Fork U with Dr. Terry Simpson

With all the spices we have access to, it is amazing how bland recipes have become. I have many cookbooks, some from great chefs, television personalities, and friends. What I am always surprised by is how bland the food has become.
People seem to think a bit of salt, pepper, maybe onions, and garlic provide the spices one needs. Perhaps it is because some associate spice with heat. Mostly because many have never experimented with some of those great warm spices available. A pinch of coriander, some freshly ground cumin, a little cardamom, or a touch of cinnamon can turn an ordinary dish into something remarkable. And the most astonishing part is that these spices financed voyages around the world, built cities, created fortunes, and caused people to kill one another.
Without the spice trade, it is safe to say that the United States, as we know it, would be vastly different from what it is now. The money loaned to the United States, when we were a fledgling country, came from the wealthy spice merchants from what was considered one of the great hyperempires of the world, based in Amsterdam.
But before we go to the birth of the United States, let me take you to the meatball.

Today’s Meatball is a bit boring
When I went to the States for college, the meatballs in the continental US were boring. Many are just combinations of beef and pork, and often the meat is overcooked, leaving the meatball dry, although that is often hidden in the sauce (tomato sauce if you are making spaghetti, or a gravy sauce for others). One recipe had frozen meatballs from the grocery store placed into a crock pot with a vat of grape jelly (it wasn’t bad, it was ghastly).
Most meatballs are like having only the meat from a burger without the crunch and sourness of the pickle, the sweetness of the tomato, and that touch of bitterness from the onion. I didn’t understand why my grandmother’s and mom’s meatballs were so delicious, and these were so dull. Over time, I had received recipes from different people who made meatballs, and they were all versions of the same recipe until history showed me the ingredients I was missing.

In Search of the Mighty Meatball
While there may have been other reasons to visit Turkey, Norway, Italy, and Sweden, there was always Project Meatball. Finding a meatball that tasted like my mom’s. I can’t ask mom about this; her dementia didn’t let me crack that code, so I had to travel the world to find the secret to unlock the flavors in her meatballs.

The Swedish Meatball’s Origins in Turkey
If you go to Stockholm, consider taking a “food tour.” Not only will you learn about the history and culture of the country, but you will also eat well. Then, if looking for recommendations, they know the city and its food like no other. In this case, I wanted a meatball. The traditional meatball as served in Stockholm.
But when talking to the food historians in Sweden, the meatball did not originate in Sweden. The meatball was brought to Sweden by King Charles XII in 1714. He was forced into exile in the Ottoman Empire (now Turkey) after losing a war to Russia in 1709. For five years, he was a guest of the Sultan, and besides trying to get the Ottoman Empire to go to war against Russia, he enjoyed the Ottoman cuisine. After five years, the Sultan became tired of Charles's scheming and tossed Charles out of Turkey.
Charles returned to Sweden with two culinary items: the meatball and coffee.

The Meatball in the Ottoman Empire
Istanbul is the western world’s second most cosmopolitan city. This was the last city of the Roman Empire, until the Sultans conquered it in 1453, which began the Ottoman Empire. But today I was walking in The Spice Market. This market has been in business since 1664. You can imagine when Charles XII came here, and his nose was filled with aromas from around the world. Aromas he had never smelled before.
Let's start counting world hyperpowers. The Ottoman Empire was one. It was built not just on military conquests, but on spices. The spice road, silk trail, ended here, and from here, money was made selling these goods to Europe.
Food Charles had never eaten before. When I was there, the smell of the spices was so abundant and so fresh that my nose was overjoyed. Just outside the spice market, as everywhere, are people who will sell you lamb cooked simply over fire, and to that lamb is added lemon zest, salt, zaatar, as well as nutmeg.
There was something comforting about the smell in the spice market. I didn’t realize my brain was remembering food aromas from home.
Putting ground meat with spices isn’t an original idea. In the Roman Empire, the cookbook author Apicius (25BC–37AD) describes meats from chicken to fish being ground with spices added. Almost every culture has a variation of a meatball (ground meats roasted with some spices). Rome is our second major global power. Yes, we learned about the conquest of the world, but where did Rome make its money? Trade. It conquered not to force people into a religion or a political system, but to secure trade routes. What made a lot of Rome’s money? Spices and food.
For the Ottoman Empire, the meats they used were lamb and poultry. No pork (they were Muslim and pork was forbidden). The flavor came from the variety of spices available to the Ottomans. The Ottomans, it turned out, had all the known spices of the Western World. The spices from Asia and Indochina were traded to Europe through the Silk Road, which began in modern-day Xi’an and ended in Istanbul.

The Swedish Version
Until the mid 1800’s, meatballs were mostly consumed by the wealthy in Sweden. Charles didn’t have meatballs as a meal, but would eat them as a snack with coffee (coffee being the other Turkish product he introduced to Sweden). Meatballs were first mentioned in Cajsa Warg’s 1754 Swedish cookbook. She described meatballs as chopped meat (calf, sheep, or ox) with grated bread and eggs. The seasonings were pepper, salt, and nutmeg. Nutmeg, for a time, was worth more per weight than gold.
By the 1850s, the meatball had become a common food for the Swedes. Much like fashion trends are set by the famous today, the meatball was the fashionable food and became a beloved dish of Sweden.
But let us get back to spices and the world.

A Night in Amsterdam
Many years ago, I stayed in the Waldorf Astoria, Amsterdam. The hotel is made up of six canal houses, once owned by some of the city’s wealthy residents.
In the seventeenth century, Amsterdam was the center of one of the great commercial empires in history. That empire was based on spices
Tea and pepper were the commodities that allowed Britain to become an empire. Notice a pattern here. Trade, often involving spices, but stable trade, which was backed by a navy. A different group of spices for Amsterdam: Nutmeg, Cloves, Cinnamon, and Pepper. Amsterdam became one of the wealthiest cities in the world from the spice trade. In fact, so wealthy that it is considered one of the great hyperempires of the world. Along with the Roman Empire, the British Empire, and the United States.
Most look at Amsterdam during this period and have called it a global power, and this would be our third global power.

A Young Republic
If you are in Amsterdam, you can find the house where John Adams lived. As ambassador, Adams secured loans to our fledgling republic, helping keep it afloat when the US was nearly bankrupt. All because the world loved the taste of nutmeg.

Amsterdam wasn’t the First
Spices were a way to display wealth and status. If you wanted to impress your guests, you served them a meal filled with spices.
One of the first spices traded was pepper. Pepper was valuable because it was small, durable, easy to transport, and in tremendous demand. In medieval London, a pound of pepper could cost the equivalent of a week’s wages for an ordinary laborer.

The Price of Nutmeg
The Banda Islands, now part of Indonesia, were once the world’s source of nutmeg and mace. The islanders traded these spices with Asian merchants for centuries before Europeans arrived.
In 1621, Dutch forces under Jan Pieterszoon Coen conquered the Banda Islands. Much of the indigenous population was killed, expelled, or enslaved, and the islands were reorganized around spice production for corporate profit.
New York City is sometimes referred to as New Amsterdam, because Amsterdam laid claim to the Big Apple. Britain gained New York in exchange for a small spice island, Run. The exchange was one of those moments when the spice trade and New York intersect.
Today, you can buy spices for a fraction of what they were. And yet, most of those spices are underused in kitchens.
Many of those spices have medicinal properties: turmeric is anti-inflammatory, cinnamon helps regulate blood sugar, and pepper improves the bioavailability of many compounds. Adding spices to your cooking not only improves flavor, but also your health.
But without spices, many global powers would never have been. Rome, the Ottomans, Britain, Amsterdam, and the United States might never have been. There may never have been a reason to cross oceans, develop corporations like The Hudson Bay, or Dutch East India. The United States is now a major power. Spices are cheap, and the seas are defended to allow them to move freely. That is why we are mighty - it is the mighty spice
So don’t let the great explorers of the past lives be for naught - add some spice to your cooking.

Coming Home Through Food
They say you travel...

Tea: The Drink That Built an Empire—and Helped Break One
China had the tea. Britain had the appetite. John Hancock had a business to protect.

British TV - No disaster can happen before a cuppa
Watch almost any British television series, and tea appears whenever you enter someone’s home or office. Tea, apparently, is not only a beverage but also a medication for both mental and physical issues.
Oh, turns out someone has died? Put the kettle on. Yes, at some point, gin or whisky will be involved, but there is always tea. Were you shot at? Tea. Your spouse has left you? Tea. Need to discuss a murder? Tea.
I have been watching Slow Horses, one of the great detective series about MI5. From this, I have learned that British intelligence can tolerate treason, Russian assassins, and Gary Oldman’s personal hygiene, as long as there is tea.
It does not matter the hour, morning, afternoon, or evening. And I am always shocked that nobody ever looks at the clock and says, “Perhaps this caffeine will interfere with my sleep.” No. Kettle on. Could be 2 am, and you just showed up to tell them bad news, are hiding from a shooter, or you broke up with your significant other - tea it is.
It is not like Americans, who offer coffee to everyone, but close. Tea is offered regardless of time, circumstances, or whether you even like the person. I am convinced that if you do not offer tea to a Brit, you will be breaking a royal command.

Civilizations and Tea
In this series about foods that built civilizations, we have covered foods from wheat to salmon, allowing civilizations to settle and develop.
Tea is different. Nobody survived a winter because they had enough tea. But tea, like coffee, helped build civilizations, providing a gathering spot. But the love of tea allowed for two wars, espionage, and ritual.

The Chinese Had Tea First
The legend is that the Chinese Emperor Shen Nong discovered tea when some leaves blew into his hot water almost 5,000 years ago.
By the eighth century, during the Tang dynasty, Lu Yu had written The Classic of Tea, an entire book about cultivating, preparing, and drinking tea.

Black and Green Tea
I’ve always thought green tea tasted like pond water. And despite the many health benefits of green tea, it never appealed to me. Black tea is my preference, and it amazes me that black and green tea come from the same plant, Camellia sinensis.
Green tea leaves are heated quickly by steaming or pan-firing right after harvesting to stop oxidation. This keeps the leaves green. Black tea leaves are withered, rolled, and left to fully oxidize in the air, which turns them dark brown or black. Same plant. Different processing.

Then the British Discovered Tea
When tea first arrived in Britain in the 17th century, it was a luxury item, as all new imports are. Catherine of Braganza, the Portuguese wife of Charles II, helped make tea fashionable at the royal court.
Expensive and exotic, the sort of imported luxury you drank because other people couldn’t afford it.
The tea moved from court to wealthy households and eventually into ordinary homes. Taxes on tea were high, which had the predictable effect of creating a thriving smuggling business.
By the eighteenth century, Britain was buying enormous amounts of tea from China. This left a large trade imbalance. China was not importing many British goods, so the Brits had to pay in silver. Silver went east. Tea went west. This was an excellent arrangement if you were China. The British were less enthusiastic. Then they discovered that China would import opium.

Things Get Ugly
The East India Company discovered an appetite for opium. Despite China's wanting to stop the drug, opium provided a tidy profit for the East India Company. Drug wars have had a similar problem. Opium also solved the trade deficit.
When China responded by restricting opium, and when you limit the profit of a Brit, you have war. The so-called opium wars began in 1839.
Britain did not go to war because somebody was late delivering Earl Grey. There was more to the wars than a tea trade deficit. But tea was at the center of the trade imbalance. History is almost never as simple as the sentence we remember from school.
While the Brits were successful in the opium wars, war is costly, even when you win. Ongoing war takes a bite out of profit.
So a fine idea developed. Instead of buying all this tea from China, they might grow it somewhere they already control. Like India.

India Already Had Tea
This is one of those parts of history that becomes more interesting when you stop telling it entirely from the British perspective.
Tea was already growing in Assam. Indigenous people, including the Singhpho, grew the tea, but it was not to the British taste. Brits preferred the taste of the Chinese varietals. The Chinese had a different method to cultivate and process tea. But they were not forthcoming in offering their knowledge or plants to the Brits. War can make people a bit selfish.
So the East India Company decided to steal the plants and knowledge
And for that, the East India Company hired Scotsman, Robert Fortune.

The Original Tea Thief
Between 1843 and 1861, the East India Company sent Robert Fortune on multiple trips to China. His mission was to obtain tea plants, seeds, and knowledge, and bring them to India. Then develop an Indian tea industry, solving the trade imbalance.
Fortune traveled into areas closed to foreigners, sometimes wearing Chinese clothing and adopting a Chinese appearance. Since he did not speak Chinese, his companions would tell people that he came from across the Great Wall.
He visited tea-growing districts, collected plants and seeds, and learned how the Chinese processed tea. He also helped settle the European misconception that green tea and black tea came from entirely different species.
Over those years, he brought 20,000 plants out of China. After trial and error, Fortune discovered tea grew best in the province of Darjeeling. Located in West Bengal, this high-altitude region became the perfect home for the tea Fortune smuggled out of China. The steep terrain and cool mists were the perfect environment. Much like Paso Robles is a perfect environment for some wines. Fortune birthed the famous, highly prized “Darjeeling tea” industry.
While a native wild tea variety (Camellia sinensis var. assamica) had been discovered in Assam, India, Fortune brought expert Chinese tea masters and workers to the Assam plantations. These workers taught the locals how to properly ferment, roll, and dry the leaves. The Assam district now made tea to the liking of the Brits.

My Tea
One of my two current teas is a Darjeeling second flush from JING. Second flush is picked later than the delicate first flush and produces a fuller tea with the flavor that tea people describe as muscatel. I'm not going to hold the cup under my nose and tell you that I'm getting notes of Himalayan stone fruit, leather, and a summer rain falling on the eastern slope of a mountain. When I was in London, I tried various teas. One morning, this one appeared during breakfast at the Langram. It has become a favorite.
Somehow, I also imported a small stockpile of the tea in that brief period, when Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Donald Trump seemed to have no tariffs between them. I think it lasted about twenty minutes.

Tregothnan
The place is called Tregothnan, an estate in Cornwall where the local microclimate is just warm and humid enough for Camellia sinensis. They planted their first tea bushes in 1999 and began selling English-grown tea in 2005.
Naturally, I purchased some.
But the irony is that now tea can be grown in the UK. While the estate in Cornwall produces about 10 to 15 tons per year. Consider London drinks about 13,000 tons per year.
Still, going to war with China over tea. Hiring a spy to bring it to India, and all that effort, and they could have grown tea in their backyard.

Boston Tea Party
You remember the story from grade school, the cry of “Taxation without representation.” Brave colonists standing up against the British Empire.
On December 16, 1773, men, disguised as Native Americans, dumped 342 chests of East India Company tea into Boston Harbor.
That isn’t the whole story. Because the Tea Act threatened the people selling tea in America. One of the men was a wealthy Boston merchant, John Hancock.
We remember the liberty. We don’t talk nearly as much about the profit margins. And that is where the tea gets really interesting.

MesoAmerica and Chocolate
In our series looking at foods that built civilizations, today we are going to stay in the Americas with chocolate.
Chocolate has been used as currency, consumed by kings, incorporated into religious ceremonies, and prescribed as medicine. Today, it is a multibillion-dollar industry that wants you to believe that eating chocolate is an act of preventive cardiology.
I mean, why not? They convinced us to give chocolate to people we love, eat it when we are happy, when we are sad, when only the dog understands us. Don’t feed chocolate to your dog.
And we have done all this with a bitter seed that most of us would probably spit out if we tasted it straight from the tree.

Ancient Harvest and Production of Cacao
Archaeological evidence from Ecuador indicates people used cacao about 5,300 years ago.
Football-shaped pods were cut from large branches of the Theobroma cacao tree. The pods are sliced open and have 30 to 40 seeds encased in a sweet, sticky white pulp. The seeds and pulp were scooped out and placed into piles or baskets covered in banana leaves to ferment for 3 to 7 days. During fermentation, yeasts broke down the pulp, killed the seed germ, and began developing the chocolate flavor.
After fermentation, the beans were spread on mats and left in the sun for about a week. Workers periodically turned them until they were dry and brown. At this point, the beans were shelf-stable, light, and portable. They were bagged and used as currency across Mesoamerica. Imagine growing your currency.
To make the cacao drink, the beans were toasted on a griddle over an open fire, which loosened the papery outer husks. They then crushed the shells and blew away the husk, revealing the inner cacao nibs.
These were then ground, like maize, by rubbing a stone rolling pin back and forth over the nibs. The friction and a small controlled fire under the stone would melt the natural cacao butter. As a result, the solid nibs transformed into a rich, glossy, flowing chocolate paste.
They mixed this pure cacao paste with water, cornmeal (to thicken it), spicy chili peppers, wild vanilla, allspice, and fragrant flowers.
To serve it, they would pour the liquid from jars into bowls until a thick froth formed on top. That was considered the most prized part of the sacred drink.
The Maya used cacao in ceremonies, the Aztecs collected cacao as tribute, and the beans were used as currency. Just like we used to use the Hershey’s bar as currency on the playground. Imagine using chocolate to pay taxes. That chocolate would be as bitter as taxes are today.

Europe Meets Chocolate
The first time Cortez drank cacao, they hated it, describing it as a drink fit for swine. But then they began to experiment with the recipe by removing the chili peppers and cornmeal and adding lots of cane sugar. Do we know what Cortez said exactly? Not really, although I think of him as one of the nastier characters on The Princess Bride.
Then they added cinnamon, vanilla, and anise, instead of using the local herbs. And they served it hot, instead of cold.
The Spanish court kept this sweetened "hot chocolate" recipe a state secret for nearly 100 years. By the 1600s, the recipe leaked to the royal courts of France, Italy, and England, becoming the ultimate luxury status symbol for the European elite, and Starbucks fans everywhere. It is a good story, and some even think it is true.
The difference between cacao and cocoa is sometimes described as the difference between the original cold Aztec drink and the modern Spanish one. But it was probably a misspelling by the English traders on ship manifests. But if you want to sound cool, you use cacao.

Mother’s Day, 1990
It was Sunday, Mother’s Day, and I was a surgical resident on the vascular service. I was thinking about driving down to Portland to visit my mom when I received a call from Dr. Raker.
There was a patient who needed vascular surgery to save his leg. There went my Mother’s Day plans. Over the course of the next six hours, we operated, bypassed the aneurysm, and saved Charlie’s See’s leg.
Charlie had tasted more chocolate than probably anyone alive, and he didn’t like most American chocolate. Some Belgian chocolate, maybe.
He told me about the Guna people of Panama, who drank six cups of chocolate a day. And they didn’t have heart disease. He had tried, but didn’t like that drink. His expressed regret was that if he had consumed more chocolate, maybe he wouldn’t have needed vascular surgery. That is unlikely, but let's find out why the people in that area of Panama have lower blood pressure.

Chocolate Flavonols
The bioactive ingredient in chocolates is flavanols. These have several effects: they reduce blood pressure directly through nitric oxide, they have a mild anti-clotting effect, and they are anti-inflammatory.
Nitric oxide causes the muscles in blood vessel walls to relax. When those muscles relax, your blood pressure goes down. The lower your blood pressure is, the less strain on your heart, the less risk of developing atherosclerosis, and the longer a person lives. Of course, we don’t want it too low.
All that from drinking chocolate. But not so fast. We often have mechanisms in biology that do not translate to eating chocolate and decrease your risk of heart attacks and strokes. But what a sweet experiment to try, so they did.

Cocoa Supplement and Multivitamin Outcomes Study, aka COSMOS.
COSMOS followed 21,000 Americans for over 3.5 years to see if the cocoa flavonols decreased the risk of heart attacks and strokes. Subjects were fed either a placebo or 500 mg of flavonols daily.
They found that the group who took flavonols had a 27% lower risk of death from heart disease, and about a ten percent lower risk of all cardiovascular disease.
Perhaps had they had the content of the bean, as in a chocolate bar, or even received the drink that the Kana (Guna) people drank, it might have had a different result.

Is it Dessert or a Health Food
One way to describe nutritional information is that there are those who are splitters - finding the ingredient in the food that causes the reaction and focusing on that. And there are lumpers, who put the food together in a matrix and see what that matrix does that a single ingredient might not.
We know that eating blueberries, seeds, nuts, other fruits, and vegetables provides improved health outcomes across all studies that have examined these. That is the backbone of the Mediterranean diet. Building a diet around those healthy foods.
Chocolate has not been on the list for the Mediterranean diet. Again, just because chocolate originated in Mesoamerica does not mean it cannot be a part of a Mediterranean diet.
However, you can make chocolate an important part of the Mediterranean diet without it being dessert. I will have a few of my favorite recipes below, like adding them to my son’s favorite “taco” soup.
When you get a chocolate bar that is 70 percent or more “dark” chocolate, that does not translate into the amount of active flavonols in the chocolate. How the chocolate is processed will determine the amount of flavanols in the chocolate, not the percentage of dark chocolate. So if you enjoy chocolate as a dessert, enjoy it. Don’t fool yourself into thinking it is a health food.
But you can add a healthy dose of chocolate to beans, stews, and sauces, and add a richness to a dish that is perfectly healthy. This is much like the mole sauces of Mexico, rich, but with more of an Italian-Sardinian twist.
As for our people from Panama, they still drink the bitter cocoa. When they move from their village to the city, they drink less and tend to develop the same diseases as the city folk: high blood pressure, heart disease, and stroke. I might add this confounding variable: while in their village, they eat more fish, almost no ultra-processed food, and their diets are filled with other fruits and vegetables (kind of like a good Mediterranean diet - or if you want to rename it to the DASH or MesoAmerican diet, you can).

I’ve been doing a series about foods that built civilizations. In this episode, we are talking about the potato.
It is difficult to imagine that thousands of years ago, people constructed large buildings, managed rivers, built monuments, and created art. We have glimpses of these civilizations through stories, archaeology, and the structures they left behind, but much of their history has been lost. Imagine, we don’t even know where Cleopatra or Alexander the Great are buried, yet we know their stories.
As European powers conquered Indigenous peoples, their languages, cultures, and oral traditions were suppressed. When a language disappears, so are the stories preserved within it. Our clues come from archaeology when we uncover a monument, a building, or an ancient settlement.
In the Andes, the potatoes they cultivated were not the Russets, Yukon Golds, or fingerlings you find in the store today. Different colors, shapes, and textures. Adapted to survive the elevations, temperatures, and growing conditions.
Biodiversity protected their food supply against frost, disease, and changing environmental conditions. If one variety failed, another might survive. The ancient wisdom of diversity that Andean farmers developed over thousands of years was lost when the potato eventually reached Ireland.

Preserving Potatoes
They even developed a method to freeze-dry the crop. They exposed the potatoes to repeated cycles of freezing and thawing. Then they pressed them and allowed them to dry. The result was called chuño.
The freeze-dried potatoes could be stored for years. When rehydrated, they were used in soups and stews.
I wonder if they ever thought about freeze-drying the coffee berry. Perhaps there was an ancient people called the Sanka.

Tiwanaku: Farming at the top of the world
The civilization flourished for centuries before it declined around the end of the first millennium CE. Near Lake Titicaca, in what is now Bolivia, the Tiwanaku civilization developed an agricultural system that allowed people to grow food in one of the most challenging environments on Earth. This pre-Inca civilization had monumental stone buildings, elaborate sculpture, and an extensive network of agricultural settlements. Its buildings and agricultural remains are still there. These people had an advanced civilization before the Inca. It is amazing to think the Inca were not the first to build a sophisticated society in the Andes.
They developed raised agricultural fields, known today as waru waru. Water-filled channels surround these elevated planting beds. The channels helped moderate temperature fluctuations, reducing the risk of frost damage to crops, while the raised beds improved drainage and growing conditions.

The Inca: An empire built on agriculture
The Incas inherited thousands of years of agricultural knowledge
The empire depended on the ability of crops to grow at different elevations. Food was collected, stored, and distributed throughout their kingdom. Potatoes were important in the highlands, while maize, quinoa, and other plants supported populations in different environments.
Machu Picchu sits high in the Andes. Its buildings, terraces, and water systems demonstrate advanced engineering. It is on most travelers' bucket lists.
When the Spanish arrived, they encountered an unfamiliar vegetable, a product of thousands of years of agricultural experimentation. They would carry that vegetable across the Atlantic.

The Irish Lumper: The Potato That Fed a Nation
The most famous potato is the Irish Lumper. When the Lumper arrived in Ireland, it thrived, even in poor soil, and produced enough food to sustain a family on a small plot of land. The Irish Lumper was a large, knobby, rather homely potato with pale skin and yellowish flesh. It wasn't known for its flavor. Historical accounts describe it as watery, bland, and sometimes soapy. It produced enough yield to feed your family. Add a little milk or buttermilk, and you have a diet that could sustain people doing hard physical labor.
Small landowners and sharecroppers throughout Ireland depended on the Lumper for their primary source of food. Then the blight came, crossing from America. It was Phytophthora infestans arriving in 1845, and harvests failed. Ireland's dependence on potatoes, combined with inadequate government relief, turned an agricultural disaster into a human catastrophe. Even while Ireland exported some grains to the UK. Approximately one million people died, and another million emigrated, many to America.
As with all waves of immigrants, they encountered discrimination, but ultimately helped shape the country's economy, literature, culture, and political life. Their wave of immigration led to a long, sustained economic boon for America.
Today, a group has reconstituted the Lumper, and you can buy one today. It is ok, not my favorite. For that, we have the simple boiled potato from Norway.

The French Fry: From Belgium to McDonald's
For generations, the French and Belgians have argued about who invented the French fry. A popular Belgian story claims that people living along the Meuse River traditionally fried small fish, but when the river froze, they cut potatoes into the shape of fish and fried them instead.
Fried potatoes became popular in Belgium and France during the nineteenth century. Belgians perfected the technique of cooking them twice: first at a lower temperature to cook the potato through, then again at a higher temperature to create that wonderful crisp exterior.
Belgian fry shops used animal fats, from beef tallow to horse fat from a horse’s kidneys. Yes, some will even tell you that horse fat from the kidney makes the best fries - I wouldn’t know.
The French fry eventually crossed the Atlantic and became an American institution. For decades, McDonald’s cooked its fries in a mixture containing beef tallow and vegetable oil.
In 1990, the company announced it would switch to vegetable oil, a decision influenced by growing concerns about saturated fat and a persistent Omaha businessman named Phil Sokolof. Many attribute this change to physicians, but it was really from this first food influencer. Taking out full-page advertisements in major newspapers claiming saturated fat from the fries was bad for the heart. Alas, that “debate” continues.
But changing the frying fat didn’t change the fundamental technique. Commercial French fries are generally cooked once, frozen, and then cooked again before serving. That is why my favorite tip for making good fries at home is to buy the frozen ones that have already been partially cooked. Finish them in the oven or air fryer, and you can get that crisp exterior and fluffy interior without turning your kitchen into a Belgian fry shop. No horse required

Fear Not the Potato. Fear the Person Who Fears the Potato.

The potato wars: From carbohydrates to beef tallow
Today, the potato is at the heart of several nutritional controversies. From those who say it is one of the evil whites that leads to obesity, to those who think potatoes should be fried in beef tallow. These are the controversies we will address for our paid members.

Blood Glucose and the Potato
Potatoes are primarily starch, which your body will break down into glucose. Eating a potato will raise blood glucose, although the magnitude of that response depends on the type of potato, how it is cooked, how much you eat, and how well your pancreas works. It also depends on what other foods you eat with it.

In our series about foods that built civilization, we talked a lot about grains, from wheat to corn to rice. Today, we are taking you to the ocean, with the civilizations that salmon built.
From California to the interior of Alaska, salmon, a staple, allowed people to settle into villages, develop complex social networks, art, and trade routes. Those trade routes are as large as the ones in the Mediterranean. Some tribes built communal homes and developed complex art and language. Some were Seafaring tribes with canoes up to 60 feet long that traveled across oceans.
All because there was a fish that would return in large numbers to streams and rivers, reliably, predictably. So predictable, the people could build their lives around salmon runs. So much so that some built a calendar not only with lunar cycles, but also with the return of the salmon.
Civilizations have always gathered around food and water. The Mediterranean connected people who grew wheat and olives, giving people time to make wine, mine copper, build ships, trade with their neighbors, and occasionally go to war with them.
Asia had rice and grain near the great river systems. The reliable calories from rice and grains allowed villages to become cities and to travel by water to trade.
Today we are going to my home, from the Ventura River in California to my home state of Alaska.

The Crop That Swam Home
Different than the other civilizations, no one had to plant this crop. They didn’t have to tend the crop. It literally swam home every year. Different times for different types of salmon.
When the first Europeans saw these fish, the river was so crowded they joked you could walk on their backs, crossing the river and never get wet.

Ketchikan, The Salmon Capital of the World
I grew up in Ketchikan, Alaska. A city founded upon salmon. Some say Ketchikan stands for smelly fish, apparently after the large spawn, as the fish died, it left quite an odor - you can only imagine thousands of dead salmon.
Everyone has their favorite type of salmon. The large ones, the King Salmon, also called Chinook, typically start their run to the creeks and rivers in April. You could catch them reliably in late May and June, or even later. We had a King Salmon derby, usually in late May to early June. The record salmon was 79 pounds for that derby. The largest King I ever caught was 26 pounds, and I cannot imagine catching one larger.
For a fish that was the livelihood of many of my neighbors, the stocks have become so low that the derby I grew up with was cancelled. Global warming has devastated salmon runs.
The above totem is either an eagle or a man, depending on who you ask. The clam has caught it, and the tides roll in, and the man, or eagle, sings a song. Note the amazing carving, and a story as old as time itself.
These are Chilkat blankets, or dancing blankets. They take up to five years to create. Made from a combination of inner cedar bark and mountain wool to make the foundation. The colors are mostly dyes of four natural pigments: black (hemlock bark/copper oxide), yellow (wolf moss), blue-green (copper soaked in urine), and the creamy white of natural undyed goat wool.

Non-Nomadic People
Because of the abundance, both in terms of the salmon runs, other marine mammals, and berries, they didn’t have to forage. So they were able to build villages with communal living - they were SF before SF was.
An intense harvest in the late spring and summer led to a winter of art, ceremonies, and the potlatch. The potlatch is a giant party where the hosts not only display their wealth, but give it away. The richer you are, the more you would give, and that would be the nudge for the neighbor to do the same.
Large villages and communal houses, when encountered by the first Europeans, weren’t something they were expecting. There was an entire civilization, clans, tribes, and alliances. People who made treaties, made war, and played games.
In Ketchikan, these were rebuilt during the Depression. Here you can see my brother and I being kids - but it also gives you an idea of the large size of these communal homes and totems.
They did travel through large canoes.