THE PRESENT STATE OF FOOD STUDIES
The enlightened decision of the Praemium Erasmianum Foundation to highlight the expanding role of food studies, more specifically food history, in the European and Western cultural firmament recognises both that something has already happened on this particular intellectual frontier and anticipates that more will occur in years to come. To the observer, there is little doubt the pace of change is quickening and might even be approaching critical mass. The intellectual construct of food studies no more than reflects the immense alteration in the public status of food in Europe and overseas: the brain, after all, is maintained by the body. Anneke van Otterloo and Albert de la Bruh?ze have pointed out that the number of restaurants in Holland grew from 19 in 1951 to 2,982 in 1981; while the contemplation of food has penetrated many areas of public taste: the print media, television, film, and even the fine arts. As Roland Barthes has so memorably described, foods have in recent decades increasingly been transformed into more than refreshments or nutrients but into a situation or circumstance: coffee ceases to be merely coffee and becomes a break, a moment to relax, to talk, to interact (Annales: ESC1961). Food has permeated every interstice of life, even life itself. Small wonder, therefore, that there is an increasing number of academics and scholars who are turning to food and cookery as valid objects of their enquiries.
On the other hand, a move towards embracing a subject like food, or even cookery and eating customs, also reflects that process of fission in intellectual activities that began with the demotion of the 'trivium' and 'quadrivium' from their historical status in university curricula. If you can study modern literature, or sociology, or business, why should you not extend this curiosity to topics such as food?
There is already an identifiable line of development in food studies which has been succinctly described by Professor Bruno Laurioux in a recent presentation to the European Institute of Food History (IEHA). In the 18th and 19th centuries, the subject was the province of gastronomes, amateurs to a man (certainly not to a woman), who were principally concerned to excavate historical curiosities and whose approach was resolutely antiquarian. Their achievement should not be dismissed. In England in the 18th century, men like Samuel Pegge and Richard Warner (Antiquitates Culinariae, 1791) preserved and publicised important medieval texts such as The Forme of Cury. In France, Le Grand d'Aussy's Histoire de la vie privée(1782) engaged to our great advantage in researches that had hitherto been considered frivolous. In the later 19th century, substantive progress was made in bibliography, partly as a by-product of philological work. Little by little, as we approach the modern era, there appeared monographs treating the history of a single commodity, foodstuff or beverage. André Simon tackled the history of the English wine trade (1906) as R. Dion was to do with France (Histoire de la vigne et du vin en France, 1959); R. Salaman sketched in the history of the potato (1949); and Heinrich Jacob (Six Thousand Years of Bread, 1944) and Sir William Ashworth (Bread of Our Forefathers, 1928) addressed that most significant foodstuff of Western cultures. However, if you look at the bibliographies of these pioneering works, it is striking how unique were their preoccupations: there simply were very few other people at the time thinking about the same sort of problems.
These problems can be divided into two categories. On the one hand there is food itself: the raw material, its production, its price, its economic impact. On the other, there is what we humans actually did with the food: how eating and drinking might relate to the rest of human activity. It seems broadly true that most early historians, sociologists, anthropologists and other scholars were rarely prepared to accept that a significant proportion of all our lifetimes is spent producing or procuring, then cooking, then ingesting food: that this activity should be accorded equal status with those of politics, warfare, or artistic creation. But then, a similar point can be made about our approach to the history of dress (only lately being given proper consideration, for example in the work of Aileen Ribeiro or Daniel Roche), or the history of sexual relations.
There was a radical reappraisal of historical priorities particularly in France after the Second World War, exemplified in the journal Annales: Économies, sociétés, civilisations which acknowledged the significance of a range of factors affecting the infrastructure of human activity, from food and drink, to biology and human health, and to that untranslatable French term 'mentalités'. Much emphasis was laid on quantification and, through the deployment of material derived from early-modern French archival resources, there were vigorous debates on diet and its nutritional value to various social classes and regions, as well as on levels of consumption. The difficulties of strict statistical comparisons are now more readily admitted than they were at the time, but the methodology had repercussions beyond France, for example in British attempts at assessment of working-class diet in the 18th and 19th centuries which led in turn to the important revisions of Thomas McKeown who claimed the population increases of Victorian England were due not so much to improvements in public health, the orthodoxy of the 1960s, as to much better nutrition (The Modern Rise of Population, 1976).
Irrespective of any problems of interpretation, it was evident that the investigations of French historians that gave rise to regional monographs such as J. Goubert's Beauvais et le Beauvaisis de 1600 ˆ 1730 (1960) or the work of Guy Thuillier on Nevers were changing the parameters of food history. Whereas it had concentrated either on specific commodities or on a more general gastronomic and literary approach, these new studies were unlocking deep reservoirs of manuscript sources that permitted new perspectives. These included the records of local and national government, administrative and statistical, just as a parallel development in Italian and Mediterranean historiography was investigating medieval notarial and court records to the same galvanic effect, for example in the studies by Stouff (Ravitaillement et alimentation en Provence aux XIVe et XVe siècles, 1970), Pinto (L'alimentazione contadina nell'Italia bassomedievale, 1986) or Cortonesi (Terre e signori nel Lazio medioevale, 1988).
Priority has been given here to French historians, perhaps because they seemed most decisively to break with current orthodoxies. But they were only part of a larger drift towards an acceptance that food and the institutions surrounding eating and drinking had much to say to any number of fields of study. Indeed, the fact that it was a matter of broad agreement encouraged the adoption of a multidisciplinary approach. Archaeologists, for example, were perfecting their capacity to identify seeds, bone fragments and other residues of food consumption and thus to extend their analyses of excavated sites to postulate diets and culinary processes as well as agricultural methods or hunting techniques. This has had repercussion not only for ancient history and prehistory, where the written record is sparse or nonexistent, but also for medieval and modern periods where archaeological conclusions can enhance and deepen the results of documentary research. J.M. Renfrew's work on palaeoethnobotany (Palaeoethnobotany: the Prehistoric Food Plants of the Near East and Europe, 1973) is a synthesis of this tendency which has had spectacular results when deployed across large excavations of entire settlements, for instance the cities of York or Winchester in England. Bone analysis, too, has yielded much-needed information from the middens of villages, cities, monasteries and other settlements.
Prehistorians have always recognised the centrality of food and feeding to human existence. They have, after all, less evidence of political or cultural activity to distract them from the obvious. The same might be observed of anthropologists and ethnologists in their study of early or rudimentary social organisation. The consequence of their preoccupations has been both continual revision of our view of human development with diet the determining factor and the articulation of a number of models that have influenced workers in other fields. Claude Lévi-Strauss's culinary triangle has been fitted to cultures far beyond its original application, as has Mary Douglas's structural analysis of foodways in modern Britain. Other structuralists have had their say, for example Jean Soler on the semiotics of food in the Bible, Marvin Harris on food taboos (The Sacred Cow and the Abominable Pig, 1985) or Elizabeth Rozin on the structure of cuisine. Their influence has been strongest on ethnologists and sociologists: the two disciplines that have supplied the most new thinking in modern food studies and food history. Because ethnology and sociology starts out by looking at human interaction at levels below those of political or cultural relations (the preserve of 'high' history) they accepted the need to investigate and explain the fundamentals of our behaviour, not least our food habits. Such models have been reviewed and classified many times, perhaps in search of a single, perfect template that could offer the discipline a single set of methodologies and vocabulary. One such review, by Jeffrey Sobal, Laura Kahn and Carole Bisogni (in SocialScience and Medicine, 1998), proposed a dynamic view of food systems that recognised change and development. Earlier anthropologists and sociologists had successfully grappled with flux and the effects of time, and their work has been central to the integration of the discipline around static description and historical chronology. Norbert Elias (The Civilising Process, 1939, and The Court Society, 1969) sketched in the development of etiquette and manners in Western Europe; K.C. Chang combined an anthropological and historical approach in Food in Chinese Culture (1977), as did Sidney Mintz in his account of the relationship between sugar, political power and slavery (Sweetness and Power, 1985). Jack Goody (Cooking, Cuisine and Class, 1982) ranged more widely across time and space (ancient Egypt, imperial Rome, medieval China, early modern Europe and modern Africa) in a work of 'comparative sociology' that encompassed all aspects of food from processes (growing, allocating, storing and eating) and locales (the farm, the kitchen, the scullery) to the relationship between sophisticated cookery and social organisation. Stephen Mennell deployed sociological methods to look at the similarities and differences between the cuisines of France and England (All Manners of Food, 1985); Johan Goudsblom went back to basics with Fire and Civilisation (1992) just as had A. Kroeber in his discussion of the effects of diet on culture across Europe and Asia in Style and Civilisations (1957). These were all significant works that set parameters of discussion and developed models often deployed to elucidate other circumstances. A modern book that shows the influence of the many strands and models is the general history of cooking by the Australian Michael Symons, A History of Cooks and Cooking, 2001. The tendencies are also apparent, in combination with influences from the world of psychology - Êall contributing to the desire to understand an age's 'mentality', in the work of Piero Camporesi (Il Brodo Indiano, 1990).
Ethnologists, too, were undertaking important projects that extended source materials from the written record to oral testimony, found objects and folklore. The most shining example of this methodology is demonstrated by the successive volumes of the International Commission for Ethnological Food Research that has been holding conferences, mainly in Northern and Eastern Europe, since 1970. Among the scholars whose work has had most effect are numbered Alexander Fenton, with a whole series of books and articles on Scottish food customs, and Nils-Arvid Bringéus whose range can be best sampled in Man, Food and Milieu: A Swedish Approach to Food Ethnology (2001). In developing yet more triangular models for approaching the subject, he defines ethnology as studying humans on the basis of 'a culturally general perspective'.
More specific points of view informed the work of other scholars who were prepared to bring food to their academic table. For them, the foodstuff was the vector of some other historical mechanism than diet and nutrition. They might have zero interest themselves in eating and drinking, nor ever contemplate their subjects within a gastronomic milieu. Thus early economic historians were much exercised by the corn trade without any knowledge of baking or even liking for bread (N.S.B. Gras, The Evolution of the English Corn Market, 1915, or, with regard to bakers, Sylvia Thrupp, A Short History of the Worshipful Company of Bakers, 1933) while later contributions have engaged at several levels with their topic, never ignoring the end-consumer, even if not necessarily allowing it the centre-stage. To stay with the corn trade, Steven Kaplan's studies of 18th-century Paris are model instances (Provisioning Paris: Merchants and Millers in the Grain and Flour Trade in the 18th Century, 1984, and The Bakers of Paris and the Bread Question, 1996). This same engagement may be seen in two other recent French studies: Florent Quellier's Des fruits et des hommes. L'arboriculture fruitière en ële de France (2003), and Reynald Abat's Le grand marché. L'Approvisionnement alimentaire de Paris sous l'Ancien Régime (2002).
These several tendencies have each contributed to a measure of agreement about the possibilities of food history and food studies. Their modes of approach have given people the instruments with which to undertake their own investigations. It is striking that much of our current intellectual preoccupation with food is in fact contingent on other factors than a liking for the raw material or a curiosity about its origins and development. Headline concerns such as globalisation, food adulteration or genetic modification, healthful nutrition and food safety, eating disorders and gender relations, national and sub-national identity have all poured their own prejudices, worries and special interests into the pot of food studies. Some of these are matters of present concern, for instance Marion Nestle's investigations of food politics, Warren Belasco's account in Appetite for Change: How the Counterculture took on the Food Industry (1993) or Eric Schloesser's discussion of the rise of the American hamburger, the fast-food economy and its effect of child nutrition in Fast Food Nation (2001) but the same interests may be given an historical slant in order to understand change over the longer duration. Thus our present fear of food adulteration or toxicity, exemplified in food scares over BSE or 'mad cow disease' through to doubtful chemicals in hitherto blameless mineral waters, has provoked Madeleine Ferrières' historical study Histoire des peurs alimentaires, du Moyen åge ˆ l'aube du XXe siècle (2002), just as the universal preoccupation with national and regional identities - as globalisation and political federalism seem to take root - Êhas spawned a number of historical approaches such as Peter Scholliers' collection of essays (Food, Drink and Identity: Cooking, Eating and Drinking in Europe Since the Middle Ages, 2003) or Jeffrey Pilcher's account of the Mexican experience in Á Que Vivan Los Tamales! Food and the Making of Mexican Identity (1998) or even the major survey of regional and traditional foods that was funded by the European Union under the rubric 'Euroterroirs'. This major assessment had more or less effect on the various contributing states. In France, it was the impetus for the Inventaire du patrimoine culinaire de la France directed by the Conseil National des Arts Culinaires which now stretches to 27 regional volumes and describes many hundreds of ingredients as well as recording local and traditional recipes. In England, it provoked a single volume offering a more authoritative account of the national larder than hitherto available (Traditional Foods of Britain, Laura Mason and Catherine Brown, 1999), and other countries, too, have responded to the stimulus. Such an inventory in Italy, however, will eventually emanate from Slow Food, the pressure group that has taken such a hold in that country and many others.
Slow Food is an instance of the symbiosis of our everyday concerns with the more highfalutin' intellectual efforts of academia. The movement was the result of a desire for greater regional identity and the realisation that food was a useful vector for tourism and trade. It gained impetus with Italian unwillingness to absorb the fast-food culture of Mcdonald's. Now, it actively pursues twin policies of preservation (of traditional food processes and ingredients) and education - with knock-on effects on food studies. The most obvious of these effects is the foundation of a gastronomic university in northern Italy. Alberto Capatti, the editor of the movement's magazine Slow, is also the historian (with Massimo Montanari) of Italian cuisine (La cucina Italiana, 1999), an important book tracing the development of Italian culinary identity.
It must be that echoes of our own concerns with the health-giving properties of diet (and its cosmetic effects too) are detectable in a new-found academic interest in the relationship between medical science and cookery, particularly in the classical, medieval and early-modern periods. Thus classical medical writers such as Galen and Oribasius are being interrogated for their culinary intelligence and European Renaissance literature likewise, for example in Ken Albala's Eating Right in the Renaissance (2001) although Jean-Louis Flandrin early signalled the value of this type of resource in his paper on the same topic delivered in 1979. Of course, this intimate relationship was nowhere more apparent than in ancient China and the work of E.N. Anderson has done much to elucidate the linkage. While present-day diet-books top the best-seller lists, scholars have described the origins of food fads in books such as Hillel's Never Satisfied: a Cultural History of Diets, Fantasies and Fat (1990) just as the clinical conditions that give rise to psychological food disorders have been traced back to the early-modern period and beyond as in Joan Jacobs Brumberg's Fasting Girls: The History of Anorexia Nervosa (1989). Another modern preoccupation with considerable repercussions on food studies is that of the place of women in society. Given the predominant role of women in the kitchen the world over as well as in the processing if not in the entire production of food it seems natural that women's studies and food studies should occasionally be hand in hand. But, just as the male cook often takes the glory, women were never given free rein. In the late 1950s, the Oxford historian Keith Thomas, whose books show the benign influence of anthropological method (for example his Man and the Natural World, 1983), offered a series of lectures on women. They were little attended but were a presage of the flood to come. However, in the main women's studies stay out of the kitchen, often out of the household; thus a synoptic work like Olwen Hufton's history of women in early modern Europe (The Prospect Before Her, 1995) mentions cooking only twice in 600 pages. But women and domestic life were more generally investigated, for instance the French historian Georges Duby was general editor of three important overviews: A History of Private Life, with Philippe Ari?s, 1987-91; Histoire de la France rurale, with A. Wallon, 1973; and A History of Women, with M. Perrot, 1992. Although there have been some sensitive treatments, such as Amanda Vickery's The Gentleman's Daughter: Women's Lives in Georgian England (1998), or Caroline Davidson's A Woman's Work is Never Done (1982), most emphasis has been on the more modern period, for instance with Laura Shapiro's Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century (2001) or Sherrie Inness's Dinner Roles: American Women and Culinary Culture (2001). The role of the genders in cookery book composition and use has also been explored by Gilly Lehmann in her The British Housewife (2003) and Janet Theophano in Eat my Words: Reading Women's Lives Through the Cookbooks They Wrote (2003).
Already it can be seen how extensive is the range of food studies and food history in modern scholarship. And this is merely skirting the crater's rim. To revert to that statistic of the growth in number of Dutch restaurants between 1951 and 1981, it is quite evident that something happened to change our relationship to food and cooking during the 1960s and 1970s, more precisely, to the public image and perception of food. This general change was reflected in scholarly enterprise and it was indeed the 1970s that saw the beginnings of a tremendous collective activity through seminars, colloquies, conferences, symposia and journals devoted to the single topic of food and, more especially, food history. A certain priority should be given to the teaching of the late Jean-Louis Flandrin at the Université de Paris 8 at Vincennes and later at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes, and to important French conferences such as those at the Centre d'Etudes de la Renaissance at Tours in 1979 and the Centre d'Etudes Médiévales at Nice in 1982. But there were many others, including the Oxford Symposium, founded by the Erasmus laureate, Alan Davidson, in 1981, the Australian Symposium of Gastronomy from 1986, the Leeds Symposium from 1986, a conference organised by the Culinary Historians of Boston in 1985, and the series of conferences on Italian food history organised by the association 'Homo Edens'. Ally the proceedings of these gatherings to the increasing number of articles in academic and semi-academic journals that have followed in their wake such as Food and Foodways, now in its tenth year, Food & History, produced by the European Institute of Food History, Gastronomica, from the University of California, and Petits Propos Culinaires, founded also by the late Alan Davidson, and the momentum seems unstoppable.
Conference proceedings and journals, as well as collective volumes like Jean-Louis Flandrin and Massimo Montanari's Histoire de l'alimentation (1996) permitted many individuals to write the articles and short studies that are needed to provide building-blocks for longer works. The bulk of mainstream journals rarely offered much space to the topic and there was a need for new vehicles of expression. You could place an article about diet in The Economic History Review, for instance, but it would have to concentrate on price-movements, not flavour.
When food historians and amateurs of food realised that they could write about what pleased them, rather than fitting it into a preconceived model, they turned overwhelmingly to textual studies of cookery books. Much bibliographic work had been undertaken in the last century, but the emphasis had not been on content, more on publishing history. This interest coincided with the publication in facsimile of early cookery books by small and large publishers in most Western countries, supplying ample raw material for the newly liberated historians. Those periods not blessed with the printed book, the Middle Ages and the Ancient World, none the less were revisited and new editions of significant texts were offered, from Archestratos - the earliest surviving Greek fragments - through to Anthimus - the first post-Roman European text - and on to medieval Arab and Catalan materials as well as the essential medieval resources of Taillevent or The Forme of Cury. This has allowed people such as Marianne Mulon, Bruno Laurioux and J.-L. Flandrin in France, Constance Hieatt, Sharon Butler, Charles Perry and Rudolf Grewe in North America, Barbara Santich in Australia and C. Anne Wilson in Britain to make new connections between cuisines and cultures. Astonishingly, the master-text of the Roman Empire, Apicius, still awaits authoritative treatment.
Much has also been undertaken in respect of printed culinary texts, for example the pan-European early-modern bibliographic work of the Norwegian scholar Henry Notaker. New editions and works of interpretation, led in France by Philip and Mary Hyman, and in Britain by Alan Davidson, Elizabeth David and a generation of 'scholar cooks' allowed a reassessment both from the point of view of the student and of the practical cook. This provoked in its turn an interest in food history.
There are several areas of the subject that have now begun to get proper attention, as well as some which await our attention. With a parallel growth in the sub-disciplines of agricultural history, architectural history and urban history, some aspects of food production and distribution are being looked at independently. Equally, literary and social historians sometimes contemplate the eating experience inasmuch as it impacts on their own researches, just as medical historians are beginning to make judgements about the efficacy or nutritive quality of diet. However, not enough has yet been published on individual or household consumption or household production. The account books of a million landed families, from one end of Europe to the other, need to be ransacked for the information they contain about the food that was actually cooked and consumed (rather than written about) as well as for data on the staff who cooked it. We still do not have a history of the chef or cook in early-modern Europe.
It is fortunate that the growing appetite for living history or historical reconstruction, as well as for museum installations relating to food and domestic life, has caused many of these early recipes to be essayed in conditions approaching those contemporary with the written text. There has been a burst of knowledge about cooking equipment, the operation of open hearths, and artefacts used at the dining-table, and this is feeding back into the more library-based historical research.
The fact of the matter is that food history is hydra-headed and can
be extended to involve almost every aspect of human life. This was part
of its appeal to Alan Davidson: all was grist to the mill.
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