AlieWard on Twitter and InstagramSound editing by Steven Ray Morris, Mercedes Maitland, and Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam MediaMade possible by work from Noel Dilworth, Susan Hale, Kelly R. Dwyer, Emily White, & Erin TalbertSmologies theme song by Harold Malcolm

Oh, hey, it's your old pop dad, flipping pancakes in a flannel robe. It's Ali Ward. We're back with another episode of Smologies. What is Smologies? I'm so glad that you asked. So we took full oligies episodes and then we sliced and diced them up to make these bite-sized classroom-friendly edits of our deep dive classics. So we're about to fill your plates with a bunch of food facts this episode.

But first, let's feast on this. My thank yous. Now, thank you to everyone supporting on Patreon as little as $0.25 an episode gets you into that club. And then you can submit questions for the oligists. Thank you to everyone who clothes your bodies and oligiesmerch.com items. And thank you for writing and subscribing. That keeps this podcast up in the charts.

So if you leave a review, I read it, I'm creeped like that. And this week, thank you to Heather Albrecht, who left a review that said that they had a moment of deep relief and gratitude when their baby, quote, in the throes of a fantastic lunchtime tantrum, stopped crying and smiled as the oligies theme song came on. And I hope they like the small oligies theme song and learning about oysters and squash, Heather. Thank you for that. Okay, let's go.

So food anthropology, it's the study of how we eat. And this week's guest is a food historian of sorts. I met her over a decade ago while we were both staff writers at the LA Times and she covered food naturally. And she moved up the ranks to be the LA Weekly Food Editor and the KCET Food Editor before she jumped into the podcast realm with this truly amazing food history podcast called Smart Mouth where she invites a guest to talk about the history of their favorite foods. She's also written for Gawker Media and Serious Eats and Tastemade and just launched HowToEatLA.com.

And for anyone who lives in LA and has a mouth that is a great site, we'll link that in the show notes. It's awesome. Pop that top button in your trousers and tuck a napkin into your collar and get ready for a buffet of information with Smart Mouth podcast host, editor of HowToEatLA.com and food anthropologist, Katherine Spires. Now, let's talk about feasts. Yes.

Let's talk about winter feasts. Yes. Why do you think from an anthropological point of view, we just want to hunker down and just get a little roly-poly and have insulin comas in the winter? Because we need the warmth from the calories and also it's boring because it's dark out. Okay. I'm born. Let's eat.

Yeah, exactly. Like you want to eat and also you don't mind sleeping more. We are bears, essentially. Like we follow the bear lifestyle. I mean, in the wild, our lipid stores are our bank accounts. Yes. I mean, I feel like when you see a Badonkadonk bear, that bear is wealthy with fats, which I suppose in the winter, we do need that.

When it comes to feasting in the winter, what was it like historically in any part of the world you can think of? Did we eat things we'd put in the root cellar in the summer or did we just find what was available? Where is the food coming from? Your point about lipids being wealth actually applies to humanity, too. If you're having a feast in the winter, that means you can afford sugar and salt. You are out of control wealthy.

Right. Yeah. A lot of it, there's different kinds of feasting and we like to think of feasting as being like celebrations and like we're all in this together and we're all celebrating and we're all having a good time. But humans being what they are, historically a lot of feasts are an opportunity to show off basically to stunt on your neighbors. No.

And part of it could be as simple, depending on like the era that you're in and the place that you live. Sometimes it is as simple as being like, oh, I'm sorry, you hadn't seen this fruit in six months. Yeah, I've got it. Whatever. Yeah, it's preserved, but I've still got it and you don't because it means like the again, you have the ingredients to do it.

You have the time when you're not out just trying to do subsistence farming to like preserve things for later. You have time to plan ahead. Being able to plan ahead is also another rich person thing still to this day. So did peasants not have winter feasts? Let them eat cake. Hard or two. And that's so that's part of the the mixture of like celebration and stunting on people

is that lots of times like the Lord of the Manor would throw a feast for the serfs. And that was partly to be like, thank you, but also to be like, see how great I am to you. Oh, no. Like don't don't defect to another farm because I've got the best feast in town bribing someone with baked goods. It is a tale as old as time. But how do we know it's interesting that the oldest evidence of feast that we have actually

comes from art rather than archaeology? Oh, because I guess it's not like chicken bones in a casserole dish wouldn't preserve, I guess. Yeah, that could well be it. Feasts often come from offerings to the gods as well. It's like a party, but also an offering. So they have like basically like pottery shards from like ancient China and Sumeria, which is Iraq.

Okay. So when what is what's the history of American holiday season feasting? So where do you even start with this one? Oh, first, referencing by the fact that we are talking about like Northwestern European traditions coming over to America and starting in New England and spreading out from there. That's probably a lot to unpack. It is a lot to unpack. And I wanted to do a little digging here.

One publication, Indian Country Today, had a great article and interview from a few years back with Ramona Peters. She's the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribal Historic Preservation Officer. Now she said, in regard to the famed 1621 inaugural Thanksgiving feast, she said the following thing. It was made up. It was Abraham Lincoln who used the theme of pilgrims and Indians eating happily together because he was trying to calm things down during the civil war.

When people were divided, it was like a nice unity story for public relations. She said, it's kind of genius in a way to get people to sit down and eat dinner together because families were divided during the civil war. Ramona Peters was asked if she'll celebrate Thanksgiving anyway. And she said, as a concept, a heartfelt Thanksgiving is very important to me as a person. It's important that we give thanks. For me, it's a state of being. So that was a great article in Indian Country Today.

And there were other wonderful first person experiences. SmithsonianAmericanIndian.si.edu has some great articles as well. But getting back to the food history. So much meat. Really any kind of meat you could get, which was turkey, wild turkeys, which don't look like the turkeys that we eat now, but it is the same animal, and then venison, and seafood. Which actually, even to this day, seafood is a bigger part of the New England Thanksgiving menu than it is anywhere else in the country.

What? Is it seafood? Yeah. Oysters and mussels are a big part of it. So you're saying the first Thanksgiving's more meat, deer, turkeys, oysters, mussels. And all the other poultry's they could find. Okay. They could find and shoot before they flew away.

They were like, yes, let's do some of this. And what I think you can sort of see how things change for people and the changing Thanksgiving menu. Because for one thing, again, they didn't have a lot of herbs and spices back then. Because those were wildly expensive. They hadn't figured out how to use the new ones. They hadn't figured out how to grow the ones they brought from Europe. Roasted flesh just tastes good on its own.

You don't have to do a lot with it the way that you do have to do with side dishes. They need a lot of different ingredients. And again, it's survival food. They had an abundance of meat, which is rare, but they weren't coming up with new recipes. They were like, it's not alive. Yeah. It's not wiggling. Let's eat it.

Yeah. Exactly. The idea of having flavored food, I think as Northern Europeans started traveling the globe, they were like, this tastes good. Taste? I don't know the word. And now when did, let's say like the Thanksgiving feast become a widespread American phenomenon? And what's changed just in the last at least decade of us like getting hip to the fact

that it's all apocryphal? Okay. So Thanksgiving for a long time was really only celebrated in New England. Oh. So basically the people whose grandparents were there. Oh my God. It's like Woodstock or something. Yeah.

Exactly. So I really think it was Intel around probably like just after the Civil War that the rest of the country got into the idea. Okay. And you can still to this day see regional differences in what people consider necessary for a Thanksgiving dinner. Oh my God. Like is this going to be all about green bean casserole?

It's largely about green bean casserole. There was a phenomenon that started around 1900 and lasted like probably until the 80s and that is food companies, the ones that sell packaged food, processed food, writing their own recipes in-house and sending them out both as recipe booklets, but also sending them to newspapers to be published in the newspapers. Oh. Yeah. And the recipes could be good, bad and different, but it was mainly about selling the products

that these companies made. So green bean casserole was invented by this food scientist who worked for a food company as a way to use cream of mushroom soup. So a big feast meal is made with love and propaganda. Now what else is on your holiday table? What are some other dishes that are pretty regional? Are some people like where a canned smooth cranberry sauce, a state and others are like chunky and others are like, we make it on the stove.

That one, I think, isn't regional necessarily. What is regional is sweet potato casserole? Okay. That's another southern one. That is another company created recipe. It was a marshmallow company. I think it was called Angelus and they hired a woman who wrote a cooking magazine in the 1920s to find out how to convince people to use marshmallows more.

Oh my God. And that was one of her inventions. Did feasting like this really take off? You said after the Civil War, but after the turn of the century, 1900s, like industrial era, when did we see an explosion in this kind of eating? So it wasn't until the 1930s that petitions to make it a national holiday really picked up. So it was Franklin Roosevelt who had to make the decision of which day to place it.

How'd they decide? It was such a huge fight. In one year, there were two thanksgivings. Stop. Yeah, because they couldn't decide. Roosevelt had said fourth Thursday in November, and then the Republican Congress got together. Republican majority Congress got together with like the business leaders association of America or whatever it was.

And they're like, no, make it the third one because they wanted people to be able to shop for Christmas and feel okay about it for longer. But then Roosevelt's idea eventually won out. But in the 1930s, there was like a lot of madness around where to place Thanksgiving. What else has changed over the years? And that's a difference too. And like the way that Thanksgiving has evolved is that it used to be like eating meat was the fancy thing.

But as America became more industrialized and wealthier, you see the addition of ingredients like every dairy product. That's something that only rich people can do. I never thought of it that way. Yeah. So you move away from meat being the special dish to like all the things that like take time and energy or you have to buy that you can't make yourself being like the star of the show.

When we think of cartoon feasts, do we see a pig with an apple in its mouth? I think for maximum upsettingness. Okay. I always wondered what that was. It was always like, oh, this means we're feasting. You're like, get that thing out of there. Well, it is that sort of like English thing, which I think in our heads were like animal presented whole on the table.

And if we're talking about like a European cultural influence, like that's what we think of for fancy. But if you think about Asian food, foods that are sort of family style, obviously lend themselves more to feasting, that's a good point, which I think might be part of the reason why so many people who don't celebrate Christmas now do Chinese food because you still got that same vibe and it's even more communal because everyone's like sharing from the same dishes, which we tend to do on Thanksgiving same idea because the idea of having a lazy Susan and a bunch of dishes at a round table where you can see everyone like that lends

itself to not only the eating experience, but also the sharing of plates. Absolutely. And I feel like in Western culture, we don't really have that. But before we spin ourselves into the questions that you submitted patrons, let's take a quick break to raise some money for a worthy cause. And Catherine just launched that new website, HowToEatLA.com. And so in her honor, we're donating to the LA Regional Food Bank because one in five people in Los Angeles County experiences food insecurity and the food bank has been fighting hunger

since 1973. Each 25 bucks provides the equivalent of 100 meals for kids, seniors, and folks who need something to eat. So learn more at lafoodbank.org. And thanks to these sponsors for helping fund that donation. Okay, let's dive in. Let's digest your questions. Vincent wants to know, why do traditions vary so much from country to country about what

foods are feast foods? And are there any feast foods that are just seen all over the world and no matter what the local culture is? So it's the issue of abundance, which is going to change based on the flora and fauna of wherever it is that you are. Starches traditionally, well, just the plain starches like plain rice, plain noodles are never going to be a feast food because those are the easy things to get. It's when you start being like, I've got this potato, but I also have two pounds of

butter. That's what makes something a feast food. So it's items that are scarce. So fruit, for instance, is considered very special. Any dairy product is considered very special. Meat used to be considered very special, but because of industrialization, it's not as much anymore. So these things will also change with just as the culture changes, so do like the considerations

like what is special or fancy. So it's the rarity. Yeah, always the rarity. We want and we appreciate what we can't usually have. And what exemplifies that more than social media? And now Sarah wants to know how his Instagram changed food. Is it prettier now? Yes.

Oh, it is absolutely prettier and restaurants at the beginning would pretend like they didn't care. You actually can see it, I think for me, the place where it's more obvious is restaurant design, like restaurants have bigger windows now and they have planar table tops and walls with pops of color. So they're thinking about what will be a good background. Yeah. And you'll also see on the plates and on more casual places on the like piece of tissue

paper that they put on the plate will now be stamped with the logo in the name of the restaurant on it. Name plates, they're just a sign of the times. Oh, and speaking of timing, Nicole Soss wants to know, why have so many holidays come to revolve around foods and feasts, Thanksgiving, Passover, Hanukkah, Christmas? So in a sense, why do the holidays? Is it gathering? Is it winter?

Yeah. It's gathering its community, but it's also, we saved up for this, which was a lot more obvious pre-industrialization where it's like, we have one pig and we're not going to eat it until this holiday. Marissa Baru wants to know, why do some cultures fixate on food more than others? In France, lunches are two hours long and food is very important, but the US food breaks are like not even taken seriously. So I actually think this totally goes back to what we were talking about earlier about

feast days and how Americans can't just like relax. We are totally Calvinistic in our society, even if no one even knows what that means anymore. Here, let me read the dictionary for us both. Calvinistic, marked by strong emphasis on the depravity of humankind. So in other words, we do not believe in having a nice time. France is like, you only have one life, enjoy it, eat a lunch. And Calvinism, side note, was the brainchild of a Protestant thinker, John Calvin, who

was a theologian, which is someone who studies the nature of God or religious beliefs, which reminds me. Okay. You are a religious studies major. Mm-hmm. Paula Herrera wants to know, is the Last Supper considered a historical feast or just theological? Like assuming it did actually happen when they have eaten anything other than bread and wine.

Oh, God, this is actually so funny because I happen to know that Da Vinci's, the Last Supper, painted in the 1490s. He's really muddied now by like years of existing and also bad restorations. But the food items depicted on the table in his painting of the Last Supper are oranges and eels. I used to serve eels here, boy. Not sure. But I did dig up that one of the reasons the meal depicted was pescatarian could have been

because Da Vinci himself was a vegetarian because he loved animals so much. So Leonardo Da Vinci, the first maybe vegan influencer. I find this cute and inspiring. Tina Rodeo wants to know, who was the first person to deep fry a whole turkey? I'm going to look into it. I'm pretty sure that's Southern. So story goes that in the 1930s, a Cajun chef witnessed a deep fried turkey and was like, yep, that's going to happen more.

I'm going to start that. Don't undertake it lightheartedly. And this is, I'm going to say something and everyone listening is going to be like, yeah, da, except for that people don't think about it. Don't do it indoors. Oh, God, no. It has to be done outside. And like, have your fire extinguisher ready.

Yeah, things can go very, very wrong. Apparently, it's delicious. Clearly, that's why people keep doing it. But don't hurt yourself. It's not worth it. It's not. So play it safe because it might save your life unless you're a turkey. Actually, speaking of sparing the birds, Todd McClaren wants to know,

what are some popular vegetarian feast main dishes other than the ones that mimic meats like Tofurky? Can we, what about like a like a stuffed portobello or like a? Yeah, I've heard some vegetarians joke about how mushrooms are the meat for vegetarians. I think mushrooms are really delicious. And you can, I think stuffed portobello is a really good idea. Lots of times, it just has to do with the seasoning that you put on Tofu or Tempe that makes it delicious.

Oh, the reason why Tofu was used as a meat substitute was like a Chinese Buddhist thing, where they would just, they would actually like form the Tofu into the shape of the animal and season it with the seasonings that you would use and for that animal. So this is true as Buddhism spread from China to Japan. So did Tofu and the Japanese label of Shōjin Ryōti arrives in Japan via the founder of Zen Buddhism, a monk. And many Shōjin dishes mimic meat and are called things like mock goose,

which doesn't have quite the same ring as a Tofurky. Which is a loaf of roasted bean curd that has spared many a bird during its forty two years on the planet. What do you love about your job the most? What's the best thing about being a food anthropologist? I like finding out new stuff all the time. And I think it's been such a way in for me to understand more about the way that the world works, which is really cool.

And to it's so easy for us to be knee jerk and be like, why did that person do that thing? But if you know why you can empathize a little bit more to the point where I actually think I'm too empathetic, I can see other people's points of view constantly and it's exhausting. It's a good problem to have. It is. So ask smart mouth people a heaping helping of questions

because they love to spill the beans. Now, once again, Catherine Spires has a food history podcast called Smart Mouth. It's truly excellent. She also owns the podcast network Table Cakes. So check out that array of shows she just launched HowToEatLA.com. If you're an Angelino who needs to know what to eat here. And a link to the LA Regional Food Bank is in the show notes. And she is at Catherine Spires on Twitter.

Catherine underscore Spires on Instagram. We are at oligies on Twitter and Instagram. And I'm at Allie Ward on both. And thank you, new Smologites for being here. New episodes are out every other Sunday. You can check the URL alleyward.com slash Smologies or the link the bio for 16 other Smologies episodes and counting for your holiday drives. Thank you, Mercedes Maitland and Jared Sleeper for working on those.

Links to the original full episode are available on alleyward.com or in the show notes and a full list of credits for this episode can be found in the show notes as well, since we like to keep things small around here. And if you listen to the end, you know, I give you a piece of advice. And this week it's just that when you're shopping for holiday food and you have the option or ability to get a second can of whipped cream, get it. No one ever turns down a second helping of whipped cream. We all love it.

Also, if you're not able to volunteer or to donate at all this holiday season to a soup kitchen or food bank, don't worry. They need volunteers and donations all year round. And help is always appreciated, even more so after the holiday cheer dies down. And if you're getting your food from a food bank or from a soup kitchen, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. And that is what people are here for to help each other out. So I hope that you have a big good dinner because you deserve it.

OK, until next time, Smolagites, bye.