Books History Politics

Islanders and The Fishers of Men

By Yevgeby Zamyatin, translated by Sophie Fuller and Julian Sacchi

from the introduction
p. 10 “Zamyatin saw the world in terms of an eternal struggle between forces of energy and forces of entropy, found in the established and dogmatic. Entropy lulled man into a dangerous complacency. What foundt against entropy was revolution and heretical thought, the energy of an unquenchable life force…. The regulated, restricted life of the respectable English middle classes seemed to Zamyatin to be a perfect example of the horrors of entropy. He depicts a world where everything has its correct place, where the vases displayed in every window on one side of the street are blue and on the other freen. It is a world in which Reverend Dewley plans a set of timetables detailing his every movement. Reverend Dewley dreams of a time when the government will adopt his ideas and everyone will live by time table. This is, of course, exactly what has happened in One State – Zamyatin’s future society in We/ Almost every hour is ruled by the Table of Hourly Commandments… He believed that literature could only be kept alive by constant innovation and revolution. His work is full of imagery and symbolism. Characters are reduced to a pair of worm-like lips or a glittering pince-nez. The lumbering Campbell is a lorry and the rigid Mr Draggs a little iron monument.”

Books Environmental politics Politics

Notes from Bruno Latour Politics and Nature

p. 232 No culture except that of the West has used nature to organise its political life. Traditional societies do not live in harmony with nature; they are unacquainted with it. Thanks to the sociology of the sciences, to the practice of ecologist, to anthropology, we can understand that nature is only one of the two houses of a collective instituted to paralyse democracy. The key question of political ecology can now be formulated: can we find a successor to the collective with two houses: nature and society.?

Once nature has been set aside, another question arises – how to bring the collective together – that is heir to the old nature and the old society. We cannot simply bring objects and subjects together… we have to consider that the collective is made up of humans and nonhumans capable of being seated as citizens, provided that we proceed to the apportionment of capabilities… leaving to be sceptical of all spokesperson – those who represent humans as well as those who represent non-humans. The second apportionment consists in redistributing the capacity to act as a social actor, while considering only associations of humans and non-humans. It is on these associations and not on nature that ecology must focus . This does not means that citizens of the collective belong to language or the social realm since, by the third apportionment, the sectors are also defined by reality and recalcitrance. The three sets of apportionments allows us to define the collective as composed of propositions. P. 233 To convene the collective, we shall thus no longer be interested in nature and society, but only in knowing whether the propositions that compose it are more or less well articulated. The collective as finally convened allows a return to civil peace, by defefining politics as the progressive composition of a good common world.

… It is impossible of course to go back to the old separation between facts and values, for that separation has only disadvantages, even though it seems indispensable to public order. … We restore order to these assemblies if we distinguish two other powers: the power to take into account and the power to put in order. The first power is going to retain from facts the requirement of perplexity and from values the requirements of consultation. The second is going to recuperate from values the requirement of hierarchy and from facts the requirement of institution. In place of the impossible distinction between facts and values we are thus going to have two powers of representations of the collective that are at once distinct and complementary.

p. 235 There are in fact not one but two arrows of time; the first one, modernist, goes towards ever-increasing separation between objectivity and subjectivity; and the other, non-modern, goes towards ever more intricate attachments. Only the second makes it possible to define the collective by its learning curve – provided that we add to the two preceding powers a third power, the power to follow up, which brings up anew the question of the State. The State of political ecology remains to be invented, since it is no longer based on any transcendence but on the qaulity of the follow-up of collective experimentation. It is on this quality, the art of governing without mastery, that civilization capable of putting an end to the state of war depends.”

Books History Women's history

Notes from Women on the Margins: Three 17th-century Lives by Natalie Zemon Davis

Jewish merchant woman in Hamburg, Glikl Bas Judah Leib
p. 19 Glikl began to write the book of her life “with an aching heart” after the death of her husnand Haim “to help against the melancholy thoughts which came … during many sleepless nights.”… Hers is the first autobiography from a Jewish woman that we know of … But Glikl never described herself as doing something odd or new, and, indeed, recent scholarship is showing that autobiographies – full or in fragment – were composed by early modern Jews more often than has previously been believed.”

p. 20 Jewish life history was fostered expecially by the centuries-old “ethical will”, an exposition of moral lessons and personal wisdom passed on to one’s children along with instructions for one’s burial and the disposal of ones goods.”

p. 21 “For the Christians, the major model was still Augustine’s confession with a definitive conversion. We see it in the widely read Latin autobiography of Anna Maria van Schurman, Eukleria, published in 1673 in Altona… tells how Schurman renounced worldly fame and the scholarship in languages and secualr literature that she had begun in her native Utrechy and how she embraced a life of humility and religious fellowship with the Labadist sectaries, just then inhabiting Altona. (They were changing their money with the Jews; Glikl and Anna Maria may have passed each other on the street.) A variation on the model is the Leben of the Pietist visionary Johanna Eleonora von Merlau Peterson, published in 1719 when she was 75… describes not a single conversion experience but rather a set of tests, all of which she passed with God’s help”.

Marie Guyart, Marie de l’Incarnation
p. 64 “one of the two women who hounded the first Ursuline convent and school for girls in North America p. 65 “femme forte, a classical and biblical image used by both the literary feminists of 17th-century France, and by the religious, “a femme forte such as Solomon depicted,” her Ursuline sisters said of her after she died.”

p. 65 “born in 1599 in Tours … came from a modest family … father was at best only a ‘merchant baker,’ and it was a step up when he arranged to marry one daughter to a schoolteacher, another to a busy wagoner, and Marie to a silkmaker – a member of the city’s most important industry. … as a teenager she had thought wistfully of the local Benedictine nunnery of Beaumont, where one of her mother’s distant kin was abbess. In fact, that ancient and noble convent would have been unlikely to receive a baker’s daugher as a novice, even if her parents had agreed to a religious vocation”.

p. 128 “As women in Europe, like Maries, expanded their religious voice … so it may be that women in the American woodlands were expanding their voice in religious culture while the men were expanding their political oratory. Conceivably, the role of Amerindian women in dream analysis and soothsaying was not a timeless one, but a response to political changes that began in the 15th-century and were intensified by the arrival of Europeans. Then the women converts that people MArie’s letters, the Hospital records, and the Jesuit Relations – women praying, preaching and teaching – would be an energetic Christian variant on a process also at work in the religion of the okis and the Manitou.

Maria Sibylla Merian

p. 154 “Merian’s … subject was a set of events ,,, and to represent them properly meant crossing the line between orders and putting the plant and animal kingdoms in the same picture. Yet even while lacking the logic of classiciation, her sequence was not “tumultuous”. Emerging, from the sensibility of two artists, Merian and her publisher-husband Graff, the books moved the reader’s eye through the transformations by a visually striking and pleasurable path. The “method” of the Raupen – highly particular pictures and accounts strung together by an aesthetic link – had scientific importance quite apart from the new species contained on its pages. It made the little-studied process of metamorphosis easy to visualize and remember, and insisted on nature’s connections, a long-term contribution. It also fractured older classification systems by its particularism and surprising mixtures, and so cleared the ground for those like Swammerdam who were proposing a replacement.”

p. 155 “Merian was a pioneer, crossing boundaries of education and gender to aquire learning on insects and nurturing daughters as she observed, painted and wrote. Her focus on breeding, habitat and metamorphosis fits nicely with the domestic practice of a 17th-century mother and housewife. We have here not a female mind uneasy with amnalysis or timelessly connected to the organic … but a woman perched for scientific enterpirse on a creative margin – for her a buzzing ecosystem – between domestic workshop and learned academy.”

p. 186 In the Metamorphosis, the Amerindian women themselves identify the abortifacient to Maria Sibylla Meriam: the peacock flower, whose seeds can also speed delivery. Here is a public sharing of the ‘secrets of women’ reported with some symoathy by a Eruopean in whose world abortions were illegal and sinful… (Merian may well have spaced her own children, born in 1668 and 1678, by some form of birth control such as coitus interruptus, but probably not by anortion.) As for her statement that the African slave women did not have children, it is hyperbole, buty it lends support to those historians who explain the low fertility among the slaces as being, in at least small party, a matter of the women’s choice.”

p. 198 “She is 62 years old, but still very lively … and hardworking, a very courteous woman.” Thus Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach, a learned young scholar from Merian’s birthplace, recorded in his notes in 1711 after visiting the artist-naturalist and buying her books and watercolors. She was now one of the international figures of Amsterdam, a person one had to meet, the way one had to attend Frederick Ruysch’s anatomy lectures, see Nicolas Witsen’s collection, and view the great maps in the Town Hall.”

Books History Politics

Notes from Bennelong & Phillip: A History Unravelled

p. 90 Burke’s prosecution of Hastings was not the anti-imperial stance that some later took it to be. Burke was an advocate of empire his whole life. The loss of Britain’s 13 American colonies in the previous decade had appalled him; he believed they had been lost due to poor management. When Burke heard of similar forms of minmanagement in British India, he leaped to curtail them, insisting that Hastings and “sulliedS and “dishonoured” Britain’s name… Bennelong and Yemmerrawanne attended Hastings’ trail at a particularly interestiung stage. Just one week earlier, on 9 April 1794, Lord Cornwallis, Hasting’s successor in India, had refuted in his testimony all of Burke’s charges, not only defending Hastings but also announcing that Britain’s name was now beloved by Indians. Burke’s case never really recovered. The House of Lords at length aquitted Hastings in favour of Prime Minister William Pitt’s ruling faction.

Although Hunter was now formally responsible for the Wangal visitors, Phillip seems to have been the driver behind their attendance at the trial. Phillip probably sided with the government’s defence of Hastings; as we’ve seen, he showed deep loyalty to Pitt’s increasingly reactionary government Benelong and Temmerrawanne could have visited the trial at any point during the previous year but only now it was turning in Pitt’s favour did they do so. As earlier events will show, Phillip was keen to demonstrate to the Indigenous guests the operation of British power at its most decisive, irrestitible and legally rationalised

p. 104-6 The most remarkable outing for Bennelong and Yemmerrawanne in October was to the Parkinson Museum in London’s Blackfriars rotunda. … Phillip probably accompanied them, knowing that Banks had deposited in the museum some of the things he’d been sending back from NSW. He may have been anxious to see eaxactly which things they were…. a teenaged medical student called Robert Jameson who happened to be visiting at the same time… He noted in his diary”… They seemed to affect a kind of cheerfulness which was far from being real. Was it the taxidermy that worried Bennelong? He had seen British officers pack off the skins of local fauna to Berewal for years,but only in slated form, not engorged with cotton and wire… Possibly it was the black club that disturned. The Yiyura believed that some objjects were imbued with special powers and could only beond to and be seen by certain people… There is a third reason… The eventual catalogue of sale indicated that the collection also contained human remains. IT listed six human foetuses, two human hands, two human skulls, an arm, a tonghue and an ear. Given the Yiyura’s known aversion to the uncovered dead body, these items alone would have turned the visitors’ stomachs. If Bennelong and Temmerrawanne suspected that these remains came from their own people, they would have felt more than wretched. .. Researcher Matthew Fishburn has recently argued that Phillip brough at least 3 Aboriginal skulls to Britain on his voyage home… in August 1793, just before this visit to the museum, Banks wrote to two of his peers in Europe that he was relived at long last to send to each of them a “Cranium of a male native of New Holand”… Fishburn is concinved that a third skulls went to the London-based anatomist John Hunter … were there more skulls… if so, they would also have gone to Banks, that powerful adviser to government … In turn, he may have deposited them in the Parkinson Museum for the public’s so-called edification.”.. the British practice of collecting human heads was not, even at the time, uncontroversial. Banks and Parkinson were on one end of an ethical spectrum; both had heard contemporaries tell them directly that the practice was in fact “the greatest of crimes”.

p. 109 “In September 1793 when Bennelong and Yemmerrawanne took the initiative to perform a song at the Mayfair residence. The only evidence we have of this recital is a single sheet of music recording the notes and words of the men’s song. They were written down by the Welsh folklorist Edward Jones… also a musician in the royal household.”

p. 112 “Phillip… was a diligent student of Britain’s history of interaction with Indigenous people and knew that since the 1600s colonial officials had been bringing Indigenous envoys from elsewhere to Briatin … the aim was to forge formal alliances with peoples who might otherwise side with Britain’s imperial competitors, such as France … suggests he thought Bennelong might serve one day, too, as a negotiator for a treaty. The question was by no means resolved for Phillip in 1793, depite many then and later thinking that it was. Philip knew from Britain’s prior experiences that treaties had to be offered to peoples who showed signs of land cultivation, or of permanent construction, or fo sustained social reason… Phillip hadn’t yet figures out that in the absence of European competition for New South Wales, those same bosses would now never be challenged on the issue.”

p. 116 Bennelong never did meet King George III. Without strong backing from the Home Affairs Office that administered the colonies, Phillip failed to secure the meeting he’d always assumed would happen.. This failure may have felt minor at the time, especially for a governor who was clearly mobing on from his colonial experience… encapsulated a momentous shift in British imperial policy … without direct threats from fellow Europeans – and also with a fresh determination to regaim all that had been lost in the American Revolution – it could set a new legal precedent regarding prior occupants of the lands it desired.”

p. 142-3 The Yiyura’s mostly intermixed world meant that all the connections Bennelong forced with the British in these years were enacted with or at least beside Indigenous women. Conversely, Britain’s custom of deparate gender sphere meant that when Phillip attempted to engage with the Yiyura he was surrounded almost entirely by men. True, there were fewer women in Phillip’s colony than men – averaging overall around 20% – but none of them exercised much power compared to men, so featured even less than might be expected… Bennelong’s wife Barangaroo died- “David Collins observed many of the events related to her death as Bennelong’s invited guest .. Bennelong had decided not to bury his wife, as was the common custom, but instead to cremate her – an honour someimtes awarded to more senior people. He invited Phillip and the surgeon John White, as well as Collins, to witness the occasion. … The next day , the same three prominent colonists were brought back to the pyre to watch Bennelong rake Barangaroo’s ashes together. Bennelong clearly wanted them to learn something about the Yiyura through this ritual, perhaps compassion. And Collins, for one, was indeed moved by the cermony, describing how Bennelong “proeced us in a sort of solemn silence, speaking to no one until he had paid Ba-rang-a-roo the last duties of a husband”… The most pressing problem for Bennelong now was how to manage his baby girl, Dilboong. The infent was still nursing. Bennelong raised the problem directly with Phillip, suggesting that he find a wetnurse for her among the convict women. No doubt bennelong could have found one among the Yiyura, which makes his act of reaching across the racial barrier significant…. We don’t know if Phillip secured… What we know more conclusively is that Phillip agreed to be the Yiyura equivalent of a British godfather to Dilboong… Bennelong attempted to cement even further the non-violent connections between peoples at the harbour. But before year’s end, Dilboon… was dead.”(1791)

p/. 157 “Phillip’s spearing in September 1790 … commentators on Bennelong … entertain the idea that rather than a random act, the spearing was the outcome of a plan by Bennelong himself. They suggest that he orchestrated it as an elaborate paycak, either for his own brutal kidnapping by Phillip in 1789 or for general incursions into Yiyura life over the three years prior. They go on to argue that this attack was why the detente could then proceed, because the slate had been wiped clean for Phillip and Bennelong.”

p. 163 – arrival of second fleet”Phillip … felt compelled to explain to the new Home Affairs Minister William Grenville that this was what happened when state-run empires contracted out their tasks to unscrupulous companies … “it was occasioned by the contractors having crowded too many on board those ships, and from their being too confined during the passage.”

p. 212 Phillip spied in pre-revolutionary France on two separate occasions. In 1786 he was paid £160 to travel to the Med town of Hyeres, close to the naval port of Toulon. This wsa a follow-up mission. A year earlier, he’d been paid £150 to travel directly to Toulon to investigate the state of French maritime rearnmament. Both times he was an employee of Evan Nepean, the under-secretary to Lord Sydney at Home Affairs.”

p. 218 Captain Cook’s Arrival “there is evidence that the observing Gweagal understood the vessel to be at least modelled on their own kind of watercraft, just in outsized proportions. As current knowledge-holder Uncle Shayne Williams discusses, the local population fomr all the way south in Dharawal Country sent smoke signals and used message sticks to convey news of the boatt’s passage; they were warning of strange people in strange vessels; they were not panicking about inexplicable spirits in fantastical creatures …. a long and powerful tradition in Western history-writing which assumed that all Indigenous people understood encounters through mythology… What Bennelong the child may instead have heard in the various tellings of Cook’s landing in 1770 was the following: On the last day, the massive nuwi sailed off up the coast, taking its 80-odd men with it. The Yiyura who watched it depart probably felt less a sense of peril or impending change and more an uneasiness about rituals undone or conventions flouted. No formal welcome had been acknowledged; so no meaningful engagement had occurrred. Materially, they had gained a swag of trinkers which did not appear to have any perceivable use… What angered the Gweagal, though, was the crew’s giant haul of fish and rays.”

p. 228 “Most of the women’s childcare responsibilities went unnoticed by the British. All did, however, remark on the women’s guiadnace of the practice that initiated female babies into girlhood. This involved tying a kangaroo sinew around the bottom joint of the baby’s lefthand little finger. After a few days of interrupted blood ciorculation, the digit shrivelled and fell off. To a man, the colonists were aghast at this procedure and most never came to any understanding of why it was gone… But all societies enact rituals to mark growth and belonging. In the colonists’ society these included circumcision, corset-drawingk trouser-lengthening and beard-trimming.”

p/ Given Phillip’s later certainty that his family coat-of-arms was the tri-camel crest of Claude-Ambrouse Philippe, Jacon could convincingly have been a descendant of Hugenot refugees wgho had once fled Catholic France to a German-speaking town and then fled again to an even staunched Protestant state. Britain experienced a particularly large influx of Germanic Protestant refugees in 1709. The British government, keen to poppulate its new territories in North America, had advertised its commitment to settling any loyal Protestant in the New World. All the same, it was not prepared for the 13,000 or so refugees who consequently flooded into London. British officials managed to send only half that number to their colonial sites; the rest stayed in London.”

Books Environmental politics Feminism History Science Women's history

Notes from Meeting with Moths

p. 34-6 “The Six-spot Burnet is Britain’s most widespread burnet moth … Their bodies are packed with poisons that deter even the hungriest of predators. These poisons are accumulated by the caterpillars… munch on leaves of trefoils, they not only get the essential nutrients for growing, they also swallow the chemicals, in this case cyanides, which the plant produces to protect itself. The caterpillars themselves have evolved ways to deal with the plant’s poisons… cunningly store the dangerous chemicals in small pounches just under the skin. This prevents the toxins from interfering with their own body functioning and also allows them to be exuded through the skin as foul-tasting droplets for any predator follish enough to investigate too closely… As adults, females use cyanides as part of their alluring perfume to help attract males, and mating males transfer varying amounts to the female in little packages with their sperm. A toxic male is the most attractive and desirable.”

p. 54 “In 29021, Butterfly Conservation estimated that the work undertaken by volunteers to protect both butterflies and moths, would cost £18 million if valued commercially.”

p. 76 Family of micromoths known as Tineidae. … most feed on organic waste… recycling nutrients back into the environment. Some… specialise in digesting the protein found in animal hair, skin, feathers, claws and horns. As they nibble, they slowly do their bit to break the tough material down … Two species have become rather well know… The Webbing Clothes Moth and the Case-making Clothes Moth are problem pests worldwide… in the dark corners of warm houses they will happily breed all year round…. each female will lay about 50 tiny eggs on suitable substrates, which in turn hatch into the fabric-destroying caterpillers.”

p. 86 Herald (Scoliopteryn libatrix) emerging … “a race against time for the moth, for if the wings are not given the space they need, they might dry in a stunted or twisted position and effective flight is never realised”

p. 88 Maria Sibylla Merian, born in Frankfut in 1647 to a family of artists and printmakers … in 1679 she published her first book on caterpillars… showing the real-life relationship between insects and plants was groundbreaking. The concept of ecology, the interactions between animals, plants and the environment now so fundamental to our understanding of the natural world, was barely considered at the time.”

p. 90 “the book for which she would later receive most acclaium. Metamorphosis Insectorum was publsihed in 1705 with 60 large copper-plate engravings illustrating the stages of development of many different insects arranged around the plants she had found them on…. Her work was circulated, discussed and admired by the scientific elite of the Royal Society of London. Tsar Peter the Great acquired a large collection of her work. Later George III bought a first edition of her Surinam book for the Royal Collection. Carl Linnaeus used her illustrations to help him describe species of plants and animals. At least nine animals now bear her name. Sadly, after her death some of her findings were disputed. Inaccurate copies of her books had been made and when these errors were spotted her work became widely criticised. Genuine observations such as a large spider capturing a bird were dismissed as fanciful female imagination. Only 150 years later, when the explorer Henry Bates proved her bird-eating spider was accurate, was the record finally set straight; but her books and their legacy were soon forgotten.”

p. 101 In most moth species it is the female that releases a sex pheronome, a behaviour referred to as ‘calling’, when she is ready to mate… Males are usually better endowed than females in the antennal department… a greater surface area and therefore more space for special scent receptors.”

p. 102 “There are reports of some species attracting a suitor from over 10 km away”

p. 113 “The very first moths, flying around 200 million years ago, had chewing moutparts and probably fed on fern spores and pollen from primitive conifers in their prehistoric swampland homes. To keep hydrated they might have sipped on dew .. and it is thought this gradiually led to the development of more specialised sucking moutnparts to better deal with these food sources. Once flowering plants made an appearance… things started to change more rapidly… There are still tiny moths that eat fern spores and pollen grains, using a special cavity in the mouth to process these granular foostuffs, But most others have moved on, with the evolution of a long tubular moutnpart called the proboscis”

p. 135 “Moths with ears were flying around their prehistoric worlds at least 28 million years before echolocating bats were on the scene … must once have been used for something other than bat avoidance, probably to hear other approaching predators but perhaps also for communicating with each other”.

p. 144 “Parasitoids… are a crucial part of ecosystems and have an important role in regulating the size of moth populations without eliminating them… reghular fluctuation of moth numbers over the course of years, tracked by a fluctuation in abundance of its parasitoids.”

p. 170 “migrating moths are naive; they’ve never done the journey before and will never do it again… they rely entirely on instinct to know when and where to go. Environmental cues of temperature, other weather patterns and day length interact with the moths’ genetics to make this work.”

p. 185 The most extreme cold conditions, as low as minus 70C, are endured by the Arctic Wolly Bear moth… most northerly breeding species of moth, eking out a remarkable life in the icy realms of Canada and Greenland… termperatures only become warm enough for activity on sunny afternoons in midsummer, so it takes on average seven years, a severely punctuated seven years, for the caterpillar to complete its development.”

p. 199 Alice Blanche Balfour (1850-1936) grew up with a love of natural history… her most significant finds happened during her 60s and 70s… bequathed her impressive collection of pinned specimens, notebooks and equipment to the National Museum of Scotland.”

Books History

Notes from The Green Middle Ages: The Depiction and Use of Plants in the Western World 600-1600

p. 19 In 512, in the same year that princess Anicia Juliana, in the city of Constantinople, received her beautiful copy of Dioscorides De materia medica, the Byzantine physician Anthimus worked at the courts of the Ostrogoth King Theordoric the Greay and of the Frankish King Theuderic I. In that year, he wrote a treatise on healthy living and eating, De observatione ciborum, that he then offered to Theuderic I. .. on the basis of this text we can develop an idea as to hom, in the sith century, people cooked in the region. Anthimus included a number of recipes and suggestions for the cooking and consumption of fruit and vegetables. Celery, coriander, dill and leeks could be added to any recipe, with the stipulation that leeks much be cooked in advance; febbel, cloves, asparagus, carrots and parsnips were considered to be always healthy. He warns against unripe fruit and uncooked beans as they are not good for the stomch or liver. He argues, without providing a reason, that fish sauce garum, a staple in Roman cooking, should be banned from all kitchens. .. Not once does he refer to philosophical treatises or the past, and certainly not to he classical gods. He barely mentions the four temperaments that, based on the writings of Glaen, would later form the foundation for an authoritative theory of health. He merely recommends that onions are wet, cabbage be eaten in winter because it produces black, bile; garlic and radishes are good for phlegmatic people and for those with a cold stomach.”

p. 166 In his Tacunium Sanitatis ‘Check board of Health,’ the Christian Arab Ibn Butlan (d. 1066) gives a detailed systematic overview of all kinds of vegan foodstuff according to the theories of the Greek physicians Hippocrates (fifth century BC) and Galen of Pergamon (second century AD) combined with the early Arabic theory of the six res non naturalis, things that are necessary for health but aren’t automatically thought of as such, of which food and drink are the most important. Because a balance of all these elements is the basis of health, the cook who has to care for an appropriate diet is the best physician.”

p. 177 “Many differents types of plants were consumed as food in the Middle Ages, among them spices from the Orient including sugar, fruit from Mediterranean countries, comfits made from quinces, mulberries and other fruits, vegetables, fruit and green herbs, grains and grapes…. A balanced diet was the best guarantee for good health and it was clear that the cook was the best doctor.”