The Oxford Handbook of Food History

Food influences virtually every aspect of life and can be defined as a “total social phenomenon”. Until the 1950s, food tended to appear in historical work only in relation to other topics. For example, early historians of agriculture investigated the production of staple crops but showed little interest in consumption. The rise of social history in the 1960s and 1970s brought food to the centre of debates about standards of living. Later studies, such as Amartya Sen’s work on famines, demonstrated that hunger results not from food shortages alone but also from failures of distribution, calling for more attention to the links between access to food and capitalism, the environment and social inequalities. The growing current interest in food ranges from attempts to predict the impacts of climate change on food production and distribution, to the industrialization and globalization of the food system, which includes the growing hegemony of supermarkets in production, distribution and dietary preferences.

This edited collection is divided into five sections. The first brings together chapters that describe how food has been discussed using various historical approaches with different emphases. The chapters in the second section examine how different social sciences disciplines – anthropology, sociology, geography – and perspectives – gender, nutrition, education – help shed light on the multiple roles of food in society. The third section turns to the “means of production”, which encompasses agriculture and environment but also transformations in home cooking, the industrialization of production, its place in imperialist relations and the rise of fast food. The chapters in the fourth section focus on the circulation of food, and how in different places and at different times the quest for exotic food, or simply for sufficient food, has driven international trade and later, globalization. Under the title “Communities of consumption”, the fifth and final section describes how food plays a key role in defining the identity of specific groups, and is central in alternative models of consumption and production such as the Slow Food movement.