Sidney Mintz grew up loving the taste of herring and cold soup, potato kugel and brisket. Now, at 73, he favors veal stew and fish poached in wine.
In fact, Mintz’s life has been dominated by food. An anthropologist who teaches at Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University, Mintz has long studied the political and social role of food in world cultures.
A gourmand who loves to cook, he savors the careful preparation of elaborate dishes, made even more special when shared with family and friends. Mintz’s new book, “Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom”, offers glimpses into food’s role as an element of cultural expression.
Specifically, the book is a collection of essays illustrating how a society’s food choices are shaped by a global economy so complex that its influence is often imperceptible.
But it starts very simply, with memories.
“This is a book that I never could have written without the childhood I had,” the slim, jovial academic said at a recent book signing sponsored by the Friends of the Johns Hopkins University Libraries. “The way I feel about food” comes from his father, he said.
The author’s father, Shlomo, emigrated from Eastern Europe as a young man and raised his family in Dover, N.J., where he worked as a cook in a diner. Soups were his specialties: borscht, cold Polish soup, oxtail, and lamb and barley soup.
Herring was a staple at every meal.
“Don’t make fun of the herring,” Shlomo Mintz once told his son. “If there hadn’t been any herring, there wouldn’t have been any Jews.”
While he has pretty much forsaken the peasant foods of his youth, the Homeland, Md., resident still eats herring, perhaps out of loyalty.
Although not an observant Jew, he said he is very proud of his Jewish heritage. He was the second Jew appointed to the Yale University faculty in 1951, he said, and has fought anti-Semitism throughout his life.
“There’s a real distinction between people who reject the ideology of their culture and people who reject their cultural origins,” he said. While he’s not interested in the religion of Judaism, he said, culturally he is very Jewish.
Many immigrant populations did not bring sophisticated cuisines with them, he said. “The people who came to this country…were running very fast. They were not so much coming as leaving,” he said.
They also had modest origins, and “poor people by and large don’t have Cordon Bleu cuisine,” he added.
Mintz said he first began to appreciate how food can be used to express love when he was a divorced father whose two children spent weekends at his apartment. He wanted so much for them to feel at home there, and he quickly found that cooking was a wonderful way to accomplish that.
“The food was important, not because it was good, but because it was the latticework along which I could show my affection,” he said.
“Food is a vehicle, an instrument, a device. It’s the mortar between the bricks of our relationships.”
In his book, Mintz devotes a chapter to the ways in which war changes a people’s eating habits.
“Armies travel on their stomachs; generals…decide what to put in them,” he wrote.
Eating has social and spiritual significance that can’t really be appreciated when you chomp on a burger that was handed to you through a bulletproof window.
To illustrate, the professor tells a story about a Caribbean couple who were arguing during dinner. The woman picked up her plate of food and threw it down on the floor.
Her husband became enraged, Mintz said, because to him that food represented “the sweat of his brow.”