Food: A History [antikvár]

PREFACE The great press baron. Lord Northcliffe, used to tell his journalists that four subjects could be relied on for abiding public interest: crime, love, money and food. Only the last of these is fundamental and universal. Crime is a minority interest, even in the v^^orst-regulated societies. It is possible to imagine an economy without money and reproduction without love but not life without food. Food, moreover, has a good claim to be considered the world's most important subject. It is what matters most to most people for most of the time. Yet food history remains relatively under appreciated. Most academic institutions still neglect it.^ Many of the best contributions to its study are made by amateurs and antiquarians. There is no consensus about how to approach it. For some people, it is all about nutrition and malnutrition, sustenance and sickness; for others, less anxious to avoid condemnation for frivolity, it is essentially about cuisine. Economic historians see food as a commodity to be produced and traded. When it gets to the stage of being eaten, they lose interest. For social historians, diet is an index of differentiation and changing class relations. Cultural historians are increasingly interested in how food nourishes societies as well as individual bodies - how it feeds identities, defines groups. In political history, food is the stuff of tributary relationships and its distribution and management are at the heart of power. The small but gallant and growing band of environmental historians sees food as linkage in the chain of being: the substance of the eco-systems which human beings strive to dominate. Our most intimate contact with the natural environment occurs when we eat it. Food is a subject of pleasure and peril.