#fromthevaultsofmann

Even the smallest organisms on this earth can fall prey to viral and bacterial diseases. Honeybee virology is still a young field, but beekeepers have known about bee diseases for a long time. Bee Diseases: How to Know and How to Treat Them (1906) by E.R. Root—son of pioneering American beekeeper A. I. Root--is an example of early literature on this subject.

Bee Diseases covers the most common bee diseases known to 19th century beekeepers along with tips on how to mitigate them. Root begins the book (small book, a pamphlet really) by lamenting the exponential increase of bee diseases across the country, and states the importance of education on bee diseases and responsibility in beekeeping to mitigate these problems. Sound familiar? Developments such as rampant varroa mite infestation, declining worldwide bee populations, and Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD)-- a phenomenon where the majority of worker bees in a hive suddenly vanish, leaving the inadequately attended queen bee and immature young vulnerable in their hives—have certainly become hot media topics in recent years.  The cause for these modern ills are still poorly understood, and have frequently been attributed to a complex set of factors, including the increasing use of fungicides and pesticides, bee malnutrition, habitat loss, and more.

While scientists are still researching the specific causalities behind the afflictions troubling the world’s bee populations today, it is certainly true that the need for beekeepers to mitigate the potential for disease is at least as important today as it was in Root’s day. Root lays out a basic protocol for dealing with a diseases colony, “...to keep all tools and clothing every thing that has been in contact with a diseased colony, away from the healthy ones. If one does not know what the disease is he should be on the safe side and proceed as if the sick colony were infected with the worst infection known to bee culture.”  Root’s protocol echoes what the medical field calls ‘sterile technique’, or a set of precautions to reduce patient exposure and reduce the spread of bacteria as much as possible. We’ve heard much of these techniques in this time of coronavirus, and as we learn to navigate the months ahead, we are likely to become more familiar with them still!

Root also reminds us that, “One of the best precautions against disease is good food, and keeping the colonies strong. A healthy human being is much more able to resist the germs of infection than one who is ‘all run down.’” Such similarities remind us of a kind of universality to how organisms cope with disease. In uncertain times such as these, it comes as a comforting reminder that many of our contemporary methods of managing viral infections are backed by many years of tried and true - as observed in the birds and the bees and proven by the beekeeper!

Sources:

Bee Diseases: How to Know and How to Treat Them, E.R. Root

BCCampus

epa.gov

(Title page from "The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy", London 1758, in the special collections of Mann Library, Cornell University)

Got assigned to make the sweet potato casserole for your big family gathering of the holiday season? Need some inspiration for your weekly meal prep? Just reach onto your book shelf and pluck out your favorite cookbook. Or, in these days of the internet, google your ingredients to find an almost infinite array of matching recipes at your fingertips. But it wasn’t always this easy. In the days of early antiquity, your success would have depended on who you knew, as recipes were primarily transmitted orally. In the Middle Ages, you would have had to be among the privileged classes to get your hands on manuscripts of collected recipes. It wasn’t until the advent of the printing press and increased literacy rates that access to cookbooks was democratized. And in the unfolding story of getting good food to the people, a leading part was played by this book: The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy, authored in 1747 “By a Lady.”

(Image of the frontispiece to “The Art of Cookery”, 1777 edition, from Wikimedia Commons)

It was later revealed that the author was, in fact, a lady: specifically an English dressmaker named Hannah Glasse, who helped usher in the development of modern cuisine by producing a cooking guide meant to be used by a wide swathe of an increasingly literate populace. Seminal though it was, Glasse’s cookbook could be considered “old-fashioned” in at least one sense: It included at least 200 recipes found to be plagiarized from other publications. At the dawn of Enlightenment, the culinary knowledge handed down through generations—via traditions of family life and food sharing—was still there for the taking, and Glasse apparently saw no problem in continuing the tradition of re-purposing other people’s recipes for her own enterprises.

The Art of Cookery contains hundreds of recipes, from puddings to gravies to food for the sick and hardy meals for voyaging sailors. Glasse purposefully used a conversational style of English in her book, avoiding the fancy French terminology associated with “high cuisine” at the time. Her stated aim with this approach: To ensure the book’s accessibility to people of any class. Asserts Glasse in her bold introduction, Cookery in hand, “…every Servant who can but read will be capable of making a tolerable good Cook, and those who have the least Notion of Cookery can’t miss of being very good ones.”

Over 40 editions of “The Art of Cookery” followed the original publication, and Glasse’s classic proved a popular hit beyond England as well, particularly in areas touched by British colonialism. But, in a telling example of the the back-and-forth nature of cultural exchange in a globalizing world, it didn’t take long for this seminal English cookbook to also be shaped by the foods and culinary traditions of far flung places. By 1774, a new edition of Cookery included a recipe for Indian "currey.” In 1805, an updated edition printed in Virginia, features quintessentially American ingredients such as maple sugar and pumpkin in dishes of a decidedly New World palette alongside the stoutly English fare.

(Recipe for Indian curry from the 1774 edition of “The Art of Cookery” from archive.org)

There are few records pertaining to the end of Glasse’s life, but it is known that she tragically plunged into debt over business troubles- so much so that she had to sell the copyright to her smash hit classic to make ends meet. While it isn’t known how much involvement Glasse had in later publications, The Art of Cookery continued to grow and develop as the years progressed- and came to mark an important milestone in the history of cooking: making good cooking accessible to the masses—which gives us yet another thing to be grateful for this holiday season.

References:

A History of Cookbooks: From Kitchen to Page over Seven Centuries, Henry Notaker, 2017

History of American Cooking, Merril D. Smith, 2013

The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, Hannah Glasse, 1758

time.com/5218240/google-doodle-cookbook-author-hannah-glasse/

Closing out April 2020, the year that we celebrate the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, we’re grabbing our spotlight of the month from the exhibit we’ve just published:  “Do It Yourself, Do It Together: Earth Thinking 1970 to Tomorrow.” There we’ve given a starring role to a publication that probably more than a few of us are going to remember rather fondly. Published about 2-3 times year from 1968 into the early 1970s’  Whole Earth Catalog offered a quirky, thoughtful, edgy “evaluation and access device,” to help humankind (at least the English speakers among us) tune into books, equipment, tools, educational materials, techniques, and all manner of things that might help make leading a meaningful earth-friendly life possible.

Whole Earth Catalog was the brainchild of eclectic visionary, big thinker, Merry Prankster, biologist-by-training, and education advocate Stewart Brand, who dropped out of the California counterculture in the late 1960s to get busy facing up to an era when pollution was so uncontrolled across widespread regions of the United States that only events as extreme as a burning river—famously, the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio—were sufficient to catch the attention of public officials. Produced with the help of a team of free thinkers including Brand’s then-wife Lois Jennings, Whole Earth Catalog proved amazingly popular. From a pickup truck hauling catalogs and wares around a circuit of communes and communities in 1968, it quickly blossomed to a building in Menlo Park, CA, with an estimated 1.5 million copies of the catalog sold in 1972.

Part catalog, part guidebook, part literary ode to new paradigms in thinking about society and economy, Whole Earth Catalog was published regularly between 1968 and 1974, and then irregularly until 1998, when it ceased publication altogether. The layouts, while appearing to be an almost haphazard DIY "zine" in nature, were carefully considered by the publishing team and made with equipment that at the time was considered quite advanced.

As relatively short-lived as the publication was, in many ways,  Whole Earth Catalog captured well the spirit of times, fifty years ago, when the United States celebrated its very first Earth Day in 1970, and the environmental movement in the United States first gathered steam to express a critical urgency to the problem of environmental decline. And maybe one of the reasons many of us remember this funky, in its own way oddly brainy “counterculture” publication so well, is that beautiful image of planet earth, as captured by NASA astronauts in the late 1960s, which adorns many of the Whole Earth Catalog covers. Stewart Brand is often credited for having waged a successful campaign to get NASA to release these extraordinary images. And while there’s reason to believe NASA would have made the images public anyway, Brand was certainly correct in one regard:  It’s hard to look at that Blue Marble and not be moved by a strong sense of how right it is to do what it takes--personal or political--to protect a very beautiful planet.