The Handbook of Food Research

Anne Murcott, Warren Belasco, Peter Jackson

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781472538987
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

The last 20 years have seen a burgeoning of social scientific and historical research on food. The field has drawn in experts to investigate topics such as: the way globalisation affects the food supply; what cookery books can (and cannot) tell us; changing understandings of famine; the social meanings of meals - and many more. Now sufficiently extensive to require a critical overview, this is the first handbook of specially commissioned essays to provide a tour d'horizon of this broad range of topics and disciplines. The editors have enlisted eminent researchers across the social sciences to illustrate the debates, concepts and analytic approaches of this widely diverse and dynamic field. This volume will be essential reading, a ready-to-hand reference book surveying the state of the art for anyone involved in, and actively concerned about research on the social, political, economic, psychological, geographic and historical aspects of food. It will cater for all who need to be informed of research that has been done and that is being done.

PART ONE

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Historical Essentials

Editorial Introduction

The Handbook of Food Research aims to highlight the value of rigorous research and a solid evidence base in understanding contemporary debates about food, starting from a firm understanding of what here are called historical essentials. To paraphrase the late Eric Hobsbawm, history reports what was never known and provides reminders of what may have been forgotten as much as what is well known and widely remembered: in this alone, history is essential. Hobsbawm’s dictum is illuminated in the six chapters in this first part of the book, in their attention to continuity, change, and context. Furthermore, these six chapters also seek to complicate popular assumptions. So doing entails investigating “what everybody knows” instead of merely accepting it at face value—an intellectual attitude that is a hallmark of good scholarship. For example, the very first chapter puts to rest the modernist conceit that globalization is a recent phenomenon, while the fifth reminds readers that people have worried about the chemical adulteration of commercially provided food for many centuries. Similarly, the third and fourth chapters, respectively, argue that provisioning cities has long been an engine of agricultural expansion—demand spurring supply—and that the quest for labor-saving technologies has roots much deeper than the modernist post–World War II era. At the same time, good historians are wary of overburdening the past with a search for precedents and perspectives, given the unevenness of data about the past. Yet the following chapters suggest that history’s source problem can be mitigated by ingenious scrutiny of neglected materials (such as cookery books, trademarks, and appliances) as well as through intensified cross-disciplinary, holistic, and comparative approaches. Indeed, a spirit of collaborative boundary crossing enlivens many chapters in this book.

Appropriately ambitious, the first chapter by Adrianne Bryant, Leigh Bush, and Richard Wilk examines globalization, a contentious issue for both advocates and opponents of the transnational integration of trade, politics, and culture. While the modern face of that dynamic is often represented by McDonald’s, with its limited menu, universally recognizable logo, and ultra-Fordist management, the authors of this chapter point out that food ingredients, practices, and regimes have been crossing borders for millennia. Going beyond this almost simplistic observation, the authors consider the underlying question of how to define food. What exactly crosses borders—ingredients, culinary practices, social structures, or controlling institutions? To complicate the inquiry further, the authors take time to define and differentiate foodstuffs, dishes, meals, cuisine, and diet. Warning that care needs to be taken with terminology, they put food at the center of world history by offering a brief chronology of people, plants, and animals “on the move.” In the process, they discuss the Neolithic domestication of plants and livestock, the post-1492 Columbian Exchange, the effects of imperial expansion, migration, and mercantile capitalism, and the history of agricultural intensification and specialization. Anticipating later chapters (especially that by Bill Pritchard in Chapter 9), they discuss the usefulness of commodity chain analysis in illuminating transnational food connections, also noting possible effects on food security in regions that export raw commodities (discussed by Jane Midgley in Chapter 25). Picking up another theme that runs throughout the book, Bryant, Bush, and Wilk note how a global food system lengthens the distance between producers and consumers, thereby increasing risks and related concerns about food safety. With globalization also comes the possible spread of health and environmental problems (discussed by Michael Winter in Chapter 11) associated with industrial food production. The chapter ends with a review of the debate as to the pros and cons of globalization, closing with a call for a calmer, less judgmental examination of this thorny issue.

Taking up the call for a fresh examination of world food networks in the next chapter, Richard Le Heron argues that our future existence as a species may depend on a better understanding of human impact on planetary ecosystems. To do so, he presents an innovative and expanded conception of “food choice.” At the center of such an inquiry is agriculture, which alters the environment in drastic ways and serves as a primary means of surviving the consequences of human-planetary interactions. Yet obscuring that basic truth is the long institutional separation between those who study food production (including agronomy and food science) and those who study food consumption (including the social sciences and humanities)—a separation still only tentatively addressed by food researchers (as discussed in the introduction). This schism can be seen in the clear demarcation between colleges of agriculture, business, and home economics (discussed by Helene Brembeck in Chapter 16), as well as the estrangement between historians of agriculture and historians of food. Transcending such divisions, Le Heron reviews recent research on global commodity chains, food regimes, and alternative agricultural movements and networks—all covered in greater depth in later chapters. All of these approaches foreground the role of “consumer choice,” which Le Heron extends beyond the psycho-biological determinants of taste to include values, perceptions, and needs. But unlike advocates of regressive “neoliberalism,” Le Heron argues that private, “free market” dynamics are insufficient to effect the necessary reforms. Rather it is through responsible, conscientious consumption that citizens can revive and energize political action. In addition to closing the gap between production and consumption, country and city, Le Heron invites alliances between academics and activists through notions of “food sovereignty” and related social movements.

The next chapter returns to the urban/rural contrast. In a sweeping historical survey of the way cities have been fed, Peter Scholliers and Patricia van den Eeckhout further demonstrate how food research moves beyond assumptions often taken for granted, in this case the agrarian populist claim that cities are parasitic “sponges” that soak up the countryside’s wealth and virtue. Instead, they argue, by serving as primary markets for agricultural surpluses, growing cities have been a central spur to innovations in agricultural technology, manufacturing, transportation, and marketing. Urbanization stimulated domestic industrialization as well as international trade. Concerns about the growing distance between rural producers and urban consumers—a theme running throughout the Handbook—stimulated research on nutrition and food safety, along with significant public efforts to regulate slaughterhouses, markets, and waste disposal. Taking the comparative approach also advocated by other authors, Scholliers and Van den Eeckhout note regional variations in the spread and acceptance of modern distributive institutions such as supermarkets and restaurants. Their discussion anticipates later chapters on retailing (by Alan Hallsworth, Chapter 15), hospitality and tourism (by Richard Mitchell and David Scott, Chapter 13), identity formation (by Krishnendu Ray, Chapter 22), and eating out (by Alice Julier, Chapter 19), in putting cities at the center of major transformations in the preparation, usage, and meanings of food. In all, their chapter illustrates the way that much can be learned about culinary inventions, business, social stratification, consumer culture, the challenges of providing food security, and conflicting anxieties and fears through the study of urban food history.

Taking her inspiration from science and technology studies (STS), Mónica Truninger reviews the evolution and consequences of industrial and domestic food technologies. Like Scholliers and Van den Eeckhout, she identifies urbanization as a key stimulus for the intensification of agriculture (through improved seeds, the use of chemicals, and the development of machinery), as well as technological innovations in food preservation, processing, and storage. From at least the late eighteenth century, military needs also spurred research and development of food technologies. As also noted in Unni Kjærnes’ chapter in Part Four, the increasing distance between rural producers and urban consumers induced government intervention not least to address distrust and anxiety. Noting the central role of women in food work, historians have shown how industrialization relocated elements of food production from home to factory, thereby reducing the drudgery of housework—or so marketers claimed. But recent research suggests that it was more of a transfer of drudgery from some women (housewives and servants) to other women working for low wages in food manufacturing and, with the expansion of opportunities for eating out, in commercial catering and food service. And as Truninger argues, it is not at all clear that domestic food work was much reduced, for new “labor-saving” appliances, along with more demanding standards of hygiene and efficiency, may have raised expectations for home cooking and cleanliness. Building on this thesis, Truninger reviews recent studies of the effects of new kitchen technologies: Did they empower women or deepen existing gender inequalities? How much work did they reduce, if at all? Did modern processed foods and high-tech gadgets “deskill” women or improve home cooking? For answers, Truninger urges a shift in the focus of research from technological advances to social contexts and uses. She also calls for more attention to non-Western examples, more work on men’s relationships with new technologies, more attention to the coevolution of industrial and domestic technologies, and, like many of the authors in this Handbook, more thought about the environmental and ethical implications of “convenience.”

Like the opening chapter, Peter Atkins’ historiography of adulteration starts with the deceptively simple question: What is food? Without a clear definition of what food is supposed to be, he argues, it is impossible to identify what should not be in food, that is, adulterants. Rather than answering the question directly, however, Atkins invites further study by surveying various ways other scholars have approached adulteration. Some researchers focus on immediate, acute threats to health of poisons and toxins. Others look at concerns about dishonesty and fraud: Does the food have the “correct” composition or ingredients; Do manufacturers and retailers take advantage of the lengthened food chain to substitute cheaper components? Some accounts focus on the rise of expert systems, often based on the development of chemistry as a means of policing components and restoring trust in the industrial food supply. Others look primarily at the evolution of state regulation and litigation. Atkins suggests that all of these approaches suffer from a lack of comparative or multidisciplinary dimensions. So, he argues, much of the social scientific literature on adulteration focuses on recent scares in the West without taking stock of a much longer and wider record of food scares and regulatory responses. Decrying the top-down orientation of much of the previous literature, Atkins (like Le Heron) recommends greater attention to the role of citizen activism and advocacy, which, he notes, goes back much earlier than the conventional focus on the period since World War II. Moreover he also recommends more focus on the market-building efforts of the food industry itself, which as early as the late nineteenth century attempted to build consumer trust through strategies such as branding (see Marianne Elisabeth Lien and Eivind Jacobsen, Chapter 14), trademarks, labels, and third-party certification (see Hugh Campbell, Chapter 10). Anticipating discussions in later chapters about the maintenance of food quality (see especially the chapters by Hugh Campbell, Chapter 10 and Harry West, Chapter 12 in Part Two), Atkins urges researchers to go deeper (by concentrating on individual commodity chains) and wider (by comparing the way different places and periods have addressed the endemic and perhaps timeless problems of risk, safety, and honesty).

In the final chapter of Part One, Kyri Claflin addresses one of the fundamental challenges facing food historians—the scarcity of good data about how and what people ate in the past. Given food’s perishability, little remains from earlier meals other than the bones and chards examined by archaeologists. Even more elusive is the ability to understand how people experienced those meals. Historians of the relatively recent past have printed materials, along with other visual representations, to use as clues, but, as Claflin demonstrates, exploiting such sources requires considerable delicacy, a firm grounding in the wider social context in which they appeared, and a willingness to borrow methods and insights from other branches of history (e.g., the history of the book itself but especially the histories of medicine, technology, and science) that examine how craft knowledge is produced, disseminated, used, and applied. Also useful are methods learned from art history, semiotics, and literary criticism. Claflin shows how printed recipes and cookery books emerged within the context of late medieval/early modern European court life, then changed to meet the evolving needs of an expanding bourgeoisie. She also examines differences in cookery book development between France (which remained more court-based) and Britain and North America (whose cookery books were intended more for private, middle-class use). Care must also be taken to allow for the class, gender, and ideological biases of prescriptive literature, much of which is intended to change behavior rather than to reflect it. And as “fantasy,” cookery books often represent extremes and ideals, not ordinary, messy realities. To illustrate the complexity of such analysis, Claflin reviews pioneering work by Barbara Ketcham Wheaton and then offers a detailed, multifaceted interpretation of Amelia Simmons’ American Cookery (1796), which, Claflin notes, is the first published cookbook written by an American cook. That such an analysis reveals a wealth of insights into Simmons’ world confirms the faith of those who investigate material culture that studying “small” things such as recipes and household manuals can yield rich rewards. It is perhaps fitting, Claflin notes, that medievalists and early modernists, whose data are often more scarce than the range of sources available to their modernist colleagues, have led the way in their skillful interpretation of these rare, often underappreciated, resources. Claflin concludes her chapter with a series of questions for further investigation, like other chapters, pointing out future research directions.

Taken together, the chapters in Part One demonstrate the value of establishing an appropriate social and historical context in orientating contemporary food research. These chapters also demonstrate that taking a rigorously historical perspective provides an essential foundation for all that follows in subsequent chapters of the Handbook.

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The History of Globalization and the Food Supply

ADRIANNE BRYANT, LEIGH BUSH, AND RICHARD WILK

The rapid international march of fast-food chains like McDonald’s, Subway, and Starbucks has convinced many, from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) to protesters in Moscow to angry Punjabi farmers, that we live in an era of unprecedented food globalization. The truth, however, is a complicated blend of history and politics, and a lot depends o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• Foreword
• A Burgeoning Field: Introduction to The Handbook of Food Research
• Part One: Historical Essentials
• Part Two: Frameworks of Provision: Production and Distribution
• Part Three: Buying and Eating
• Part Four: Contemporary Issues, Problems, and Policy
• References
• Name Index
• Subject Index