Why I Write About Food as Translation

I am asked, more often than I expected when I started, why a working chef would devote ten books to imagining what would happen if ancient peoples ate modern food. The question is fair. I run a kitchen four days a week. I have neither the time nor the inclination to write about food for sentimental reasons, and I find the genre of food-as-nostalgia almost physically uncomfortable to read. The series exists because I came, slowly and over the course of writing the first book, to believe that food is the most honest available medium for examining a problem I had been thinking about for years before I knew it was the problem. The problem is translation. Not the translation of words across languages, although that is one instance of it, but the translation of meaning across the irreducible differences between human contexts — between an Egyptian field hand of the New Kingdom and a Tokyo office worker of 2026, between a Roman legionary at his evening meal and a college student finishing a bowl of instant ramen, between the body of a person who has never eaten refined sugar and the body of one who has eaten little else.

What I noticed, working in restaurants in my twenties, is that the things we mean by "food" are wildly, almost incommensurably different between cultures, and yet the underlying chemistry is identical. A grain is a grain. A protein is a protein. Salt does to a Roman tongue what it does to mine. The molecules of fermentation behave the same in a Sumerian beer vessel as in a craft brewery in Portland. And yet the experience of eating the same molecules is structured by everything outside the molecule — the season, the labor that produced the food, the social hierarchy that distributed it, the ritual that surrounded the meal, the assumptions about hunger and satiety that the diner brought to the table. A meal is a sentence in a language, and the chemistry is only the grammar. The vocabulary is everything else. To eat a meal from another time or place is to attempt a translation, and translations always lose something and always keep something, and the interesting question is which is which.

The series tries to ask that question concretely rather than abstractly. What Happens When Ancient Egyptians Eat Modern Pizza? is the first of the ten because the contrast is so extreme it forces the analytical apparatus into the open. New Kingdom Egyptians ate a diet built on barley bread, beer, onions, garlic, occasional fish, occasional fowl, and a great deal of vegetable matter — emmer wheat porridge, leeks, lettuce, the chickpeas and lentils that anchored the laboring diet. Their bodies were calibrated to a specific load of fiber, a specific load of salt (modest by modern standards), no refined sugar, no dairy beyond the rare goat-milk product, and a fat profile dominated by sesame and flax oils. Drop a slice of modern Neapolitan pizza into that body and what happens is not a simple matter of "they would enjoy it." The wheat is the same wheat in principle, but the gluten content of modern bread wheats is several times what it would have been in a 1,500 BCE emmer. The cheese is, to that body, almost a pharmaceutical — a concentrated lactose-and-fat package the digestive system has no experience of. The tomato is something the Old World had never seen until the sixteenth century and to which the Egyptian palate had no cultural relationship at all. The salt load is roughly three times an Egyptian daily intake. The body might enjoy the meal. It would also be staggered by it. Translation, here, is not equivalent. The book is an attempt to take that asymmetry seriously.

The companion experiment in What Would Happen If Romans Ate Modern Ramen runs the same procedure in a different direction. A Roman legionary's daily diet was anchored on emmer porridge, hard cheese, salted olives, garum, and a vinegar-and-water beverage called posca; the umami of garum, the fish sauce that flavored almost every Roman dish, was the closest analogue in the ancient Mediterranean to the kombu-and-bonito umami of a Japanese dashi. Hand that legionary a bowl of tonkotsu ramen and the umami load is, surprisingly, not the part that disorients him. The Roman palate is trained on intense fermented savor, and the tonkotsu pork broth registers as a richer, fattier cousin of a meat-bone-and-garum soup he already knows. What disorients him is the noodle — wheat treated with kansui alkaline salt, an Asian preparation entirely outside the Roman flour vocabulary — and the precise heat and softness of the egg. The translation succeeds in the place I did not expect and fails in the place I did. This kept happening as I wrote, and it is the reason I came to think of the project as a translation exercise rather than a comparative-cuisine exercise.

What gets lost in any food translation, reliably, is the cultural context. The seasonal logic — that this food belongs to this month, in this latitude, after this rainfall, before this festival — does not survive the move to a modern kitchen, because the modern kitchen has detached itself from season as a working constraint. The labor structure — that this food required the labor of these specific people, in these roles, under this hierarchy, paid in these terms — is invisible by the time the food reaches a plate. The ritual context — that this food was eaten in this posture, with these utensils, alongside these prayers or songs or silences — is almost always discarded when a dish is moved out of its origin culture. What gets kept is the chemistry, the appetite, and the bodily response, all of which are biologically conserved across time and culture and which therefore behave in ways we can model. A Roman body fed ramen will register the sodium load, the fat load, the carbohydrate load, the umami density, all of these the way a modern body does. What it cannot register is the meaning of ramen — its place in a Japanese post-war recovery story, its association with late-night work, its specific relationship to the rest of the Japanese culinary canon. The chemistry is portable. The meaning is not.

I am unusually positioned for this work, and I should say so plainly. I am a working chef. I cook every day, professionally, in a Japanese kitchen, and the questions I ask about ancient food are the questions a cook asks: what does the dough do under the hand, what does the protein do under the heat, how does the salt distribute through the fat, how long does the ferment take in this temperature, what does the diner's body do with the meal once it is eaten. I am also a historian, in the sense that I have done the archival reading and the comparative reading and have spent enough years inside primary sources to know what they will and will not tell me. The two vantage points are not commonly combined. Most people who write about ancient food are scholars who do not cook, and most cooks who write about food do not read in five-thousand-year-old archives. I happen to do both, and the series is what comes out when those two practices are forced into the same project.

The choice to write across eras rather than within one is the deliberate part. A book about Roman cuisine alone would let me stay safely inside Roman categories. A book about Japanese cuisine alone would let me stay inside Japanese ones. The act of putting a Roman legionary in front of a bowl of ramen, or an Egyptian field hand in front of a slice of pizza, makes both cultures visible at once in a way neither would be in isolation, because the comparison forces the reader to notice the assumptions each culture brought to the table. The series is, in that sense, a series of forced encounters. The food is the pretext. The encounter is the subject. The book on the shelf is shaped like a food book because food was the cleanest test case I could find. The thing the books are actually about is the difficulty, and the necessity, of moving meaning between people who do not share a context. That is what I think writing is for. That is why I write about food as translation.