Bureaucrat, administrator, widgeteditor
146,870
edits
Changes
no edit summary
<center>'''A Resource for Today'''</center>
<center>'''Monique Chastanet<ref>Historian, CNRS, Paris.</ref>, February 2022'''</center>
Book review of: Dr Adam MAURIZIO, ''Histoire de l’alimentation végétale. Depuis la Préhistoire jusqu'à nos jours'', translated from German into French by Ferdinand GIDON, Introduction and commentary by Michel CHAUVET, Preface by Claude AUBERT, Paris, Ulmer, 2019 (facsimile of the French edition, Payot, 1932), Collection “''Vieilles Racines et Jeunes Pousses''”, 688 p.
The choice of publishing a commentated facsimile was the only one possible. Otherwise, it would have been necessary to rewrite the book completely with corrections and updating. Hence, this edition utilizes the 1932 French translation of the 1927 German edition, which was revised and enlarged from the 1926 edition in Polish (published as a reprint in 2017). As for Maurizio’s other books, it was not translated into English. The historian François Sigaut pointed out the errors that occurred in the French edition from the German text. M. Chauvet, who worked on both versions as well as the Polish, notes these problems in his Introduction and Annex. The 1932 edition was preceded by a presentation in French: A. Maurizzio [sic], « Histoire de l’alimentation végétale chez l’Homme », ''Revue de botanique appliquée et d’agriculture coloniale'', 1931, 115, p. 159-168. His study particularly concerns Central and Eastern Europe, as well as Scandinavia and Western Europe, with examples from outside these areas. This work is based on Maurizio’s reading, personal contacts, and field inquiries into practices that have disappeared today. The text had 82 figures that were either original or borrowed from other authors.
It is worth casting a glance at Maurizio’s (1862-1941) education and scientific trajectory. He was a Swiss national who spent his youth in Poland – in Kraków (Cracow) where his father emigrated in 1850 and where Maurizio was born – and Switzerland, where he studied. In 1894, he defended his botanical dissertation at the University of Bern, and in 1896, became research assistant in plant physiology near Zurich, then in botany in Zurich itself. In 1907, he became professor of botany and plant technology in Lvov, today Lviv in the Ukraine but at that time in Poland. In 1927, he was appointed to the Department of Pharmacy of Warsaw and lived there until 1935, when he returned to Switzerland. His family history – they came from the trilingual canton of Grisons (Graubünden) – and his own career undoubtedly underwrote the European breadth and language abilities shown in his work. Although he mainly published in German, he also spoke Polish, French, English, etc., as we can see in the “Extracts from [his] bibliography” (“Extraits de [sa] bibliographie”) established by M. Chauvet from the footnotes of the 1932 edition (2019, Annex 3, some titles are translated and commented). He began studying cereal grains in the early 1900s before widening his research to the whole of plant foods. His interest in gathering practices may have been influenced by his education in Switzerland which he mentions several times, where food gathering supplemented the insufficient resources of mountain agriculture and stockbreeding <ref>R. Kruker et A. Niederer, « Aspects de la cueillette dans les Alpes suisses », ''Études rurales'', 1982, 87-88, p. 139-152.</ref>. Even more broadly, he enriched his approach as a naturalist with contributions from archaeology, ethnography, history and linguistics. This book was the culmination of his work and brought him international renown.
Maurizio provides an inventory of food species that M. Chauvet puts in an historical perspective between applied botany publications from the early 20th century and recent work, such as that of the FAO, Slow Food or the many studies carried out on local terroir products. Without forgetting M. Chauvet’s ''Encyclopédie des plantes alimentaires'' (Belin Publishing, 2018) and the collaborative website Pl@ntUse, which he created. This re-edition of Maurizio’s book is available there with the agreement of Ulmer Publishing and is accompanied by an update on species names, whether cultivated or not, indicated in the table “Plantes de ramassage” [“Gathered plants”] and in the Index. He notes around 700 “wild” species utilized in times of food shortage or dearth. Today, we speak more of the varying status of food plants, some eaten in times of need, others lying along a continuum among wild and cultivated species. This selection of mainly European vegetables reflects his concern with periods of food scarcity and famine that affected the continent.
These crisis periods “gave rise to survivals in habits and often showed there were returns to the past with consumption of bark and leaves, for example” (A. Maurizio, 1931, p. 165). All the while set within the evolutionist conception of history dominant at the time, which led from the “primitives” to the “civilized”, Maurizio does not have a strictly linear perception. What is more, his text is a goldmine of information on plant foods such as lichen, moss and roots used by Northern peoples, which can be eaten fresh but also dried or put up in “sour preserves” or “sauerkrauts” (2019, p. 43-44) <ref>[Peoples of Northern Europe, Asia and America let the leaves, young flowering or leafy shoots, as well as lichens, ferment. Fresh, dried or fermented, these were often used with other plant or animal resources. On the diversity of this gathering (berries, bark, tubers, etc.) and preparation ways, see A. Maurizio, 2019, p. 39-50.]</ref>. Maurizio minutely describes these ancient strategies against hunger right up to the substitutes European countries had recourse to during the First World War. If societies affected by food scarcity try to remain faithful to their usual foodways, the seriousness of a food crisis subsequently wipes out the differences “between peoples of diverse civilizations” (2019, p. 168). He compares this famine behaviour to similar observations from other areas of the world, thus rehabilitating the know-how associated with gathered foods and defending a critical vision of “progress” that led, in his opinion, to a pauperization in food resources (A. Maurizio, 1931, p. 168). In this, he has a very similar attitude to today’s concerns. However M. Chauvet adds nuance to this idea by referring to recent plant domestications linked to urban growth, mainly in tropical countries.
Fig. 3. Islandic moss, Cetraria islandica (L.) Ach. An old food resource in Northern Europe, mentioned by Maurizio as among gathered foods (2019, p. 44), still used today even beyond its region of origin. It was kept dried or fermented and played a considerable role in famine times (2019, p. 44-45), as well as having therapeutic uses. Today, it is utilized for its medicinal properties in Europe and North America. © Rémy Poncet, INPN, MNHN, Paris.
