History of food

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The history of food has been a subtopic explored in economic and social history.

United States and Canada

Ethnic foods

Immigrants from Europe 1840-1910 all had experienced hunger in their countries of origin. Irish, Italians, and Eastern European Jews looked at America as a place where food was abundant and available to all. The prospect of improving their limited, sometimes meager, diets was a major "pull" factor in their decision to emigrate to America. The new land fully delivered on that promise: Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants enjoyed a better, richer, more varied diet in the United States than they ever did in the past. The abundant availability of food significantly shaped subjective and collective identities. On the one hand, it helped redefine immigrants into free consumers in a single democratic market. In this perspective, the abundance of food that immigrants encountered in America function as a shaping element in a common American culture. On the other, these dietary revolutions made the construction of private and public ethnic rituals possible and thus played an important role in the parallel processes of “ethnicization” of immigrant groups.[1]

Diner (2001) shows that Italian immigrants created a symbolically lush Italo-American food culture based on their memories of crushing poverty and landlord exploitation in peasant Italy, while the Irish, whose ethnic memory linked colonialist starvation to collective identity, did nearly the opposite, eating because they must but refusing to elevate food to any sort of iconic status (such symbolization was reserved for hunger).

While sharing with other immigrants the deep impress of American material abundance, a conspicuous feature of which was a variety of protein-rich meals, eastern European Jews differed on account of the dense religious significance that centuries of halakic existence had imparted to their foodways. Diner (2001) depicts the sanctification of food in the shtetl, based on scriptural and rabbinic sanctions for eating well. Jewish political activism sometimes centered on food; witness the famous kosher meat protests of the turn of the century and labor struggles within the Jewish food industry. By 1929 waiters' unions controlled roughly eight hundred restaurants in New York City. When bakers, poultry handlers, and other food-industry employees went on strike, consumers overwhelmingly sided with the workers. Conflicts emerged between "experts" such as nutritionists and social workers and immigrant housewives, who were criticized for their unenlightened cookery. Immigrant Jewish women flocked to cooking classes, demonstrating their anxieties and aspirations about food and its Jewish and American meanings.[2]

Ethnic entrepreneurs--such as the Swedish immigrant Carl Swanson of TV dinner fame and the Italian immigrant Hector Boiardi who morphed into Chef Boyardee--developed national brands that, lacking any clear ethnic markers. Businessmen whose products had no clear ethnic identity (Fleischmann's margarine) or who themselves had no connection to the ethnicity of the food they purveyed (such as the German immigrant William Gebhardt who developed a brand of Mexican foods) played key roles in the spread of ethnic foods to grocver stores consumers nationwide. The separation of ethnicity from entrepreneurship found its most influential expression in the fast foods of the late twentieth century--with Ray Kroc's Czech ancestry having no visible impact on the nature of McDonald's Egg McMuffin. [3]

Historiography

In the 21st century the history of food began attracting more scholarly attention. Two book series appeared, Food in American History series by Greenwood Press, and Arts and Traditions of the Table: Perspectives on Culinary History series by Columbia U. Press.

See also

Bibliography

  • Achaya, K. T. Indian Food: A Historical Companion. Oxford U. Press, 1994. 322 pp.
  • Anderson, E. N. The Food of China Yale U. Press, 1988. 263 pp.
  • Ashkenazi, Michael and Jacob, Jeanne. Food Culture in Japan. Greenwood, 2003. 207 pp.
  • Belasco, Warren and Scranton, Philip, ed. Food Nations: Selling Taste in Consumer Societies. Routledge, 2002. 288 pp.
  • Bonanno, Alessandro et al., ed. From Columbus to ConAgra: The Globalization of Agriculture and Food. U. Press of Kansas, 1994. 294 pp.
  • Burnett, John. England Eats Out: A Social History of Eating Out in England from 1830 to the Present. Harlow, England: Pearson Educ., 2004. 363 pp.
  • Cathie, John. The Political Economy of Food Aid. St. Martin's, 1982. 200 pp.
  • Chetley, Andrew. The Politics of Baby Foods: Successful Challenges to an International Marketing Strategy. St. Martin's, 1986. 189 pp.
  • Cwiertka, Katarzyna and Walraven, Boudewijn, ed. Asian Food: The Global and the Local. Richmond, England: Curzon, 2002. 190 pp.
  • Dunmire, William W. Gardens of New Spain: How Mediterranean Plants and Foods Changed America. U. of Texas Press, 2004. 375 pp.
  • Evans, Lloyd T. Feeding the Ten Billion: Plants and Population Growth. Cambridge University Press (1998).
  • Farquhar, Judith. Appetites: Food and Sex in Postsocialist China. Duke U. Press, 2002. 341 pp.
  • Federico, Giovanni. Feeding the World: An Economic History of World Agriculture, 1800-2000.Princeton U. Press, 2005. 388 pp.
  • Fernández-Armesto, Felipe. Near a Thousand Tables: A History of Food. Free Press, 2002. 258 pp.
  • Ferguson, Priscilla Parkhurst. Accounting for Taste: The Triumph of French Cuisine. U. of Chicago Press, 2004. 258 pp.
  • Fletcher, Nichola. Charlemagne's Tablecloth: A Piquant History of Feasting. St. Martin's, 2005. 256 pp.
  • Fussell, Betty. The Story of Corn. U. of New Mexico Press, 2004. 356 pp.
  • Glants, Musya and Toomre, Joyce, eds. Food in Russian History and Culture. Indiana U. Press, 1997. 304 pp.
  • Greenspoon, Leonard J. and Simkins, Ronald A., ed.; Shapiro, Gerald. Food and Judaism. Creighton U. Press, 2005. 345 pp.
  • Kiple, Kenneth F. and Ornelas, Kriemhild C., ed. The Cambridge World History of Food. 2 vol. Cambridge U. Press, 2000. 1958 pp.
  • Long, Lucy M., ed. Culinary Tourism. U. Press of Kentucky, 2004. 306 pp.
  • Ochoa, Enrique C. Feeding Mexico: The Political Uses of Food Since 1910. Scholarly Resources, 2000. 267 pp.
  • Oddy, Derek J. From Plain Fare to Fusion Food: British Diet from the 1890s to the 1990s. Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell & Brewer, 2003. 269 pp.
  • Paarlberg, Robert L. Food Trade and Foreign Policy: India, the Soviet Union, and the United States. Cornell U. Press, 1985. 266 pp.
  • Rebora, Giovanni. Culture of the Fork: A Brief History of Food in Europe. Columbia U. Press, 2001. 196 pp.
  • Spencer, Colin. British Food: An Extraordinary Thousand Years of History. Columbia U. Press, 2003. 416 pp.
  • Super, John C. and Wright, Thomas C., eds. Food, Politics, and Society in Latin America. U. of Nebraska Press, 1985. 261 pp.
  • Toussaint-Samat, Maguelonne. A History of Food. Basil Blackwell, 1992. 801 pp.
  • Wheaton, Barbara Ketcham. Savoring the Past: The French Kitchen and Table from 1300 to 1789. U. of Pennsylvania Press, 1983. 341 pp.
  • Zuckerman, Larry. The Potato: How the Humble Spud Rescued the Western World. Faber & Faber, 1998. 304 pp.


United States and Canada

  • Arnold, Eleanor, ed. Feeding Our Families: Memories of Hoosier Homemakers. (Memories of Hoosier Homemakers series.) Indianapolis: Indiana Extension Homemakers Assoc., 1983. 153 pp.
  • Audet, Bernard. Se Nourrir au Quotidien en Nouvelle-France [Everyday eating habits in New France]. Quebec: Editions GID, 2001. 367 pp.
  • Bentley, Amy. Eating for Victory: Food Rationing and the Politics of Domesticity. U. of Illinois Press, 1998. 238
  • Charlton, Mark W. The Making of Canadian Food Aid Policy. McGill-Queen's U. Press, 1992. 242 pp.
  • Denker, Joel. The World on a Plate: A Tour through the History of America's Ethnic Cuisine. Westview, 2003. 196 pp.
  • Diner, Hasia R. Hungering for America: Italian, Irish, and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration. Harvard U. Press, 2001. 292 pp.
  • Gabaccia, Donna. We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans Harvard University Press, (1998). 278 pages.
  • Goodwin, Lorine Swainston. The Pure Food, Drink, and Drug Crusaders, 1879-1914. McFarland, 1999. 352 pp.
  • Levenstein, Harvey. Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America (1993)
  • Levenstein, Harvey. Revolution at the Table: The Transformation of the American Diet (1988).
  • McLean, Alice L. Cooking in America, 1840–1945. (Greenwood, 2006. xxx, 194 pp. isbn 0-313-33574-5.)
  • McWilliams, James E. A Revolution in Eating: How the Quest for Food Shaped America. (Arts and Traditions of the Table: Perspectives on Culinary History series.) Columbia U. Press, 2005. 386 pp.
  • Oliver, Sandra L. Food in Colonial and Federal America. Greenwood, 2005. 230 pp. (Food in American History series.)
  • Parkin, Katherine J. Food Is Love: Food Advertising and Gender Roles in Modern America. U. of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. 296 pp.
  • Smith, Andrew F. The Turkey: An American Story. (University of Illinois Press, 2006. xxii, 224 pp. isbn 978-0-252-03163-2.)
  • Smith, Andrew F. Peanuts: The Illustrious History of the Goober Pea. U. of Illinois Press, 2002. 234 pp.
  • Smith, Andrew F. Pure Ketchup: A History of America's National Condiment. Smithsonian Inst. Press, 2001. 242 pp.
  • Stavely, Keith W. F. and Fitzgerald, Kathleen. America's Founding Food: The Story of New England Cooking. U. of North Carolina Press, 2004. 396 pp.
  • Williams, Susan. Food in the United States, 1820s–1890. (Greenwood, 2006. xvi, 240 pp. isbn 0-313-33245-2.)
  • Witt, Doris. Black Hunger: Soul Food and America. U. of Minnesota Press, 2004. 292 pp.

  1. Diner (2001) p. 229
  2. Diner (2001) pp 209, 216
  3. Gabaccia (1998)