Hopped Up: How Travel, Trade, and Taste Made Beer a Global Commodity

The global spread of lager is a capitalist story of Western cultural imperialism: a European product travels through merchants, migrants, and imperialists to upend local patterns and transform faraway consumers' tastes. But modern beer is just as much a product of globalization, invented and reinvented around the world, in this talk leading Food Historian Professor Jeffrey Pilcher (University of Toronto) explores not only how humans have made beer but also how consumers have used beer to make meaning in their lives. As part of the “History of Food Safety Workshop,” Professor Pilcher’s talk addresses how industrial food processing helped to turn lager, with its clean, fresh taste, into a symbol of hygiene and civilization.