Routledge International Handbook of Food Studies

Historical background of studies in the cultural history of food

The Annales school, founded in the 1920s by Jacques Le Goff and Fernand Braudel, united the study of economies, societies, and the mental frameworks (mentalités) belonging to particular historical periods. Braudel’s magisterial treatment of Mediterranean commerce included trade in food supplies and the pursuit of maritime occupations related to the procurement of food (Braudel, 1982, 1972). Other works examined provisions within modes of production that served as the organizational basis of economic and social life. The works of Marc Bloch and Jacques Le Goff offer some of the best foundational texts in the study of medieval European society, touching frequently on questions of food consumption, including hunger and its psychological impact (Bloch, 1961; Le Goff, 1988). Students of history later gained access to volumes of translated essays from the journal (e.g., Forster and Ranum, 1979). Emphasis on the embedded nature of food, especially in relation to food security, survival, and reproduction, enabled historians to envision wholly new ways of framing historical problems.

Humanitarian and nutritional interest in food during the Second World War inspired early scholarship on the subject. In Britain, scientists as well as historians produced wide-ranging accounts of the history of British food, valuable as much for their judgments on how to examine a nation’s choices as they were for their interesting sources (see, for example, Drummond and Wilbraham, 1939). Redcliffe Salaman, a physician and geneticist by training, published a remarkable history of the potato, which described itself as a social rather than a cultural history, but its coverage of the different habitats, uses, and political implications of this globally essential food made it a much broader work of scholarship. Recent treatments have not supplanted its usefulness (Salaman, 1985; Smith, 2011; Reader, 2011; Zuckerman, 1999). Political developments in postwar Europe, particularly the emergence of the welfare state, created a setting favorable to the investigation of food as a social necessity. To a certain extent, the same was true in the United States, where a democratic awareness of dietary deficiencies across social classes and the rise of government assistance generated an interest in “food habits” and history (Cummings, 1940).

Socialism and communism in Europe and Britain had a considerable impact on historical scholarship, and this, in turn, led to increased interest in the subject of food. For the influential school of British Marxist historians, the subject served as a lightning rod of instances of class conflict in the history of capitalism. Though Marxist historians had been charged with economic determinism, scholarship of this era ultimately developed a more nuanced understanding of culture as a means of understanding historical change. Social historians broadened the framework of traditional history by focusing attention on common people and by raising new questions about ordinary life, including food consumption. In a controversial essay, Eric Hobsbawm brought historical analysis to the study of the impact of an uneven distribution of wealth in what became known as the “standard of living debate” during the classic phase of British industrialization (Hobsbawm, 1957). The ensuing discussion inspired scholars in other periods and fields to interrogate diverse issues surrounding the production, distribution, and consumption of food (Dyer, 1989). E. P. Thompson’s discussion of the “moral economy of the crowd” (Thompson, 1971) included attention to the rituals and symbols of protest against changing marketing practices in the trade in grain and bread. Thompson brought to light the negotiation of popular political rights to affordable food that were inscribed in English law. The eventual abandonment of the Assize of Bread consigned English consumers to the vicissitudes of free trade in grain. By calling attention to the ethical component underlying laws governing necessities, Thompson showed how historians could discover conflict over issues of food justice in the past. The concept of a “moral economy” would, of course, migrate into anthropology and the study of non-Western cultures.

Social history in the following generation, grounded in issues of class conflict and economic change, generated important studies of food as an indicator of status and living standards. Of course, an enormous literature on the production of food grew within the history of agriculture and the rural world, not just Europe, but across every part of the globe and in all periods. In an environment favorable to “history from below,” food histories were not seen as out of the ordinary, and several general works appeared, some of them with a cultural slant, and several of them authored from outside the academy. Reay Tannahill’s Food in History (1973), for example, provided a cultural context for a narrative about changing diets through history. John Burnett’s Plenty and Want: A Social History of Diet from 1815 to the Present Day (1979), an academic contribution, explored the striking contrasts in food consumption in different social classes in England. In a different vein, Waverly Root and Richard de Rochemont produced Eating in America: A History in 1976. Even from more conventional perspectives, particularly that of liberal reform, food as drink received attention (Harrison, 1971), though with less engagement of economic or social theory.

Anthropology was already exerting a definitive influence on the practice of social history by the 1980s, so it was not surprising that one outstanding example of food history should act as a focal point for further discussion. Probably the single most widely read book of food history in the Western world is anthropologist Sidney Mintz’s Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, a historical study of political economy bound together with an anthropological investigation of work and food. In an original and provocative way, Mintz linked the worlds of production, especially slave labor, with that of consumption, probing the dietary adaptations generated by the adoption of sugar among different social classes in Europe and the Americas. The suggestive influences of his work proved to be innumerable: links between the fields of anthropology, history, and political economy forced historical discussion into further analysis of global trade and the “rise of the West.” The fact of geographical separation between the realms of production and consumption, as just one example, set a model for future considerations of food in later studies of commodity chains and food regimes (Mintz, 1986).

Owing largely to the work of Massimo Montanari, the Institut Européen d’Histoire et des Cultures de l’Alimentation and the journal Food and History provide another approach to the cultural history of food. Montanari’s many works of scholarship, including his survey of medieval and early modern European food history, The Culture of Food (1994), and most recently, his reflective collection of short essays, Food is Culture (2006), present every aspect of food history as thoroughly embedded in a broad set of cultural assumptions and practices. Quoting Hippocrates, he describes food itself as “a thing not of nature” and argues that human artifice – what we commonly refer to as culture – affects every step of food provisioning, from production to consumption. His attention to symbolic meanings surrounding food, coupled with attention to the history of ideas and belief systems, provide an interdisciplinary model of food writing unique to the academy.

From the 1980s, growing interest in cultures of consumption indicated a shifting center of gravity in the historical profession. While earlier interest had focused on economic and political change, the next generation of theoretical and empirical works now focused primarily on a more elaborated picture of the consumption patterns of commercial society. Cultural historians would find interpretative inspiration in the provocative work of Norbert Elias (1983, 2000) in order to theorize the impact of increasing wealth and changing practices of consumption. Focusing on increasing pressures in political life, Elias showed how competitive behavior resulted in an increase in sophistication and the rise of “civility” at court. Historians broadened his notion of the “civilizing process” to include matters of taste, as well as the extension of courtly manners, to an ever-widening circle of historical agents. Parallel shifts in scholarly interest occurred in the choice of agencies, from common people, working classes, and peasants to the emergent bourgeoisie and political and social elites. At the same time, studies came to focus on “identity-value conferred by commodities, the way they constitute the self and communicate it to others”. As Alan Warde pointed out, the new wave of scholarship indicated that “personal taste and aesthetic judgment,” as “critical assets in the project of self-development,” replaced “use or exchange value as the central mechanism driving consumption decisions” (Warde, 1997: 2). Underlying assumptions of status hierarchies and practices of emulation offered a different paradigm, one that would differentiate the work of historians interested in culture from those who would continue to pursue issues grounded in political economy.

Research methodologies and theoretical approaches

Scholars interested in the cultural history of food would do well to examine the methodology used by Steven Mennell in Chapters 3 through 5 in his dazzling All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present (1985). As a historical sociologist, Mennell constructed a picture of prevailing and distinctive sensibilities in England and France, using Elias’s theories of the civilizing process in order to elucidate the political and social bases of prescriptive behavior at French and English courts. For Mennell, the complex distribution of power and prestige becomes the framework for culinary choices at court. In England, he argued, little regard was given to distinguishing elite foods from those of commoners, and, in fact, such practices were decried as distinctly French. Mennell draws from contemporary accounts of food and behavior as well as cookery books in order to paint different pictures of refinement on either side of the Channel. In later chapters, he shows how “diminishing contrasts and increasing varieties” characterize twentieth-century consumption, reflecting the impact of new technologies of production and transport, along with the rise of a more modern attitude toward individualized consumption patterns.

Dietary regimes can also be seen as disciplinary practices working upon the body as a site of health and reproduction. The wide-ranging influence of Michel Foucault is an unmistakable influence in many works. Foregrounding religious beliefs and rituals, Caroline W. Bynum’s Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (1987) and Rudolph M. Bell’s Holy Anorexia (1985) exerted important influence on scholars of women and gender. Ken Albala’s Eating Right in the Renaissance (2002), an innovative study of understandings of food in Renaissance Europe, combined an interest in health and the body with a study of the changing adaptations of Galenic principles in the early modern period. The Renaissance table itself provided a stage for medical and bodily discourse; as Albala pointed out, physicians were often present to provide guests with on-site advice on the possible effects of the food items set before them.

As crucial agents in generating a knowledge base concerning food and the body, medicine and science provide important windows into questions of culture for food historians. Investigations into the history of medicine in Britain have traced the development of a field of human nutrition, showing how scientific concepts of dietetics and health have informed popular beliefs, public policy, and commercial strategies. Mark Finlay’s essay on the medicinal uses of Liebig’s extract of meat, for example, constructed the overlapping worlds of German laboratory science, capitalist investments in colonial Latin America, and the hunger for therapeutic foods in nineteenth-century Britain (Kamminga and Cunningham, 1995). Colonial involvements led to the European “discovery” of malnutrition in African populations, a subject that intersects with interdisciplinary work in the health sciences. Diseases commonly thought to be generated by microbes at the turn of the century required an entirely new paradigm when deficiencies in diet were finally understood (Worboys, 1988). Several works by David Smith on nutrition during the world wars have pointed the way to further research into the linkages between science, industry, and nutrition (Smith, 1995; Smith, 2000). Along parallel lines, yet from a social perspective, John Burnett and Derek Oddy’s studies of food and nutrition place nutritional concerns at the center of a study of historical change and class difference (Burnett, 1999; Oddy, 1993; Geissler and Oddy, 2003).

The study of material history in Europe, meanwhile, continues to generate widespread interest in the history of provisioning, which has intermittently engaged with the role of culture defined more generally to mean broad consensus. Explorations of agriculture and other aspects of food production continue to inspire creative works of cultural history, such as Joan Thirsk’s Food in Early Modern England; Phases, Fads, Fashions, 1500–1760 (2006) and Steven L. Kaplan’s Good Bread is Back: A Contemporary History of French Bread (2006). Following the inception of the International Commission for Research into European Food History in 1989, volumes of studies on selected topics, including health, material culture, food and the city, and eating out, have made available a wealth of research (Scharer and Fenton, 1998; Fenton, 2000; Atkins, Lummel and Oddy, 2007; Jacobs and Scholliers, 2003). The many essays on Germany and Europe by Hans Jurgen Teuteberg, for example, depend largely on a model of technological change (e.g., Teuteberg, 1992), while other European scholars interested in nutrition, such as Adel P. den Hartog (1995) and Ulrike Thoms (Fenton, 2000), or material culture, including Lydia Petránová (1985, 1997), Peter Scholliers (2001), and Martin Franc (Oddy and Petránová, 2005), have expanded the connections linking food to agriculture, labor, and changing styles of living.

Luxury products have attracted a great deal of interest in the cultural history of food. Inspired by Habermas’s notion of a public sphere, a proliferation of studies of coffee and tea related those products to particular settings and styles of consumption (Cowan, 2007; Pendergrast, 2010; Kowaleski-Wallace, 1997). Schivelbusch’s Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants sketched a captivating picture of the European consumption of luxury imports, emphasizing the parallels between substances like tobacco and beer with more “tasteful” and conventionally accepted commodities like chocolate and coffee (Schivelbusch, 1992). Historians have traced the appearance of commercial establishments aimed at luxury consumption in the eighteenth century, particularly in Enlightenment Europe. Rebecca Spang’s history of the restaurant is situated at the intersection of studies of consumption and sensibility during this definitive period of history. The changing meanings of a cup of restorative broth to a more generalized site for gourmandizing consumption makes the restaurant an ideal example of how elite clientele shaped new attitudes toward the body and pleasure (Spang, 2000).

Social historians working within the social sciences employ a more capacious notion of culture as something related to convention, somewhat theoretically aligned with a Marxist concept of cultural hegemony. Underlying much of this scholarship is a critique of capitalism, which is seen as creating its own “culture” of consensus and conformity. Harvey Levenstein’s Revolution at the Table: The Transformation of the American Diet (1988) and Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America (1993) highlighted the role of giant, powerful corporations, a reverence for science within an influential middle class, and a diverse, diffuse working population in producing what became understood as a hegemonic construct of food culture. His critical treatments of the interplay between corporate power and middle-class reform laid the groundwork for further discussion of the role of capitalism in constructing modern food commodities. Warren Belasco’s Appetite for Change: How the Counterculture Took on the Food Industry, 1966–1988 (1989) developed this argument at greater length, demonstrating how food reformers and, in turn, the business of food responded to what were perceived as new cultural imperatives shunning the evils of modern society as they manifested themselves in food. Belasco’s study was explicitly cultural in orientation: focusing on countercultural gurus and ecology movements, he illustrated how the rebellions of the 1960s expressed themselves through changes in eating orientations: “food was a medium for broader change” (Belasco, 1989: 28). On a more descriptive level, Margaret Visser’s Much Depends on Dinner: The Extraordinary History and Mythology, Allure and Obsession, Perils and Taboos, of an Ordinary Meal (1986) extended an analysis of single items of food, such as salt and ice cream, to brief but incisive historical sketches of relevant changes in economic or political forces that made such items commonly available.

Cultural history offers the best means of understanding rejections of dietary norms in the past: as histories of vegetarianism have revealed, for example, reasons for avoidance of meat have differed greatly over time and according to region (Spencer, 1995; Preece, 2008; Stuart, 2006). The ethical dimensions of vegetarianism have demanded cultural histories based on religion and non-Western cultures (Adams, 1994). Other dietary reforms, such as Fletcherism and the popularity of health spas, have had a similar appeal to cultural historians (Merta in Oddy and Petráňová, 2005). Even more provocative is correlative interest in animals and society, intriguingly discussed in relation to food in Richard Bulliett’s Hunters, Herders, and Hamburgers: The Past and Future of Human–Animal Relationships (2005).

Somewhat paradoxically, the post-modern breakdown of a notion of cultural consensus into myriad forms of identity has given rise to a proliferation of studies examining shared culinary traditions within ethnic groups or regional identities. Historians in this vein have tended to emphasize the interconnections among tastes and values associated with particular collectivities, presenting a framework of tradition in the face of forces of change. Hasia R. Diner’s Hungering for America: Italian, Irish, and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration combined an examination of migration history and food practices to show how “women and men transformed food into the essence of identity and as the focal point of loyalty.” Not simply an examination of food choices, Diner’s work used data on occupational history, marketing, religious practices, and social and domestic spaces to create a variegated narrative of immigration history (Diner, 2001: 73). Other studies of particular regional cuisines, such as those by Jeffrey M. Pilcher, focus more specifically on historical forces impinging on food sources and thus more accurately belong to the social vein of culinary history (Pilcher, 1998).

Rebellion against normative cultural imperatives provides an entry into examining women, gender, and food in nineteenth- and twentieth-century history. As a field of its own, feminist food studies exists at the intersection of women’s studies and numerous other disciplines. Early works included Dolores Hayden’s The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities (1982), which revealed how thinking about women’s crucial place in food preparation led to visionary designs of public kitchens at the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition in 1883. The career of Ellen Swallow Richards, the force behind the establishment of home economics as a division of academic study, appeared again in Laura Schapiro’s Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century (1986).

Academic studies of domesticity grappled with the more complicated tensions involved in women’s experiences as caregivers and victims of oppression. Particularly in periods of conflict, women were called upon to ensure what Amy Bentley aptly termed “the icon of the ordered meal.” In Eating for Victory: Food Rationing and the Politics of Domesticity (1998), Bentley blended anthropological and sociological theories with an investigation of American expectations of food during the Second World War. Using government documents, nutritional information disseminated during the war, and other sources of iconography, she shows how the numerous sources of prescriptive ideals of female domestic roles, including that of black servants, reinforced a sense of urgency around meal provision. Bentley’s example became a model for the burgeoning area of feminist food studies (Avakian and Haber, 2005). Later works attempted to trace the meanings and impact of housekeeping literature, cookbooks, and advertisements on the population, particularly women. Mary McFeeley (2000) and Sherrie A. Inness (2001) reconstructed the ways in which a particular cultural model of female activity in the kitchen became normative in the twentieth-century United States.

European studies are more likely to investigate the relationship between gender, food provision, and social class. An early work of history that focused as much on power relations as food provision itself was Judith M. Bennett’s Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England: Women’s Work in a Changing World, 1300–1600 (1996), a fair reminder that cultural food history has been flourishing as a subset of women’s history for some time. In examining motherhood in East London, Ellen Ross examined the particular ways that poor women managed household resources in order to feed children (Ross, 1993). Within European food studies circles of a later date, attempts to track the diffusion of distinctive food cultures, identified by time periods and regions, have inevitably revealed the central role of women (Oddy and Petráňová, 2005). The intersection of anthropology and history continues to enhance the analysis of issues of power invested in food production and consumption (Counihan and Kaplan, 1998).

The modern state has intervened in critical ways in matters relating to provisioning, whether owing to colonialism, war, or the welfare state. Cultural historians of food have found fertile material for analysis in the growth of state agencies and bureaucracies. The ideologies of capitalism, socialism, and communism provide contexts in which programs relating to food provision have flourished or foundered in the past two centuries. Studies of the Irish famine, which locate their origins in political economy, yet also extend the analysis to social and cultural contexts, remain an important part of the narrative of modern Western European history (Clarkson and Crawford, 2001). More recently, James Vernon has offered a bold analysis of the several ways in which hunger – whether defined as malnourishment or economic deprivation – intersected with humanitarian drives to mobilize against what were seen as detrimental features of modernity (Vernon, 2007). Wartime policies have offered historians and writers a plethora of opportunities to discuss how food distribution and shortages revealed the everyday workings of business and society (Davis, 2000; Zweiniger-Bargielowska, 2011; Collingham, 2011).

The power of modernity to construct food commodities with characteristics distinctly new and often alienated from their natural origins has created a flourishing subset of cultural histories. Distinct from popular commodity treatments, which often claim credit for changing the path of world history, cultural histories of food commodities aim to construct a context that is either deep (within one particular area of culture) or carefully delineated across space (usually according to a particular pathway of global trade). From a cultural perspective, commodity histories have revealed the ways in which consumers adopted products in ways that made them distinctly their own, according to time and place. The imaginative power of spices is at the heart of medieval historian Paul Freedman’s recent study (Freedman, 2008). In the more modern case of canned food, cultural histories have shown how enlisted soldiers became accustomed to food that was of little interest to finicky consumer markets before the war, as in early twentieth-century France (Bruegel, 2002). Certainly the advertising industry joined in making certain products like milk more appealing to a broad public, as E. Melanie DuPuis has shown (DuPuis, 2002). The example of milk also reveals how cultural orientations, whether rooted in mythology, medicine, or science, can determine the power of a product to conjure up prevailing images of natural goodness and health (Valenze, 2011).

Most survey courses covering the cultural history of food necessarily find that certain key products demand attention: maize, meat, rice, milk, and beer reveal key transformations taking place in the provisioning of food on a large scale. Sydney Watts’s recent treatment of meat in eighteenth-century Paris offers a fine example of cultural history built around one commodity (Watts, 2006). Thematic approaches like that of Susanne Freidberg’s Fresh: A Perishable History (2009) can be illuminating. Accounts relying simply on technology tend to replicate models of modernization theory, but cultural history offers a way out of this trap by revealing the tensions and contradictions of modernizing trends.

Agriculture, the land, and the environment

Health, the body, and the senses

Migration of food and people

9
The cultural history of food

Historical background of studies in the cultural history of food

Research methodologies and theoretical approaches

Avenues for future research

How to get started

Key reading

Bibliography

9The cultural history of food

Historical background of studies in the cultural history of food

Research methodologies and theoretical approaches

Avenues for future research

Agriculture, the land, and the environment

Health, the body, and the senses

Migration of food and people

How to get started

Key reading

Bibliography

9
The cultural history of food