Review essay: food and history.

Historians of food usually find it necessary to explain the significance of their subject. Lest the uninitiated think that food is simply planted, harvested, processed, transported, sold, and consumed, readers are alerted to the many and complex roles that food plays in human society. For the most enthusiastic, food is the ideal cultural symbol that allows the historian to uncover hidden levels of meaning in social relationships and arrive at new understandings of the human experience. The tug of cultural anthropology and sociology is strong here, and underscores food as symbol and metaphor, a cultural numerator essential to the human equation.

The transformation of food from a marginal subject of interest to a few agricultural historians to one recognized for its potential for exploring new dimensions of the past is now almost complete. A generation ago, propelled by the hope for a new direction for the discipline, the Annales. E. S. C. published a series of articles on food and nutrition, many of them concentrating on diets and using rations as evidence, that staked out the new terrain. (1) Much of this work drew inspiration and direction from still earlier studies, most long since forgotten. (2) From that point food studies began to gather strength and momentum, pushed along by an occasional best seller that drew an immediate and widespread following, such as Alfred Crosby's The Columbian Exchange. (3) These early efforts established a framework for food history, and a growing recognition of its legitimacy as a field of study.

As the field has grown, it has become more specific and particular, and at the same time more general and comprehensive. Research criss-crosses time and space, race and class, society and culture, all with the aim of explaining and interpreting the not always clear meaning of food. This gives the field energy, but makes it difficult to summarize. Instead of an attempt at summarization, the following essay first discusses selected recent publications on food, concentrating on those that can serve as examples of the range of scholarship. It then describes the types of evidence and the themes and problems common to most of the research, emphasizing those that have the most promise for future research. It concludes with some generalizations on the present state of food and historical studies.

I

Three recent and very ambitious publications go a long way toward summarizing the current state of scholarship. All three are significant in their own right, and will long serve the scholarly community. They are indispensable for those interested in the history of food.

Food. A Culinary History from Antiquity to the Present is the English translation of a work first published in French under the direction of Jean-Louis Flandrin and Massimo Montanari in 1996. (4) Albert Sonnenfeld did a fine job editing the English translation and imposing a uniformly smooth presentation. The result is an achievement of some forty essays, beginning with antiquity and carrying forward into the twentieth century. Taken together the essays give a good sense of the rhythms of food history through time, largely due to Flandrin and Montanari's introductions to each section of the book. With titles such as "The Humanization of Eating Behaviors," "Food Systems and Models of Civilization," and "Romans, Barbarians, Christians: The Dawn of European Food Culture," they give a direction and contextual richness to studies of diet, health, cooking, manners, social structure, food diffusion, production and distribution and much more. One difficulty with this approach is that some of the essays are so short t hat they lack introductions and conclusions, and fail to adequately develop their themes. Others lack balance, and in a few cases resort to a mere listing of foods. Furthermore, the book almost ignores the Americas, Africa, and Asia.

Two other publications aim at more comprehensive contributions. Alan Davidson's The Oxford Companion to Food and Kenneth E Kiple and Kriemhild Cornee Omelas' The Cambridge World History of Food share some similarities but are products of different traditions and will ultimately find different audiences. (5) Alan Davidson, writing as he hopes in the tradition of Alexandre Dumas' Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine, has created a work of scope, style, and utility. Some 2,650 entries, starting with aardvark and ending with zucchini, range from brief descriptions to long botanical and historical discussions.

For the historian The Oxford Companion to Food has two advantages. First, it gives precise, usually accurate (some mistakes are bound to enter into a work of this magnitude, such as the assertion that beer was only introduced into Mexico in the nineteenth century, or that the Arabs conquered Spain in the seventh century) descriptions of the development of foods and foodways. As an example, the entry "Culinary Mythology" debunks the belief that spices were used to camouflage the taste of rancid meat (the same point is made in the entry "Spice Trade"), a widely disseminated bit of misinformation. These accounts fall short in comparison to Flandrin's carefully constructed analysis of the spice trade in Food. A Culinary History from Antiquity to the Present, but they arrive at many of the same conclusions. The longer articles give more detailed descriptions of historical change, and do demonstrate the many different food traditions that enrich the human tradition with studies of "Byzantine Cookery," "Classical Gr eece," Classical Rome, "Inca Food," and the like.

Second, are the hundreds of quick references to food topics. In addition to expected entries on basic food stuffs, readers can find summaries of German cheeses, oatcakes, culinary terminology, and just about everything else related to food. Fermented and distilled beverages are exceptions. The brief entries on beer and wine (they do not appear in the general index), and the omission of most of the world's alcoholic beverages -- despite Davidson's declaration that he does not drink wine -- are inexcusable in a work of this scope. As some research suggests, beer might have preceded bread making, and was thus the indispensable first step in the rise of ancient civilizations. So much of history is related to beer, wine, and distilled beverages that readers will be disappointed in these omissions.

The Cambridge World History of Food (in the interest of disclosure I mention that I have contributed to this work) goes beyond the Oxford Companion in breadth and depth. The work culminates decades of inquiry into the biological dimensions of the past, and is the direct offspring of Kiple's The Cambridge World History of Human Disease. Explicit in the editors' approach is an analysis of the diffusion of food through space, and the ultimate globalization of foods and foodways. This in turn depends on culture, technology, and politics, all of which figure into the essays. These questions are suborned to those about health, "which appears in none of our titles but is -- either explicitly or implicitly -- the subject of every chapter that follows and the raison d'etre for the entire work." (6)

The comprehensiveness of the study makes it unique in the historiography of food. Part I, "Determining What Our Ancestors Ate," offers bioanthropolgical explorations of the diets and lives of early humans, with several of the chapters emphasizing that hunters and gatherers had better diets than the sedentary cultures that followed. Part II presents syntheses of botanical, historical, and medical knowledge of everything from amaranth to yaks. Part III studies many of the liquids important to diet and culture. The chapter on "Tea" by John H. Weisburger and James Coiner is representative of the breadth of the essays. After a discussion of the botanical and processing characteristics of tea, they analyze the history of tea drinking, first in China, Japan, and India, and then other parts of the world. They follow with a discussion of the most recent findings on tea and health, and then conclude with recommendations for preparing tea. For the food researcher, little more could be asked. Part IV moves to a discussio n of vitamins, other nutrients, deficiency diseases, and food disorders. Even here, most of the articles probe carefully into the cultural and historical dimensions of their subjects. Heather Munro Prescott's "Anorexia Nervosa," for example, summarizes the class, cultural, and ethnic assumptions about anorectics, and concludes that "the standard image of anorexia nervosa as a privileged white girl's disease is increasingly being called into question." (7) The essays in Part V approach the history of food regionally, often shifting the emphasis from the nutritional and medical to the cultural and historical. Part VI analyzes questions of nutrition and mortality, stature, and health, and related aspects of food and life, such as food taboos and fads. Part VII discusses food policy, with many interesting contributions on the background of subsidies, interventions, and recommended daily allowances. Finally, Part VIII is a dictionary of food plants that provides balanced entries on the biological and cultural prop erties of plants, in addition to synonyms for their names. All is made accessible by a subject index that runs for 152 pages. The result is a work essential for those interested in food, health, and the human experience.

Though more modest in length, Raymond Grew's Food in Global History deserves mention along with the above works. It hangs together by the efforts of the individual authors to go beyond the uniqueness of their particular story and search for broader patterns of change. Thus Alex McIntosh's "The Family Meal and Its Significance in Global Times" extends from the history of the meal to discussions of labor divisions, child rearing practices, and parenting styles, and Warren Belasco's "Food and Counterculture: A Story of Bread and Politics" argues that countercuisine was the building block for challenges to an elaborate set of "hegemonic" relationships that determined much of western culture. (8) Given the abilities of Grew and his own carefully stated framework for a world history of food, the success of these essays is not surprising. (9)

More focused in time and space are works such as Muysa Glants and Joyce Toomre's Food in Russian History and Culture, a collection emphasizing the connections between food and artistic and spiritual life, and Martha Carlin and Joel T. Rosenthal's Food and Eating in Medieval Europe, essays devoted mainly to England and France with a concentration on interpreting the problems of the production and consumption of food. (10) The dozens of essays in these collections offer much that is new and revealing about food.

Most single-author works have difficulty matching the breadth of the edited works, but not Phyllis Pray Bober's Art, Culture, and Cuisine. Ancient and Medieval Gastronomy. She believes that every time period and culture expresses modes and manners that give it a unique identity, and that the study of cuisine offers a good opportunity for understanding this identity. Using evidence from art, archaeology, and written records, she tries "to peel back as many layers of meaning as possible, using various methods appropriate to different epochs in my diachronic approach." (11) She moves from the scholarly to the practical, arguing that "environmental degradation, loss of biological diversity and problems of feeding the world's expanding population may all be addressed in the long run by wider dissemination of the story of humankind's imagination and creativity in uniting the body's nutritional demands with the spirit's joys of the table." (12) Bober's book reflects her understanding of early cuisine, her passion fo r the kitchen, and her concern for the future of the planet. It is a graceful and elegant book by a scholar who has an eye for both detail and general trends that combines sound scholarship, recipes, and a coffee table appearance. It is appealing to look at and fun to read.

Most recent studies are more focused in the questions that they ask, though they often range widely across time and space. For a good example of squeezing the most out of limited evidence, read Peter Garnsey's tightly argued Food and Society in Classical Antiquity that attempts to use "the universal activities of food and eating as a way of clarifying the distinctive nature of Graeco-Roman society and culture." (13) Alongside of monographs such as Garnsey's that are aimed at a scholarly audience, there are expanding efforts to write more popular histories of food. Two examples will suffice. Andrew Dalby tells the tale--and he tells it well--of Dangerous Tastes. The Story of Spices, a history of places, spices, and the ways in which spices gradually became parts of global diets. (14) Diane M. Spivey takes a different approach in The Peppers, Cracklings, and Knots of Wool Cookbook, a search for political and cultural meaning in food that attempts to correct the "insensitivity and blatant misinformation" about t he history of African cuisines. (15) Works such as these try to straddle the divide between the interests of the academic community and the general public, a stretch that is tough under the best of circumstances.

II

The imaginative use of evidence and new questions about its meaning have led to the analysis of deeply rooted social habits that are related in one way or another to food. Four themes in particular seem to embrace much of the discussion: diffusion, "other," cuisine, and nutrition. When these themes are analyzed as patterns of behavior that transcend time and space, they give blueprints for interpreting the architecture of food and society. Before examining these themes, it is worthwhile to give a few examples of some of the more interesting types of evidence.

Evidence. Constance Hieatt introduces the reader to the problems of interpreting recipes and the types of mistakes resulting from a misreading. The belief that medieval English meals lacked brandy and macaroni, and that gingerbread was actually a type of hard candy, not a sweetened bread or cake, are problems of transcription and translation, and the failure to understand how recipes changed through time. (16) The household records of Humbert II of Viennois (1333-1349) provide another example of what could be called cookbook exegesis. As Bruno Laurioux says in his study of medieval cookery "if historians are to interpret cookbooks correctly, they must first carefully examine textual traditions and separate the various layers of each manuscript" (17) When these recipes are placed in the context of household accounts, they illustrate broader social patterns. In England the Acton manor house of Alice de Bryene served 16,500 meals during one year in the early fourteenth century. Who was eating with Alice? Not jus t social guests, but members of the family, workers on the estate, and members of the church. "The daily dinners at Acton manor reinforced this sense of mutual dependency; food was the tie that bound them all." (18)

Literature and painting offer other insights. For examples of the moral qualities of food, historians can do little better than to examine the food preferences of Chaucer's pilgrims as they go about their journeys in the Canterbury Tales. Thus the Monk, who prefers the very expensive swan to other types of fowl, exhibits sloth, gluttony, pride, and most of the rest of the Seven Deadly Sins. At a more general level, meat consumption was associated with males; a vegetable diet with females, who have a "patient, even abstemious, temperament," in contrast to males. (19) For Russia, the fiction of Dostoevsky describes how food was a "metaphor for illustrating human conflicts in modern life between the sexes, the generations, and the social classes." (20) The harsh and cruel elements of Russian society, especially the drive to dominate and control, fill the imagery of Dostoevsky's novels. Artists use scenes the way that authors use metaphors to illustrate class divisions, political agendas, and cultural sentiments. Among the many telling examples by Musya Glants is the painting by Vasili Perov, "Tea-Drinking in Mytishchi, near Moscow," which depicts a corpulent prelate stuffing his face while a crippled war veteran and a boy dressed in rags plead for food, a moving statement about social inequalities in Russia. (21)

Diffusion. The evidence for studying the diffusion of food and foodways is generally less direct. For early history, the enduring questions are the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture, the rise of grain-based diets, the emergence of cooking, and the complex of social relationships associated with food. Despite the scarcity of sources for interpreting these problems, students of the Neolithic period can state that eating "gradually became a key element of group structure, a mark of identity, and a symbolic means of expressing thought." (22) By the time of the Second Dynasty in Egypt it is possible to talk about types of food, methods of preparation, banquets, dining rooms, kitchen help, and the relationship between social groups and food. (23) Here are the characteristics of food that will preoccupy the historians of all time periods.

Interpetations such as that by Yves Pehaut in "The Invasion of Foreign Foods" push diffusion in a new direction. (24) While invasion is too strong a word, Pehaut does a fine job explaining how the Industrial Revolution and population increases changed the energy needs of Europe. As traditional fats and oils failed to satisfy the new hunger of industry and people, Europe turned to palms, coconuts, and peanuts imported from their colonial possessions, a dependence that continued until the 1960s, when the newly independent former colonies had to compete with the increasing availability of soybean oil.

Most of the diffusion literature concentrates on Europe and the Americas, or on the spices and aromatics that link Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Studies of sub-Saharan Africa are few, and for the most part follow the thinking of Flandrin and Montanari who believe that "it is hard to imagine what the African diet was like before the introduction of American species: that is, without manioc, peanuts, and red pepper." (25) Spivey challenges this interpretation in her study of the diffusion of African foods and cuisines, arguing that "there is compelling evidence that during the most remote periods in history Africans made transatlantic voyages to the Americas for the purpose of trade and exploration. Some records of pre-Columbian African trading expeditions have survived and shed light on the advanced and rich civilizations that flourished on Africa's west coast." (26) There is no need to quibble about when these "remote periods" were, but it would be nice to see the "records." The last word on trans-Atlant ic and trans-Pacific migrations has not been written, but to assert that "migration and trade between the Americas and Africa had made the exchange and transplanting of foodstuffs between the two quite common" lacks verifiable evidence. (27)

Studies of diffusion now emphasize methods of preparation and consumption in addition to food. Claude Fischler uses McDonald's as a case study of the homogenization of eating practices that have swept the world in the last generation. According to Fischler, "in efficient America, the home of Yankee pragmatism, the purpose of eating is above all to aid in the reproduction of labor power with virtually no interruption of the productive process." (28) This is going too far, as Fischler himself recognizes, and has to be tempered by an explanation of the recent rise and success of boutique food enterprises, where everything from beer and coffee to cheese and artisan bread emphasizes quality and taste over convenience and price. Despite this reaction, the industrialization anti commercialization of food have eroded traditional food practices. In addition, as studies of France have made clear, the entry of women into the labor market, the geographical dispersal of families, and the growing number of non-traditional families have all threatened the family meal and the social relationships that depended on it. (29) In such an environment the fast food industry has few serious obstacles, and McDonald's, with its successful combination of sound management and effective use of nutritional universals easily beats the competition. In the words of Fischler, "The softness of hamburgers and buns, the sweet sauce, and the sweet-and-sour ketchup reproduce the taste sensations of childhood, a kind of regression coupled with transgression." (30)

"Other." Whether Big Macs in the United States, chocolate shops in seventeenth-century Spain, or meat in Ancient Rome, the diffusion of food and foodways produced a cultural reaction. Massimo Montanari summarizes much of the thinking about how food as a physical property and a social symbol both divides and unifies. (31) Eating together and preparing foods in special ways separated groups, distinguishing them from others in their own society, and from those beyond. Garnsey provides details from the ancient world, where stereotypes contrasted the sedentary, farming Greeks and Romans with the Scythians of Herodotus and the Celts of Strabo, supposedly uncivilized wanderers, who ate meat and drank milk. A quote from Tacitus on the Fenni of northern Europe illustrates an extreme association of food and barbarism. "So hardy is their way of life that they have no need of fire nor of savory foods but eat the roots of wild plants and the half-raw flesh of any kind of animal whatever, which they put between their thigh s and the backs of their horses and thus warm it a little." (32)

Societies also used the other internally to meet their own needs for cultural markers. Stated another way, as foodways change, perceptions of the relationship between food and society change. Thus the new refined cuisines of the early Hellenistic period called forth memories of earlier, better times. The evidence for this type of interpretation is fragmentary, but the point that ancient societies, like modern ones, used changes in foodways as filters to find or create a vision of the past makes sense.

Food taboos are an extreme method of separation. Historically, the most frequently discussed taboos are those associated with the early Hebrews, whose most famous restrictions forbade the consumption of animals that did not have cloven hooves and did not chew their cud. Interpretations of the functions of this and other dietary restrictions generally agree that they helped to bind several Semitic tribes into a unified group, separating them from other tribes. Interpretations of the reasons for the development of food regulations--usually emphasizing nutrition and hygiene--are not as clear. Jean Soler adds another level of complexity to interpretations by arguing that Hebrew dietary laws conformed to beliefs about God's creation plan. The same explanation applies to the blood taboo, where man was forbidden from eating living creatures, a prohibition that evolved into preparing meat in a ritual manner. (33)

Cuisine. The most successful analyses of the other recognize that food is only one part of a historical matrix that shifts and changes through time. The task for the historian is to capture the change in all of its energy and complexity, a task that requires moving beyond food as metaphor and cultural symbol to a more complete discussion of social structure. Many of the works under consideration here do this, best represented by studies of the Greek symposium, that part of the evening that followed eating and brought together the political and military elite for entertainment, and for serious intellectual and political activities. The convivium had a different function, and was one of the "means that the governing class of Rome perpetuated itself and maintained its hold on society." (34) The public banquet was different still, an occassion that integrated different social groups through celebrations and feasting, much in the same way that Inca rulers used food and drink to create a reciprocal relationship wit h their subjects.

A similar approach analyzes the "manieres de table," the complex of relationships that revolve around the presentation and consumption of food. (35) The table takes center stage as the embodiment of social and cultural trends, all grounded in the economic and political realities of the time. Thus the aristocracies associated with the emerging monarchies of the sixteenth century expressed their power by the food that they ate, and the way that they ate it. In the eighteenth century, bourgeois pretensions challenged the exclusivity of aristocratic food ways, and led to different table manners. Prohibitions such as licking ones fingers would remain in force, but others such as using a knife to cut fish would gradually lose their influence. Out of this tradition grew the family meal, which led to the central role of the woman of the household to manage the meal, and through the meal to insure the strength of the family.

When foodways are interpreted in an extended chronological context, as Bober does, interesting opportunities arise for exploring changes and continuities. Some of the continuities are striking, such as the continued consumption of ful, a flavored bean dish commonly eaten for breakfast in Egypt. The downside of the search for comparisons and continuities is the tendency to overextend, as in suggesting that on the latifundia of ancient Rome, "life must not have been very different from that on pre-Civil War plantations in our Deep South; the diet as least was comparable." (36)

Despite the need for caution in taking the long view, the approach promises much. In "From Dietetics to Gastronomy. The Liberation of the Gourmet" Jean-Louis Flandrin explains the shift from a cuisine based on medicine and dietetics to one based on taste. The transition in France followed the course of the seventeenth century, and by the early eighteenth century taste had liberated itself from the confines of medical tradition to become a metaphor for refinement and beauty. Food preparation itself became an art, and thus the basis for the emergence of gastronomy in the early nineteenth century. (37) Investigation of the diffusion of the concept of taste and the culinary arts lags in many parts of the world, but could emerge at the forefront of the next wave of food studies.

The individual is usually lost in these interpretations of food and social structure. An important exception is Taillevent, the much referred to author of Le Viandier and the chef to Phillipe VI, Charles V, and Charles VI in fourteenth-century France. (38) Taillevent rose from an enfant de cuisine, a mere kitchen helper who spent his days scrubbing and plucking, to supervising the provisioning of the royal household. He died a squire sporting a coat of arms displaying three kitchen pots. Taillevent's life work speaks to the kitchen but also to the social structure of food in the tumultuous years of the fourteenth century.

Nutrition. The best food studies continue to ask basic questions about food availability and nutrition. For the Greco-Roman world, Garnsey concludes that food shortages were common, but at the same time recognizes the difficulties of trying to "demonstrate that malnutrition was the normal condition of large numbers of people in antiquity." (39) The problem as usual is one of evidence, and the emphasis placed on selected aspects of what is known about production systems. The assertion that small producers had more concern for minimizing risk than for maximizing production, with the consequence of marginal production and scarcity, lacks the evidence necessary to use as a nutritional explanation. So does recognition that the lack of state regulation of production and distribution might put urban residents at a disadvantage, forcing them to rely on "euergetism" (the largess of the wealthy) to get through the hard times. More specific evidence comes from Galen's discussion of famine foods, and from skeletal remain s that demonstrate that adults were "prone to disease and malnutrition." (40) Garnsey quotes Galen later on in another context: "All Greeks eat tortoises every day, though they have hard flesh and therefore are difficult to digest, but if you can digest it, it gives a lot of nourishment ..." (41) If Galen can be used as evidence for shortages, he should also be used as evidence for adequate food supplies.

Efforts to say something specific about nutrition, sketchy though they may be, usually make contributions on different levels, and Garsney's work is no exception. He states that the Mediterranean dietary trilogy (grains, vines, olives), so often used by nutritionists and historians to explain the health of Mediterranean peoples, is too simplistic. He argues that pulses were an essential part of the regime as well, and should have strengthed the diet. He also insists on a more careful definition of famine as distinct from shortages. Famines were catastrophic, causing widespread loss of life. Shortages caused suffering but never to the same extent as famines.

Christopher Dyer asks the same questions in a far different place and time. Borrowing from Peter Laslett's The World We Have Lost, he asks "Did the Peasants Really Starve in Medieval England?" The answer is yes, but distinctions have to be made between rich and poor peasants, those on pensions and those not, those with access to other resources and those entirely dependent on food from their plot of land. For the peasantry in general there was seasonal fluctuation in the availability of food, but extreme scarcity and widespread mortality were apparently restricted to the early fourteenth century, especially during the Great Famine of 1315-1318. From that point the demographic balance shifted in favor of the peasantry, and by the end of the century the food situation had improved considerably, to the point that the peasantry began to imitate the foodways of the aristocracy. Portions of meat, fish, and ale increased; roasting and frying made inroads on the traditional cooking technique of boiling; tableware and service moved beyond the rusticity of the past. The end of the century "ushered in an era of cheap and plentiful food ..." (42) How plentiful is still questionable, but Martha Carlin's, "Fast Food and Urban Living Standards in Medieval England," argues that even for the urban poor, there was a thriving industry that served hot meats, vegetables, tarts and other types of food for those without the facilities or resources to cook. (43) James A Galloway in "Driven by Drink? Ale Consumpion and the Agrarian Economy of the London Region, c. 1300-1400" provides additional evidence, though much of it indirect, for an increase in ale consumption in the fourteenth century. (44)

Massimo Montanari pushes the evidence hard, and comes up with a similar conclusion that the "European peasants of the Middle Ages enjoyed a diet that was certainly more balanced than those of other periods, both before and after ..." (45) A balanced diet of cereals, pulses, and meats underlay a stable social and economic system that allowed for population growth, at least until the eleventh century when the clearing of forests began a process of restricting diets to a heavier reliance on grains.

In other parts of the medieval world, the increasing consumption of bread was a stark indicator of changing social status. In Italy, shepherds had to spend upwards of 52 percent of their dietary expenditures on bread, in contrast to overseers who only had to spend 32 percent. The difference was important, since it also reflected differences in clothing, housing, and access to amenities.

Differences in diets had broader philosophical and moral implications. Allen J. Grieco demonstrates how the medieval world clung to the idea of a "Chain of Being" that proceeded from the lowest, the earth, upward through water, air, and fire. (46) The foods represented in different levels of the chain carried properties appropriate for different social groups. The lowest foods produced by the earth were onions and garlics, suitable for the poor, while the highest were fruits, fit for the aristocracy. Here the natural world reinforced the social world in a hierarchy that was easy to explain and defend.

The lack of quantifiable data usually weakens conclusions and assumptions about the quantities of food and drink consumed. Galloway summarizes: "Unfortunately, direct evidence of consumption levels, which might serve to validate such assumptions, is scarce, often ambiguous and usually relates to restricted and probably atypical sections of society. (47) Attempts to understand diets by reducing them to "chief nutritional systems" is one solution, but it usually obscures the diversity within systems and the ways that they overlap and change with time. (48)

The rise of the nation state and the growth of bureaucracies would soon generate types of evidence that make quantification possible. The evidence is unmistakable that bread and other grain foods became staples of the European diet, and that the dependency on grain increased vulnerability to changes in weather and crop diseases. Grain shortages led to hunger and in some cases famine, all now measurable in different ways. Evidence suggests a general decline in the nutritional well-being of Europeans as the dependence on grain increased. Jean-Louis Flandrin demonstrates that "over the course of the eighteenth century, the average height of Hapsburg army recruits apparently decreased, as did that of Swedish conscripts. Moreover, the average height of London adolescents appears to have decreased in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, while that of Germans in the early nineteenth century was significantly less than it had been in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries." (49)

Nutritional questions usually loop back to questions about diffusion, the other, and cuisine. Together, the answers to these questions help to understand how societies have faced the fundamental problems of the production, distribution, and consumption of food.

III

In conclusion, several observations may be useful in understanding the present state of food studies. First, as previously suggested, these studies and questions take food beyond the realm of agricultural and economic history and give it the fuller meaning that it deserves. Many do so by leaning toward cultural explanations, concentrating on the symbolic importance of food items, the cultural patterns that they underscore, and their influence on human behavior.

Second, chronological approaches reminiscent of Braudel's longue duree that search for persistent patterns that transcend the events and passions of the day are particularly valuable. Here the old idea of prehistory, that time "before human beings could record their present or their past" has no useful purpose. (50) Foodways change but not always according to traditional concepts and periodization schemes used by historians. Nevertheless, it is still important to be attentive to mainstream historiography and avoid the reductionism that comes from an overemphasis on one theme or problem. There is a bit of irony here, since many students agree that food, maybe more than most subjects, is interwoven with just about every aspect of life. Separating the strands of food history from other types of history do justice to neither. Even within the camp of food history, the emphasis on cultural symbolism without attention to the political and economic problems of production and consumption oversimplifies the problem. If food studies took a different methodological tack--trying to demonstrate the insignificance of their subject rather than its significance--the results might be different.

Third, students of food in the past are defining their field in ever more ambitious ways. Ellen Messer, et. al., offer a definition of what they call culinary history. "Culinary history studies the origins and development of the foodstuffs, equipment, and techniques of cookery, the presentation and eating of meals, and the meanings of these activities to the societies that produce them." (51) Grew offers another definition: "The history of food can be thought of as beginning with biology and the hard realities of climate, soil, property, and labor; but it continues through social structure, economic exchange, and technology to embrace culture and include a history of collective and individual preferences." (52)

Fourth, with definitions as encompassing as these, the food historian has much to do. Much to do but no clearly defined or widely accepted way to do it. There are no archetypes or colligate concepts that provide unity to the diversity that is food, and that is the way that it should be. Future research on food will benefit from the richness of the works mentioned above, but in all likelihood will go far beyond them in ways that are difficult to predict. My own sense is that the biological and ecological dimensions of food and human behavior represent areas of research that offer great promise when combined with more traditional social and economic approaches.

Fifth, the momentum that is evident in food studies will likely continue. Food magazines, cookbooks, culinary schools, and television chefs are only the most popular manifestations of an interest in the historical and cultural significance of food. Gastronomica. The Journal of Food and Culture by the University of California Press represents the most recent effort to combine the popular and the scholarly interest in food. Public policy at the national and international level aimed at problems of nutrition and food distribution recognizes now more than in the past the value of an historical approach. Historians of food, if they so desired, could inform policy on programs ranging from agricultural production in the Sahel to school lunch programs in Appalachia. With this momentum it should not be long before survey texts in history give food the attention that it deserves.

Food historians have a well-founded enthusiasm for their subject. They convey a sense of freshness and excitement associated with new fields of inquiry, and at the same time a maturity and sophistication born of thinking across traditional disciplinary boundaries. There is little doubt that their future research will continue to enrich the study and teaching of history.

Department of History

Morgantown, WV 26506-6303

ENDNOTES

I wish to thank Peter N. Steams and several anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on this essay.

(1.) Dutch, Swedish, Russian, English, and French soldiers and sailors were among the many groups analyzed in the Annales. E. S. C. in the 1960s.

(2.) Earl J. Hamilton's "Wages and Subsistence on Spanish Treasure Ships," Journal of Political Economy, 37(1929), 430-450, provided one of the earliest models for this type of research. For a discussion see John C. Super, "Spanish Diet in the Atlantic Crossing, the 1570s," Terra Incognitae, 16 (1984), 57-70.

(3.) Alfred W. Crosby, Jr., The Columbian Exchange (Westport, 1972).

(4.) Jean-Louis Flandrin and Massimo Montanari (dirs.), ed. by Albert Sonnenfeld, Food. A Culinary History from Antiquity to the Present (New York, 1999). A comparable work that concentrates on Latin America (with many articles devoted to Mexico) appeared the same year. Janet Long, coord., Conquista y Comida: Consequencias del Encuentro de Dos Mundos (Mexico City, 1996).

(5.) Alan Davidson, The Oxford Companion to Food (Oxford, 1999); Kenneth F. Kiple and Kriemhild Conee Ornelas, The Cambridge World History of Food, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 2000). The dust jackets of The Cambridge World History of Food and Food. A Culinary History demonstrate the enthusiasm for the art of Giuseppe Arcimboldo; the former has "L'Automne" and "Vertumnus" for the insets on the jackets of volumes land II, while the latter has "L'Ete" for its jacket.

(6.) Kiple and Ornelas, Cambridge World History of Food, Vol. I, 1.

(7.) Heather Monroe Prescott, "Anorexia Nervosa," in Kiple and Ornelas, Cambridge World History of Food, Vol. I, 1006.

(8.) Alex McIntosh, "The Family Meal and Its Significance in Global Times," in Raymond Grew (ed.), Food in Global History (Boulder, CO, 1999), 217-239, and Warren Belasco, "Food and the Counterculture: A Story of Bread and Politics," 273-292.

(9.) Raymond Grew, "Food and Global History," in Food in Global History, 1-29,

(10.) Musya Giants and Joyce Toomre (eds.), Food in Russian History and Culture (Bloomington, 1997), and Martha Carlin and Joel T. Rosenthal (eds.), Food and Eating in Medieval Europe, (London, 1998).

(11.) Phyllis Pray Bober, Art, Culture, and Cuisine: Ancient and Medieval Gastronomy (Chicago, 1999), 4.

(12.) Ibid., 11.

(13.) Peter Garnsey, Food and Society in Classical Antiquity (Cambridge, 1999), xii.

(14.) Andrew Dalby, Dangerous Tastes. The Story of Spices (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2000). Works that concentrate on a single food generally have the most success in combining scholarship with narrative appeal. As examples, see Martin Gonzalez de la Vera, Historia del chocolate en Mexico (Mexico City, 1992), Nikita Harwich, Histoire du Chocolat (Paris, 1992),

(15.) Diane M. Spivey, The Peppers, Cracklings, and Knots of Wool Cookbook. The Global Migration of African Cuisine (Albany, 1999), 1.

(16.) Constance B. Hieatt, "Making Sense of Medieval Culinary Records: Much Done, But Much More to Do," in Carlin and Rosenthal, Food and Eating in Medieval Europe, 101-116.

(17.) Bruno Laurioux, "Medieval Cooking," in Flandrin and Montanari, Food. A Culinary History, 297.

(18.) ffiona Swabey, "The Household of Alice de Bryene, 1412-13," in Carlin and Rosenthal, Food and Earing in Medieval Europe, 144.

(19.) Elizabeth M. Biebel, "Pilgrims to Table: Food Consumption in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales," in Carlin and Rosenthal, Food and Eating in Medieval Europe, 23.

(20.) Ronald D. LeBlanc, "An Appetite for Power: Predators, Carnivores, and Cannibals in Dostoevsky's Fiction," in Glants and Toomre, Food in Russian History and Culture, 125.

(21.) Musya Glants, "Food as Art: Painting in Late Soviet Russia," in Glants and Toomre, Food in Russian History and Culture, 218.

(22.) Catherine Perles, "Feeding Strategies in Prehistoric Times," in Flandrin and Montanari, Food. A Culinary History, 29.

(23.) Edda Bresciani, "Food Culture in Ancient Egypt," in Flandrin and Montanari, Food. A Culinary History, 38-45.

(24.) Yves Pehaut, "The Invasion of Foreign Foods," in Flandrin and Montanari, Food. A Culinary History, 457-470.

(25.) Jean-Louis Flandrin and Massimo Montanan, "Introduction. The Early Modern Period," in Flandrin and Montanan, Food. A Culinary History, 358.

(26.) Spivey, The Peppers, Cracklings, and Knots of Wool Cookbook, 93.

(27.) Spivey, The Peppers, Cracklings, and Knots of Wool Cookbook, 87.

(28.) Claude Fischler, "The 'McDonaldization' of Culture," in Flandrin and Montanari, Food. A Culinary History, 539.

(29.) Claudine Mareno, Manieres de table, modeles de moeurs. [17.sup.eme]-[20.sup.eme] siecle (Paris, 1992).

(30.) Fischler, "The 'McDonaldization' of Culture," in Flandrin and Montanari, Food. A Culinary History, 546.

(31.) Massimo Montanari, "Food Systems and Models of Civilization," in Flandrin and Montanari, Food. A Culinary History, 69-78.

(32.) Quoted in Garnsey, Food and Society in Classical Antiquity, 68.

(33.) Jean Soler, "Biblical Reasons: The Dietary Rules of the Ancient Hebrews," in Flandrin and Montanari, Food. A Culinary History, 46-54.

(34.) Massimo Vetta, "The Culture of the Symposium," in Flandrin and Montanari, Food. A Culinary History, 96-105; Garnsey, 138.

(35.) Marenco, Manieres de table.

(36.) Bober, Art, Culture, and Cuisine, 181.

(37.) Jean-Louis Flandrin, "From Dietetics to Gastronomy: The Liberation of the Gourmet," in Flandrin and Montanari, Food. A Culinary History, 418-432.

(38.) Alan S. Weber, "Queu du Roi, Roi des Queux: Taillevent and the Profession of Medieval Cooking," in Carlin and Rosenthal, Food and Eating in Medieval Europe, 145-157.

(39.) Garnsey, Food and Society in Classical Antiquity, 3.

(40.) Ibid., 52.

(41.) Ibid., 83.

(42.) Christopher Dyer, "Did the Peasants Realy Starve in Medieval England?," in Carlin and Rosenthal, Food and Eating in Medieval Europe, 70.

(43.) Martha Carlin, "Fast Food and Urban Living Standards in Medieval England," in Carlin and Rosenthal, Food and Eating in Medieval Europe, 27-51.

(44.) James A. Galloway, "Driven by Drink? Ale Consumption and the Agrarian Economy of the London Region, c. 1300-1400," in Carlin and Rosenthal, Food and Eating in Medieval Europe, 87-100.

(45.) Massimo Montanari, "Production Structures and Food Systems in the Early Middle Ages," in Flandrin and Montanari, Food. A Culinary History, 169.

(46.) Allen J. Grieco, "Food and Social Classes in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy," in Flandrin and Montanari, Food. A Culinary History, 302-312.

(47.) James A. Galloway, "Driven by Drink? Ale Consumption and the Agrarian Economy of the London Region, c. 1300-1400," in Carlin and Rosenthal, Food and Eating in Medieval Europe, 94.

(48.) Antoni Riera-Melis, "Society, Food, and Feudalism," in Flandrin and Montanari, Food. A Culinary History, 258.

(49.) Jean-Lous Flandrin, "Introduction. The Early Modem Period," in Flandrin and Montanari, Food. A Culinary History, 351.

(50.) Bober, Art, Culture, and Cuisine, 15.

(51.) Ellen Messer, et.al., "Culinary History," Kiple and Ornelas, The Cambridge World History of Food, Vol. 2, 1367.

(52.) Raymond Grew, "Food and Global History," in Grew, Food in Global History, 6.