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Gourmet

Gourmet (US: /ɡɔːrˈmeɪ/, UK: /ˈɡɔːrmeɪ/) is a cultural ideal associated with the culinary arts of fine food and drink, or haute cuisine, which is characterized by refined, even elaborate preparations and presentations of aesthetically balanced meals of several contrasting, often quite rich courses. Historically the ingredients used in the meal tended to be rare for the region. Also, can also be impacted by the local state and religious customs. The term and its associated practices are usually used positively to describe people of refined taste and passion. Gourmet food tends to be served in smaller, more expensive, portions. There also tends to be cross-cultural interactions when it comes to Gourmet, introducing new ingredient, materials, and practices.

What is considered gourmet is different depending on the time and geographic region. What is gourmet historically depended upon what ingredients the people of that region had access to and how easily they acquire them. For instance, seafood could be considered a luxury in an area that lacks fish, whereas it would not be seen as such in an area near the ocean or a great river. Gourmet tended, and still does in many parts of the world, to be revered by a person with access to wealth because gourmet food has always been expensive. The expense was the result of a scarcity of ingredients for a particular food in the region at the time. This fact meant they needed to be brought in from far away, which brought a variety of risks to the merchants. Merchants would have to deal with weather conditions, thieves, and broken equipment, intermediaries, and other such factors that could delay or interrupt the shipment of the good at the cost of their lives and fortune. Thus they asked for higher prices.

This trading from non-local regions, also means, almost by necessity, that there was much cultural exchange between different groups to get these goods. The Columbian Exchange introduced many ingredients and styles to the new world and Europe starting with the expansion of the Iberian Empires. The new world introduced to Europeans tomatoes, potatoes, chocolate, and many more. Another example would be interactions with the Islamic world, which impacted catholic cuisine in the 1100s. These interactions introduced many spices, the theory of the culinary cosmos, and cooking items such as North African pottery. These trades were facilitated by rich merchant states that traded with them the most notable being Venice. Then there was a Portuguese arrival to East Asia which brought along common Portuguese goods like wine to China.

Another factor would be religious/cultural beliefs and customs, which have a significant impact on the food that was eaten. For instance, Jewish and Islamic cultures have rules for not only what they can eat, but how to prepare the food and what it can be paired with. To eat specific food items they must be Kosher (for Jews) and Halal (for Muslims). The most obvious example is that neither can eat pork because pigs are considered unclean. Another example is that many people of India generally do not consume beef because many devout Hindus believe the cow is a sacred animal. Buddhism encourage vegetarianism so that limits what Buddhist can eat. These practices and beliefs encourage what is not eaten and society but also what can be eaten. For instance, the Buddhists have a history of preparing and eating tofu to get protein. There is also the role of the state when it comes to these issues sometimes dictating how meals should be prepared. An example of this would be that of edicts of Ashoka who declared that many animals shall be given decent treatment and limited the numbers that could be consumed. Although, it should be noted Ashoka was a very devout Buddhist and that affected his policies.

For millenniums, about 10% of the population could eat food that may have been considered gourmet in their time. Potentially 80% of the global population worked in food production and would have eaten more typical meals to survive. The typical meal would be what they could most easily get there hands on. In Britain, for instance, that was gruels, vegetables, small amounts of wild game, and grains.

History of Astronomy

During the renaissance period, astronomy began to undergo a revolution in thought known as the Copernican revolution, which gets the name from the astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, who proposed a heliocentric system, in which the planets revolved around the Sun and not the Earth. His De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium was published in 1543. While in the long term this was a very controversial claim, in the very beginning it only brought minor controversy. The theory became the dominant view because many figures, most notably Galileo Galilei and Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton, who championed and improved upon the work. Other figures also aided this new model despite not believing the overall theory, like Tycho Brahe, with his well-known observations.

Brahe, a Danish noble, was an essential astronomer in this period. He came on the astronomical scene with the publication of De Nova Stella in which he disproved conventional wisdom on SN 1572. He also created the Tychonic System in which he blended the mathematical benefits of the Copernican system and the “physical benefits” of the Ptolemaic system. He is most known for his highly accurate observations of the stars and the solar system. After his exile, he moved to Prague and continued his work. In Prague he was at work on the Rudolphine Tables, that were not finished until after his death. The Rudolphine Tables was a star map designed to be more accurate than either the Alphonsine Tables, made in the 1300s and the Prutenic Tables which were inaccurate. He was assisted at this time by his assistant Johannes Kepler, who would later use his observations to finish Brahe’s works and for his theories as well.

After the death of Brahe, Kepler was deemed his successor and was given the job of complete Brahe’s uncompleted works, like the Rudolphine Tables. He completed the Rudolphine Tables in 1624, although it was not published for several years. Like many other figures of this era, he was subject to religious and political troubles, like the thirties year war, which led to chaos that almost destroyed some of his works. Kepler was, however, the first to attempt to derive mathematical predictions of celestial motions from assumed physical causes. Kepler discovered the three laws of planetary motion that now carry his name. Those laws being as followes:


 * 1) The orbit of a planet is an ellipse with the Sun at one of the two foci.
 * 2) A line segment joining a planet and the Sun sweeps out equal areas during equal intervals of time.
 * 3) The square of the orbital period of a planet is proportional to the cube of the semi-major axis of its orbit.

With these laws, he managed to improve upon the existing Heliocentric model. The first two were published in 1609. Kepler's contributions improved upon the overall system, giving it more credibility because it adequately explained events and could cause more reliable predictions. Before this the Copernican model was just as reliable as the ptolemaic model. This improvement came because Kepler realized the orbits were not perfect circles, but ellipses.

Galileo Galilei was among the first to use a telescope to observe the sky, and after constructing a 20x refractor telescope. He discovered the four largest moons of Jupiter in 1610, which are now collectively known as the Galilean moons, in his honor. This discovery was the first known observation of satellites orbiting another planet. He also found that our Moon had craters and observed, and correctly explained, sunspots, and that Venus exhibited a full set of phases resembling lunar phases. Galileo argued that these facts demonstrated incompatibility with the Ptolemaic model, which could not explain the phenomenon and would even contradict it. With the moons it demonstrated that the earth does not have to have everything orbiting it and that other parts of the solar system could orbit another object, such as the earth orbiting the sun. In ptolemaic model the celestial bodies were supposed to be perfect so such objects should not have craters or sunspots. The phases of venus could only happen in the event that venus orbit is insides earth's orbit which could not happen if the earth was the center. He, as the most famous example, had to faced challenges from church officials, more specifically the  Roman Inquisition. They accused him of heresy because these beliefs went against the teachings of the Bible and was challenging the Catholic church's authority when it was at its weakest. While he was able to avoid punishment for a little while he was eventually tried and pled guilty to heresy in 1633. Although this came at some expense--his book was banned--he spent one day in prison, and was put under house arrest until he died in 1642.

Isaac Newton developed further ties between physics and astronomy through his law of universal gravitation. Realizing that the same force that attracts objects to the surface of the Earth held the moon in orbit around the Earth, Newton was able to explain--in one theoretical framework--all known gravitational phenomena. In his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, he derived Kepler's laws from first principles. Those first principles are as follows:


 * 1) In an inertial frame of reference, an object either remains at rest or continues to move at constant velocity, unless acted upon by a force.
 * 2) In an inertial reference frame, the vector sum of the forces F on an object is equal to the mass m of that object multiplied by the acceleration a of the object: F = ma. (It is assumed here that the mass m is constant)
 * 3) When one body exerts a force on a second body, the second body simultaneously exerts a force equal in magnitude and opposite in direction on the first body.

Thus while Kepler explained how the planets moved, Newton accurately managed to explain why the planets moved the way they do. Newton's theoretical developments laid many of the foundations of modern physics.