Food & History

Emerging records of plant distributions and domestications for three carbohydrate-rich plants indicate highly complex histories of social interaction between New Guinea and Island Southeast Asia during the early and mid-Holocene. Phytogeographic, morphological, molecular and archaeobotanical evidence suggests variable histories of domestication: for Musa bananas is complex and involved inter-regional hybridisation between species and subspecies; for taro (Colocasia esculenta) suggests regional isolation of wild populations and separate domestications; and, for the greater yam (Dioscorea alata) is suggestive of initial domestication of an unknown wild-type in the New Guinea region with subsequent widespread dispersal of sterile clones.

Ambrosia, nectar, smoke that rose up from the altars, pieces of meat and cakes that were left on sacred tables, not to mention hymns, prayers and even, towards the end of Antiquity, pure thoughts, the list of dishes, real or metaphorical, that were supposed to confer immortality to Greek Gods is long. In an anthropological approach, through the reading of texts spanning from the Homeric Epic to the first centuries of the Christian era, this article aims to show the prodigious variety of the intellectual constructions that allowed the believer, according to his faith, his needs and his budget, to choose the most appropriate diet for his gods.

Ambroisie, nectar, fumée qui s’exhalait des autels, morceaux de viande et gâteaux que l’on déposait sur les tables sacrées, mais aussi hymnes, prières voire même, à la fin de l’Antiquité, pures pensées… la liste des mets, réels ou métaphoriques, censés assurer l’immortalité des dieux grecs est longue. Dans une démarche anthropologique, à travers la lecture de toute une série de textes allant de l’épopée homérique jusqu’aux premiers siècles de l’ère chrétienne, cet article se propose de montrer la prodigieuse variété des constructions intellectuelles qui permettaient au croyant, selon sa foi, ses besoins et sa bourse, de choisir pour ses dieux le régime le plus adapté.

Evidence for foods eaten on the festival of Hanukkah by Jews in the Middle Ages is found in a poem called Even Bohan, written in Provence in the fourteenth century, which includes real medieval foods, together with food names from the Talmud. The anonymous story Megillat Yehudit, copied in 1402 probably in Provence, also includes details of both allegorical and real foods. These Hebrew documents are discussed here, together with collateral evidence from medieval rabbinic commentaries, which interpret Talmudic food words using terms from their own European vernaculars. We can thus identify some Jewish festive foods with foods from contemporaneous non-Jewish sources.

Previous research on food supply and consumption in Medieval western European cities carried out since the 70s has offered a great deal of information on meat supply and consumption. Nevertheless, no research has addressed the differences in consumption habits among various European regions. This study aims to fill that gap by analysing the kinds of meat consumed by city dwellers in the Iberian Peninsula, France, England, and Italy as documented in sources including tax records, account legers, cookbooks, and archaeological evidence. Despite the relative scarcity of available sources, this analysis nonetheless reveals compelling patterns of meat preferences and uses which vary by region.

This article examines the structure and content of what Jacques Revel called a new modèle alimentaire. It does so by reconstructing and analysing the dietary habits of the Roman Province of the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits, during the seventeenth century. This is made possible by a cluster of archival and printed documents here assembled and studied together for the first time: the financial accounts of the Collegio Romano, the Jesuits’ flagship educational institution, which give annual expenditures on different categories of food; the regulations of the Collegio regarding diet and the maintenance of health; the Levitico, which provided a day-by-day, month-by-month meal plan for the Roman Province, including recipe outlines and portion sizes; and the manuscript recipe collection of Francesco Gaudentio, lay Jesuit at the Collegio’s infirmary. These are integrated with other secondary research into the practices of Jesuits elsewhere in Italy, as well as those of other religious orders during the Counter-Reformation. The Jesuits initiated a new dietary style, in terms of both meal structure and content, that is recognisably “Italian” (at least at this privileged level). It corresponded to contemporary medical notions of how best to nourish the body and maintain its health, with the aim of allowing the Jesuits and those in their care to lead the kind of active, religious life the Society so encouraged.

Today, vodka is an important element in Polish national identity. The distillation of wine was known to a small number of Polish physicians and scholars by the end of the 13^th century, but widespread popularity of distillates as beverages did not come earlier than the end of the 16^th century. Grain vodkas, in particular rye vodkas, have been an important part of Polish culture since at least the early 17^th century. Polish potato vodkas arose in the late 18^th century and dominated production in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, but then fell to minimal levels.

The early history of nutrient research leads back to the turn of the 19^th century and the milieu of chemically interested physicians. William Prout, a physician in London, is supposed to be the first who developed a concept of nutrients or alimentary substances as he called them. The paper introduces Prout’s life, states his work and contributions to the development of chemistry and concentrates on Prout’s use of chemical analysis as a way of understanding human digestion. It will be shown in detail how he came to introduce the term “alimentary substance”. The aim of the paper is to show from the point of view of the history of knowledge that nutrients are not so much the building blocks of our food but merely experimental laboratory entities. Hence, as technologically produced objects of knowledge they cannot be considered independently from the style of research, theory or apparatus, which brought them into life.

The disruption of the global food market during the Second World War prompted many governments to introduce rationing and price controls to ensure that what remained available was distributed fairly among their populations. Those populations did not necessarily agree with the pattern of consumption imposed on them, and throughout the developed world black markets were common. As yet, the effects of black-marketeering on popular nutrition are not well understood. Taking the Netherlands as a case study, this paper aims to elucidate the way in which people with different incomes, backgrounds and interests used the black market.

In Jacques Rancière’s essay “The Distribution of the Sensible,” Rancière basically argues that any object may be used to make Art inasmuch as Art in the 21^st century is no longer subject to essential criteria that condition how an object ought to be represented. While admittedly Rancière has had a minimal impact on Food Studies, the idea that any food object is Art is a central aesthetic-theoretical supposition within Food Studies and the food world at large. Employing Roman Ingarden’s central thesis in Ontology of the Artwork, namely, that particular artworks are intentional objects conditioned by their particular intentional sensate structures, I argue one must understand the “food artwork” as an absolutely particular ontological object that is conditioned by the intentional sensate structures of the food object and not its representational aims. In doing so, I also question what is traditionally thought to be the relation between ideas and sense-perception as well as the hierarchy of the senses in 18^th century Western thought by way of an interpretation of Condillac’s Treatise on Sensations and a consideration of Michel Onfray’s La Raison Gourmande. To illustrate my argument, I consider two examples of what I deem to qualify as “food artworks,” namely, Chef Heston Blumenthal’s “Bacon-and-Egg Ice Cream” and, by way of considering Walter Benjamin’s writings on reproducibility and its relation to artworks, “Locavore dishes.”

Late nineteenth-century globalization of the food industry gave formal and informal empire more significance than ever before. This article argues that the French response to this vast colonial marketplace was to embrace the local or terroir, the connection with place and history, as an antidote. Notions of terroir complicated the story of colonial culinary competition and dependence – in the period of empire and the post-colonial period – raising questions of identity, belonging, and the legacy of empire. The consequence was the creation of a sense of a gastronomic “us” and “them” between France and the colonies with implications that continue to play out in contemporary French politics.

Taste is a conservative sense and there are many barriers to the consumption of new and exotic foods. One of these barriers is disgust, which is not only physical, but also interpersonal. It serves a social function of maintaining hierarchies and boundaries between peoples. Yet despite the conservatism of taste, in interwar Paris there was an increase in the eating of exotic foods, especially of those foods associated with the French colonies. By examining an exotic dining experience that elicited disgust as well as exotic eating venues that avoided disgust reactions, this article explores how colonial foods in interwar Paris were mediated to appeal to French diners.

The late nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries saw both increasing trade in perishable foods and the expansion of European overseas empires. This article argues that these seemingly unrelated developments were in fact connected. It also shows how modern meanings of freshness in food took shape during this period, and were influenced by some of the same ideologies and anxieties that informed the imperial project.

The articles by Kolleen Guy, Lauren Janes and Susanne Freidberg open up new perspectives on colonial food studies. They show how scholars can use food to explore social relations on many scales: relations among countries, among peoples, but also social interactions at the level of the school yard or household. In order to understand the role of food in social relations, researchers must link food production and distribution analytically with its consumption. The authors also suggest that food studies can lay bare the anxieties that infuse social relations when power and responsibility are unequally distributed.

Sera BAKER, Martyn ALLEN, Sarah MIDDLE & Kristopher POOLE (eds.), Food and Drink in Archaeology I. University of Nottingham Postgraduate Conference 2007, Blackawton (Totnes, Prospect Books, 2008), 175 pages. ISBN 978I903018606 ; Price: 30 £, p. 291 – Sera BAKER, Annie GRAY, Kay LAKIN, Richard MADGWICK, Kristopher POOLE, and Michela SANDIAS (eds.), Food & Drink in Archaeology 2. University of Nottingham Postgraduate Conference 2008, Blackawton (Totnes, Prospect Books, 2009), 160 pages. ISBN 9781903018682 ; Price: 20 £, p. 293 – Michael BEER, Taste or Taboo: Dietary Choices in Antiquity (Totnes, Prospect Books, 2010), 152 pages. ISBN 9781903018637 ; Price: £12, p. 295 – Annette M. MAGID (ed.), You Are What You Eat: Literary Probes into the Palate (Newcastle, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), 464 pages. ISBN 1847184928 ; ISBN (10): 1847184928 ; ISBN (13): 9781847184924 ; Price: 44.99 £ ; 67.99 $, p. 300 – Derek J. ODDY, Peter J. ATKINS, Virginie AMILIEN (eds.), The Rise of Obesity in Europe. A Twentieth Century Food History (Farnham, Ashgate, 2009), xv, 246 pages. ISBN 9780754676966 ; Price: 60.00 £, p. 302.