| Title | : | Food in History |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0517884046 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780517884041 |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 448 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1973 |
Food in History Reviews
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From a fellow bus rider: "So what's that book about: food and history?" Me: "Yes." Him: "So like real stuff that happened and food?" Me: "Yes."
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I read this book a few years ago (softcover book), and it sits as a treasured book in my collection (I'd like to have a hard cover of it one day). This is a fantastic reference book. It begins where humans began, back in the caves, and gives archeological evidence as well as common sense theories on how certain foods likely came to be, such as yogurt and butter were probably discovered because of the practice of traveling with milk in the dried stomachs of animals. And one thing leads to another. The book is full of fascinating points on the usage, origin and development of all kinds of food, and not just covering the western world. Nearly every country is mentioned, though as the author freely admits, written history needs to be taken with a... grain of salt, so to speak.
I have several food history books in my collection - this one is my favorite that I flip through time and again. -
I enjoy food histories and this was no exception. There were a few points that disagreed with other histories, most notably the idea that man once used spice to disguise rancid meat. (Jack Turner's "Spice: A History of Temptation" soundly refutes that idea. ) However, overall I thought it gave an excellent overview and serves as a good companion to other more focused food histories.
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Pre-review: I decided I wanted to read this book for a very weird reason. While I was reading
So Many Africas, So Little Time: Doing Justice to Africa in the World History Survey by Jonathan T. Reynolds the author said something intriguing in a morbid train-crash kinda way. Here is a direct quote from his article:
"...[Africa as a Broken place] is perhaps the most contemporary version of Africa ��� an Africa where nothing ever works and all good intentions come to naught. This image of Africa stresses all the bad things about Africa, highlighting political corruption, famine, violence, and sickness as the defining characteristics of African life. For example, in her popular Food in History, Reah [SIC] Tannahill dismisses the very idea of African cuisine because "... when shortages are the currency of everyday life, filling the stomach is the only art."20 Thus, because Tannahill believes Africans have always been on the verge of starvation, she assumes that nobody ever took the time to develop tasty recipes. Anyone with experience in the diversity and edibility of African cooking would find this a laughable notion. Sadly, Tannahill's book has been in print for three decades without this brutal absurdity being corrected."
I just want to comment that regardless if you have ever actually met an African person in your life (and I really hope you have) you definitely had to have at least heard of, if not actually eaten, Ethiopian food--famous for it's delicious Injera. How can you write a book about food history and dismiss the entirety of Ethiopian, Moroccan, and Egyptian food, all know to be famously delicious and available even in America? And I haven't even mentioned the fantabulous cuisines from literally dozens of other countries on the continent of Africa.
Reynolds wrote that article in 2004. So I was really curious about the status of this book now, in 2016. So I decided to take a break from my reading and pop on over to my favourite book reviewing site, good ol' Goodreads to see how people feel about it now. At this time of this writing, there are only 16 1-star reviews and 55 2-star reviews. And none of the 1-star, 2-star, or 3-star reviews mention this. One person specially said "Holy Masculine Generic Batman! And this book is dated in other ways." However, that person didn't elaborate on exactly what ways. Most reviewers also feel comfortable using the word "primitive" to describe people from the past (and possibly present), which is very problematic. So I decided I want to read this book specifically to do a more thought-out criticism of it as a colonialist, inherently racist book. And let me be clear--I basically think all history books are that, even though I like history books. When I finish the book, I will update my review but I will leave this part for future readers to understand the context of my relationship to and perspective of this book. -
I put this down for the moment and turned to Roger Osbourne's Civilization: A New History of the Western World, to fill my history needs at the moment.
Thus, far, I've gotten to easily annoyed at some of the sweeping generalizzations and assumptions the author has made about what was chosen as the first methods of food, and the apparent lack of scholarship in how she decided. I'll have to come back to it when I'm less annoyed with her approach to history. -
My first Folio Society book and a fascinating one detailing the changes in diet, hunting/gathering/farming of food and its preparation and cooking from pre-history to the beginning of the 21st century. Tannahill not only describes these changes and, for example, regional differences in diet but also explains them, e.g. in hot climates people eat spicy foods which make them perspire which cools them down (and prompts them to drink more fluids).
The book also demonstrates the wide-ranging impact of food-related issues on civilization. Thus science and technology are important (e.g. the effects of the Industrial Revolution on mechanised farming, or indeed simply the invention of the plough, let alone 20th century and later concerns such as GMOs and food additives) as are socio-economic issues - e.g. cookery books are only of general use when literacy is widespread, when people have enough disposable income to be able to afford the books and the ingredients and when they have some knowledge or curiosity about foods from outside the immediate vicinity (itself in practical terms necessitating improvements in transportation).
Changes in food can have long-lasting impacts. This doesn't just refer to the change from hunting and gathering to domestication and farming but also, e.g., in colonization - today's taste for refine sugars (and thus the West's obesity crisis) came from the New World plantations worked by African slave labour.
Sri Lanka's ethnic tensions similarly stem from plantations in the colonies. It was not the tea that the country (formerly Ceylon) is famous for, but instead for coffee, produced by Dutch colonists, that the Tamil workforce was brought to the plantations from India.
A fascinating book tracing food from pre-cooking-with-fire beginnings to modern day preoccupations with obesity vs famine, food buzzwords like 'natural' 'healthy' 'organic', diseases such as BSE and Foot and Mouth, additives and genetic modification. -
There is much to admire about this book, the fact that it is dated not withstanding. Its prose is efficient and clear and keeps an excellent pace that carries you through the book almost effortlessly, synthesizing a breadth of material that, in moments, veers from the ambitious to the reckless before swerving back to relatively safety, always acknowledging the limits of its knowledge and signaling its intention when it passes into speculation.
The book is great fun, and doesn’t a excellent job of building scaffolding that will support and structure more specific knowledge one obtains about the world of cuisine and its role in the development of human civilization.
I recommend it highly. -
reading this book kind of made me want to become a food anthropologist.
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As the title indicates, this is an exposition on the role that food - its cultivation, enjoyment, transportation, and its politics - has played in history.
As the author notes in her introduction, for all our technological savvy and utopian visions of the approaching singularity, the fact remains that humanity is still not rid of its all-too-earthly dependence on food.
The author begins by looking at the origin of the human species ; forced onto the treacherous Savannah by the retreating ice caps, our primate ancestors evolved big brains and bipedal motion, the better to cooperate socially and chuck rocks at potential prey. From these inauspicious beginnings and precarious technology, we stumbled upon agriculture - and with the burgeoning populations that this afforded, came the first administrative centers, the first vague sense of social unity, and eventually the first cities and civilizations.
The author then looks at the food stuffs of the major civilizations from the ancient Mesopotamians, the Romans, the Chinese and the Indians - always making sure to delineate how the climate, availability of grain crops, and available technology determined the variety of food available to these ancient peoples, and also detailing how these burgeoning national cuisines dovetailed and commingled with an emerging national character.
(Somewhat pathetically, apparently the only commonality among these different civilizations spanning the globe was the near universal distinction between the quality of food available to the upper classes and that of the lower classes)
The author does a fantastic job in subtly adjoining her descriptions of the food cultures of various places in the world with broader historical shifts and changes in fortune ; for example, the Roman Republic took to seafaring primarily because they needed access to the grain of the fertile Nile plains, all the better to fulfill the “panem” part of their governing ethos (“panem et circenses”) ; the curious evolution of Indian vegetarianism, a development that had historical parallels with the early Jews ; the European hunger for spices, arising from their climactically conditioned blandness of food, which led to the great seafarers looking for the spice islands of Indonesia, but instead stumbling upon the giant land mass of North America ; the British and Dutch attempts to escape the stranglehold of the Portuguese on said spice trade, and the resulting British domination of the subcontinent ; the rise of plantations, indentured servitude, and slavery from the new sugar crops found in the West Indies and Cuba, and the expansion of this method to other crops - there are plenty of such deft connections across history, geography, and gastronomy performed.
The book ends with a discussion of the Industrial Revolution, and the associated revolutions of food transportation and supply, quality management, and the scientific revolutions, which brought us the Green and White revolutions.
The author ends with an enigmatic epilogue which posits that the early co-evolution of culture and cuisine was determined by the nature of an indigenous terrain, and thus, for a particular purpose ; but since these purposes have been transcended by technology and globalization, many peoples consume their traditional food uncognizant of the mismatch between the intended purposes of such food and the current reality.
This is an impressive, and engrossing work, with plenty of insights regarding the fundamental nature of our food and its subterranean role in far-flung phenomena with apparently little overlap ; the historical aspect aside, there are many interesting glances into the nature of various cuisine, and how they managed to get that way.
This is a good book for fans of general history, food writing, or millennial males who enjoy reading about food without ever once stepping into a kitchen. -
We all must eat. Some of us are curious about how we have come to eat what we do eat. Tannehill’s book retells the long journey through time – and space. This is a history book for the general reader that is full of interesting details that enrich the background for the reader. Beginning with our prehistoric past, the reader is taken through the classic civilizations, then into the European Middle Ages and on to our own time. The book has a strong Eurocentric slant, the evolving cuisines of this peninsula being central and all other food complexes included primarily as they affect this evolution. The background stories are entertaining and give perspective to the changing foods, preparations and manners of eating in the past and as they relate to our own home tables. The book was first published in 1973 – my edition dates t 2002 and includes some more recent information. Still, that was 17 years ago and a few things have changed. The last chapters dealing with the craziness of the latest (post-1950) food fads brings some of the scientific information close to being up to date – that is, “healthy diets” are not necessarily more healthy than earlier “unhealthy diets.” Which reminds me of my own impression of the scientific literature that exercise/physical work is more important than diet in remaining healthy.
Full-color pictures illuminating the text are found on almost a quarter of the pages including many that were probably difficult to find. A down side to these illustrations is that they must be printed on slick paper that reflects light in the reader’s face in a most distracting manner if held at a bad angle.
I began reading the book to get a better perspective on food as it affects human health through time. I was not disappointed. If you enjoy eating or preparing a diverse selection of cuisines you will enjoy reading the book almost as much as you like food itself. It took me years to read the book. Why I originally stopped reading mystifies me now that I have resumed reading and finished my task.
The text is well-written and interesting, allowing the reader to zip through the book much more rapidly than might be anticipated. The chapters are a bit long but broken up into subsections. For the scholar, there are useful footnotes, bibliography and a minimal index. It is a good book to just read, but if you need information on specific topics, Tannahill’s book is a reasonable start. -
One of my alltime favorites. I loved learning about and following the history of ingredients & food that we now take for granted. The life of pepper could be a short story.
But more interesting to me was the description of the different practices cultures have surrounding eating. Banquet versus intimate dinner. A family table. Sacred foods. Topics about food -- particularly the familiy meal -- that I had never considered having had a origin someplace. -
Was reminded about this book today when someone posted about a food stall in Pompeii. Most did not have home kitchens, so they went to local public food stalls and stores to buy their meals. (Wondering about those who couldn't afford to eat...) I loved this book, especially the details about Roman food and its origins. Recommended reading, but not for everyone as it is a pretty detailed history of cooking.
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Concise history of food dating back to BCE to the 1980s. The publication date is over 30 years so it would be interesting to read an updated revision of this book.
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Food and history are two of my favorite things to read about so there was a high probability I would enjoy this book no matter what. My one worry going in was that it was published in 1973 and perspectives on history and food have changed a lot since then.
My worry was founded. The author shaped the story from a very Eurocentric view point. Often, they only referred to the entirety of Africa as "the dark continent" and discussed what colonialists brought TO the land instead of what was created there. Australia is similarly dismissed. They do somewhat better with Asia, Mexico, and South America. I found myself frustrated at this even though it was expected.
The chapters of prehistory and early civilizations were significantly more interesting than those of "modern" times. The author's views on environmentalism, manufacturing, and vegetables are very dated and that came through most clearly in the latter chapters.
That said, I did learn lots of delicious fact morsels which I will bust out in conversation at mostly awkward times. That counts for something. And the author's insistence on saying "avocado pears" instead of just avocados was charming and made me giggle. -
Sebuah buku sejarah yang ditulis dengan menarik, ringan, dan mengandung subjek yang menarik pula: makanan.
Dalam buku ini dihidangkan makanan dari masa ke masa, mulai dari masa prasejarah hingga masa keemasan Romawi, Revolusi Industri, dan masa modern.
Lebih dari itu, buku ini juga mengulas hubungan makanan dan keyakinan, trend pada masa tertentu, dan segala macam problema yang hadir karena makanan atau ketiadaan makanan. -
"This culture ate this food and this food and this food and here's an interesting tidbit about this food and that food and then this food was on this menu with this food and this food..."
A well-curated book of facts, but its lack of narrative made it a slog. I'm glad to have read it for the sake of having these facts in my brain and knowing where to find them, but man is it dry. -
I've read this twice cover to cover and possibly three times, I now can't recall with certainty. As of the moment, I feel that I may read it again, it's that well written and that unique.
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Wow, a whirlwind but fascinating tour of how food has shaped, well, everything!
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Holy masculine generic, Batman! That shit is hella distracting, and the book is dated in other ways, too.
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Empty shelves are in the news now, and high prices on food. A blog I follow posted a rant this morning and described the “golden goose” of plentiful food.
Many years of economic evolution led to the bounty of pre-Covid lockdowns. No person could ever design or command the economy to function as it did… golden geese take a long time to evolve.
This book describes a little of that evolution, how technological and scientific advancement from our first forays into agriculture, through crop rotation, through free trade, and into the modern age, has changed not only how we eat, but how we view what we eat.
…cooking is an art only where food is consistently plentiful. When shortages are part of everyday life, filling the stomach is the only art.
I’ve had this book on my shelf for a long time; I expected it to be a dense and hard read. In fact, its real problem is that it’s not dense enough. Much of it is overview. About halfway through, she jumps into the eighteenth century beginnings of the “Grand Tour”. The descriptions of the food people eat, and even how they complain about foreign food, starts to resemble modernity. But there is little sense of how this transition happened.
In what was later to become Germany, pork and sausage, cabbage, lentils, rye bread and beer were the staples of the diet. A thick, hearty soup appeared on the table at almost every meal, and a fruit-stuffed goose on high days and holidays. In Russia, though the rich fared well, much of the population subsisted on black bread, soured dairy products, cabbage, and kasha, made from buckwheat, and cooked either in whole-grain form to make a dish resembling pilaf or, as groats, into a coarse thin porridge.
But good food often accompanied plenty even in the ancient world. Her description of the Sumerian and Babylonian diets sound tasty!
The raw materials of the Sumerian diet were barley, wheat and millet; chickpeas, lentils, and beans; turnips; onions, garlic, leeks; cucumbers; and fresh green lettuce, cress and mustard. By early Babylonian times, a kind of truffle had been discovered, which was regarded as a great delicacy, and dispatched to the king by the basketful.
Some of the histories here sound like cookbook history, in that a lot is speculation and a lot sounds odd. But it does seem to check out. That, for example, “The Ochanomisu station takes its name from that of a once pure stream which flows nearby. It means ‘the emperor’s tea water.’”
In modern transliterations, “ocha-no-mizu” does appear to mean “tea water”, and this particular water was for the emperor. Unless the “no” has some extra meaning, however, the phrase itself doesn’t mention the emperor.
Similarly, the etymology of the word “vitamin” also appears to check out. It was formed from “vita” (life) with “amine” because they thought all vitamins were amino acids. When they discovered they were wrong, she writes, they dropped the final ‘e’.
There are also fascinating hints about the effects of food on art; for example, she doesn’t say this explicitly, but the Dutch Masters’ fascination with painting fruit is juxtaposed with the newness of fresh fruit as an available food. They painted these still-lives because the subject was exciting and new.
And in the final chapter, about the future of food, she actually quotes a source that predicts that “the world’s population will have doubled from the 3,706,000,000 of 1971 to over 7,000,000,000 in 2007.” The actual estimated population of 2007 appears to range from 6.6 to 6.7 billion. While this is not over 7 billion, it is still a lot closer than other predictions I’ve seen.
This is not a recipe book, and is not meant as such, but she does include a few things that are very close to recipes, at least given the vagaries of old recipes. Page 174 has a recipe for the “makhfiya” of “Muhammad isn al-Hasan ibn Muhammad ibn al-Karim al-Katib al-Baghdadi.”
As is typical of old cookbooks, it combines several steps into a very large paragraph.
On page 218 there’s a recipe for “Pumpes”, “meatballs in sauce”. On page 288 a description of a Spanish cup of chocolate uses cocoa, chili, aniseed, cinnamon, almonds, hazelnuts, and sugar. Sounds a lot like Mexican chocolate.
And on page 312 there’s a basic but probably usable description of Surat “dumpoked fowl” which is “from the Persian dampukht: air cooked”; and kebabs.
…food is history. -
Very interesting book. People's diets over time depended on what food products were available. Available food products were adapted to the specific requirements of the inhabitants based more on work and living conditions rather than on pleasure or satisfaction. Food was only a requirement to live for thousands of years Eating tools and habits have also evolved over time from eating with their hands from the same pot to the invention of the fork in the early 1900's. The book has a description of a large pot being served on a table and men reaching their arms in up to their shoulder to dig something out that had settled to the bottom. Yuk!
In cold damp climates before central HVAC, rich, fatty foods were comforting and warming. In milder climates the field laborer wanted energy giving food. In tropical countries, perspiration evaporating from the skin helped to cool the body and strong spices encouraged the perspiration and stimulated a thirst for the liquid necessary to replace it.
Prior to the invention of the fork, people used their always present knife as well as their hands and sopped up soup with bread provided either in the soup for that purpose or separately. Prior to 1700, even though the spoon was not uncommon, only a few eccentrics used a fork. Europeans continued to eat with fingers and knives, or spoon and bread. In 1897, the British Navy was forbidden to use knives and forks because it was considered contrary to discipline and manliness.
However, good ole America saw it differently! The 19th century etiquette manuals were so severe about people who ate peas off their knives, that those with the better manners went to the other extreme--with the result that America became a nation of dedicated fork-eaters.
This info barely touches the information included in this 370 page slow reading book. Thanks Cheffie for loaning it to me! -
An extraordinary book. The only thing wrong with this book is that it is missing the last30 odd years of food history. Having read many genres of history (political, economic, religious, etc), the history of food is really the is history of people rather than institutions.
I can only wonder what Tannahill would think about the yoga/QAnon nexus but I have an inkling and would really love an updated version of this book to cover the last 30 years.
"Before the 1960s there were many among the silent majority in the Western world who canalized their ordinary human need to feel superior into what had for centuries been a social acceptable (if less that admirable) intolerance of homosexuals, Jews, people who ate garlic or dyed their hair, Catholics, black, old clothes, four-letter words, promiscuity, pacifism ... and so on. Then, at one blow, all these faithful old prejudices became unrespectable, and those who had held them were deprived of an outlet for their need to disapprove. The next generation, however, with the same need and no traditional focus for it, was saved by the American evangelical tradition and the new obsession with diet and health. Those who might easily have be the bigots of the 1960s became the health evangelists of the 1980s, reborn on the side of the angels." -
I really liked this one. It was an amazing look at history but used food as the vehicle to get there. We take for granted the variety of food that we have these days. As food production, preservation and distribution got better so did the expansion of people. One of the reasons that Rome fell was supply lines collapsed so food for the people just was not there. During the call up for WWI it was discovered that many of the men were malnourished. Life was shorter for centuries because the lack of nutrition was immense. There was no understanding of vitamins and minerals for centuries. The science just was not there. Malnutrition was not too bad for the farmer but those in cities had the worst food. Mostly because of distribution issues and being able to keep things fresh. Even farmers had it tough though as they were usually dependent on only one or two crops and weather, insects and diseases could make those crops fail. It really was a good read and I learned a great deal of how our food evolved and was partly a cause of our evolving.
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I generally steer clear of history books as I find them to be mind-numbing. This book took one of the subjects I most loathe and brought the theme of food down upon it to a point where I was actually interested in knowing more. The tongue-in-cheek humor at the expense of our courageous culinary ancestors was much appreciated throughout the text and I loved the visuals that reinforced the text. I'm putting this one on the shelf.
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Because I believe in creation and that men and women were created as intelligent beings, I cannot agree with the information presented for the prehistoric humans. The rest of the book was very interesting and comprehensive. I learned a great deal about the food eaten in different parts of the world, how it was prepared from plant or animal to table, and how it ultimately spread from one culture to another. A definite need to read for foodies of any caliber.
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interesting but sort of textbook-y.
i wanted to find something on the history of food and this pretty much fit the bill, though probably could have been shorter and i wished there was more of an emphasis on everyday eating rather than the history of agriculture, industry, trade etc.
overall good and read in the background of some other books for a dip into nonfiction every now and again. -
It was overall a very well researched book. That being said, the last time this was revised was 1988. There have been a lot of strides in nutrition science in the past 34 years and I had to keep reminding myself of that while reading a section that I knew was incorrect. I can't blame the author since they were writing with the research of the time.
