Book Review: Cuba and Its Music by Ned Sublette

Cuba and Its Music:

From the First Drums To the Mambo

by Ned Sublette

      When it comes to exports, Cuba is known for a handful of things. Cigars, sugar, communist revolution, and refugees immediately come to mind. With the exception of that last category, those are, to some extent, not so good for your health. But there is one Cuban export that makes up for all that and music is what I’m talking about. What most people don’t realize is that those polyrhythmic salsa songs are the long range product of several centuries of history. Can you blame them? They are probably too busy listening or dancing when they hear Cuban music to be inclined towards studying where it all originated. Unless they are my neighbors and they are probably too busy fuming with anger at all the loud music blasting from my stereo to really care. But for those who are inclined towards historical scholarship and not just the infectious grooves and dance steps, Ned Sublette’s Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums To the Mambo is the ultimate guide for exploring the musical roots of that tropical island’s tradition of melodic innovation.

Music doesn’t emerge out of a void. That is why the cultural and political systems of the regions that preceded Cuban colonial settlement are the starting point for this exploration. This history starts in medieval Spain on the island of Cadiz where Jews played the oud and in Al-Anadalus, now currently known as Andalusia in present day Spain, where Muslim poets recited Koranic verses to single-stringed instruments and drums. Up until the voyages of Columbus, the kingdoms of Spain were a Mediterranean crossroad for migrating cultures that included Celts, Franks, Visigoths, Romanis, Moors, Berbers, Basques, and a few others. All of them brought some small contribution to the music of Spain.

Cuba’s second large immigrant group is the African people due to the slave trade. They were mostly brought to the Caribbean by European traders from Central Africa and the western coastal regions which are now Benin, Nigeria, and Angola. These slaves brought a variety of drumming styles like talking drums and vocal harmonies along with the unique percussive bamboo thumb pianos which later influenced the piano lines that are so pervasive in contemporary mambo and salsa.

For many slaves, the port at Havana was an entry point into the Americas where they were sold at auction and then redistributed to other Caribbean islands, Brazil, and the United States. The slaves who remained in Cuba mostly worked in the sugar industry. Unlike the United States, they were allowed to practice their traditional religions and play variations of their traditional music. The societies of Lukumi, Palo, and Abakua were spaces where dance, music, and spirit possession flourished. When the Catholic church cracked down on these traditions, the Afro-Cubans continued worshiping the old deities by associating them with the cult of the saints. And so Santeria became prominent. To this day, drummers in Cuban music bands are initiates in Santeria or one of the other African diaspora religions. Drums are ceremonially possessed by spirits in Abakua lodges before they can be used in public performances.

Just as important to Cuban percussion are the rhythm sticks called “clave”. Afro-Cubans who worked in the ship building and repair industry would sing while they worked. Wooden ships were held together with wooden pegs that workers would hit together while singing to keep time. These became known as “clave”, a word which has a double meaning because “clave” is also used to designate the simple 2/2 rhythm to revolve around that acts as a central point for syncopated and polyrhtyhmic songs. Clave is a beat that holds all the complexity together and the high-pitched rhythm sticks are still used to this day.

The history of rumba is also of interest. The tradition originated in Central Africa. The word “rumba” did not originally signify a particular style of music. Rumbas were actually a type of party or celebration held by Cuban slaves on their days off. It involved drumming, chanting, and singing as accompaniments to bare knuckle boxing and highly sexualized dances that anthropologists have called ritual courtships. Rumba had a direct influence on the development of son in the early 20^th century.

As a colony, Cuba had musical styles that corresponded to class divisions. Aside from Afro-Cuban innovations, Spanish Creole street musicians, buskers, and folk singers were common, often playing styles like boleros. We can only guess what that music sounded like because lower class musicians played music by ear and never wrote down lyrics or musical notations. The upper classes of Europeans brought classical and orchestral traditions with them and opera was part of that. Ballroom dancing was also a past time for the rich and well-connected and styles like habanera, contradanza, and danzon came out of those milieus. The lower classes also had dance halls where lonely Cuban men and sailors on shore leave could rent girls to dance with. But class lines were sometimes broken because white Cubans of all statures were fascinated by Santeria and were often present at ceremonial gatherings.

The 19^th century in Cuba was a time of war. Cubans rallied around the nationalist Jose Marti in the Wars of Independence. Marti was an advocate of racial equality so the slaves supported the end of colonialism along with the abolition of slavery. This brought the Afro-Cubans and mulattos closer together. After the abolition of slavery in Cuba during the 1880s, and the liberation of Cuba from the Spanish colonialists by the USA in the Spanish-American War, Afro-Cuban music exploded, proliferated, and expanded overseas. Ned Sublette traces the influence of Afro-Cuban music on ragtime, tango, dixieland jazz, big band jazz, swing, and bebop. This happened because musicians traveled frequently between Havana, New Orleans, and New York. Radio and the invention of records also played a huge role in spreading the rhythms across the island and far from Cuban shores.

The first half of the 20^th century in post-colonial Cuba was possibly the most politcally turbulent time in the nation’s history. It was also a time of economic growth and a mass influx of tourism. Cuban casinos and nightclubs became world-famous and so did the underground economy of vice and crime. Havana had an edgy, urban atmosphere and it created its most innovative and influential musicians during then. Talented musicians have often been difficult, temperamental, mercurial, egotistical, and sometimes violent. Cuba’s modern were no exception. Some of the stories related about their lifestyles are comparable to what you find in the biographies of rock and hip hop artists of the latter half of the century in America and the U.K.

Sublette gives brief biographies of musicians and singers like the blind Arsenio Rodriguez and the OG Cuban gangsta Chano Pozo. Those musicians and other like Celia Cruz, Machito, Beny More, and Desi Aranaz brought Cuban sounds to the USA where the likes of Benny Goodman, Xavier Cugat, Dizzie Gillespie, Nat King Cole, and Tito Puente took the styles and ran with them. Cuban musicians were especially influential in Spanish Harlem where they became popular primarily with a Puerto Rican audience.

This was the time when bongos and congas were invented and son became the most prominent style, elevating the percussive rhythms of Afro-Cuban tradition into the center of Spanish influenced songs. Regardless of style, any Cuban, tropical, or Caribbean influenced music at this time became classified as “rhumba” for American audiences. As all the strands of Cuban music merged with son, it eventually coalesced into one form which was called “mambo” by the time the 1950s arrived. That is the point where Sublette’s history stops.

Cuba and Its Music is vast in its scope and detail. It doesn’t just tell the history of Cuban music up until the Cuban Revolution of 1958; it gives enough contextual information on the political, cultural, and economic history of the island to be used as a history book in general. If you want to learn about Cuba, but want more than just the political side, this is the perfect book for you. The only major problem with it is that Sublette sometimes writes about music with heavy doses of jargon and technical terminologies. If you aren’t well-versed in the vocabulary of music, these passages will be difficult to understand. You can use language to describe things like machinery or architecture so that the reader can visualize what is being described, but using language to write about music is a fool’s errand. It just can’t be effectively done. That’s not to say that Ned Sublette is a fool though. Quite the opposite since this book is consistently engaging and encyclopedic at the same time. This is a work of extensive research and he accomplishes more than most academic scholars ever will. And those paragraphs full of musician’s esoteric terms don’t last so long that he loses the reader. They are always padded between easier to understand passages so a persistent reader will stay lost for long.

After finishing Cuba and Its Music, it is easy to see how mambo, salsa, and everything that came after came to be. When you listen to Cuban music today, you are literally hearing layers of sound that stretch back beyond the island itself to the rainforests of Africa, the arid regions of Spain, the music venues of the United States, and a few other things as well. You are literally listening to a living, breathing, loving, spinning, swirling, gyrating melange of beats, voices, and rhythms propelled outwards by the sexual lifeforce itself. If this is where Cuban music has arrived, it will be interesting to see how it expands from here on out. But as good as Ned Sublette’s history is, Cuban music isn’t intended to be read about. It is intended to be listened to. So get off your ass and dance. That’s what he would want you to do anyways.

 

Book Review & Critical Analysis: Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco & Sugar by Fernando Ortiz

Cuban Counterpoint:

Tobacco & Sugar

by Fernando Ortiz

      If you mention Cuba, the first thing most people will think of is revolution, politics, Fidel Castro, and Che Guevara. The second thing would probably be music and dancing. After that, I’m guessing another strong association with that Caribbean island nation would be cigars. There might be a few other general associations like beaches, palm trees, jungles, Ernest Hemingway, and rum. Somewhere in there you might also find sugarcane. This is significant for Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz since the titular essay of his book Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco & Sugar is about defining his country’s national identity through its most prevalent economic industries.

While Fernando Ortiz is considered to have been Cuba’s premier anthropologist to date, the titular essay really isn’t a work of social science. The point of it is to compare and contrast Cuba’s sugar and tobacco industries in order to define the national character of the Cuban people. From the start it is clear that he believes tobacco to be the ultimate symbol of Cubanismo and that he has a less favorable view of the sugarcane industry even though it has been the backbone of Cuba’s economy for at least two centuries.

His argument is provocative. Tobacco is a native plant to Cuban soil and its cultivation and use was a part of the Taino and Arawak indigenous people’s culture before the arrival of European colonialists. Tobacco is grown in dry riverbeds called “vegas” and even though some cigars are manufactured using machinery, those of the highest quality are hand-rolled. Thus, making a good cigar is a craft or an art form, as he puts it, more than an industrially produced commodity. Cuban cigars are also a source of national pride because they are popular worldwide and considered to be the gold standard of smokes by connoisseurs. That is why if you tell someone you have a box of habanas or puro cubanos they know by association that it is a box of the best cigars you can buy. Even cigars from neighboring countries like the Dominican Republic or Jamaica don’t compare. The use of the words “habanas” and “cubanos” to mean cigars proves semantically just how closely people outside the country associate cigars with Cuba.

Sugar, on the other hand, is just sugar. While the quality of tobacco can range from putrid to a champagne-like elegance, there is little to no difference once sugar crystals have been processed and granulated into the white powder we find in any grocery store around the world. Sugar that comes from sugarcane is also indistinguishable from that produced by sugar beets. People generally don’t associate sugar with any particular nation the way tobacco is strongly associated with Cuba. Sugarcane was also imported by colonialists and is therefore, not native to the Caribbean. Sugarcane cultivation and the manufacture of processed sugar is also the primary reason so many slaves were imported into Cuba. This is a source of shame to Ortiz who also uses this as a chance to take a swipe at capitalism since it requires that laborers, be they slaves, indentured servants, or wage laborers, get treated as commodities for production rather than as human beings. You could easily counter this claim by arguing that communism does the same thing. Thus that problem probably has more to do with the technology of industrialization than it does with whatever politico-economic system that utilizes it.

So as it stands according to Fernando Ortiz, tobacco is far superior to sugar when it comes to symbolically defining Cuba’s national identity.

I’ll be honest at this point. I have no emotional investment in this subject. I have no ancestral ties to Cuba, but I find the history and culture of the nation endlessly fascinating. I do appreciate sweet foods, but I gave up smoking long ago when I became wise enough to admit that I am afraid of getting cancer. So the argument over whether tobacco or sugar is more suitable for defining Cuba’s identity is of no importance to me. I could weigh the pros and cons of Ortiz’s reasoning, but I don’t feel its necessary to expend my mental energy on the matter. It reminds me of John Milton’s rhetorical argument that the moon is superior to the sun. But Milton’s essay on that matter is a great work of art. I’d say that Fernando Ortiz’s essay is a great work of art too. It is fascinating to read from beginning to end and, even if you don’t agree with his opinion, or even care all that much, it does say a lot about Cuban history and society. It certainly serves as a good introduction to anybody who wants to learn about tobacco or sugar cultivation and how it relates to Cuban culture.

Some of the ideas might be outdated though. Ortiz argues that tobacco is masculine and sugar is feminine in a way that relies on traditional gender stereotypes. Even considering those stereotypes, I find his reasoning on that point to be vague and insufficient to make his case. And his attempt at defining national character leads in the direction of essentializing in a way that would get labeled problematic by hyper-sensitive social theorists today. I have some problems with the concept of “essentializing” to beging with, but this is not the place to take that up. The use of outdated words like “Negro” “retarded”, and “Mongoloid” will also be jarring to some, but this essay was written in the 1940s when those words were considered neutral terminologies. Any offense you might naively take will also be undercut by that fact that Ortiz was a strong proponent of racial equality and the bulk of his work was done to document the cultural practices and patterns Afro-Cuban people. Hopefully someday more of his works will be translated into English.

The following essay in the book is of some interest up to a point. Ortiz examines the cultural uses of tobacco in pre- and post-contact indigenous societies. Although he starts by examining the practices of the Taino, Arawak, and Carib peoples, the scope extends farther into what we now call North, Central, and South America. The cultural uses of tobacco fall into four main categories being the social, the medicinal, the ritual/spiritual/religious/shamanistic, and the individual/leisure uses. He examines the history of how tobacco was ingested and the paraphernalia used as well as the social etiquette and praxis. He also examines whether or not tobacco was the only substance used in these ways. Various other writers have labeled tobacco and nicotine with contradictory terms like “stimulant”, “depressant” amd “hallucinogen”. Thus he analyzes evidence from colonial, missionary, archaeological, and pharmacological sources to figure out if some naive scholars in the past, not paying careful attention to details, mistakenly designated plants other than tobacco as tobacco. A lot of the essay is also devoted to disputes amongst anthropologists and archaeologists over what tools and paraphernalia were used for ingesting tobacco smoke and snuff. I feel like those debates are of more interest to specialists in this field and not so much for the general reader. His arguments aren’t hard to follow though and if you want to learn about the reasoning process and problem-solving methodologies in the social sciences, this is an accessible place to look.

The remaining essays are about the history of sugarcane cultivation and the effects of the Industrial Revolution on mass production and consumption of sugar. Again, these essays are well-researched and easy to follow, however, they feel more like filler than anything substantially related to the supposed main theme of the book which is Cuba and the importance of tobacco and sugarcane to its culture and economy. These filler essays stand on their own but stray too far outside the subject of Cuban national identity to be worthwhile in the larger context of the book. If you are solely interested in the subject of Cuban culture, you might want to consider reading the titular essay only and skipping the rest of the book. If you’re interested in the history of tobacco and sugar from a global perspective than the whole book will be of value. I fall into the former category, not the latter, so reading a lot of this felt like a chore even though all the essays are well-written.

Cuban Counterpoint was written at the end of World War II when the post-colonial era was taking off. Cuba was politically turbulent at the time, but it was also at the peak of its pre-Revolution cultural development. At that time the island nation was asserting itself internationally as a tourist destination and a producer of goods for international trade. In this context you can see how the subject of national identity and character could be of importance to a social scientist like Fernando Ortiz, especially considering his high academic stature then and now. Still, the book feels a bit dated. The negative health effects of smoking tobacco have caused it to be associated more with lung cancer than Cuba. Processed sugar is now associated with obesity, tooth decay, and other diseases. The tobacco and sugar industries plus communism should have made outsiders’ perceptions of Cuba inherently bad yet the country’s reputation is still alluring. Maybe it’s time for Cuba to choose a new symbol to redefine its national character. I’d choose their music to be a symbol of that identity if it were up to me (it’s not). Who couldn’t be enticed by those beautiful curvaceous women in tight skirts and stilleto heels defying the laws of gravity while dancing to mambo, rumba, charanga, salsa, cha cha cha, or Latin jazz. And if this book is dated, it still can evoke fantasies of sipping rum in a shack on a beach, palm trees swaying in the wind while clear waved waters wash ashore as you relax with a burning puro, its tip dipped in honey, while the silvery blue smoke you exhale disperses in the Caribbean breeze. If we lived in a just world, cigar smoke wouldn’t be harmful. But we don’t. Your dreams, however, won’t hurt you. Let those dreams keep you alive. 

 

Book Review: Skulls To the Living, Bread To the Dead by Stanley Brandes

Skulls To the Living, Bread To the Dead:

The Day Of the Dead in Mexico and Beyond

by Stanley Brandes

      In the 1990s while living in Albuquerque, New Mexico, I went to a Day Of the Dead celebration. On the day after Halloween, a crowd gathered in the neighborhood of Barelas. Many wore skull masks or homemade calavera costumes. Some just wore ordinary street clothes. Some solo musicians strummed guitars while others beat on congas. There were kids and adults, people of all ages, ethnicities, and economic classes. Political activists and artists showed up and camera crews from the local TV stations were there to make 30 second clips to be shown at the end of the 6:00 news. The crowd formed into a procession and circulated through the main streets of Barelas. It was fun and inclusive. Nobody was turned away or told to leave. Occasional cars would pass by, the drivers honking their horns to arouse cheers from the procession, but there were very few people standing on the roadsides watching, something unusual for a parade. But the emphasis was on participation more than observation. After winding through the neighborhoods a few times, the sun began to set and the procession found its way to the Mexican-American community center where information booths were set up and vendors sold sugar skulls, tamales, and hot chocolate.

This way of celebrating the Day Of the Dead is controversial to some. Purists might think it is an inauthentic reinterpretation of a holiday that doesn’t respect Mexican traditions. Less conservative people might say it is an educational opportunity that raises awareness of the Chicano community in America and brings people of other backgrounds into friendly contact. The anthropologist Stanley Brandes, in his study of the Day Of the Dead Skulls To the Living Bread To the Dead, explores the way this most famous of Mexican holidays has changed in practice and meaning over time.

While doing fieldwork in the town of Tzintzuntzan, set in the Mexican state of Michoacan, Brandes began seeing changes to the way the Day Of the Dead, which should properly be called the Days Of the Dead because it is celebrated on November 2 and 3 on All Souls Day and All Saints Day, was celebrated. More people from outside the town were coming in for celebrations and a commercialized aspect was being introduced. This was in the 1960s. To his surprise, the local people welcomed these changes. So he set off to explore the origins of the holiday, how it changed over time, and what it has become today.

Brandes starts off with the common belief that the Days Of the Dead originated with the pre-Conquest indigenous people under the Aztec empire. After checking all the written records in the documented history, he did find evidence that those people had festivals commemorating death, but he did not find any direct connection to the Days Of the Dead. In fact, in most of its aspects, including sweet foods, altars, and the symbol of the skull, it appears to have been imported to Mexico by the Catholic church. In its most traditional form, people built altars in their houses, cleaned ancestral graves, gave sugar skulls to children as gifts, and attended an overnight mass in the cemetery. It was a small affair that mostly involved the family and not much else.

During the Mexican Revolution, the artist Jose Guadalupe Posada used iconography from the Days Of the Dead to make scathing commentaries on the politicians of his day. This brought the holiday into greater prominence both nationally and internationally. By the 1970s, the Mexican government realized how the Days Of the Dead could be used to promote a stronger cultural identity for Mexicans and attract tourists for the commercial benefit of the country at both local and national levels. As Halloween became more popular in Mexico and elements of the two celebrations merged, some Mexican intellectuals started questioning the meaning of the Days Of the Dead and how it related to Mexican national identity.

The controversies get more heated as Brandes’ studies take him north of the border into the United States where he examines the use of the Days Of the Dead as an educational tool. A whole passage is dedicated to how the holiday is presented in public schools, children’s books, and displays in libraries and community centers. He goes a little too in depth here for my tastes. He examines some of the Latino community’s reactions including controversies about what is presented and how. From my own point of view, which has nothing in common with anything the author says, these types of educational programs either overly-glorify aspects of cultural diversity or underwhelm the observer with watered down versions of cultural differences. From my own American perspective, educational programs teaching people about a holiday like Thanksgiving can be misleading. Books and displays make it look more festive than it really is and present history as if it is an important part of every American’s life. The truth is, most Americans can’t explain what Thanksgiving is supposed to be about let alone how it originated. Most people see it as a time to eat like pigs and care little about its intended meaning. Thanksgiving dinners with my family tend to be less than exciting and often not much different from other dinners we have together with the exception of what we eat. Likewise Mardi Gras, as celebrated in New Orleans, is a huge party where lots of people get blind drunk, but very few of them have any idea of what the celebration is actually about. But a survey of children’s literature on these holidays would give an entirely different picture. Community educational displays are also often weak and shallow without providing much in the way of experience or insight; they often come across as little more than scraps of information in a society already super-saturated in information and advertising. My whole point here is that attempts at teaching cultural and national traditions should be looked at with a critical eye since the people producing them mostly fail to give an accurate picture, usually little more than a small taste, of what they present. This applies to the educational representations of the Days Of the Dead just as much as to Thanksgiving and Mardi Gras.

There is little wonder that Chicano community leaders and their supporters raise questions about the authenticity of how the Days Of the Dead are promoted and celebrated in the United States. Brandes examines the whole spectrum from an activist group, at one extreme, that tries to create a Days Of the Dead celebration that is entirely composed of pre-colonial indigenous cultural motifs and from there to a working class neighborhood fiesta with music, dancers, theatrical performers, and vendors that seeks to build bridges between communities while fostering a positive image of Chicanos to those of other ethnicities. Beyond that is a Days Of the Dead art fair in the Mission District of San Francisco that is organized by a Korean woman and has displays that only marginally touch on the themes of the holiday. This is further complicated by the fact that the Mission District used to be a Mexican and Central American enclave that has since been gentrified and now is a predominantly Korean and Asian neighborhood. Brandes analyzes how each festival along this entire range generates its own controversies and disputes about representation and the Mexican-American identity in the USA. This is important as the Chicano community is growing and they need to establish some sense of identity in a sometimes hostile cultural environment where your average citizen knows nothing about Mexican culture aside from tacos, undocumented immigrants, and drug cartels along with whatever caricatures and cliches are found in popular culture.

Brandes finishes the book with a discussion on how the Days Of the Dead prove that Mexicans have a uniquely jocular attitude towards death. He contrasts Mexicans with other Western nationalities who he claims are more serious and less accepting of death. I have to say I disagree with him strongly on this. While I’m not qualified to speak on behalf of Mexican people, I can say that Americans are not any less casual about imagery representing skulls, grim reapers, ghosts, or other things we consider to be macabre. Horror movies are wildly popular as are haunted houses that are staples of carnivals and amusement parks, not to mention the ones that crop up at Halloween time. Jack o’lanters are ubiquitous in the Fall. Skulls are common on t-shirts, album covers, and tattoos. People tell jokes about death and it is a common subject for songs especially in the punk, goth, and metal genres. There was a musical trend in the 1950s called “death rock” in which teenage crooners sang about losing lovers in car wrecks. Death and murder as plot devices are ever-present in movies and TV shows. True crime is a popular genre in literature. And doesn’t he even know about the Grateful Dead? That cult band has done more to spread Days Of the Dead imagery around El Norteno since the 1960s than anybody else with their t-shirts and album covers. The list can go on forever. We see so many skulls and crossbones in America that it hardly even registers with us. Nobody is sad, disgusted, offended, or disturbed when somebody wears a Misfits t-shirt in public. We have a casual attitude towards death too; it just manifests in a different cultural style. Brandes isn’t the only anthropologist I know of who has made this erroneous claim about Mexico either. Leave it to the academics to be completely unaware of their own culture, the one they live in. I guess fish don’t comprehend the water they swim until they reach dry land.

While the conclusions aren’t infallible, Skulls To the Living Bread To the Dead provides a useful history and cultural analysis of Mexico’s most famous holiday. It forces us to question what cultural authenticity really is and also draws attention to socio-political issues embedded in representations of traditional practices. Stanley Brandes doesn’t come to any strong conclusions, but he thoroughly provides enough information to give the reader direction in how to think about Mexico and the Days Of the Dead.

 

Book Review

Honey From a Weed:

Fasting and Feasting in Tuscany, Catalonia, the Cyclades and Apulia

by Patience Gray

     When it comes to food, Europeans have great traditions. In America, on the other hand, we make ourselves an easy target of ridicule. For example, think of drive-through windows at restaurants. Not only is fast food crappy tasting and terrible for your health, but eating a meal in your car is just downright gross. No class, no style, no elegance, no taste. People turn their vehicles into motorized garbage cans this way. I realize not every meal can be gourmet, but with a minimal amount of effort you can be a little less trashy. And its nice that we have a much broader range of ethnic options than we used to, but so many of these restaurants Americanize their food to the point where they no longer resemble the authentic dishes you get in their nations of origin. I’ve had Thai curries that were so sweet they tasted like desserts and larb without fish sauce. Ask for something spicy and they dump a ton of salt in it. Burritos, nachos, and fajitas aren’t eaten in Mexico. Hummous and falafels aren’t Greek, having their origins in Palestine. Greek people eat massive amounts of seafood but you never see fish on a Greek menu in America. The vomit they serve at The Olive Garden bears little resemblance to real Italian food. Don’t get me going on how fake our Chinese food is. Our fruits and vegetables taste like plastic, unlike the produce in other countries. Obviously not all food in America sucks, but more than half of it does. At least we have better food than British people do. What hell is marmite? Industrial sludge on bread?Axle grease in a jar? It tastes like cigarette ashes with shoe polish.

Mediterranean people, on the other hand, know all about food. So when I heard about Patience Gray’s Honey From a Weed, I knew I had to read it. The author spent time living in rural Mediterranean countries during the 1960s and 1970s with her husband, an artists she calls The Sculptor rather than using his real name. She witnessed the farming lifestyle of people in Catalonia, Tuscany, the Greek island of Naxos, and Apulia, the part of Italy shaped like the heel of the boot, a place where the local language is a mixture of Italian and Greek. As she wrote down her collection of recipes, she decided to put them into context with passages about how the cooking materials were collected or harvested, and detailed all this with short passages about the culture of the people she encountered. What results is a cookbook you can read as part ethnography, part memoir, part travelogue, and part philosophical discourse examining what it means to live a good life.

The recipes cover a wide range of ingredients with chapters on farmed vegetables, wild herbs, mushrooms, seafood, and game. If you’ve ever wondered how to cook a fox, a horse, or a sea urchin you need look no further. If you want to cook everyday items like chicken, mussels, or zucchini you can find that here too. A lot of the recipes are redundant, being variations of food fried in olive oil with garlic and diverse seasonings, occasionally with anchovies or tomatoes thrown in. But here is the catch: the types of tomatoes, or other vegetables used, depends on the season since different kinds of produce naturally ripen at different times of the year depending on the season and climate. These people did not have supermarkets that have the same industrially-grown, genetically altered produce all year long the way we do in the 21^st century. European farmers lived so close to nature that the seasons dictated what kind of game you had, what fruits you could pick, or what kind of wine you could drink. It may have been a harder life, but the food was of much higher quality. In the 1970s, Patience Gray realized these cultures were vanishing so she wrote all her observations down for posterity.

The author, rightly so, must have thought that not many people would be interested in a cookbook full of recipes that most people probably wouldn’t use or even couldn’t use considering that some of these food items no longer exist. Some of the cooking utensils are rare or obsolete. In my favorite chapter of all, she gives a detailed analysis of how cooking over open flames with different varieties of wood complement the flavors of all kinds of dishes. With this in mind, you begin to see why these traditions couldn’t survive. Most of us don’t have the time or the resources to find twenty different kinds of wood to cook twenty different meals.

But to get back to the main point, she made this book readable by adding in passages about the different places she lived in. There are descriptions of villages, architecture, farms, kitchens, and landscapes. She makes mention of some of the rural people and their customs along with musings on their religious and political beliefs. With a healthy contempt for the fascism of Mussolini, she points out that these rural people were mostly anarchists or communists. In our day you can criticize these ideologies all you want, but with hindsight you have to realize that when industrial capitalism is the dominant economic system and your community is famished and living at the edge of death, all those “isms” looked like desirable alternatives.

Finally, Gray iterates her own philosophy, simply put, that lacking something is what makes it pleasurable when you get it. Tomatoes taste like ecstasy when they are harvested because the farmers can’t have them for three-quarters of the year. It’s like saying Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas if you have it every day. This might be a cause of such widespred psychological dissatisfaction in our times. At least that’s what The Unabomber Ted Kaczynski said. In our age of abundance and mass conformity this might not be so clear, yet we may still know it by unconscious instinct. It is why a rare book might sell for $500 while a mass-produced Harry Potter novel will get a book dealer little more than fifty cents. The problem is that Patience Gray states her philosophical position but never explores it in depth.

In fact, she doesn’t explore many ideas at all in depth. Her writing just isn’t that good. It’s interesting that she created a cookbook you can read, but the things to be read are not always clear or even interesting. The recipes get redundant and a bit of a chore to read and some of the rest of it is just weak in its execution. I am in love with the idea of this book, but not the final product.

Patience Gray’s Honey From a Weed is not one of the most memorable books I have come across, but I don’t regret reading it. Having traveled and studied a lot, I can’t say I’m lacking in alternate perspectives on the world and the current state of our society, but I did enjoy imagining myself being in the Mediterranean places she described. It also gave me renewed inspiration for cooking; I learned the best way to cook radicchio and was reminded that I haven’t had any scungilli in a really long time. Once was enough though and I probably won’t be re-reading it this the future.