Food & History

This paper introduces the special issue of Food & History, which is the product of a two-day colloquium that was organised in December 2010, aiming at closing a large-scale research project. This investigation questions whether food (and if so, to what extent) serves as a reliable proxy for measuring rough and more subtle social hierarchies. Three themes have been considered, which this paper presents and situates in a broader context: elite cuisine, middle-class shopping for food, and bourgeois eating out.

This article discusses the main arguments of the so-called modernization paradigm in food history, according to which the industrialization and urbanization process would enhance the passage from quantity to quality concerns in individual perceptions and public policies. This shift is supposed to be associated with product standardization, decreasing social inequalities and, ultimately, globalization. The author argues that in the long run these changes need to be better qualified. Quantity and quality concerns, social inequalities and unequal access to food persist despite industrialization and economic growth. Gift economy, qualitative differentiation of products and segmented local economies and food values coexist within global market dynamics.

Focus on the elite tables, following the (luxury) food chain and the networks of the eaters, and study the dramaturgy of commensal micro-politics in order to understand how soft power via feasts and gastronomy, distinction strategies and elite cultures functioned in Europe in the past five centuries (and continue to do so). All this is important in the study of the processes of convergence and divergence as well as trajectories of continuity in eras of rapid change. Actor-network analysis, performance studies and sensitized comparative historical research offer promising tools to demonstrate and explain the relationships between corporeal performances, conviviality and micro-political work, as well as macro-processes outside the black box of elite table culture. The reign of Louis XIV, the Napoleonic era (see Cambacérés, Talleyrand, Carême), or the gastronomy politics in present-day France provide eye-opening examples of yielding and wielding power via tables, discourses and food.

The article presents a survey of the literature published since 1990 on shopping for food in Western Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. After a geographically organised survey of contributions dealing with the history of food retailing in Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and France, four topics of food retailing history are discussed: multiple grocers, self-service outlets, supermarkets and co-operatives.

The role of female protesters in the “food politics” of the First World War, both in Britain and in other combatant countries, is well known. Indeed, their absence would be surprising: women, it is widely acknowledged, played a central role in selecting, buying and preparing food for the family, and the wartime shortages placed an especially heavy burden on them. Men, on the other hand, feature far less in accounts of wartime food politics, and middle-class men hardly at all, at least not as consumers of food in their own right. Focusing on the English home front, this article suggests that this “absence” was not the product of a lack of interest on the part of middle-class men in issues of food consumption. On the contrary, men were deeply concerned by deteriorating middle-class diets, were involved in families’ purchasing decisions and practices, and often sought to supplement their families’ diets through self-provisioning. However, this article suggests, many middle-class men found their forays into food production and shopping to be deeply troubling: in the particular circumstances of the wartime home front, they often found that their identities and responsibilities as food consumers threatened to undermine their sense of themselves as competent, authoritative, fit and manly men.

This paper explores the extent to which Delhaize Le Lion Belgium’s first and largest food chain store, exploited the semiotic potential of architecture to construct a brand identity and to ensure visibility and recognition in a modern urban context. By using photographs and building plans as primary sources, the article analyzes the store front design in order to gain insight in the social values and cultural categories that are embedded therein and the clientele at which they were aimed.

The article presents a survey of the literature published since 1990 on the history of restaurants in Western Europe and the United States. It focuses on the following topics: the invention and extension of the modern restaurant, celebrity chefs and more humble members of kitchen and dining room staff, and ethnic restaurants.

The role of restaurants and chefs in contemporary Norway is interesting not only as a local phenomenon reflecting a shift in food mentality, but also a global phenomenon. This article offers an exploratory study, mostly descriptive, but linked to the concept of globalization. The first part gives a brief account of the political and cultural framework of Norwegian food. The second part focuses on the evolution of the structural system Norwegian chefs have worked within during the past thirty years. Thirdly, we emphasize chefs’ direct responsibility in respect of the construction of traditional, local, regional and national understanding of food.

The restaurant is a place of various social interactions, not only between patrons, but also between owners and staff. The representation of these interactions in one particular literary genre, the restaurant review, is of particular interest. Through the use of linguistic methods such as frequency and collocational analysis, a number of discursive transformations are uncovered. The most striking discovery is the near-disappearance of references to particular social actors and the relations of power between them throughout the 1980’s and 1990’s as compared with the two previous decades. One possible explanation focuses on the changed nature of restaurant guide publishing.

In this article we extend the papers by Steven Van den Berghe, Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson and Virginie Amilien to highlight the most salient changes and evolution of the restaurant industry, emphasizing the first decade of the twenty-first century. Reflecting some of the themes raised by the preceding articles we ask: what are the identities of the contemporary restaurant and how are they expressed? Focusing on the American context we trace four major developments: the new charismatic celebrity chef, food enthusiasts and the expansion of a unique food culture, “moral” eating and related food politics and the changing structures of kitchen life.

Gonzalo ARANDA JIMÉNEZ, Sandra MONTÓN-SUBÍAS, Margarita SÁNCHEZ-ROMERO (eds.), Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner: Feasting Rituals in the Prehistoric Societies of Europe and the Near East (Oxford, Oxbow, 2011), 245 pages. ISBN 978-1-84217-985-7, price £40.00 / $80.00.

Nelly LABÈRE (études réunies et présentées par), Être à table au Moyen Âge (Madrid, Casa de Velázquez, 2010), 277 pages. ISBN 978-84-96820- 49-4, Prix € 24.

Craig MULDREW, Food, Energy and the Creation of Industriousness: Work and Material Culture in Agrarian England, 1550-1780 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2011), 355 pages, ISBN 9780521881852; Price £60.00 (US$ 99.00)

David GENTILCORE, Pomodoro! A History of the Tomato in Italy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 272 pages, 45 illustrations. ISBN 978-0-231-15206-8 (ISBN 978-0-231-52550-3 e-book), price £ 18,95 / $ 26,95.