Food History (Routledge Studies in Modern History)

This pioneering book elevates the senses to a central role in the study of food history because the traditional focus upon food types, quantities, and nutritional values is incomplete without some recognition of smell, touch, sight, hearing, and taste.

Eating is a sensual experience. Every day and at every meal the senses of smell, touch, sight, hearing, and taste are engaged in the acts of preparation and consumption. And yet these bodily acts are ephemeral; their imprint upon the source material of history is vestigial. Hitherto historians have shown little interest in the senses beyond taste, and this book fills that research gap. Four dimensions are treated:

• Words, Symbols and Uses: Describing the Senses – an investigation of how specific vocabularies for food are developed.

• Industrializing the Senses – an analysis of the fundamental change in the sensory qualities of foods under the pressure of industrialization and economic forces outside the control of the household and the artisan producer.

• Nationhood and the Senses – an exploration of how the combination of the senses and food play into how nations saw themselves, and how food was a signature of how political ideologies played out in practical, everyday terms.

• Food Senses and Globalization – an examination of links between food, the senses, and the idea of international significance. Putting all of the senses on the agenda of food history for the first time, this is the ideal volume for scholars of food history, food studies and food culture, as well as social and cultural historians.

Putting all of the senses on the agenda of food history for the first time, this is the ideal volume for scholars of food history, food studies and food culture, as well as social and cultural historians.

Sylvie Vabre is Associate Professor in Modern History at Toulouse Jean Jaures University, France. She is President of the International Commission for Research into European Food History. Her PhD, Le sacre du roquefort – l’émergence d’une industrie agroalimentaire fin XVIIIe siècle–1925, was published in 2015. Her researches and teaching are dedicated to consumer history, business history and the history of local food productions.

Martin Bruegel is an historian at the Institut de la Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement (INRAE), Centre Maurice-Halbwachs, Paris, France. He wrote Farm, Shop, Landing. The Rise of a Market Society in the Hudson Valley (2002) and edited A Cultural History of Food in the Age of Empire (2016).

Peter J. Atkins is Emeritus Professor of Geography at the University of Durham, UK. His principal interest over several decades has been food history, with particular reference to perishable foodstuffs. He is the author of Liquid Materialities: a History of Milk, Science and the Law (2010) and A History of Uncertainty: Bovine Tuberculosis in Britain, 1850 to the Present (2016).