THE GLOBALIZATION OF PLENTY

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CHAPTER
24
THE GLOBALIZATION
OF PLENTY
The world of food requires unobtrusive erudition. It is well known
that curiosity is the basic thrust toward knowledge, which in turn is
the necessary precondition for pleasure.
Giovanni Rebora
1
AS WE JUST SAW, American anguish about weight and well-being has
prompted scientifi c probes into obscure food-related alleyways. It also
did much to advance food globalization in America. During the 1950s,
Americans with a hankering for the foreign had pizza parlors for eating
out and canned chow mein and chop suey for eating in, but most were still
meat and potatoes people. It was a time when nobody used garlic and only
winos drank wine. But this stolid unimaginative image was chipped away
at beginning with the refi ned tastes of highly visible Jacqueline Kennedy
and her fondness for French, Italian, and even British foods. Moreover,
Americans took a good look at their waistlines, had their hearts checked,
worried about their fat consumption, and began in earnest to adopt foreign
foods increasingly thought to be healthy.
A stick prodding the public in this direction was the controversial
1977 document entitled Dietary Goals for the United States, published
by the Senate Select Committee headed by George McGovern. Its 1978
bombshell edition alleged that the nation was under siege from an epi-
demic of “killer diseases” – heart disease, stroke, cancer, and diabetes, and
obesity brought on by changes in the American diet during the preceding
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half-century. The document called for a more “natural” diet, as well as

more nutritional research to counter the epidemic.
2
The carrot came with an 1980 publication by Ancel Keys and col-
leagues on the virtues of the Mediterranean diet. These investigators
added more than two decades of their own research to earlier explo-
rations of the Mediterranean diet, which, when contrasted with most
“Western” diets, revealed a clear relationship between the intake of satu-
rated fats and cholesterol and the incidence of heart disease, diabetes, and
certain forms of cancer.
3
The Mediterranean diet, although based on some consumption of fi sh, was
pretty close to vegetarian – rich in fruits, vegetables, legumes, tomatoes, and
grains, with olive oil, a monounsaturated oil, providing most of the fat.
4
It
also famously featured alcohol in the form of wine as a regular part of the
Mediterranean regimen.
5
It did not take long for scientifi c research as well
as popular writing about the Mediterranean diet to turn into industries,
particularly after it became apparent that the diet had a special appeal
for those interested in guilt-free alcohol consumption.
6
Indeed, a glass or
two (or more) of wine became a dietary imperative for many in the 1990s
after the beverage was promoted to the rank of a heart-disease preventive,
because some studies showed that it elevates blood levels of high density
lipoprotein, the “good” artery cleansing cholesterol.
Appreciation of wine as a miracle worker soared even higher as details
of the so-called “French Paradox” began appearing in the media and were

featured on the TV series 60 Minutes. Those details credited red wine
drinking among the French with their relatively low rate of heart attacks.
7
Especially impressive was the much lower than expected rate of coronary
artery disease among the foie gras–gobbling ( but wine drinking) people of
Gascony who were also heavy smokers and whose diet incorporated many
more cholesterol-laden foods than just goose liver. All of this led to a panel
of nutrition authorities from Harvard University and the World Health
Organization, which unveiled in 1994 a “Mediterranean Diet Pyramid.”
This gave olive oil a prominent place, along with cheese, yogurt, and, of
course, red wine.
8
Wine achieving health-food status arrested falling sales of California
wines, especially the reds. American tastes had leaned toward white wines
as fi sh and chicken became trendy, but now veered back to red wines while
an expanding population of wine drinkers discovered what Californians
already knew. California wines had come a long way since the 1960s when
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269
Orson Welles, as a television pitchman for Paul Masson Wines, intoned that
“we sell no wine before its time.”
9
The transformation began at the University of California at Davis,
where from the 1950s through the 1970s new technologies were applied
to turn winemaking and vineyard management into sciences. California
wines began to compete favorably with wines the world over and, during
the 1990s, the number of wineries in that state jumped from 600 to more
than 900.
10
The baby boomers were absolutely charmed by wine and

bought plenty of foreign, as well as domestic, offerings. Those of France,
Germany, Austria, and Italy began sharing shelf-space with the wines of
Spain and Portugal, only to be jostled by New World bottles from Austra-
lia, New Zealand, Argentina, and Chile (in 1993, U.S. consumers bought
close to two million cases of Chilean wines). Americans began to speak
knowledgeably of Viño Cohcha y Toro, a German Kabinett versus a Trock-
enbeernauslese, and the “Super Tuscans” of Italy, while putting a few bottles
of French Bordeaux down in their newly constructed wine cellars.
11
And,
in 1999, a new French wine was released, the “Paradoxe Blanc.” Named for
the “French Paradox,” it is a white wine made like a red wine to boost its
antioxidant-rich tannins.
But a new appreciation of wine was not limited to the West. In China,
a growing health awareness has produced a market for dozens of foreign
wines, mostly cheap ones from France, Spain, and nearby Australia. And
although the custom of mixing wine with soft drinks like Coca-Cola or
Sprite may cause Western connoisseurs to shudder, the Chinese are enjoying
the benefi ts of wine by the pitcher.
Olive oil was also credited with lowering the incidence of heart disease
among Mediterranean peoples, and its use in America soared to the point
where people became picky wanting more than just “extra-virgin.” For
many it now had to be “cold-pressed extra virgin,” and arguments about
the superiority of Greek, or Italian, or Spanish olive oils became as routine
as the pesto made from them.
12
Per capita pasta consumption more than
doubled between 1968 and 1982, the sale of spaghetti sauces skyrocketed,
and America discovered risotto and balsamic vinagar.
13

The Food Guide Pyramid, which included pasta and rice at its base,
pushed up the consumption of both, although Chinese foods were dealt a
glancing blow by the 1994 revelation from the Center for Science in the
Public Interest that popular Chinese restaurant dishes had high levels of
fats, cholesterol, and sodium.
14
The Center also showed that foods served in
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Tex-Mex restaurants were ridiculously high in saturated fats.
15
But sushi in
Japanese establishments was not and, improbably, after its introduction
in the 1960s, Americans gingerly discovered that they could stomach raw
fi sh, and sushi became something of a craze. Food critic Craig Claiborne
enthused that sushi was “a great vehicle for maintaining a stable weight
and is enormously gratifying to the appetite.”
16
Dim sum – Chinese appetizers – also became popular, as did the French
foie gras. Yogurt, used in much of the world for ages, remained a novelty in
the United States as late as the 1950s. Subsequently, however, it became
aU.S. staple, available in myriad fl avors and textures from dozens of pro-
ducers. Annual sales of kosher foods grew from 1.25 million dollars in
the 1940s to almost $2 billion by 1993, even though less than a third of
the consumers were Jewish.
17
Kosher foods were perceived by the public
to be healthier than their non-kosher counterparts. And in 1994, Lean
Cuisine varieties of frozen foods that could be microwaved in a few min-
utes included Cheese Lasagna, Fettucini with Chicken in Alfredo Sauce,

Mandarin Chicken, and Teriyaki Stir Fry.
18
Hawaii may have been the last state to enter the union but it has been
fi rst in food globalization. A leading producer of pineapples (an American
import), sugar from southeast Asia, and famous for its Kona coffee, which
derived from Africa, Hawaii has few food plants of its own. The original Poly-
nesian navigators who apparently arrived from Tahiti were sustained by those
they carried with them such as taro, bananas, perhaps sweet potatoes, bread-
fruit, kava, even coconut palms and, of course, dogs, pigs, and chickens.
The vegetables are called “canoe plants,” an acknowledgment of their
foreign origin. Had they stuck with this nomenclature such Hawaiian sta-
ples as linguiça from Portugal and rice from China would have been called
“ship food,” and Japanese fl avorings like dashi and furikake, “airplane food.”
Such migrating ethnic ingredients, which traveled mostly with foreign-
born whalers, explorers, and plantation workers from China, Japan, Korea,
Portugal and the Philippines, have all been scrambled together to comprise
Hawaii’s “Pacifi c Rim” cuisine.
On the mainland, a wholesale acceptance of foreign foods was to some
considerable extent also the result of immigration, or perhaps better, the
result of a dramatic shift in the origins of immigrants who entered the
country during the last half-century and especially after the 1965 Amend-
ments to the Immigration Act.
19
Between 1950 and 1990, the percentage
of new arrivals from Europe fell from over 50 to just 15 percent, whereas
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271
those from Asia jumped from 6 to 30 percent, and Mexican arrivals more
than doubled from 12 to 25 percent.
By the 1990s, the giant food companies had concluded that American

tastes had reached a point where “foreign” was perceived as better and they
scoured the globe for exotic foods while also giving a foreign cachet to
foods produced at home. “Haagen-Dazs,” for example, was a name dreamed
up to convey the impression that European infl uences were behind the ice
cream’s production.
20
It was in the late 1980s and the decade of the 1990s that so many food
globalizing forces coalesced in America that people can now embark on an
extensive journey of “culinary tourism” without leaving their hometown.
21
Posters in ethnic restaurants let diners know what is on the menu as mata-
dors face bulls, the Taj Mahal looms, the Tower of Pisa leans, Far Eastern
markets beckon, Thai temples glisten, and sleepy European villages lull. In
the supermarkets, meat and seafood counters feature ostrich, squid, and
escargot, items that few would have dreamed of putting in their mouths
in the recent past, along with other foreign delicacies such as Black Forest
ham, weisswurst, mortadella, pancheta, and prosciutto. In addition, many
of these outlets now have Asian counters featuring sushi, seaweed wraps,
wasabi, and soy products.
Produce markets (and farmer’s markets) stock cilantro, chayote, jicama,
avocados, chilli peppers, tomatillos, and nopales for Mexican dishes;
arugula, fennel, fresh basil, radicchio, porcini mushrooms, celery root, and
sun-dried tomatoes for Italian meals; leeks, for French and other European
dishes; basmati rice, ginko nuts, litchis, shitiake mushrooms, tofu, taro root,
and Thai lemon grass for Asian occasions; manioc, papayas, and plantains
to be eaten Caribbean (or Brazilian) style. Pomelos, highly valued in South-
east Asia (they are associated with the Chinese New Year), are now readily
available in U.S markets.
22
Fish became globalized so that we regularly eat tilapia – an African fi sh

few Americans ever heard of until a few years ago. Long farmed in Asia and
Africa, tilapia is now farmed in the United States and Canada as well as in
Central and South America. And Alaska pollock, made into surimi (faux
crab, lobster, shrimp, and scallops) has radiated out from Japan to sweep
the United States and is poised to engulf the world. Even salt, or rather
salts, have gone global so that sea salt in various colors can be obtained
from France, South Africa, and Bali, and exotic table salt is also mined in
the Himalayas (it is pink), and the mountains of Bolivia.