Birth of the modern diet.

Journal of Interdisciplinary History of Ideas, 2015

A set of paradoxes lay at the heart of early modern European culinary experiences. The food culture of the period can be understood as perpetually torn between pressures to maintain continuity in the face of revolutionary changes as well as being divided between common cosmopolitan tastes shared by European elites across the continent and a growing sense of urgency behind defining national differences in terms of rival national cuisines. On the one hand, the cosmopolitan intellectual culture of humanism struggled to maintain and revive the culinary and dietetic legacies of classical antiquity. On the other hand, the ‘modern’ pressures for change were irresistible, particularly as access to, and knowledge of, new foods and new cooking techniques increased. This chapter explores these paradoxes of early modern food culture by examining carefully the two most important influences on European understandings of food between the age of Columbus and the age of the French Revolution: humanism and mercantilism. This chapter also explains the rise of a new culinary aesthetic in early modern Europe (c. 1500- c. 1800). It describes the transition from medieval and renaissance culinary ideal of 'intensive‘ flavouring through sugars and spices of a few select dishes to a more expansive early modern and enlightenment culinary aesthetic of 'extensive‘ spicing of a wider variety of new foods. This transformation in taste was part of a wider European cultural revolution that occurred in the wake of humanist neo-classicism and the expansion of European trading networks in Asia and the Atlantic world. While this post-renaissance cultural revolution had its origins in the late fifteenth and sixteenth-centuries, its impact on European taste was not fully felt until the mid-seventeenth century.

Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 2005

European Journal of Food, Drink, and Society, 2022

Book review of The Literature of Food: An Introduction from 1830 to the Present, by Nicola Humble, London: Bloomsbury Academic, Hardback 2020, 368pp., ISBN 978-0- 8578-5455-1; Paperback 2020, 288 pp., ISBN 978-0-8578-5456-8.

2012

2016

This number of our Journal is again a special, thematic issue, that brings to our readers the results of the Call on “Gastronomy and Revolution”, that we announced in 2014, and of the 2015 Seminar that followed the Call. In these few pages, we would like to provide a brief introduction to the theme of the issue.

This paper introduces the special issue of Food & History, which is the product of a two-day colloquium that was organised in December 2010, aiming at closing a large-scale research project. This investigation questions whether food (and if so, to what extent) serves as a reliable proxy for measuring rough and more subtle social hierarchies. Three themes have been considered, which this paper presents and situates in a broader context: elite cuisine, middle-class shopping for food, and bourgeois eating out.

2007

Explores the post-1945 big and small changes in food throughout the world