History of food

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

See Cuisine

Europe

Until the 20th century, the peasants and the poor of Europe ate mostly bread (or pasta), supplemented by vegetables and fish. Meat was reserved for special occasions. By the twentieth, per capita consumption of bread had dropped off precipitously due to social and economic modernization and the availability of a wider choice of foods.

World War II

see World War II, Homefront Severe food shortages were systemic throughout Europe during the war, except in Britain (which had an elaborate rationisng system). In Germany memories of the turnip winter of 1917-18 (when people ate turnips because there was so little food) led the government to force occupied countries to ship large supplies of food to Germany. Elsewhere the black market flourished, as farmers secretly sold foods to the cities at prices far higher than allowed.

Communist systems

The Communist systems of Eastern Europe and China privileged industrial workers, at the expense of farmers. Major famines took place in the Russian Ukraine in the 1930s (as the government removed grain from the countryside to force people to move to the ciites), and in China (1959-61).

In Poland after 1945 modernization was accompanied by demands for more meat instead of bread by workers and in time also by the peasants. The new demands on meat production could not be met because of the government's policy of investing in factories, not farms. Increasing the performance of the government was measured by the availablility of meat, and the performance was poor. Fearing mass protests, the Commuist party did not balance the market by raising prices but instead spent its money on growing subsidies to keep food prices lowe. Every attempt to raise price caused grumbling; twice (1970, 1976) the government had to recerse the increases. By 1980 the scale of the imbalance of demand and supply led to the introduction of controls of meat and processed meat products, a system that broke down in 1989, when in view of roundtable talks and rumors about anticipated price increases, the farmers simply ceased selling meat. The final solution was introducing market prices in the summer of 1989. The chronic imbalance of supply and demand can be related to the coexistence of a system of trading and distributing food products that from 1948 was state-owned and subjected to the directives of the Communist ideologues and an agricultural sector comprising private farms and reacted to market stimuli.

After the Communists came to power in 1949 in China, they planned to provide industrial regions with a steady food supply, so they began compulsory delivery of agricultural products in 1953. In 1955-56 collectivization was accelerated. Dissatisfied with the achievements of agriculture, the Chinese leadership endeavored to catch up with the most developed countries. This resulted in the "[[Great Leap Forward]" in 1958, which created large people's communes in the countryside. Home kitchens were destroyed to gforce families to eat in communal dining halls. The result was an unparalleled famine; upwards of thirty million died. Mao Zedong finally change methods and by 1965 the level of agricultural production reached that of the years prior to the "great leap," but the country's population had by then increased by another eighty million. The upheavals of the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76 further damaged agricultural efficiency. The economic reforms initiated by Deng Xiaoping in 1978 were first introduced in agriculture. The return to family-based agriculture greatly increased peasant productivity.

Asia

Japanese farmers as late as the 1950s spent most of their income on rice as their staple diet and on fish and shellfish as subsidiary items. Landowning farmers, with higher incomes, also purchased meat, dairy products, and eggs. By the 1930s both groups had started making small purchases of Western-style "luxury" foods, nontraditional seasonings, and fruits.

United States and Canada

South

The South was pig country. The animals were easy to take care of--they fed themselves on mast in the forest, and came when called. Hogs could be herded and walked to distant markets, providing income for farmers from remote areas. Pork, ham and bacon--fried and covered with molasses--became popular in colonial days for all classes, including slaves and the rural poor. Hog-calling and hog-butchering became a ritual, as did the cooking and eating of barbecued pork. While pork's importance has diminished in the South, the continued popularity of barbecue and barbecue restaurants remains high.

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.

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.

Pizza caught on late and slowly in the United States. The first restaurant appeared in Lower Manhattan in 1905, but the popularity of pizza did not take off until the 1940s. With many changes from the old Italian recipes and interest in the market of returning GI's, by the mid-1950s, pizza was suddenly in fashion. It became a staple in school lunch menus in the 1960s, and with home delivery the cheap, easy-to-eat meal soon became the favorite food of millions of Americans, regardless of ethnicity.

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.

1945-1975

The coming of television into homes starting around 1950s changed dining habits, leading to more informal lifestyles. Families started eating in front of the television set, so dining moved out of the kitchen and dining room. Changes came in food preparation and new cooking and dining equipment. Women's magazines instructed housewives on the best setting and introduced new products, such as vinyl furniture, frozen dinners, tray tables, and plastic dishes.

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

• Agriculture
• Homefront
• Irish Famine

Bibliography

• Davidson, Alan, et al, eds. The Oxford Companion to Food (2nd Ed 2006), 907 pages with 2,650 entries covering the world's foods, seasoning, cuisine, cooking methods, chefs, historical developments, and myths.
• 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.
• Cook, Guy. Genetically Modified Language: The Discourse of Arguments for GM Crops and Food Routledge, 2004 online edition
• 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.
• Garnsey, Peter. Food and Society in Classical Antiquity Cambridge University Press, 1999 online edition
• Glants, Musya and Toomre, Joyce, eds. Food in Russian History and Culture. Indiana U. Press, 1997. 304 pp. excerpt and text search from Amazon.com
• Greenspoon, Leonard J. and Simkins, Ronald A., ed.; Shapiro, Gerald. Food and Judaism. Creighton U. Press, 2005. 345 pp.
• Grew, Raymond. Food in Global History Westview Press, 1999 online edition
• Kaplan, Steven. Good Bread Is Back: A Contemporary History of French Bread, the Way It Is Made, and the People Who Make It (2006) excerpt and text search
• Kaplan, Steven. The Bakers of Paris and the Bread Question, 1700-1775 (1996), 758pp excerpt and text search
• 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. online edition
• Paarlberg, Robert L. Food Trade and Foreign Policy: India, the Soviet Union, and the United States. Cornell U. Press, 1985. 266 pp.
• Pilcher, Jeffrey. Food In World History (2005) excerpt and text search
• Rebora, Giovanni. Culture of the Fork: A Brief History of Food in Europe. Columbia U. Press, 2001. 196 pp.
• Root, Waverley. Food, An Authoritative and Visual History and Dictionary of the Foods of the World. Simon and Schuster, 1980. 602 pp. ISBN 0-671-22589-8
• Shaw, Gareth; Curth, Louise; and Alexander, Andrew. "Selling Self-service and the Supermarket: the Americanisation of Food Retailing in Britain, 1945-60." Business History 2004 46(4): 568-582. Issn: 0007-6791 Fulltext: Ebsco
• Shaw, D. John. The UN World Food Programme and the Development of Food Aid Palgrave, 2001 online edition
• Scholliers, Peter. Food, Drink and Identity: Cooking, Eating and Drinking in Europe since the Middle Ages Berg, 2001 online edition
• Sen, Amartya. Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation Oxford University Press, 1982 online edition
• Simoons, Frederick J. Food in China: A Cultural and Historical Inquiry (1990) excerpt and text search
• 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.
• Toke, Dave. The Politics of GM Food: A Comparative Study of the UK, USA, and EU Routledge, 2004 online edition
• Toussaint-Samat, Maguelonne. A History of Food. Basil Blackwell, 1992. 801 pp.; popular history from perspective of a French chef
• Wheaton, Barbara Ketcham. Savoring the Past: The French Kitchen and Table from 1300 to 1789. U. of Pennsylvania Press, 1983. 341 pp.
• Wilson, C. Anne. Waste Not, Want Not: Food Preservation from Early Times to the Present Day Edinburgh University Press, 1991 online edition
• Zuckerman, Larry. The Potato: How the Humble Spud Rescued the Western World. Faber & Faber, 1998. 304 pp.

United States and Canada

• Abarca, Meredith E. Voices in the Kitchen: Views of Food and the World from Working-class Mexican and Mexican American Women (2006) excerpt and text search
• 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.
• Cinotto, Simone. "Leonard Covello, the Covello Papers, and the History of Eating Habits among Italian Immigrants in New York." Journal of American History 2004 91(2): 497-521. Issn: 0021-8723 Fulltext: History Cooperative and Ebsco
• 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. excerpt and text search
• 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) excerpt and text search
• Levenstein, Harvey. Revolution at the Table: The Transformation of the American Diet (1988). excerpt and text search
• 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.
• Ogle. Maureen. Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer (2007) excerpt and text search
• 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. excerpt and text search
• Smith, Andrew F. ed. The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America (2004), 2 vol, 1584 pages excerpt and text search from Amazon.com
• Smith, Andrew F. The Turkey: An American Story. (University of Illinois Press, 2006. xxii, 224 pp. isbn 978-0-252-03163-2.) excerpt and text search
• Smith, Andrew F. Peanuts: The Illustrious History of the Goober Pea. U. of Illinois Press, 2002. 234 pp. excerpt and text search
• 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. excerpt and text search
• 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. online edition

---