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This chapter discusses the place of SPAM in today's culinary cultures of the Pacific, Pacific Rim, and among many Asians and Pacific Islanders in the United States. SPAM, one of the major dubious foods in America, is widely regarded as vulgar, tacky, and farcical. Some claim that SPAM is an affront to the very idea of real or whole food, but others believe it to embody discrete indigenous cuisines or, alternatively, a luxury commodity—or simultaneously both. This chapter first considers how SPAM came to be a beloved comfort food in Hawaii and a status symbol in the Philippines and South Korea. It then examines the role of food preservation—particularly the method of canning food—in the history of seafaring and the modern military. It also explores how SPAM figures in popular culture and how it became America's substitute meat of choice and gained international fame. Finally, it looks at a number of SPAM recipes in Hawaii, including “Chili, SPAM, and Egg Rice Bowl.”

This chapter explores the role of hunger in food history, and how it has led to many revelations and innovations that are often overlooked by its chroniclers. Gastronomy is in itself a product of hunger and the need to consume food, and it comes in many forms. Understanding the diversity of food is one such endeavor, as the knowledge of the land and the plants it generates spontaneously, and the oral transmission of knowledge shared by common people, is recognized as extremely important even by official science. But this powerful link between food and hunger can be expressed in other ways, such as in the conception of food “staples” and food preservation, as it is these that sustain the peasant through the harsh winter months. Overall, food is both a pleasure and a resource.

This chapter explores the various ways in which food is prepared, sold, and served in ancient China. The agricultural system—which included soil cultivation, animal husbandry, the production of clothing and medicines, as well as trade, community, and religious functions—all followed the rhythm of the four seasons. The storage and preservation of food was doubtless of great concern at the time, with ice becoming a precious commodity. And food preparation, the domain of butchers and cooks, was refined over the centuries, as eating raw food was often considered barbaric. In the larger scale, trade and food production was overseen by a complex network of guilds that regulated the market. Evidently, throughout Chinese history, food is sometimes treated as more than mere subsistence, as even the tableware unearthed in archaeological digs shows that food also serves an aesthetic function.

This chapter explores the culinary diversity of Chinese cuisine. Roughly speaking, Chinese regional cooking can be observed in four distinct areas. The eastern part of China is predominantly Buddhist, with an appetite for vegetarian dishes as well as seafood. The south is likewise a haven for seafood, though its history of foreign trade allows a large and at times shocking variety of flavors; including dog, cat, monkey, and rat. The north, which was traditionally the seat of the royal court, suffers from particularly tedious winters; its flavors remain modest and practical, with an emphasis on grain products and food preservation. Finally, the west is known for its spicy dishes, although the spices primarily used in its cooking had been introduced from overseas. Additionally, this chapter explores the practice of anthropophagy in Chinese culinary history, as well as the cuisines enjoyed by the minority cultures living in China.

As the Western economy grew and industrialized, society came to rely less directly on agriculture and the vagaries of the seasons. This is illustrated by tracing a series of major climatic disturbances from the late eighteenth century onward and showing how those natural factors lost much of their impact. In the early part of that era, beginning in the 1780s, volcanic eruptions contributed to an alarming era of climate disruption, and the Tambora blast in particular (1815) sparked new churches and denominations teaching apocalyptic and millenarian doctrines, with dreams of the end times. But as we proceed deeper into the nineteenth century, much of Western humanity, at least, felt ever more detached from the direct impact of climate.

In 1810, more than four in five Americans lived in one of the original thirteen seaboard states. Half a century later, though those states had grown considerably, they held less than half of the nation's population. The reason lay in the post-1815 rush of settlers beyond the Appalachians into the continental interior, “one of the great immigrations in the history of the western world.” Chaotic though this movement was in many ways, it showed at least one orderly pattern. Individually these settlers followed many paths, but the typical ones moved due west, erring to the north or south only when their path was blocked by mountains or water or political boundaries or when they were pulled aside by the easier travel routes along navigable rivers. Most of the inhabitants of every inland state in i860 came from the states to the east within its own latitudes. It was mostly New Englanders and upstate New Yorkers—themselves mostly of New England origin—who occupied the territories and states bordering on British North America. They left the central and southern parts of Ohio and Indiana and Illinois mainly to settlers from the middle states and the Chesapeake. The frontier of the Deep South was colonized from the far southern coastal states much more than from Virginia or North Carolina, states that furnished Kentucky and Tennessee and Missouri with the bulk of their inhabitants. “Ohio Fever” swept the rural Northeast after 1815, followed by “Michigan Fever” in the 1830s, but it was “Alabama Fever” and “Texas Fever” that gripped the southern states. Modern research has documented what many Americans at the time spotted for themselves, what some who could agree on little else agreed was a constant truth of human behavior growing out of a basic law of climate-society relations. “The great law that governs emigration,” announced a Massachusetts congressman during an argument against the spread of slavery, “is this: that emigration follows the parallels of latitude.” It was “a great law of emigration,” “fixed and certain,” echoed a Louisiana editor in a defense of the South and its institutions, “that people follow the parallels of latitude.” People were presumed to do so in order to avoid the change of climate that traveling north or south would have entailed.