Dan Bender

The edible midterm: U of T history students serve curry for their final history grade

ullahnor — Fri, 03 Mar 2017 21:52:30 +0000

The edible midterm: U of T history students serve curry for their final history grade

ullahnor Fri, 03/03/2017 - 16:52

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Students enrolled in Edible History: History of Global Foodways at U of T Scarborough cook curry for Professor Dan Bender (second from right) for their midterm (photo by Ken Jones)

Don Campbell

Author legacy

Don Campbell

Topic

City & Culture

Food

U of T Scarborough

Midterm

Undergraduate Education

Dan Bender

Culinaria

It’s not every day that you walk into a classroom for a midterm and are handed a wok and colourful ingredients.

But that’s exactly what happened to students enrolled in Edible History: History of Global Foodways at U of T Scarborough. Instead of sitting down to write an essay, they faced a “pop-up” kitchen where they cooked curry recipes, spanning 400 years into the past.

“Curry is one of those remarkable foods that has really travelled the globe,” says History Professor Dan Bender, director of the Culinaria Research Centre and the course instructor.

“It’s also somewhat ambiguous – are we talking about the curry leaf, a powder, or a type of food? Curry has different meanings depending where you are, but it also gives you a sense of the different types of food exchanges that have taken place and continue to take place around the world.”

Read about another food-based midterm at U of T

In addition to preparing one of 15 different curry dishes dating all the way back to the 1600s – the earliest being Akbar’s Dopiaza from Mughal India – students were also expected to serve the food and offer a mini lesson to diners. The diners in this case were staff, faculty and students from across campus invited to sample the dishes and hear about what makes them unique.

“I can lecture about different cooking techniques and ingredients or get students to read examples of culinary exchanges and encounters. But until they get to experience it firsthand, there’s no substitute for that type of learning experience,” says Bender.

A prime example of how curry is such a global dish is the Japanese Battleship Curry from 1877. Around that time the British were consulting with newly industrialized Japan to build a navy and brought with them a taste for curry from India. But in this case, the recipe relied on flour, an ingredient used in many European-style sauces.

“The Japanese first encountered curry not in South Asia but in their relationship with the British navy. Even today, Friday night is curry night in the Japanese navy,” adds Bender.

Read about other culinary activities like the Iron Chef Competition

Edible History has been offered at U of T Scarborough for more than a decade now but only recently has a minor in food studies been offered. Bender adds it’s the only program of its kind in Canada featuring the only industrial kitchen on a university campus used for teaching purposes.

Pirouz Salari, a fourth-year history student, says he enjoys how the course allows him to take theoretical lessons and apply them in tutorials. Much like the pop-up kitchen midterm, the weekly tutorials involve cooking with ingredients they’ve learned about in class.

“What I find most interesting about curry is that it incorporates so many different flavours, especially when Indigenous ingredients are added to the mix. There’s nothing restrictive about it,” he says.

Salari was responsible for cooking chicken for Akbar’s Dopiaza recipe, which he explains is an Indo-Pakistani curry with some Middle Eastern influences. He said despite being the earliest example of curry on the midterm, it still shows signs of different influences, all traits that epitomize the global dish.

“It’s a very unique experience, but more importantly it’s engaging and educational,” says Megann Davidson, a second-year human biology and biochemistry student who took the course as part of her degree requirement.

Davidson helped serve A Dainty Shrimp Curry dish that originated in 1890s New York. She says the unique ingredient in the curry is Maggi Sauce, a seasoning that originated in Switzerland, of all places. The idea of a shrimp curry being prepared by Asian immigrants living in New York using an ingredient of Swiss origin highlights the intricate historical and cultural roots of many popular foods.

“It’s important to think about and appreciate where our food comes from. This course really allows you to do that.”

The complicated history of zoos: U of T's Dan Bender

ullahnor — Wed, 16 Nov 2016 21:56:13 +0000

The complicated history of zoos: U of T's Dan Bender

ullahnor Wed, 11/16/2016 - 16:56

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U of T Scarborough history professor Dan Bender talks about the controversial history of zoos in his new book (photo by Bradley Anderson via Flickr)

Don Campbell

Author legacy

Don Campbell

Topic

The ethics of zoos provoke intense debate, but they’re still the most popular cultural institutions in North America when it comes to annual attendance.

In his new book The Animal Game, U of T Scarborough history professor Dan Bender dives into this irony, exploring the uncomfortable aspects of zoo history while also illustrating their rise as important centres for conserving animals that are quickly disappearing in the wild.

“The history of zoos can be troubling, and the zoos of the past are certainly very different than those of today,” says Bender, who teaches a course on animal history.

“But we need to make sense of why zoos are such important cultural institutions that continue to define our popular understanding of different parts of the world.”

Bender’s book focuses on the period from the 1870s when zoos were first being established to their evolution as places for animal conservation and breeding beginning in the 1970s. It’s a history that coincides with the rise of American imperial power whose elites were competing with their contemporaries in Europe to build the biggest and best cultural institutions. Those elites envisioned zoos as orderly places of education, where the public could go to learn about animals.

“Early zoos were organized in opposition to the little menageries of circuses and the world of P.T. Barnum, but it didn’t work,” says Bender.

“Zoo visitors didn’t follow the signs. They wanted to poke and feed the animals. Zoos were meant to be science labs for study, yet all people wanted to do was ride the animals.”

Bender uses sources including archival documents, artifacts, books, films, memoirs and other materials such as souvenir postcards, maps and magazines to bring the history of zoos to life. But it wasn’t always easy gaining access to zoo archives.

“Some zoos were great. Others outright told me I would never get to see their archives,” he says. “It became a challenge to get into these archives and shed a light on a history many were intent on keeping in the closet.”

The U of T Scarborough library has digitized parts of Marlin Perkins' Zoo Parade Board game

It’s impossible to talk about the history of zoos without looking at the wild animal trade, notes Bender. He recalls Frank Buck, an American icon during his time, but someone who would be judged as appalling by modern standards. Buck was heavily involved in the animal trade and created a celebrity persona around capturing animals in the wild. In reality, notes Bender, he was buying animals from markets in Singapore and shipping them to America.

“As he was doing this he also spun these imagined tales and created this image of animal capturers as brave men.”

Buck’s movies were very popular during the interwar period and heavily influenced western perceptions of jungles as wild, untamed places filled with “savage” people and dangerous animals. They also contained “horrific” animal fights that were staged for the camera.

Many of the artifacts collected for the book have been digitized by the U of T Scarborough library. One of these is the Marlin Perkins' Zoo Parade board game, which involves capturing animals in the wild and shipping them to America. The game has also been programmed to play online and also features interactive photos highlighting important events in zoo history.

Bender notes that during the Cold War period, popular culture turned its attention towards the nuclear family of the 1950s. The wild animal trade was slowly being outlawed, thus zoos began looking more into their breeding programs. This not only maintained their stock of animals, it also attracted visitors eager to see baby monkeys, lions and elephants.

While the debate over the true place of zoos continues – dominated by animal rights advocates on one side and by those committed to the conservation of wild animals on the other – there’s no denying the importance zoos play in shaping popular attitudes towards animals.

Bender points to the popularity of chimpanzee shows of the early 20th century as a prime example. These vaudeville shows with often racist aspects were adopted by zoos and became big money makers. By the 1980s most accredited zoos across the U.S. had all but decided to put an end to them, not because the public didn’t want them, but because zoos no longer wanted to display their animals that way.

“The aim of the book is to shed a light on the uncomfortable aspects of zoo history while also recognizing their enduring place as important cultural institutions,” he says.