phd in food history

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• How I Got My Job

How I Got My Job: Researching the History of American Food at the Smithsonian

Ashley Rose Young went from bored biology student to one of the foremost experts on street-food history in New Orleans

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In How I Got My Job , folks from across the food and restaurant industry answer Eater’s questions about, well, how they got their job. Today’s installment: Ashley Rose Young.

Ashley Rose Young faced some skepticism when she began her career as a food historian. Other historians — and even some acquaintances — questioned the seriousness of her chosen subject. But Young was undeterred. Having written a dissertation on the history of street food in New Orleans, she knew how much food can reveal about a society, from how people make and spend their money to the class and racial inequities they face.

Now, Young has trained her eyes on U.S. food culture as historian for the American Food History Project at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History (NMAH) in Washington, D.C. Beyond her duties as a researcher and curator at the museum, she hosts a live cooking demonstration series exploring food histories with guest chefs ranging from professionals like Sean Sherman and Edouardo Jordan to home cooks. In the following interview, Young shares what it takes to become a food historian and some of her coolest experiences — including hanging out in Julia Child’s kitchen.

Eater: What does your job involve?

Ashley Rose Young: I’m a trained historian who researches and teaches the history of the United States through the lens of food: its culture, economy, politics, environmental impact, and more. Many trained historians go on to be professors at colleges and universities, but I chose a different path. I am what people call a “public historian.” I share my research through articles, museum exhibitions, programs, and special events created to engage and educate a broad public.

At NMAH, my position has several components. I’m part of the curatorial team that recently refreshed and re-opened the exhibition, Food: Transforming the American Table , which explores the cultural and technological changes that have shaped how and what we eat since 1950. We conducted fieldwork and archival research, recorded oral history interviews, and collected objects to provide new perspectives on the story of food in modern America.

I am also the historian and host for our live cooking demonstration series, Cooking Up History . Each month, we invite a special guest chef to the museum to prepare several dishes on stage while discussing the history and traditions behind its ingredients, culinary techniques, and enjoyment. I’ve had the opportunity to collaborate with home cooks and professional chefs, including Edouardo Jordan, Mollie Katzen, Priya Krishna, Martin Yan, Carla Hall, Aarόn Sánchez, Maneet Chauhan, Sean Sherman, and Sheldon Simeon.

Additionally, I work with my colleagues to organize the Smithsonian Food History Weekend . Each year, we bring together culinary professionals, activists, scholars, and community members to explore an annual theme such as “ Innovation on Your Plate ,” “ Many Flavors, One Nation ,” and “ Power Through Food .” Through live cooking demonstrations, round table discussions, and hands-on activities, we bring museum visitors together to understand the profound impact that food has on our everyday lives.

What did you originally want to do when you started your studies?

My interest in becoming a public historian is deeply rooted in my college experiences at Yale. When I started my freshman year, I wanted to be an evolutionary biologist. At that time, my dream was to work with professor Richard Prum and examine the cellular structure of bird feathers and how birds of paradise use ultraviolet feathers to attract potential mates. A strange start for a food historian, right?

It was not long into my freshman year that I found my history course on the American Revolution, taught by noted Hamilton scholar Joanne Freeman , to be way more engaging than the prerequisite courses required for the biology major (chemistry, calculus, organic chemistry, etc.). It took some time, but eventually I switched to the history major. After earning my bachelor’s degree, I immediately went on to graduate school at Duke where I earned my master’s degree and PhD in history.

What was your first job? What did it involve?

I cut my teeth on food entrepreneurship in my family’s business, McGinnis Sisters Special Food Stores [in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania]. The business, open for more than 70 years, was owned and operated by my mother, Sharon, and my two aunts, Bonnie and Noreen. It closed in 2018.

The business grew out of my grandfather’s post-World War II employment as a produce vendor selling oranges from a roadside cart. Street food vending provided him an economic toehold in the postwar period and he eventually opened a small corner grocery store with an in-house butcher shop (my grandfather Elwood’s kielbasa were much beloved by Pittsburghers). From there, he established several other grocery stores.

In the early ‘80s, my mother and aunts took over the business, expanding it, refining it, and making a name for themselves as local business leaders and entrepreneurs. I grew up watching these amazing women (often clad in ‘80s power suits) transform a small family grocery business into an industry leader in gourmet retailing.

As soon as I could hold a spoon, I was put to work spreading tomato sauce on our hand-tossed pizza crusts. Eventually, I graduated to the bakery department, where during the holiday rush, I would help my mother bake cookies, pies, dinner rolls, and loaves of bread in the middle of the night. From placing product orders with our vendors, to peeling more shrimp than I could ever count, to ringing out customers at the cash register, I worked in every department of our stores, and that was all before I started high school.

How did you first get interested in pursuing food history?

My role in the family business had a profound impact on my interest in food cultures, business history, and entrepreneurship. My father is a retired public high school history teacher who instilled in me a passion and insatiable curiosity for history. The long-term influence of my parents’ professional lives came to bear on my own life in college; specifically, when I took a course with professor Maria Trumpler called Women, Work, and Food. Given my mother’s business and my own experiences in the food industry, you can guess why I was interested in the course.

In 2009, freshly inspired by the possibility of critically studying food, I interned with Liz Williams at the Southern Food and Beverage Museum in New Orleans where I found my passion project: to research and write a history of New Orleans through its food culture and economy. And I did just that. My senior history thesis at Yale was a critical study of historic Creole cookbooks, specifically examining racial, gender, and ethnic stereotypes of the women who were cooks in private homes, catering businesses, and restaurants throughout the city in the 19th and 20th centuries.

I continued to pursue my focus on New Orleans as a graduate student in the history department at Duke, eventually writing my dissertation, “ Nourishing Networks: the Public Culture of Food in Nineteenth Century America ,” which uses New Orleans as a case study to examine the culture around selling and eating foods in city streets, plazas, and parks. In other words, I wrote a street-food history of the Big Easy, taking seriously the entrepreneurial spirit and tenacity of women, recent migrants, people of color, and other marginalized communities. I am now developing that dissertation into my first academic book.

What was the biggest challenge you faced in starting your career?

Although scholars have been writing about history through the lens of food for generations, there were still historians and members of the public who were skeptical of the seriousness and rigor of food history just 10 years ago.

When I told people that I was a food historian, their first response was usually to laugh with surprise and ask the follow-up question, “What does that mean ?” And then many of them would try to guess what I researched before I had a chance to answer their first question: “Does that mean you look at what George Washington ate?” I would reply that some scholars do, in fact, pursue that topic. Then, I clarified that my research interests were in the life and labor of everyday people: market people, street-food vendors, and cooks.

I would tell them how food history enabled me to begin piecing together the experiences of people who are often overlooked in history — the people who fed entire cities and whose ingenuity, perseverance, and business acumen are regularly ignored in traditional histories. And my goal was, and is, to help people understand the importance of the street food economy historically as the primary means through which cities fed themselves well into the 19th century. Further, street food labor was a means through which many people provided for their families when their access to other jobs was limited, because of structural barriers tied to race, ethnicity, and gender.

What was the turning point that led you to where you are now?

In 2014, I was in the midst of graduate school when I received an email from my now colleague, Steve Velasquez . He asked me for recommendations of senior scholars who wrote about New Orleans through the lens of food. He had learned about my work through my research fellow profile page on the Southern Food and Beverage Museum website. I replied back with several suggestions, but a few weeks later, Steve asked me if I would be interested in coming to the National Museum of American History to speak about my research during their Food in the Garden series.

A few months later, my parents and I traveled to D.C. where chef David Guas and I spoke about New Orleans’ rich culinary history. Leading up to and during the event, I developed a sense of kinship with the Smithsonian food history team. Their approach to public programming was so creative and engaging, all while being grounded in serious academic research. I fell in love with their work, and became a close follower of the American Food History Project . A few years later, I interned for the project, and shortly thereafter was hired as its historian.

What were the most important skills that got you there?

The Smithsonian is a scholarly institution, and so my professional research and writing skills in history played a key role in my ability to thrive at the museum.

Perhaps surprising to some, another key component is my love of performance, which stems from my childhood obsession with musical theater. I was never the star in the high school musical, more like the overenthusiastic chorus member, but I learned how powerful art can be in communicating a message. In graduate school I applied skills of oration, movement, and improvisation in the classroom.

Now, as the host of our monthly cooking demonstration series, Cooking Up History, I bring that same skill set to our demonstration stage, drawing the audience into history through storytelling, lively conversation with guest chefs, and, on occasion, a song or two (ones that are historically relevant, of course). One of my favorite cooking demo moments was when Carla Hall taught the entire crowd her “mirepoix” song (a way to remember key ingredients in classical French cooking).

What’s your favorite part of your job?

I enjoy connecting with museum visitors and discovering a shared sense of curiosity and wonder about history.

What’s one of the coolest things you’ve gotten to do as a food historian?

Julia Child’s Cambridge, Massachusetts, kitchen is on display in the Food: Transforming the American Table exhibition at the museum. As a member of the exhibition team, I have the chance to step inside the kitchen to check the condition of the objects — the tools, equipment, furniture, books, and decorative pieces — that are placed exactly as they were when Julia left Cambridge in 2001.

The first time I crossed the threshold, a shiver ran down my spine (my body’s reaction to what can only be described as a religious experience of the culinary kind). To stand in the kitchen of such a talented, dedicated culinary educator, surrounded by the tools of her trade was inspiring.

How are you making change in your industry?

The museum field is always evolving, but it feels as though we are in a particularly transformative time as institutional priorities shift to creating museums that are even more inclusive, relevant, and accessible. As a member of the Smithsonian food history team, I am working with my colleagues to create opportunities for community leaders, chefs, and home cooks from incredibly diverse backgrounds to come to the museum and share their personal and community history through food.

In the past several years, our research has focused on the relationship between migration and food, mapping out the kaleidoscopic presence of diverse food cultures in the U.S. This year alone, our lineup of guest chefs included those originally from Eritrea, Iran, Syria, Vietnam, El Salvador, Ethiopia, China, and Peru, along with second-generation guest chefs from the Philippines, Armenia, India, and Mexico. It was an honor and privilege to work with such knowledgeable cooks, and I look forward to expanding the content and reach of our food history programming at the museum.

What advice would you give someone who wants your job?

I would advise people to build professional and personal relationships with historians they admire. I firmly believe in the power of mentorship, and encourage young scholars to seek out the advice and support of both their peers and senior scholars.

Amy McKeever is a freelance writer based in Washington, DC. Photo courtesy of Ashley Rose Young . Illustrations from the Noun Project: camera by Dhika Hernandita; covered dish by Made by Made; wine by Made by Made; lightbulb by Maxim Kulikov; hand writing by Pongsakorn.

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Emily Contois

Graduate food studies programs: a list.

I began keeping this list of graduate food studies program after a fascinating roundtable discussion titled, “Masters Programs in Food Studies, Food Systems, and Food Policy,” at the 2013 joint meeting of the Association for the Study of Food and Society and the Agriculture, Food & Human Values Society  at Michigan State University in East Lansing.

During this discussion, the directors of seven graduate food programs debated the key issues emerging in graduate food education. They were also asked by a session attendee to summarize each program’s distinguishing features, which I’ve summarized here in the hopes it might prove useful for any students currently weighing their options for graduate study in food.

Note: I’ve been keeping this list as current as possible. Last update: January 25, 2019

Boston University,  MLA in Gastronomy 

• Location: Boston, MA
• Program Director: Megan Elias, Ph.D.
• Program History:  Co-founded in the 1990s by Julia Child & Jacques Pépin
• Strengths / Specialities : Focus on the liberal arts; can include culinary arts & wine study; online, blended and in-person courses; in large, research university
• Follow: Twitter ( @GastronomyatBU ); Facebook ( BU Gastronomy ); Blog ( Gastronomy at BU )

Chatham University, MA in Food Studies

• Location:  Pittsburgh, PA
• Program Director: Alice Julier, Ph.D.
• Program History:  Graduated first cohort in May 2012
• Strengths / Specialities :  Focus on agriculture/farming, sustainability, and the food system; campus includes a 338 acre farm
• Follow: Facebook ( Food Studies at Chatham University ); Blog ( Eden Hall Farm )

Drexel University, Master of Science in Culinary Arts and Science (MS CAS)

• Location: Philadelphia, PA
• Program Director: Rosemary Trout
• Program History: Launched fall 2017
• Specialties / Strengths: Program combines focus in culinary arts, food science, and gastronomy/food systems
• Follow: Twiter ( @DrexelHSM )

Green Mountain College, MS in Sustainable Food Systems – University to close in 2019 

• Location:  Poultney, Vermont
• Program Director:   Robin Currey, Ph.D.
• Program History: Launched first cohort in 2012
• Strengths / Specialties: Institutional focus on the environment; “low-residency” program meets once per year; significant online teaching/learning experience
• Follow:  Facebook ( Green Mountain College M.S. in Sustainable Food Systems )

Marylhurst University, MS in Food Systems & Society  

• Location:  Marylhurst, OR
• Program Director: Patricia Allen, Ph.D.
• Program History: Enrolled first cohort in 2014; program closing in 2018
• Strengths / Specialities :  Focus on social justice and change through food; “low-residency” program combines online learning with twice a year on campus intensives
• Follow:  Twitter ( @marylhurstfood )

New York University, MA in Food Studies

• Location:  New York City, NY
• Program Director:  Jennifer Berg, Ph.D.
• Program History:  Program began in 1996
• Strengths / Specialities :  Focus on food and culture; can concentrate in food culture or food systems; specialized in urban food systems
• Follow: Facebook

Syracuse University, MS in Food Studies

• Location: Syracuse, NY
• Program Director: Anne C. Bellows, Ph.D.
• Program History: MS program was approved in 2015
• Strengths / Specialities:  Program provides a foundation in a political economy and human rights-based approach to food systems; program intersects with longstanding professional programs in nutrition and public health
• Follow: Facebook ( SUFoodStudies )

University of Adelaide, MA in Food Studies   – Program closed  November 27, 2013

• Location:  Adelaide, SA, Australia
• Program Staff:   Barbara Santich, Ph.D. and   Rachel Ankeny, Ph.D.
• Program History: In existence for more than 10 years, but recently changed
• Strengths / Specialities:  International focus; graduate certificate in food writing; online and in-person study options

University of the Pacific, MA in Food Studies   – Program to close in 2020

• Location: San Francisco, CA
• Program Director: Polly Adema, Ph.D.
• Program History:  Enrolled first cohort in 2015
• Strengths / Specialties: Food policy and politics, food history, food sociology, food business

University of Vermont, MS in Food Systems

• Location:  Burlington, VT
• Program Director:  Amy Trubek, Ph.D.
• Program History:  Enrolled first cohort in 2013
• Strengths / Specialties:  Focus on food systems and hands-on, skill based education
• Follow: Facebook ( UVM Food Systems Masters Program )

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• March 8, 2016

Hi, I was wondering what you had heard about the MSc in Gastronomy program at Queen Margaret University in Edinburgh… I’m currently looking at food studies/gastronomy post-graduate degrees and came across it in my search.

• March 14, 2016

I’ve never heard of it! I checked ASFS’s list of programs and it isn’t listed there either. Sorry I can’t be more helpful with that particular program…

• June 19, 2018

Marylhurst is closing the school in 2018.

• June 21, 2018

Thanks for letting me know!

• June 30, 2018

Currently looking into online programs or graduate certificates in Food Studies. Have any suggestions? All I’ve been able to find are in person…

• July 2, 2018

Hi Leslie. I know that the Boston University Gastronomy program has a food studies certificate that they endeavor to make available online. If you’re looking for an international option, Gustolab in Italy also has some online programming. Good luck!

• July 24, 2018

‘University of the Pacific is no longer accepting applicants or new students for the Master of Arts in Food Studies program, which is scheduled to close in spring 2020.’

Thanks! I forgot to make that update and appreciate your help.

• August 17, 2019

Thank you so much for this list. It’s invaluable!

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Ph.D. in Food Science

Thrive in a challenging research environment.

Our Ph.D. program is geared toward individuals with B.S. or graduate degrees in related sciences who want an in-depth research experience.

Research areas include:

• Brewery and dairy fermentation
• Food ingredient functionality and rheology
• Genetics and beneficial effects of probiotic microbes and lactic acid bacteria on human health
• Molecular mechanisms of foodborne illness and detection of foodborne bacterial and viral pathogens
• Sensory and flavor chemistry of dairy and other ingredients
• Thermal and aseptic processing of foods

Our faculty  are routinely recognized for their research achievements and teaching accomplishments. Under their mentoring, Ph.D. students publish in prestigious peer-reviewed journals and present at national and international conferences.

Alumni Spotlight

Trisha Bhatia earned her Ph.D. and is now a production and quality manager at Ripe Revival. “We seek to address the growing issue of food waste and food insecurity by creating ‘better-for-you’ health foods out of excess fruits and vegetables.”

Future Career Pathways

A Ph.D. in Food Science can prepare you for a career as a:

• Flavor chemist
• Food microbiologist
• Food chemist
• Food processing specialist
• Food engineer
• Sensory scientist

This degree program has prepared me, has given me the theoretical knowledge and understanding of food science, food chemistry, food packaging, flavor chemistry. So I apply those concepts as an entrepreneur but also as a product developer Michael Lloyd current student

Preparing the Professoriate

Preparing the Professoriate is a nationally recognized program designed to give exceptional doctoral students and postdoctoral scholars an immersive mentoring, teaching, and future faculty preparation experience.

Learn more 

Fellowships and Grants

Fellowship, traineeships, and grants are awards that require no service in return. They may be based on merit and/or financial need. Often they provide the cost of tuition and fees plus a stipend to cover living expenses.

Ready to Take the Next Step?

FoodAnthropology

Wisdom from the Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition

Graduate Programs

Anthropology graduate programs.

Graduate programs in anthropology that have a focus on food issues are relatively few. Many universities have individual faculty with interests in food, so check the faculty listings carefully.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________

Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana

Anthropology Department

Graduate Program in Anthropology of Food

School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS)

SOAS at the University of London has a MA in the Anthropology of Food

MA Anthropology of Food

Food Studies Graduate Programs

In addition to anthropology graduate programs, there are also opportunities for graduate study in Food Studies. Food Studies programs are quite diverse and offer opportunities to study food and/or nutrition from a variety of disciplinary perspectives.

New York University

NYU has a variety of graduate programs related to food studies, nutrition, and public health Master’s programs: Clinical Nutrition, Community Public Health, Food Studies, or Food Management PhD programs: The Department of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health offers three interdisciplinary programs of advanced study: Nutrition and Dietetics, Food Studies and Food Management, and Public Health.

Department of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health

Boston University

Founded by Julia Child and Jacques Pepin, this Masters program has a strong Liberal Arts core and offers four concentrations: History and Culture; Communications; Food Policy; Business and Entrepreneurship. SAFN members, Rachel Black, Carole Counihan and Ellen Messer, regularly teach courses in this program. BU Gastronomy offers a number of food-related anthropology courses, such as: Anthropology of Food; Food Ethnography; Food Policy and Culture; Food Activism; Alcohol and Culture.

Master of Liberal Arts in Gastronomy

Chatham University

“The Masters of Arts in Food Studies emphasizes a holistic approach to  food systems , from agriculture and food production to cuisines and consumption, providing intellectual and practical experience from field to table.”

Master of Arts in Food Studies

University of Gastronomic Sciences

Master in Food Culture

The University of Adelaide

Oxford brookes university.

Master in Food, Wine and Culture

University of Vermont

Food Systems Graduate Program

Green Mountain College

Master of Science in Sustainable Food Systems

______________________________________________________________________________

Oregon State University

Oregon State University’s Food in Culture and Social Justice Program aims to give students a holistic background in the study of food and culture and tools to help construct socially just food systems.

Graduate Minor in Food in Culture and Social Justice

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Indiana University Bloomington Indiana University Bloomington IU Bloomington

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Food Studies M.A.

Growing interest in food quality, policy, nutrition, and the socio-cultural aspects of food, along with concern over the sustainability of food systems in the face of global environmental change, has created new opportunities for those interested in the field of food studies.

Our Food Studies M.A. is a multidisciplinary degree program that will prepare you with the knowledge and skills necessary to become an expert in food systems at the production, distribution, consumption, and/or policy levels. Through a problem-based approach, you will explore the interconnectedness of food systems with ecological, social, cultural, and political systems. These problems will vary according to your interests, but may include culturally appropriate food, the relationship between farms and the household, policies surrounding food relief and sustainability, food justice and food system governance, the relationship between industrial agriculture and specialty agriculture, problems faced by local food movements, and the future of food systems in a rapidly changing global environment.

Our Food Studies M.A. program provides you with opportunities to:

• Develop a general knowledge of specific foods and food systems, including a biocultural and spatial-temporal approach to human-food interactions.
• Analyze the influence of environmental and cultural variation on food production and consumption and the ways these interactions influence decision making within and outside the food system.
• Engage with broader issues in agriculture, distribution and origin through food chain analysis.
• Focus on policy analysis and associated skills such as scenario simulation will also play a central role in the food studies skill set.
• Gain field research skills, including data collection on abiotic factors, biodiversity, and farm crop diversity and productivity, complemented by laboratory skills focused on nutritional analyses and related aspects of food chemistry.
• Obtain hands-on skills in small-scale farming and food service operation.
• Participate in an internship to better prepare you for careers in the field of food studies.

Your program of study will culminate in a student-defined, capstone research project that demonstrates skills in project management, synthesis, problem identification, and problem solving.

Who should consider this degree program?

This M.A. program is a good fit for students interested in numerous aspects of food systems who wish to enter arenas in the private and public sector with expertise in Food Studies. It may also serves as a good entry point for those who wish to eventually pursue a Ph.D. in the field. You do not need to have a background in Food Studies to apply to this M.A. degree program.

More about the Food Studies M.A.

If you have questions about the Food Studies M.A. program, please contact:

• Brian Gilley ( [email protected] ), program coordinator
• Robert Girard ( [email protected] ), graduate coordinator
• Sara Friedman ( [email protected] ), director of graduate studies

Learn more about the Food Studies M.A. in our Student Portal

Interested in applying to our Food Studies M.A. program?

Learn how to apply

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• Food Science, Ph.D.

The graduate program in the Department of Food Science ranks among the best of its kind in the United States. Strong faculty research groups exist in food chemistry, food engineering, food microbiology, and health. The Ph.D. track in these areas combine an array of in-depth courses with the use of advanced research methods for studying food properties: chemical, physical, physiological, and bioactive characteristics; material properties; microbial control and safety; sensory quality; procedures for the processing, storage, and preservation of foods.

Research areas in which the department has special expertise include: chemical attributes of proteins, enzymes, lipids, flavors, bioactive components, and pigments; processes for crystallizing, separating, freezing, and drying; food safety (detection, control, and mechanistic action of pathogenic microorganisms, and undesirable chemicals in food); process optimization and validation of critical processing limits. Commodity foci include: dairy products, confectionery products, fruits and vegetables, muscle foods, and fermented products.

The department occupies Babcock Hall, a building with excellent facilities for instruction and research. Availability of appropriate instruments, equipment, and pilot-plant facilities enables research on the above topics to be conducted in a manner that has impact worldwide.

About 40–50 students from many countries are currently pursuing both the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in the areas mentioned above. This includes some graduate students working in programs associated with the Food Research Institute and closely allied departments.

Individuals obtaining advanced degrees in food science will find employment opportunities in academic instruction and research, government research or regulatory programs, and industrial research, development, or quality assurance. Historically, the department's placement record for graduating students has been very good.

Please consult the table below for key information about this degree program’s admissions requirements. The program may have more detailed admissions requirements, which can be found below the table or on the program’s website.

Graduate admissions is a two-step process between academic programs and the Graduate School. Applicants must meet the minimum requirements of the Graduate School as well as the program(s). Once you have researched the graduate program(s) you are interested in, apply online .

Students who are admitted to the program must meet the Graduate School minimum requirements , including completion of a bachelor's degree which typically consists of a satisfactory undergraduate education in fields such as food science, dairy science, chemistry, most biological sciences (e.g., biochemistry, microbiology, nutrition), and engineering (especially chemical and agricultural).

Recommendation for admission is determined almost solely by the faculty member food science or affiliated faculty member .  Final admission is determined by the Graduate School.

The recommendation for admission is made usually based on the review of the following:

• applicant's online application
• academic record (scanned PDF academic transcripts)
• official test scores (sent directly from the testing agency (code: 1846)) of English proficiency test ( non-native English speaking applicants only)
• recommendation letters (three)
• personal statement (reasons for graduate study) up to two pages double-spaced
• CV or resume
• applicant's particular research interest(s) as indicated in supplemental application
• available funding/space in their research lab

After the application is submitted, applicants should contact  faculty  members directly (via email) to discuss research opportunities in their labs.  Some dialogue can be exchanged in advance. However, like virtually all institutions that support graduate studies, one must submit a formal application to UW-Madison before being considered for admission. The Food Science Department cannot take any action regarding admission until the application is complete. We do not pre-screen applications, nor do we provide an informal assessment of qualifications based on volunteered documents from individuals prior to application. 

Students interested in applying for the food science program should look closely at the  website  for specific information about the admissions process.

Graduate School Resources

Resources to help you afford graduate study might include assistantships, fellowships, traineeships, and financial aid.  Further funding information is available from the Graduate School. Be sure to check with your program for individual policies and restrictions related to funding.

Program Resources

We recommend that your application be complete by the application deadlines in order to be considered for funding. Financial assistance is sometimes available to qualified individuals in the form of research assistantships, teaching assistantships, or fellowships. Fellowships are granted to students meeting specific criteria and with outstanding academic records.  Research assistantships are awarded by individual professors through funds available to their research programs. Funding is awarded on a competitive basis and renewed annually pending the student's satisfactory progress. (Teaching assistant positions in food science are available primarily to students who have already been enrolled for at least two semesters.)

Please be advised that you do not need to make a separate application for financial support as your admission application will also serve as an application for assistantships and fellowships. 

Prospective students are encouraged to search and apply for external funding sources (scholarships and fellowships) on their own.  (If faculty do not have funding or lab space available, they often do not accept new students into their labs.) Additionally, prospective students are encouraged to apply for graduate assistantship (teaching, research, or project) positions in other UW–Madison departments to potentially defray the costs of their studies.  See  Graduate School Funding pages  for more information.

Minimum Graduate School Requirements

Major requirements.

Review the Graduate School minimum academic progress and degree requirements , in addition to the program requirements listed below.

MODE OF INSTRUCTION

Mode of instruction definitions.

Accelerated: Accelerated programs are offered at a fast pace that condenses the time to completion. Students typically take enough credits aimed at completing the program in a year or two.

Evening/Weekend: ​Courses meet on the UW–Madison campus only in evenings and/or on weekends to accommodate typical business schedules.  Students have the advantages of face-to-face courses with the flexibility to keep work and other life commitments.

Face-to-Face: Courses typically meet during weekdays on the UW-Madison Campus.

Hybrid: These programs combine face-to-face and online learning formats.  Contact the program for more specific information.

Online: These programs are offered 100% online.  Some programs may require an on-campus orientation or residency experience, but the courses will be facilitated in an online format.

CURRICULAR REQUIREMENTS

Required courses, graduate school policies.

The  Graduate School’s Academic Policies and Procedures  provide essential information regarding general university policies. Program authority to set degree policies beyond the minimum required by the Graduate School lies with the degree program faculty. Policies set by the academic degree program can be found below.

Major-Specific Policies

Prior coursework, graduate work from other institutions.

Prior graduate-level coursework from other institutions does not transfer in for credit, but may satisfy specific food science course requirements.  In that case, students do not need to take the food science course requirement, but do need to choose, in consultation with their advisor, another course with at least the same number of credits.

No more than 6 credits from prior graduate level coursework may be applied toward fulfillment of the distributed minor (breadth) requirement. Coursework earned ten or more years prior to admission to a doctoral degree is not allowed to satisfy requirements.

UW–Madison Undergraduate

Prior coursework as a UW–Madison undergraduate student does not transfer in for credit, but may satisfy specific food science course requirements.  In that case, students do not need to take the food science course requirement, but do need to choose, in consultation with their advisor, another course with at least the same number of credits.

UW–Madison University Special

Prior coursework taken as a University Special student does not transfer in for credit, but may satisfy specific food science course requirements.  In that case, students do not need to take the food science course requirement, but do need to choose, in consultation with their advisor, another course with at least the same number of credits.

This program follows the Graduate School's Probation policy.

ADVISOR / COMMITTEE

This program follows the Graduate School's Advisor policy and   the Graduate School's Committees policy.

CREDITS PER TERM ALLOWED

Time limits.

It is expected that students will complete all degree requirements in five years.

Dissertators cannot schedule their dissertation defense sooner than six months after the actual  date of passing the preliminary examination.

A candidate for a doctoral degree who fails to take the final oral examination (thesis defense) and deposit the dissertation within five years after passing the preliminary examination may be required to take another preliminary examination to be admitted to candidacy a second time. (per Graduate School Policy)

Doctoral degree students who have been absent for ten or more consecutive years lose all credits that they have earned before their absence. Individual programs may count the coursework students completed prior to their absence for meeting program requirements; that coursework may not count toward Graduate School credit requirements.

Grievances and Appeals

These resources may be helpful in addressing your concerns:

• Bias or Hate Reporting  
• Graduate Assistantship Policies and Procedures
• Office of the Provost for Faculty and Staff Affairs
• Dean of Students Office (for all students to seek grievance assistance and support)
• Employee Assistance (for personal counseling and workplace consultation around communication and conflict involving graduate assistants and other employees, post-doctoral students, faculty and staff)
• Employee Disability Resource Office (for qualified employees or applicants with disabilities to have equal employment opportunities)
• Graduate School (for informal advice at any level of review and for official appeals of program/departmental or school/college grievance decisions)
• Office of Compliance (for class harassment and discrimination, including sexual harassment and sexual violence)
• Office of Student Conduct and Community Standards (for conflicts involving students)
• Ombuds Office for Faculty and Staff (for employed graduate students and post-docs, as well as faculty and staff)
• Title IX (for concerns about discrimination)

College of Agricultural and Life Sciences: Grievance Policy  

In the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences (CALS), any student who feels unfairly treated by a member of the CALS faculty or staff has the right to complain about the treatment and to receive a prompt hearing. Some complaints may arise from misunderstandings or communication breakdowns and be easily resolved; others may require formal action. Complaints may concern any matter of perceived unfairness.

To ensure a prompt and fair hearing of any complaint, and to protect the rights of both the person complaining and the person at whom the complaint is directed, the following procedures are used in the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences. Any student, undergraduate or graduate, may use these procedures, except employees whose complaints are covered under other campus policies.

• The student should first talk with the person at whom the complaint is directed. Most issues can be settled at this level. Others may be resolved by established departmental procedures.
• If the complaint involves an academic department in CALS the student should proceed in accordance with item 3 below.
• If the grievance involves a unit in CALS that is not an academic department, the student should proceed in accordance with item 4 below.
• If informal mediation fails, the student can submit the grievance in writing to the grievance advisor within 10 working days of the date the student is informed of the failure of the mediation attempt by the grievance advisor. The grievance advisor will provide a copy to the person at whom the grievance is directed.
• The grievance advisor will refer the complaint to a department committee that will obtain a written response from the person at whom the complaint is directed, providing a copy to the student. Either party may request a hearing before the committee. The grievance advisor will provide both parties a written decision within 20 working days from the date of receipt of the written complaint.
• If the grievance involves the department chairperson, the grievance advisor or a member of the grievance committee, these persons may not participate in the review.
• If not satisfied with departmental action, either party has 10 working days from the date of notification of the departmental committee action to file a written appeal to the CALS Equity and Diversity Committee. A subcommittee of this committee will make a preliminary judgement as to whether the case merits further investigation and review. If the subcommittee unanimously determines that the case does not merit further investigation and review, its decision is final. If one or more members of the subcommittee determine that the case does merit further investigation and review, the subcommittee will investigate and seek to resolve the dispute through mediation. If this mediation attempt fails, the subcommittee will bring the case to the full committee. The committee may seek additional information from the parties or hold a hearing. The committee will present a written recommendation to the dean who will provide a final decision within 20 working days of receipt of the committee recommendation.
• If the alleged unfair treatment occurs in a CALS unit that is not an academic department, the student should, within 120 calendar days of the alleged incident, take his/her grievance directly to the Associate Dean of Academic Affairs. The dean will attempt to resolve the problem informally within 10 working days of receiving the complaint. If this mediation attempt does not succeed the student may file a written complaint with the dean who will refer it to the CALS Equity and Diversity Committee. The committee will seek a written response from the person at whom the complaint is directed, subsequently following other steps delineated in item 3d above.

Students are admitted by faculty in the department through direct admission. 

Take advantage of the Graduate School's  professional development resources to build skills, thrive academically, and launch your career. 

• Articulates potentials and limits of core paradigms in food science; formulates ideas and extrapolations beyond current boundaries of knowledge.
• Develops breadth through competencies in minor field(s) of study.
• Fosters ethical and professional conduct.
• Critically evaluates evidence to articulate research questions and develop appropriate research hypotheses.
• Formulates an effective experimental design and develops appropriate methodology to address problems in a systematic manner.
• Creates knowledge that makes a substantive contribution to the field and articulates how society may benefit.
• Communicates complex ideas in a succinct and understandable manner to diverse audiences.
• Develops mentoring and teaching skills.

Professors: Hartel, Ingham, Lucey, Rankin (chair)

Assistant Professors: Bolling, Girard, Huynh, Ujor, van Pijkeren

• Requirements
• Professional Development
• Learning Outcomes

Contact Information

Food Science College of Agricultural and Life Sciences [email protected] foodsci.wisc.edu

Graduate Program Coordinator [email protected] 608-263-6388 105 Babcock Hall, 1605 Linden Drive Madison, WI 53706 https://foodsci.wisc.edu/grad.php

Director of Graduate Study [email protected] 608-263-6388 105 Babcock Hall, 1605 Linden Drive Madison, WI 53706 https://foodsci.wisc.edu/grad.php

Graduate School grad.wisc.edu

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PhD in Food Science

Join one of the nation’s oldest and strongest food science programs..

Food science as a formal academic discipline began at UMass Amherst in 1918, and now, more than a century later, the program at UMass remains one of the world’s best. The PhD in food science will prepare you to be a researcher, scholar, and leader in the field.

In your work in the program, you’ll delve into a range of research areas, choosing from specialties in food biotechnology, physical-chemical properties of food, food safety, and foods for health and wellness.

The Department of Food Science has been ranked the #1 food science PhD research program in the U.S. by the National Research Council, and UMass has been ranked the #3 best university for food science and technology by U.S. News & World Report .

We have a long history of training food science professionals, with our graduates moving on to careers within the food industry, higher education, and government.

Related offerings

Students interested in our PhD in Food Science may also be interested in these other offerings.

• Bachelor of Science in Food Science
• Minor in Food Science
• Master of Science in Food Science

Featured faculty

Lili He is the department head and a professor in the Department of Food Science.

Food Science

A highly interdisciplinary field focused on providing nutritious, safe, and wholesome food for populations around the world.

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Search NYU Steinhardt

Master of Arts Food Studies

Application extended: still accepting applications.

As the first master’s degree in the US devoted to food scholarship, the Food Studies MA combines approaches from the humanities and social sciences to prepare you to analyze cultural, political, economic, environmental, and geographic approaches to food within local, urban, and global contexts.

Degree Details

Official degree title.

Master of Arts in Food Studies

About the Degree

Your academic experience, careers and outcomes.

Our mission is to teach you how to examine the ways in which individuals, communities, and societies produce, distribute, and consume food. Given the University’s dynamic New York City location, your investigations of these topics will focus on cities as the center of flows of people, produce, and media products.

Students in the Food Studies MA develop a range of skills, including:

• How to apply an interdisciplinary approach to understand the cultural, political, and economic aspects of the food system
• How to discuss with fluency issues related to food sovereignty, sustainability, ethics, and culture
• How to assess policies that shape the food landscape, addressing questions of equity, and preserving cultural values

View the full curriculum.

Course work in the Master of Arts in Food Studies encompasses the study of food systems, culture, and policy, as well as a research component designed to help you learn how to apply class concepts to real-world issues. You will take additional credits in specialization modules likes policy/advocacy, business/social entrepreneurship, and media/cultural analysis, allowing you to dig deeper into your personal interests within the world of food studies.

Graduates of the Food Studies MA find jobs in all areas within the food industry:

• Publishing (magazines, newspapers, online sources)
• Public relations (restaurants, food lobby groups, cookbooks, food organizations)
• Marketing (for restaurants, celebrity chefs, cookbooks, organizations)
• Nonprofit work (education, food/hunger advocacy groups)
• Food operations (wine importers/distributors, restaurants, retail)
• Local and national governmental (city government, federal government, food regulations, relations between industry and government)
• NGO work in advocacy and policy (farming, labor, food scarcity, trade)
• Development organizations (community building, national programs, international trade and aid organizations)
• Food production companies (producers and manufacturers of food items)
• Food distribution companies (importation, transportation, and retail)

Visit our Alumni in Action page for more information about graduates of our program.

Graduate Adjunct Faculty Spotlight

Meet Sara Snyder who is a media producer currently at the TODAY Show.

Current Student Spotlight

Check out a Q&A with Food Studies graduate student Abby Katz, who was recently named a James Beard Foundation National Scholar.

Why NYU Steinhardt Food Studies?

• Learn from the best. Our faculty, prominent leaders in the field, teach and provide mentorship while actively conducting research.
• Study abroad. We offer global coursework in sites like Paris, Hong Kong, Puerto Rico, and Puebla, providing immersive, international experiences.  
• Get ahead. We help you find diverse internships (in food production companies, distributors, nonprofits, marketing firms, magazines) to form relationships and develop their knowledge.
• Gain practical skills. The degree emphasizes the development of critical thinking, preparing you for the professional world.

If you have any additional questions about our degree, please feel free to contact  [email protected] .

Nutrition and Food Studies

411 Lafayette Street, 5th Floor New York, NY 10003 Phone: 212-998-5580 Email: [email protected]

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Take the next step.

Advance your personal and professional journey – apply to join our community of students.

Food Studies Programs

The american university of rome (italy).

The Graduate School

Degree(s) awarded: M.A. in Food Studies

http://www.aur.edu/gradschool/graduate-programs/food-studies/introduction/

Arizona State University (online, USA)

School of Nutrition and Health Promotion

Degree(s) awarded: Master of Science in Nutrition (Dietetics)

http://asuonline.asu.edu/online-degree-programs/graduate/master-science-nutrition-dietetics

Benedictine University (online, USA)

Master of Science in Nutrition and Wellness

Degree(s) awarded: M.S. in Nutrition and Wellness

http://online.ben.edu/msnw/masters-in-nutrition-wellness

Boston University, Metropolitan College (USA)

Gastronomy and Food Studies

Degree(s) awarded: Master of Liberal Arts in Gastronomy, graduate Food Studies Certificate

www.bu.edu/gastronomy

Carleton University (Canada)

Food Science & Nutrition

Degree(s) awarded: BSc (Honours)

http://www.carleton.ca/chem/fsn/

Chatham University (USA)

Falk School of Sustainability

http://www.chatham.edu/mafs

City University of London (England)

Public, Healthy, Primary Care & Food Policy

Degree(s) awarded: MSc Food Policy

https://www.city.ac.uk/prospective-students/courses/postgraduate/food-policy

Culinary Institute of America (USA)

Applied Food Studies

Degree(s) awarded: B.P.S.

https://www.ciachef.edu/cia-applied-food-studies-bachelors-degree-program/

Cornell University (USA)

Division of Nutritional Sciences

Degree(s) awarded: M.S., M.S./Ph.D. or Ph.D.

http://www.nutrition.cornell.edu/

Department of Food Science

Degree(s) awarded: M.S. and Ph.D.

http://foodscience.cornell.edu/

Drexel University (USA)

Department of Culinary Arts and Food Science

Degree(s) Awarded: Master of Science in Culinary Arts and Science

http://drexel.edu/hsm/academics/Culinary-Arts-Food-Science/MS-in-Culinary-Arts-and-Science /

Gustolab Institute , Borromini Institute

Degree(s) awarded: Study abroad programs

http://www.gustolab.com/

Le Cordon Bleu International

Culinary/Hospitality Management/Gastronomy

Degree(s) awarded: Masters/Bachelors/Diploma

http://cordonbleu.edu/

Locations: Paris, London, Ottawa, Seoul, Kobe, Tokyo, Adelaide, Sydney

Johns Hopkins University (USA)

Bloomberg School of Public Health

Degrees: PhD, DrPH, MPH, MSPH, Certificate in Food Systems

http://www.jhsph.edu/academics/certificate-programs/certificates-for-hopkins-and-non-degree-students/food-system-envir-publ-health.html

Indiana University, Bloomington (USA)

Anthropology – Anthropology of Food PhD track

Degree(s) awarded: Ph.D., MA

http://www.indiana.edu/~anthro/food_anthro.html

Institut European d’Histoire et des Cultures de l’Alimentation, Universite de Tours (France)

Histoire et Cultures de l’Alimentation

Degree(s) awarded: Master d’Histoire et des Cultures de l’Alimentation (prof. Jean-Pierre Williot)

www.iehca.eu

New School (USA)

Food Studies

Degree(s) awarded: Courses can be taken for an undergraduate degree

https://www.newschool.edu/bachelors-program/food-studies-ba-bs-aas/

New York University– Steinhardt (USA)

Department of Nutrition and Food Studies

Degree(s) awarded: B.S., M.A., PhD

http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/nutrition/

Oregon State University (USA)

Food in Culture and Social Justice

Degree(s) awarded: Graduate minor; undergraduate certificate

https://liberalarts.oregonstate.edu/slcs/fcsj/academics/graduate-minor-food-culture-and-social-justice

Oregon Health & Science University (USA)

Graduate Programs in Human Nutrition

Degree(s) awarded: M.S. in Food Systems and Society

https://www.ohsu.edu/school-of-medicine/human-nutrition-graduate-programs/master-science-food-systems-and-society

Oxford Brookes University (England)

Department of Sport, Health Sciences and Social Work

Degree(s) awarded: B.S., M.A., Ph.D.

http://www.brookes.ac.uk/studying/courses/postgraduate/2013/food-wine-culture

Ryerson University (Canada)

School of Nutrition & Center for Studies in Food Security

Degree(s) awarded: post-degree Certificate in Food Security

https://continuing.torontomu.ca/public/category/courseCategoryCertificateProfile.do?method=load&certificateId=194754

Syracuse University (USA)

Food Studies Program in Department of Public Health, Food Studies and Nutrition

Degree(s) awarded: B.S. and M.S. in Food Studies

http://falk.syr.edu/FoodStudies/

Taylor’s University (Malaysia)

Degree(s) awarded: M.A., Ph.D.

https://university.taylors.edu.my/en/study/postgraduate/food-studies-gastronomy/master-of-philosophy-food-studies.html

https://university.taylors.edu.my/en/study/postgraduate-research/culinary/doctor-philosophy-food-studies.html

The Umbra Institute (Italy)

Degree(s) awarded: Certificate

http://www.umbra.org/academics/food-studies/

Tufts University (USA)

Agriculture, Food & Environment

Degree(s) awarded: M.S., Ph.D.

https://nutrition.tufts.edu/academics/degree-programs/food-nutrition-policy-programs

University College Cork (Ireland)

MA in Food Studies and Irish Foodways (online) 

Food Studies and Irish Foodways MSc | University College Cork | UCC | Ireland | Courses

Postgraduate Diploma in Food Studies and Irish Foodways (online) 

Food Studies and Irish Foodways Postgraduate Diploma | UCC | University College Cork | Cork | Ireland

Université François Rabelais, Tours (France)

UFR Arts et Sciences Humaines / Département Histoire

Degree(s) awarded: M.A. (Food History)

http://www.univ-tours.fr or http://www.iehca.eu

Université du Québec à Montréal (Canada)

Certificat en gestion et pratiques socioculturelles de la gastronomie (in French) (Management and Sociocultural Practices of Gastronomy)

Degree(s) awarded: one-year university certificate (undergraduate level, which can be combined with a major to become a bachelor’s degree

https://esg.uqam.ca/programmes/programme-court-de-2e-cycle-en-foodstudies/

University of Arizona (USA)

Food Studies & Nutrition and Food Systems

Degree(s) awarded: B.A and B.S.

https://sbsmajors.arizona.edu/foodstudies

https://foodsystems.arizona.edu/

University of British Columbia (Canada)

Land and Food Systems

Degree(s) awarded: B.S., M.F.S, M.Sc., and Ph.D.

http://www.landfood.ubc.ca/graduate/

University of California, Davis (USA)

Program in International & Community Nutrition

Degree(s) awarded: Ph.D.

http://picn.ucdavis.edu/

Viticulture & Enology

https://vengg.ucdavis.edu/

University of Exeter (UK )

Food Studies, Centre for Rural Policy Research, Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences

Degree(s) awarded: Masters in Food Studies; MA in Food Studies: Food, Society and Culture; MSc in Food Studies: Food Systems and Sustainability

https://www.exeter.ac.uk/study/postgraduate/courses/anthropology/food-studies-ma/

University of Gastronomic Sciences (Italy)

Gastronomy & Food Communications (in English or English/Italian)

Degree(s): B.A., M.A. (equivalent)

www.unisg.it

University of London, School of Oriental & African Studies (England)

Anthropology & Sociology

Degree(s) awarded: M.A. https://www.soas.ac.uk/anthropology/programmes/maanthoffood/

University of New Hampshire (USA)

Dual Major in Ecogastronomy

Degree(s) awarded: Bachelors

http://www.unh.edu/ecogastronomy/

University of Oregon (USA)

Graduate Specialization in Food Studies

Degree(s) awarded: B.A. (Concentration), M.A., M.S., M.B.A., Ph.D. or J.D.

http://foodstudies.uoregon.edu/graduate-specialization-in-food-studies/

University of Southern Maine (USA)

Food Studies Program

Degree(s) awarded: Undergraduate minor and graduate certificate in Food Studies.

Undergraduate major in development.

https://usm.maine.edu/food-studies

University of Vermont

Food Systems Graduate Program

Degree(s) awarded: M.Sc., Ph.D., Food Systems

http://www.uvm.edu/foodsystemsprogram/

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PhD Food Heritage

The phd in food heritage: cultures and identities is a formative offer of high studies, of an interdisciplinary and unique nature in portugal. existing since 2015 in the faculty of arts and humanities of the university of coimbra, it was created with the aim of elevating the multidimensional theme of food to the status of a university scientific research area..

The main uniqueness of the subjects delivered lies in addressing Food Studies from a holistic perspective, centred on the Humanities. History, Culture, Literature and Arts are the pillars of this humanist knowledge, in dialogue with the disciplinary perspectives of Tourism, Anthropology, Sociology, Communication and Medicine. All these areas are taken care by a fixed teaching staff and by national and foreign guest specialists.

The course is directed both at candidates who have not yet entered the professional market and for professionals linked, in particular, to the food, gastronomy, culture and tourism areas, and educational professionals who wish to value themselves and acquire knowledge and skills of the highest level of research and education.

Overall goal

The main goal of academic research developed within the course is to understand how individuals and societies, in the long duration of the historical process (from prehistory to the present), relate to food from the sociocultural, aesthetic, communicational, ethical, religious and medical points of view, in all its stages (production, distribution, transformation, consumption and its consequences at the socio-environmental and health levels). These universes of questioning seem indispensable to answer a set of key questions in contemporary discourses on Heritage, Gastronomy, Healthy & Sustainable Food, Health, Leisure & Well-Being.

Specific goals

• Provide in-depth knowledge on Food Heritage as an expression of multiculturalism and as identity markers open to change.
• Carry out research and application of knowledge to the academic and civil communities of scientific knowledge on the major dietary and culinary models that influence the modus vivendi of societies, formed from the relationship and openness to food practices in other countries.
• Demonstrate the relevance of Food Heritage in the context of the peoples’ cultural heritage of and their cultural manifestations.
• Promote the transfer of knowledge to the business and the civil communities, a dynamic necessary for economic development, knowledge and the enhancement of local and global heritage and identities.
• Development of collaborative actions and projects between the team of professors and PhD candidates of PACI, civil society, public or private institutions and the business sector.

For more information, see the page of the Faculty .

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Introduction

• Published: October 2012
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The history of food, long derided as an amateur’s avocation, has finally won professional respectability based on a generation of high-quality scholarship. The defensive justifications for studying food often given by the field’s pioneers, many of whom labored in obscurity at provincial colleges and universities, has given way to a new self-confidence and recognition. 1 Food matters, not only as a proper subject of study in its own right, but also as a captivating medium for conveying critical messages about capitalism, the environment, and social inequality to audiences beyond the ivy tower. This handbook seeks to recognize the contributions of early scholars, consolidate our understanding of the field, and point out new challenges for future researchers.

Although professional historians were slow to perceive the importance of food, the evidence was always there waiting in the primary sources. Ancient Chinese social philosophers acknowledged cooks as state ministers and butchers as role models of enlightened behavior, demonstrating the critical importance of feeding the people to political legitimacy and of decorum at the table to a well-ordered society. By contrast, the Greek intellectual tradition disdained the practical labor of the scullery as inferior to the theoretical musings of the philosopher king, although that did not stop early Greek historians and geographers from taking careful note of eating and drinking habits as markers of cultural difference. Renaissance humanists’ textual criticism, a methodological foundation of the historical profession, was directed toward culinary works by Athenaeus and Apicius along with other classical writings. Enlightenment philosophes produced the first national histories of food, including Le Grand d’Aussy’s Histoire de la vie privée des françois (History of the Private Life of the French, 1782) and Richard Warner’s Antiquitates Culinariae, or Curious Tracts on Culinary Affairs of the Old English (1791). 2

The professionalization of history, initiated in nineteenth-century German universities, marked a step backward for the study of food. Leopold von Ranke and his colleagues considered nation building to be the proper subject of history, and they privileged state archives as the appropriate sources for such a project. Eager to claim scientific objectivity, professors carefully policed the boundaries of their masculine, nation-centered discipline and derided any deviations or attempts to write history as literature. Lucy Maynard Salmon, author of the path-breaking social history Domestic Service (1897), incurred the ridicule of colleagues when her Vassar College seminar analyzed historical recipes and kitchen appliances alongside more traditional documents. 3

Scholars who dared to study food history generally did so outside of national and disciplinary boundaries. Early immigration historian Theodore Blegen examined food in works such as Grass Roots History (1947). The French Annales school likewise included food in their broad geographical and interdisciplinary vision of “total history”; but although Fernand Braudel focused on demography and nutrition by counting the calories in historical diets, he gave less attention to the social and cultural contexts of eating. The recent burst of historical scholarship on food was inspired largely by anthropologists. Kwang-Chih Chang organized perhaps the first major English-language collection, Food and Chinese Culture (1977); as an archaeologist, he perceived the importance of establishing a basic chronology of the historical development of Chinese cuisine. Sidney Mintz’s landmark history of sugar, Sweetness and Power (1985), set a model for commodity studies by linking the production of Caribbean slaves with European consumption and the rise of modern industry. 4

Meanwhile, professional scorn had not prevented a dedicated clan of culinary historians from pursuing valuable research on historical cookery. Profoundly knowledgeable of their subject, although often lacking in professional credentials, they combined careful textual analysis of old cookbooks with archival research and the historic recreation of old recipes using period technology. Through such historical reenacting, at times in museums and other public history settings, they acquired a detailed acquaintance with the materiality of food, which professional historians would do well to emulate. Some of these nonprofessionals, most notably Mark Kurlansky, have won enormous popular audiences, which seemed all the more evidence that they were not serious scholars. More appropriate criticisms of culinary historians would be that they have frequently failed to ask difficult social questions, ignored previous historical works, both by culinary and academic historians, and as a consequence, often reinvented the wheel, even while insisting that they were correcting myths and errors perpetuated by unnamed rivals. I should add that I intend these remarks not in the spirit of academic gatekeeping—culinary historians were, after all, among the pioneers of the field—but rather as an encouragement to engage more fully with a historiography that is growing rapidly in scope and quality. 5

This handbook is intended for a number of audiences: graduate students preparing for comprehensive exams and dissertation research, established scholars interested in food as a research or teaching field, and culinary historians who want to kick it up a notch. The essays take stock of the field, review literatures, evaluate methodologies, and compile historiographies. Some authors focus in depth on illustrative topics, for example, the medieval spice trade or modern culinary tourism. Others survey the entire sweep of world history by way of fundamental thematic categories such as human mobility, labor, and the environment. Together they illustrate the wide range of approaches taken by contemporary historians of food and society.

Historical debates around food—in contrast to highly polarized contemporary food politics—remain relatively diffuse. In part, this openness reflects the wide range of topics that involve food; as a “total social phenomenon,” it influences virtually every aspect of human life. The potential for research in the history of food is therefore limited only by our own imaginations. Yet too often scholarship responds to the particular concerns of national historiographies, precisely because the profession is still institutionally constrained by national boundaries, particularly in training graduate students and hiring faculty. This volume is purposely organized along thematic and comparative lines in the hopes that national concerns will not become blinders to larger historical processes. Scholars who read narrowly in their own period and area miss valuable insights and often reinvent wheels of their own. Broad interdisciplinary reading is particularly important to avoid perpetuating what Richard Wilk has evocatively called “zombie theories,” pernicious concepts such as modernization that have been buried in the fields that spawned them, only to rise from the dead and wreck havoc in neighboring departments.

Until at least the 1950s, food tended to appear in historical works haphazardly as it related to other topics. For example, early historians of agriculture investigated the production of staple crops, while showing little interest in consumption. 6 Likewise, political historians at times examined the institutions for urban provisioning and food distribution. 7 Richard O. Cummings’s The American and His Food (1940) was basically a study in the historical development of nutritional science. 8 Meanwhile, the Cambridge orientalist Arthur J. Arberry translated a medieval Baghdad cookbook as a linguistic curiosity alongside the Quran and works of Sufi poets. 9

The rise of social history in the 1960s and 1970s first embroiled food in controversies at the center of the historical profession, particularly debates about standards of living. The question, whether industrialization led to an improvement in the livelihood of European workers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was approached via the interdisciplinary, quantitative methods that had been pioneered by Fernand Braudel and his Annales colleagues in their sweeping histories of agricultural production and demographic change in the medieval and early modern Mediterranean. 10 In the United States, polemics erupted most fiercely over contested claims by economic historians Stanley Engerman and Robert Fogel that slaves on antebellum plantations were well fed. 11 Although such arguments helped push economic and demographic history to the margins of the profession by the 1990s, scholars have continued to refine our understanding of the quality of historic diets and health, most notably through the examination of skeletal remains. 12

Already in the early 1970s, scholars had begun to question the deterministic assumptions behind economic studies, thus setting the stage for a culturally attuned political history of food. One starting point was E. P. Thompson’s essay on the “moral economy” of the crowd and food riots in England during the transition to capitalism. Rather than chart the rise of food riots as a “spasmodic” response of hungry people to rising prices, Thompson sought to understand the cultural logic used to justify rioting at a time when a new commercial economy began to violate the long-standing rules of an older moral economy that were intended to protect the most vulnerable members of society. 13 This anthropological approach to the politics of hunger was reinforced by Amartya Sen’s economic theory of entitlement, which demonstrated more generally that hunger has resulted not from food shortages alone but primarily from failures of distribution. 14 Inspired by these works, scholars have examined the links between food distribution and political legitimacy in a wide range of societies. Peter Garnsey, for example, located the origins of Western ambivalence toward food welfare programs in classical Greek and Roman notions of self-reliant citizenship and the belief that food assistance should come in the form of private charity rather than as a government entitlement. Lars Lih demonstrated the importance of food politics in the Russian Revolution, both in the collapse of the Tsarist regime due to its failure to ensure urban food supplies and in the Civil War between the Bolshevik power base in grain-consuming regions and loyalist agricultural centers in the Caucuses and Siberia. 15

The political history of food has also reached beyond struggles over distribution to examine other ways that food has contributed to hegemonic rule, which allowed elites to cultivate legitimacy through consent rather than naked force. Warren Belasco wrote his classic book, Appetite for Change (1989), as a case study in hegemony by the food industry, which co-opted the 1960s counterculture by marketing various forms of “yuppie chow.” 16 In a similar fashion, Natalia Milanesio has noted that the government of Juan Domingo Perón sought to gain populist support by creating an entitlement to beef, an iconic food in Argentina; the policy backfired, however, when drought and mismanagement crippled the livestock industry. In ancient Athens, as James Davidson has observed, fish were considered to be a luxury food whose allure could tempt citizens into profligate spending, which posed a threat to the egalitarian, democratic order. 17 Scholars have also examined hegemonic contests fought out over food by marginalized peoples, including women, the working classes, and racial and ethnic minorities. For example, Amy Bentley has discussed the ways that women in the United States used domestic labor as a means for claiming patriotic citizenship during World War II. 18

A second important focus of historical research on food has sought to explain cultural and culinary change over time. Alfred W. Crosby Jr.’s foundational study of globalization, The Columbian Exchange (1972), examined a crucial moment of culinary transformation at the dawn of the early modern era, giving particular attention to agents of change and to environmental contexts. Trained as a Latin American historian, Crosby interpreted the spread of foods from the Old World to the New as a case of cultural conquest based on the Spaniards’ insistence on having access to familiar foods and their rejection of indigenous staples. In narrating the return voyages of American foods, however, Crosby made an essentially Malthusian argument based on the productivity of crops within broadly defined ecologies. 19 Sucheta Mazumdar, James McCann, and others have revised Crosby’s argument by giving closer attention to local social and environmental conditions. Moreover, scholars such as Judith Carney have challenged Crosby’s focus on conquistadors and merchants as agents of cultural transfer by showing that plebeian and even enslaved farmers and cooks largely determined the acceptance of new foods. 20

Marcy Norton has argued for consideration of taste as an autonomous force in shaping cultural change, thereby moving historical causation beyond either biological determinism or cultural functionalism. Using the case of chocolate, she observed that traditional explanations for European adoption point either to the addictive biological properties of theobromine, a chemical relative of caffeine that is found in cacao, or to the adaptation of chocolate into European cultural systems by adding sugar and spices to a bitter indigenous drink. Neither approach can fully explain the European taste for chocolate; she argued instead for a close examination of complex social relationships linking Natives and Spaniards in the early era of the conquest. 21 Paul Freedman has likewise shown the potential for historicizing taste in a book on spices and the medieval imagination. He examined the uses of spices not only to flavor food but also as perfume, medicine, and even a source of spiritual power. By revealing the ways that medieval Europeans imagined the unknown origins and seductive allure of spices, Freedman conveyed a sense of the mystery in their mental world. 22 In addition to the Columbian exchange and the spice trade, another perennial topic of research in food history has been the early modern transformation in French cooking from what Alberto Capatti and Massimo Montanari have described as a “taste of artifice,” exemplified by spice-laden medieval banquets, to a supposedly more naturalistic and modern “analytical taste” in which flavors were kept distinct, for example, sour was the predominant flavor of the salad course while sweet was reserved for dessert. The meticulous work of Jean-Louis Flandrin, a successor to Braudel in the French Annales school, served to formulate the terms of this debate. 23

A third basic area of historical research has been the connections between food and identity. One of the earliest and finest such works was Caroline Walker Bynum’s Holy Feast and Holy Fast (1987), which examined the importance of food as an expression of religiosity for medieval women. Food imagery was particularly prominent in the lives of female saints, who performed charity and miracles to feed the community, in imitation of Christ. 24 In the modern era, secular versions of commensality, shared meals taken at restaurants or clubs, have become important site for building class identities, whether elite distinction claimed in exclusive temples of haute cuisine, as expressions of middle-class ideals of democracy, or working-class solidarities forged over fish and chips. 25 Food has also helped preserve ethnic identities through rituals that maintain family and community traditions. Such practices of cooking and eating together were particularly important among marginalized groups, whose foods were often derided as unhealthful or immoral by dominant social groups. 26 Nevertheless, even as foods contributed to social differentiation, they also provided a nonthreatening bridge for crossing ethnic and racial boundaries. Scholars have found interethnic sharing of meals to be particularly common among the lower classes and other marginalized groups. 27 Eating across ethnic boundaries has also been the basis for a sense of national identity, as Arjun Appadurai discovered in a formative article on middle-class cookbooks in postcolonial India. Yet domestic attempts to define a nation have frequently served as tools for particular social groups to deny others from citizenship. 28 Moreover, Eric Rath has warned against fetishizing a nation; his study of culinary culture in early modern Japan found fantasies of beauty, morality, and emotion at the dinner table, but found little evidence of the “imagined community” that would later constitute the Japanese nation, nor even of such iconic dishes as sushi or tempura. 29

A fourth point of contention, and one that extends far beyond the historical profession, has concerned the rise of the modern industrial food system. Activists within the “good food movement” have blamed agrifood corporations for a host of evils, including contamination, obesity, social anomie, and environmental devastation. 30 Supporters of industrial food have argued to the contrary that technological advances of the past two centuries have created unprecedented abundance, whereas in premodern eras the vast majority of the population labored on the brink of famine. 31 Historians should have something to contribute to these polemics, but far from offering a clear chronology of the process of food industrialization, recent scholarship has done more to unsettle accepted narratives than to offer a comprehensive new interpretation. Although some scholars date the modern industrial farm to twentieth-century improvements in mechanization, irrigation, and the like, economic historians Alan Olmstead and Paul Rhode have argued that biological innovations in plant breeding and fertilizers dating back to the nineteenth century have had far greater effects on agricultural productivity. 32 In a similar fashion, Nick Cullather has challenged the traditional chronology of the Green Revolution, which supposedly prevented massive starvation during the Cold War era by diffusing highly efficient capitalist agricultural systems. In fact, the productivity gains of the Green Revolution were not as dramatic as they have been portrayed and in any event grew out of earlier farm improvement programs, often carried out by experts from Third World countries. 33

There is also no clear understanding of the effects of industrialization on consumption habits. Although some have argued that consumers have been duped by food processors into eating inferior products by intensive advertising campaigns and the availability of subsidized commodities, a revealing study by Martin Bruegel demonstrated the slow acceptance of canned foods by the French, who began to eat them on a large scale only after a century of efforts by the food processing industry and government educational efforts. One might attribute this resistance to French culinary exceptionalism, but the chapter by Gabriella Petrick in this handbook shows a similar delay in accepting industrial processed food in the United States. 34 Of course, it is hard to deny the growing industrial concentration of the global food system under the control of transnational corporations, from the seed (Monsanto) to the grocery store (Walmart) and the fast food restaurant (McDonald’s). 35 Nevertheless, we still have much to learn about the historical nature of commodity chains, as well as of consumer reactions to new products and technologies. 36

Changing beliefs about dietary health have been a final important focus of the recent boom in food history. The history of medicine was long concerned with documenting the progressive advance of knowledge in understanding the cause of disease; for example, Daphne Roe’s A Plague of Corn (1973) examined medical descriptions of the nutritional disease pellagra from outbreaks in eighteenth-century Europe to the adoption of vitamin B fortification in the decades around World War II. 37 Although valuable, such works have tended to naturalize scientific description as objective accounts of reality. More recently scholars have sought to understand nutritional beliefs instead as expressions of particular cultural systems rather than as approximations of ultimate truth, which turns out to be another way of saying modern Western nutritional science. For example, E. H. Collingham, Rebecca Earle, and Trudy Eden have examined the fears of early modern European colonizers in South Asia and the Americas that eating indigenous foods would cause them to degenerate to the level of their colonial subjects. 38 As these examples reveal, nutritional knowledge is deeply embedded in moral systems and cultural beliefs. Modern campaigns that stigmatize obesity in the United States reflect the same desire to control the lower classes as did the middle-class social workers trying to transform the dietary behavior of immigrants a century earlier. Moreover, Western nutritional science has become an international regime of power that has been widely accepted by medical experts in the Global South. 39 Charlotte Biltekoff has called for a “critical nutrition studies” that will examine the ways that dietary knowledge reproduces social relations of power, as well as a “critical dietary literacy” that will empower citizens to understand the vested interests behind nutritional claims made by industry and the medical professions and thereby forge healthier lives for themselves. 40

These five themes—political history, cultural change over time, food and identity, industrial transformation, and nutritional health—by no means exhaust the rich potential of food history. Yet another, more implicit, debate in food history concerns the proper narrative form for the field. Perhaps because food has been peripheral to the wider profession, scholars have felt free to experiment with novel ways of framing their studies. The biography, a staple of traditional history, has been turned to nonhuman subjects, including sugar, codfish, bananas, and pineapples, although there have also been numerous biographies of people such as Julia Child. 41 Chronological and civilizational narratives, another traditional historical approach, have also been common. 42 My own attempt to write a brief survey of food in world history used thematic, comparative case studies. 43 Felipe Fernández-Armesto wrote of historic “revolutions” in production, distribution, and consumption, while Kenneth Kiple organized his history around successive waves of globalization. 44 Indeed, the crucial role of food in the two most fundamental transformations in human history—the Neolithic revolution and the industrial revolution—has encouraged such sweeping narratives.

One final, existential question has long persisted among food studies scholars: can we even speak of ourselves as a distinctive field, one with its own methodologies and literatures, one that will not just rely on innovative work borrowed from others but also repay old intellectual debts by contributing new ideas and approaches to the broader pursuit of knowledge? Without trying to impose any one vision or agenda, the essays in this volume provide a resounding affirmative answer.

Belasco, Warren. Food: The Key Concepts . Oxford: Berg, 2009 .

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Bynum, Caroline Walker. Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987 .

Chang, K. C., ed. Food in Chinese Culture: Anthropological and Historical Perspectives . New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977 .

Counihan, Carole M. The Anthropology of Food and Body: Gender, Meaning, and Power . New York: Routledge, 1999 .

Flandrin, Jean-Louis, Massimo Montanari, and Albert Sonnenfeld, eds. Food: A Culinary History from Antiquity to the Present . Translated by Clarissa Botsford, et al. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999 .

Freedman, Paul, ed. Food: The History of Taste . Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007 .

Kiple, Kenneth F., and Kriemhild Coneè Ornelas, eds. The Cambridge World History of Food . 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000 .

Mintz, Sidney. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History . New York: Viking Books, 1985 .

Scholliers, Peter. “Twenty-five Years of Studying un Phénomène Social Total : Food History Writing on Europe in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.” Food, Culture, and Society 10, no. 3 (Fall 2007 ): 449–71.

Teuteberg, Hans J., ed. European Food History: A Research Overview . Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1992 .

Jennifer K. Ruark, “A Place at the Table: More Scholars Focus on Historical, Social, and Cultural Meanings of Food, but Some Critics Say It’s Scholarship-Lite,” The Chronicle of Higher Education , July 9, 1999, A17 . As an example of this recognition, the American Historical Review , the flagship journal of the American Historical Association, has published at least half a dozen articles on food history since 2004. These titles illustrate the wide range of scholarly literatures to which research on food has contributed. Roger Horowitz, Jeffrey M. Pilcher, and Sydney Watts, “Meat for the Multitudes: Market Culture in Paris, New York City, and Mexico City over the Long Nineteenth Century,” AHR 109, no. 4 (October 2004): 1055–83 ; James Vernon, “The Ethics of Hunger and the Assembly of Society: The Techno-Politics of the School Meal in Modern Britain,” AHR 110, no. 3 (June 2005): 693–725 ; Marcie Norton, “Tasting Empire: Chocolate and the European Internalization of Mesoamerican Aesthetics,” AHR 111, no. 3 (Jun 2006): 660–91 ; Nick Cullather, “The Foreign Policy of the Calorie,” AHR 112, no. 2 (April 2007): 337–64   Michael A. LaCombe, “‘A continuall and dayly Table for Gentlemen of fashion’: Humanism, Food, and Authority at Jamestown,” AHR 115, no. 3 (June 2010): 669–87 ; Rebecca Earle, “‘If You Eat Their Food …’: Diets and Bodies in Early Colonial Spanish America,” AHR 115, no. 3 (June 2010): 688–713 .

David Knechtges, “A Literary Feast: Food in Early Chinese Literature,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 106, no. 1 (1986): 49–63 ; Deane W. Curtin, “Food/Body/Person,” in Cooking, Eating, Thinking: Transformative Philosophies of Food , ed. Deane W. Curtin and Lisa M. Heldke (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 5 ; Ken Albala, “Cooking as Research Methodology: Experiments in Renaissance Cuisine,” in Renaissance Food from Rabelais to Shakespeare: Culinary Readings and Culinary Histories , ed. Joan Fitzpatrick (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 73–74 ; Jean-Baptiste-Donaventure de Roquefort Le Grand, Histoire de la vie privée des françois: depuis l’origine de la nation jusqu’a nos jours (1782; repr., Paris: Laurent-Beaupré, 1815) ; Richard Warner, Antiquitates Culinariae, or, Curious Tracts on Culinary Affairs of the Old English (London: R. Blamire, 1791) .

Bonnie Smith, The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 115 ; Lucy Maynard Salmon, Domestic Service (New York: Macmillan, 1897) .

Theodore Blegen, Grass Roots History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1947) ; Fernand Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life: The Limits of the Possible , vol. 1 of Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century , trans. Siân Reynolds (New York: Harper and Row, 1979) ; K. C. Chang, ed., Food in Chinese Culture: Anthropological and Historical Perspectives (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977) ; Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Viking, 1985) .

Among the best of these culinary histories are Mark Kurlansky, Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed World (New York: Walker and Company, 1997) ; Anne Mendelson, Stand Facing the Stove: The Story of the Women Who Gave America The Joy of Cooking (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1996) ; D. Eleanor Scully and Terence Scully, Early French Cookery: Sources, History, Original Recipes and Modern Adaptations (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995) ; Laura Shapiro, Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1986) ; Andrew F. Smith, Eating History: Thirty Turning Points in the Making of American Cuisine (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009) ; Barbara Ketcham Wheaton, Savoring the Past: The French Kitchen and Table from 1300 to 1789 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983) .

Naum Jasny, The Wheats of Classical Antiquity (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1944) ; Redcliffe N. Salaman, The History and Social Influence of the Potato (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1949).

Raymond L. Lee, “Grain Legislation in Colonial Mexico, 1575–1585,” Hispanic American Historical Review 27, no. 4 (November 1947): 647–70 ; Murray Benedict, Farm Policies in the United States: A Study of their Origins and Development (New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1955) .

Richard O. Cummings, The American and His Food: A History of Food Habits in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1940) .

A. J. Arberry, “A Baghdad Cookery-Book,” Islamic Culture 13 (1939): 21–47, 189–214 .

Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life ; Robert Forster and Orest Ranum, eds., Food and Drink in History: Selections from the Annales Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations , trans. Elborg Forster and Patricia Ranum (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979) ; Louis Stouff, Alimentation et ravitaillement en Provence aux XIVe et XVe siècles (Paris: Mouton, 1970) .

Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974) ; Herbert Gutman, Slavery and the Numbers Game: A Critique of Time on the Cross (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975) .

Richard H. Steckel and Jerome C. Rose, ed., The Backbone of History: Health and Nutrition in the Western Hemisphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) .

E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present 50 (February 1971): 76–136 . See also Cynthia Bouton, The Flour War: Gender, Class, and Community in Late Ancien Régime French Society (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1993) ; Judith A. Miller, Mastering the Market: The State and the Grain Trade in Northern France, 1700–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) .

Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984) .

Peter Garnsey, Food and Society in Classical Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) ; Lars T. Lih, Bread and Authority in Russia, 1914–1921 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990) . See also Pierre-Étienne Will and R. Bin Wong, Nourish the People: The State Civilian Granary System in China, 1650–1850 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, Center for Chinese Studies, 1991) ; LaCombe, “‘A continuall and dayly Table.”

Warren J. Belasco, Appetite for Change: How the Counterculture Took on the Food Industry, 1966–1988 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989) .

Natalia Milanesio, “Food Politics and Consumption in Peronist Argentina,” Hispanic American Historical Review 90, no. 1 (February 2010): 75–108 ; James Davidson, “Fish, Sex and Revolution in Athens,” Classical Quarterly 43, no. 1 (1993): 53–66 .

Amy Bentley, Eating for Victory: Food Rationing and the Politics of Domesticity (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998) .

Alfred W. Crosby, Jr., The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1972) . Crosby built on the work of Ping-Ti Ho, Studies on the Population of China, 1368–1953 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959) ; and William Langer, “Europe’s Initial Population Explosion,” American Historical Review 69, no. 1 (October 1963): 1–17 .

Sucheta Mazumdar, “The Impact of New World Food Crops on the Diet and Economy of China and India, 1600–1900,” in Food in Global History , ed. Raymond Grew (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999), 58–78 ; James McCann, Maize and Grace: Africa’s Encounter with a New World Crop, 1500–2000 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005) ; Judith Carney, Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001) ; Arturo Warman, Corn and Capitalism: How a Botanical Bastard Grew to Global Dominance , trans. Nancy L. Westrate (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003) .

Norton, “Tasting Empire,” 660–69, 691 .

Paul Freedman, From Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008) .

Alberto Capatti and Massimo Montanari, Italian Cuisine: A Cultural History , trans. Aine O’Healy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 86 ; Stephen Mennell, All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985) ; Jean-Louis Flandrin, Arranging the Meal: A History of Table Service in France , trans. Julie E. Johnson, Antonio Roder, and Sylvia Roder (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007) ; T. Sarah Peterson, Acquired Taste: The French Origins of Modern Cooking (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994) ; Susan Pinkard, A Revolution in Taste: The Rise of French Cuisine, 1650–1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009) .

Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987) . See also Nathan MacDonald, Not Bread Alone: The Uses of Food in the Old Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) .

Rebecca Spang, The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000) ; Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Accounting for Taste: The Triumph of French Cuisine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004) ; Andrew P. Haley, Turning the Tables: Restaurants and the Rise of the American Middle Class, 1880–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011) ; John K. Walton, Fish and Chips and the British Working Class, 1870–1940 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1992) .

Harvey A. Levenstein, “The American Response to Italian Food, 1880–1930,” Food and Foodways 1, no. 1 (1985): 1–23 ; Hasia Diner, Hungering for America: Italian, Irish, and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001) ; Tracy N. Poe, “The Labour and Lesiure of Food Production as a Mode of Ethnic Identity Building Among Italians in Chicago, 1890–1940,” Rethinking History (2001): 131–48 ; Franca Iacovetta and Valerie J. Korinek, “Jell-O Salads, One-Stop Shopping, and Maria the Homemaker: The Gender Politics of Food,” in Sisters or Strangers: Immigrant, Ethnic, and Racialized Women in Canadian History , ed. Marlene Epp, Franca Iacovetta, and Frances Swyripa (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 190–230 ; Psyche Williams-Forson, Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006) .

Donna R. Gabaccia, We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998) ; Marcie Cohen Ferris, Matzoh Ball Gumbo: Culinary Tales of the Jewish South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006) ; Frederick Douglass Opie, Hogs and Hominy: Soul Food from Africa to America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008) .

Arjun Appadurai, “How to Make a National Cuisine: Cookbooks in Contemporary India,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 30, no. 1 (January 1988): 3–24 ; Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, Rice as Self: Japanese Identities Through Time (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993) ; Jeffrey M. Pilcher, ¡Que vivan los tamales! Food and the Making of Mexican Identity (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998) ; Warren Belasco and Philip Scranton, eds., Food Nations: Selling Taste in Consumer Societies (New York: Routledge, 2002) .

Eric C. Rath, Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010) .

Marion Nestle, Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002) ; Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal (New York: Harper Collins, 2002) ; Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (New York: Penguin, 2006) .

Rachel Laudan, “A Plea for Culinary Modernism: Why We Should Love New, Fast, Processed Food,” Gastronomica 1, no. 1 (February 2001): 36–44 ; Robert Paarlberg, Food Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010) .

Alan L. Olmstead and Paul W. Rhode, Creating Abundance: Biological Innovation and American Agricultural Development (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008) ; Vaclav Smil, Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch, and the Transformation of World Food Production (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001) ; Deborah K. Fitzgerald, Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003) ; J. L. Anderson, Industrializing the Corn Belt: Agriculture, Technology and Environment, 1945–1972 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2008) .

Nick Cullather, The Hungry World: America’s Cold War Battle Against Poverty in Asia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010) . See also Joseph Cotter, Troubled Harvest: Agronomy and Revolution in Mexico, 1880–2002 (New York: Praeger, 2003) .

Martin Bruegel, “How the French Learned to Eat Canned Food, 1809–1930s,” in Belasco and Scranton, Food Nations , 113–30 ; Gabriella M. Petrick, “Industrial Food,” Oxford Handbook of Food History , ed. Jeffrey M. Pilcher (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012) . On the meatpacking industry, see Roger Horowitz, Putting Meat on the American Table: Taste, Technology, Transformation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006) ; Jeffrey M. Pilcher, The Sausage Rebellion: Public Health, Private Enterprise, and Meat in Mexico City, 1890–1917 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006) .

For exemplary works, see Jack Kloppenburg, First the Seed: The Political Economy of Plant Biotechnology (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004) ; Steve Penfold, The Donut: A Canadian History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008) .

William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: Norton, 1991) ; John Soluri, Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption, and Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005) ; Warren Belasco and Roger Horowitz, eds., Food Chains: From Farmyard to Shopping Cart (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009) .

Daphne Roe, A Plague of Corn: A Social History of Pellagra (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973) .

E. M. Collingham, Imperial Bodies: The Physical Experience of the Raj, c. 1800–1947 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001) ; Earle, “‘If You Eat Their Food …’”; Trudy Eden, The Early American Table: Food and Society in the New World (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2008) .

Cullather, “The Foreign Policy of the Calorie”; James Vernon, Hunger: A Modern History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007) ; Mark Swislocki, “Nutritional Governmentality: Food and the Politics of Health in Late Imperial and Republican China,” Radical History Review 110 (Spring 2011): 9–35 ; Sandra Aguilar-Rodríguez, “Nutrition and Modernity: Milk Consumption in 1940s and 1950s Mexico,” Radical History Review 110 (Spring 2011): 36–58 .

Charlotte Biltekoff, Eating Right in America: Food, Health and Citizenship from Domestic Science to Obesity (Durham: Duke University Press, forthcoming) .

Notable examples include Kurlansky, Cod ; Mintz, Sweetness and Power ; Warman, Corn and Capitalism ; Pierre Boisard, Camembert: A National Myth , trans. Richard Miller (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003) ; Gary Y. Okihiro, Pineapple Culture: A History of the Tropical and Temperate Zones (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009) . See also Noël Riley Fitch, Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child (New York: Doubleday, 1997) .

Reay Tannahill, Food in History (New York: Stein and Day, 1973) ; Chang, Food in Chinese Culture ; Jean-Louis Flandrin, Massimo Montanari, and Albert Sonnenfeld, eds., Food: A Culinary History from Antiquity to the Present , trans. Clarissa Botsford, et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999) ; Paul Freedman, ed., Food: The History of Taste (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007) .

Jeffrey M. Pilcher, Food in World History (New York: Routledge, 2006) .

Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Near a Thousand Tables: A History of Food (New York: Free Press, 2002) ; Kenneth F. Kiple, A Movable Feast: Ten Millennia of Food Globalization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) .

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PHD, Food Science

Food Scientists apply science and engineering to study the physical, chemical, and biological nature of food. They develop new food products, design food processes, chemically analyze food, and evaluate food safety and sensory quality.

Degree Type: Doctoral

Degree Program Code: PHD_FDST

Degree Program Summary:

Our mission is to disseminate science-based knowledge of food through student education; to seek, verify, and apply information related to food; and to communicate through professional, scientific, and public outreach programs.

Programs of study leading to both the Master of Science and Doctor of Philosophy degrees in food science are offered in the various fields of interest in the Division of Food Science and Technology.

Since the application of science and engineering is important in properly selecting, preparing, processing, packaging, distributing and utilizing foods, students selecting this field must be able to delve into problems involving chemistry, microbiology, engineering, and other sciences as well as in the more applied problems concerned with food production, stability, or toxicology. Individuals whose baccalaureate degree is in other fields of science often enter this graduate program because of the important challenges of supplying food to mankind and the opportunities that this field provides to those with advanced degrees. Programs of study are designed for each individual to best utilize his/her prior training and his/her career objectives. The food science and technology division occupies the food science building and the food processing laboratory in the University of Georgia Science Complex on South Campus in Athens and the food science building at the Georgia Agricultural Experiment Station in Griffin. All three buildings are well-equipped with modern instrumentation, pilot plants, and other facilities necessary for graduate research in food processing, food chemistry, food microbiology, food engineering, sensory evaluation, food biotechnology, food toxicology, product development, and nutrient analyses. Faculty in the division are scientists and engineers with expertise in several fundamental and applied disciplines offering a diverse selection of courses and research programs.

Locations Offered:

Athens (Main Campus)

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College of Agricultural & Environmental Sciences

147 Cedar Street Athens, GA 30602

706-542-3924

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Food Science and Technology

Graduate Coordinator(s):

Abhivav Mishra

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Department of Nutrition and Food Sciences

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PhD in Food Systems

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College of Agriculture and Life Sciences

The Food Systems Graduate program offers a transdisciplinary, cohort educational model.

The PhD in Food Systems combines a comprehensive investigation of food systems and a commitment to developing methods for solving the current problems of the food system.

Every year, the food systems cohort will work together to address problems and devise potential solutions through an oral competency examination. Students then move towards disciplinary depth and mastery by designing a course of study with a dissertation committee and developing a research proposal as part of a qualifying exam.

A student’s course of study in the PhD program will integrate a comprehensive understanding of food systems with focused disciplinary inquiry. Students draw from each other’s skills and experiences to foster a more rich and diversified learning environment. The program curriculum integrates humanities, social and natural science approaches to understanding complex and interdependent food systems of varying scope and scale.

PhD in Food Systems Requirements >>

Food systems faculty and staff >>, food systems graduate program website >>, the phd in food systems is a transdisciplinary degree and administered through the graduate college, not individual departments., for information please contact the food systems graduate program coordinator allison spain , 802-656-2042., questions about the phd in food systems.

Contact Allison Spain , Foods Systems Graduate Program Coordinator.

Rachel Laudan

A historian's take on food and food politics.

Getting Started in Food History

This is an updated version of a handout for a special meeting on food history sponsored by the  International Association of Culinary Professionals . To my surprise, it has turned out to be useful to lots of people judging by comments on my blog, its use in many universities, and its presence on Wikipedia.

Many people want to write food history. And many ask if they have to get a Masters or Doctorate in history.

My answer is no.  Anyone who is interested should. Right now. This is the Dummies guide to getting started.

Perhaps you inherited your grandmother’s recipe file. Or you are proud of your culinary heritage. Or you have a hunch that cooking has had a greater effect on history than people realize. Or you adore chocolate and want to know more about it. Or, like me when I arrived in Hawaii, you are fascinated by an utterly foreign cuisine. You want to find out more. You want to write a history.

You’ve already got the best of all possible starts: a problem that intrigues, perhaps really bugs you.

It’s not necessary to have a formal historical training to get started. The skills you’d learn in such a program can be picked up. It’s worth remembering that even now most history is not written by people in history departments. Lawyers write the history of law, musicians write the history of music, scientists or former scientists write the history of science, anthropologists write the history of early man and geologists the history of the earth.

There’s a good reason why so much history is written outside history departments. It helps to know what you’re writing about. So if you’re a cook or if you have a keen interest in food, you already have an important head start on writing history.

On the other hand, you’d be mad not to avail yourself of some of the hard-won skills and assumptions of professional historians.

Historians do three things at the same time: researching the sources, thinking, and writing.

If you just do research without thinking, you’re wasting your time. History is not just a pile of facts. If you sit and think without checking your ideas by doing some research, you’re wasting your time. And there’s no better way to bring your research and your thinking together than getting out a pencil and tablet, or your laptop or your iPad and jotting down ideas for your story, questions you need to answer, sources to go to, and, of course, bits and pieces of the finished product.

NOTE. 03/23/2016.  It has just come to my notice that at least one on-line site is using this piece to suggest that it’s easy to put together a career as a food historian because you don’t need a further degree.  I cannot stress enough that a paid career as a food historian is extremely difficult to achieve.

So, some things to think about as you get started. I’ll begin with thinking.

1. Thinking about Your Food History Project

What is your problem or question.

That sounds simple.  I’ve already given a possible list of questions above.

Hang on a minute, though.  It turns out that formulating your question precisely and succinctly is perhaps the most difficult part of writing food history (or any other history). I find I start off with only the vaguest of questions such as “What in the world is this stuff they are eating in Hawaii?” Only when my research is nearly finished do I end up with something reasonably clear. “What happened when three utterly distinct culinary traditions were transplanted to tiny Pacific Islands? “What does this tell us about culinary change?”

Going from an ill-defined or ill-conceived question to a to well-defined and well-conceived question lies at the heart of your endeavor. Like me, you will end up going down all kinds of blind allies. As the question gets refined and redefined, you will have to go to different sources, or go back to old sources looking for different things.

You also need to ask yourself is: Why is my question important?  Is it important just for me and my family or friends?  Nothing wrong with that.

Or is the question important for a broader group of people?  Does it shed light on contemporary debates about food? I decided that the story of Hawaii’s food was important because Hawaii was a natural laboratory for the transplantation, modification, and fusion of cuisines.  Or put another way, the different peoples who had immigrated to Hawaii had brought different ways of cooking and eating, they’d changed them in their new circumstances, dropping some elements and adding others. Now lots of people, including nutritionists, food businesses, and governments are interested in when and why people change their eating habits. This was a question that had wide relevance.

If I don’t keep returning to “What is my question?” “Why is it important?” I just get quite lost happily trawling through dusty bookshelves or poking in markets and mom ‘n pop stores.

What kind of food history are you writing?

Not all food history is the same. Different people want to find out different things about food in the past. Here are some major approaches. (By the way, I have tried to choose examples that are readily available, not too pricey, and that show the range of backgrounds food historians come from).

• Culinary history. The word “culinary” comes from  culina , the Latin word for kitchen. Culinary history focuses on what cooks knew how to prepare. It’s what people  could  have eaten at a particular time, had they had the resources. I suggest in my Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History (2014) that cuisines—that is, styles of cooking—are a useful way of telling a culinary history.
• Dietary history. This deals with what people  actually  ate in the past. It usually concentrates on the intake of calories and nutrients rather than on finished dishes. Social historian John Burnett’s Plenty and Want: A Social History of Diet in England from 1815 to the Present Day (1966) is a classic in this area. This kind of history requires a lot of digging in archives.
• Nutritional history. This addresses how people’s diet affected their health and well-being. This is really tricky to do, usually depending on inferences from average heights and longevity, neither of those easy to determine. If this intrigues you, look at the early parts of   The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death (2004)  by Robert Fogel, Nobel Laureate in Economics.
• History of dining and manners. Just what it says. How people consumed their food and the rules they followed. Feast: A History of Grand Eating (2003 ) is an example.
• History of theories of diet. The evolution of what physicians have said about what we should eat.  See, for example, food historian Ken Albala’s Eating Right in the Renaissance (2002).
• History of foodstuffs. This concentrates on a particular ingredient such as sugar, salt, ketchup, or cake. Often this is a commodity (that is, a good produced for the market that is pretty much the same everywhere, such as sugar, wheat, or hogs).  Then the history is part of commodity history. A deserved classic of commodity history is  Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History  (1986) by anthropologist Sidney Mintz, a leading anthropologist.

These are just the beginning. You also have histories of the language of food, national histories, histories of food and war, food and politics, of movements such as vegetarianism or home economics. There are lots of possibilities.

Deciding What Were the Important Turning Points

As you begin putting your history together, you may decide that you want to write a story or narrative. (Not all histories are narrative. You can do a study of a particular period).

If you write a story, you have to decide when to begin it, when to end it, and what are the important turning points along the way.  (By the way, the term historians use for this is the problem of periodization.)

It’s all to easy to assume that we should take the calendar–decades, centuries or other common historical divisions–as our framework. You see book with titles like “American food in the Nineteenth Century” or “European Food in the Middle Ages.” That’s OK.

But once you’ve decided what your problem is, you and your readers may find it more useful to divide up your story by events important to the story itself.  I struggled with this when I was writing a world history of cooking.  Nearly every work I consulted said that the transition to agriculture was one of the most important events in the history of food. Their authors divided their stories up into the food of hunters and gatherers and the food of farmers.  If you are talking about where food comes from, that’s fine.  I, however, was telling the story of cooking, of preparing not producing food.  It was evident that no one was going to farm if they did not know how to cook food.  So for my story the important turning point was when people discovered how to cook the foods that they later farmed, a point many thousands of years earlier.

Inference and Argument in Food History

If invention is one percent genius and ninety-nine percent sweat, history is one percent sources and ninety-nine percent the inferences you draw from them. Well, that’s not quite true of course, but it’s what distinguishes historians from antiquarians (see ways of approaching the past below).

Interpreting facts to put together a history is tricky.  If you read detective stories, watch police procedurals or courtroom movies, you already know this.

For an older but still relevant, cautionary tale of the traps that even the most experienced and distinguished historians have fallen into when going from facts to interpretation, see David Hackett Fischer’s   Historians’ Fallacies  (1970).

One of the best ways to criticize sources is to compare, compare and compare again.

An example. It is widely stated that the British working class diet was worse at the beginning of twentieth century than at any time in history. The source for this was a famous government report on the physical deterioration of the British people presented to Parliament in 1904. Many of the witnesses talked about a poor diet as the cause.

But since we don’t have any comparative evidence about the physical state of the British in earlier times, we don’t actually know whether or not the diet had deteriorated.

Which leads to. . .

Traps to avoid

• Don’t assume that everyone in the past ate home cooked or restaurant food as we tend to do.  Many people ate in institutions (courts, monasteries, prisons, ships). Many people lived on street food.
• Don’t assume that what tastes good to us would have tasted good to earlier peoples. Tastes are acquired.
• Don’t assume that food tasted better in the past. Or that it tasted worse.
• Don’t assume that food was necessarily healthier in the past. Or that it was necessarily less healthy.
• Don’t assume that nations or regions are the best units for your study. Most nations have been created in the past two hundred years.  Most regions have been re-defined from time to time.
• Don’t assume that you must start with farming. If you were writing a history of clothing, you would not necessarily have to start with sheep herding or silkworm cultivation.
• Don’t ask when dishes were first invented.  When was red velvet cake first invented? Who was the first cook to make mayonnaise?   These seem such obvious problems to start with.  But beware the first question.  Asking who was first can lead you down the wrong path.

One of the truisms of the history of technology, a field I labored in for many years, was that asking who invented something, or when something first appeared was usually asking the wrong question.

Let me take a modern example from food. “Who invented the pineapple upside down cake?” It’s the kind of question food editors in newspapers get asked all the time.  The immediate response is to scurry around searching through magazines and cookbooks for the first pineapple upside down cake recipe and then anoint Mrs. X of Cakeville the inventor of the cake.

What have we learned?  Zilch.  Well, more likely we’ve learned that Mrs. X has staked her fame on a dubious priority claim to be the inventor of pineapple upside down cake.

Now suppose we ask different questions.  Why were people interested in cakes?  What were the preconditions for making these kinds of cakes? What problems did pineapple upside down cakes solve?

Now we can begin to talk.  Oversimplifying a bit, the preconditions for cakes are metal molds, enclosed ovens, chemical raising agents, fine white sugar, and fine white flour.  When did these become available?  At the tail end of the nineteenth century.

Why does anyone want to make cakes?  The housewife wants to look cool, modern and sophisticated, her family like the treat, the big millers in Minnesota want to sell more flour. Cake hits all those notes.  There’s a nice alliance of interests between the housewife and industry.

Just a little later, Jim Dole began an advertising blitz for a cool new ingredients, canned Hawaiian pineapple, which combined cosmopolitan sophistication and tropical exoticism. Bingo. Lots of people were going to simultaneously invent some kind of pineapple cake. And you’ve now given historical context for the appearance of cake.

How historians classify themselves

It helps to understand a little bit about academic history departments just so that if you want you can locate your work in that context.

People in history departments think of themselves in three ways (and divide their journals up in the same ways).

• Their geographical area. They might say “I’m an Asianist” or “I’m an Africanist” or (overwhelmingly likely if we’re talking about the US), “I’m an Americanist.” In most countries of the world, the national history swamps all others, reflecting the origins of modern academic history in nineteenth-century nationalism. Today in Mexico, for example, history means almost exclusively Mexican history.
• Their time period. The historian might say “Oh I do Ren and Ref (Renaissance and Reformation), or “I do the colonial period.”
• Their thematic interest. This might be diplomatic history, economic history, social history, or cultural history for example.

Academic history has its fashions like every other walk of life. In the last seventy-five years, these have been some of the major trends: from the thirties on, social and economic history; in the 1960s, economic and business history often of a quantitative sort; from then the late 1960s a new wave of social history, particularly of the poor and of women (“history from the bottom up”); more recently cultural history heavily influenced by cultural anthropology.  Overlying all this, in the last generation the question of identity (class, race and gender, particularly the latter two) has absorbed many historians.

So, if you are busy studying Chinese restaurants in California in the early twentieth century, you might say “I’m doing the economic and business history of migrant groups in twentieth-century America.”  Or if you are looking at how food figures in Shakespeare’s plays, you might say “I’m doing the cultural history of food in sixteenth-century England.” You get the picture.

Ways of approaching the past: chronology, memory, legend, antiquarianism, and history

History isn’t the only way of approaching the past.

Chronology .  You can think of chronology as the peg on which history hangs.  A chronology is just a list of events in the order in which they occurred.  In general, you won’t have any problem getting your chronology straight because you are likely to be working in periods with good calendars and established dates.  Once, though, chronology was a real intellectual challenge. Isaac Newton (yes, the Isaac Newton of the three laws of motion) was just one of the very smart people who spent a lot of time trying to reconcile Greek, Persian, and Egyptian calendars.

As an example, for the history of specific dishes, particularly American and those from other English-language countries.  Lynne Oliver’s Food Timeline  is very handy.Sadly this will not be updated as Lynne died in 2015.It lists foods chronologically and gives short extracts from reliable secondary sources about each one.

Legend . A story that supports the beliefs of lots of people. Every Thanksgiving countless publications and radio and television programs repeat a legendary version of the first Thanksgiving. And the women who voted Betty Crocker the second most popular woman in America after Eleanor Roosevelt expressed how reassuring they found that smiling woman in the red suit. Toni Tipton Martin shows just how powerful these legends can be in her The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African-American Cookbooks (2015), which takes on the belief in a round, smiley, African-American Aunt Jemima.

Memory . A tribute to something that we believe we have lost. Like legend this can be a way of creating group identity. So sitting down to a Thanksgiving dinner helps unite Americans whatever their ethnic origins.

Both memory and legend can be very important. In the realm of food, they are everywhere. Watch out for them and don’t make the mistake of repeating them uncritically.

An old but entertaining look at these issues can be found in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds.  The Invention of Tradition   (1983).

Antiquarianism . A disinterested investigation of the past for its own sake.  Tends to be dry and not relate to readers’ interests.

Historians are busy debating how these different approaches to the past are related. I think most would agree that compared to legend and memory, history takes a more critical and comparative attitude to sources. Compared to antiquarianism, it is more concerned with interpretation and with linking past to present concerns. (There is a vast literature mainly under the heading of Whiggism about how to and how not to link past and present but no need to worry about that right now).

Authenticity

It’s not very useful to try to recreate the “authentic” foods of the past or the authentic foods of another society.  I have lots more to say about this, but my short, popular article  Desperately Seeking Authenticity  that I wrote for the Los Angeles Times will get you started.  My point there is that authenticity is not out there to be discovered but something we seek.

2. Researching Your Food History

The historian approaches all sources with a critical eye. Just like witnesses in the courtroom, people forget, slant, interpret or sometimes downright lie about the past. Objects can’t be trusted. Bones archaeologists dig up may have been moved by a flood, paintings in caves and graves may have been planned to help the dead in the next world, not to show us how people cooked, documents may be forged, and so on.

Wikipedia and other Internet References

No doubt about it, you are going to be turning to Wikipedia . I do all the time. But, as you are doubtless aware, you need to be careful.  I remember once looking up “food processing” because I was confused about what it was only to find that whoever had written the article had used my writings as their chief source. Whoops. That’s now been changed, but it certainly made me wary. Follow up those links at the bottom.

You should also use Google Books . Just enter Books in your search bar and Google Books will come up. You can then search for a word or words, “food processing” since we’re on the subject and you will find a huge list of books in English with those words. You can click on them and see how they are used or you can refine your search by date or other parameters.

Try searching “n-gram” and try this neat little tool for finding how, say, the frequency of the term “food processing” has varied in printed books over the years. This is not deep research but often offers information to ponder.

Google scholar and academia.edu are indispensable for finding academic articles but a bit arcane for this introduction.

Written sources

Historians usually distinguish primary and secondary sources. Primary sources are documents (such as diaries, letters, cookbooks, speeches, interviews) or objects (kitchens, gadgets, buildings, markets) that give direct evidence of the past. Secondary sources talk about primary sources. The distinction is not an absolute one.  Although professional historians are wedded to primary sources, both are useful.  And both (see below) can mislead.

Usually the first thing one thinks of in terms of written resources are cookbooks and recipes. For interesting discussions of how to interpret these, look at The Recipes Project (which includes recipes for medicines, spells, etc. as well).

Think beyond recipes, though, because for most of history most people cooked without recipes or cookbooks. Even now who uses a cookbook to make a sandwich?

Novels are a rich source of references to food, as are other forms of literature. Letters and diaries ditto. Proverbs and sayings. Words themselves. A little more esoteric for the beginner are legal documents, company archives, and patent records.

Ethnographic Studies and/or Kitchen Experience

Nothing beats an experimental batch of fish sauce under the kitchen sink, a meal prepared over an open fire, or an hour or so spent working with a woman hulling rice to throw a new perspective on past foods.

My own The Food of Paradise: Exploring Hawaii’s Culinary Heritage  (1996) is based on walking the streets of Honolulu, supplemented with library research. For reconstructions of eighteenth-century high-end kitchen practice, see Ivan Day’s Historic Food .

Oral History

For many of us, oral history is an important part of our work. It is also very tricky.

All our instincts to the contrary, eyewitness accounts, stories straight from the horse’s mouth are no more reliable than any other source. It’s not that people deliberately lie, even though few of us want to stress our less glorious moments. It’s just that everyone forgets bits of the past, reinterprets others, thinks that yet others are too unimportant to mention even though they might be crucial bits of evidence.

On the practical front, using a tape recorder can be useful for archives. Transcribing tapes, though, is excruciatingly slow and tedious. Taking quick notes like a journalist is very helpful.

If you google, how to do an oral history, you will find a wealth of advice. Pick what works for you.  I like Oral History Interviews  by the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. Smithsonian Guide.

Visual materials

Drawings, paintings, all sorts of images of food are becoming much more readily available thanks to the internet. The NY Public Library and the Library of Congress both have excellent collections. If you want to use these in a blog or book, just be sure you read up on copyright.

Maps can really help readers appreciate the spatial dimension, how foodstuffs spread, where cuisines are centered, trade routes, etc. Mapping foodscapes  by a senior researcher in the field, Peter Atkins, draws on historical maps of food to open all kinds of possibilities for representing food’s spatial relations.

The Perry-Castañeda Library of the University of Texas at Austin has a huge collection of  maps on line, including historical maps .  They also have a very useful page on  on-line resources for making maps .

Physical Remains of Food

Archaeologists have always had interesting insights on food from funerary remains, paintings and so on. These can often correct or supplement information from literary sources.

A slew of new techniques including optical and scanning microscopy have opened new possibilities. Delwen Samuel has an excellent, accessible summary of these new techniques in archaeology .  You probably won’t be using them, but it will help you assess the mass of new results coming from archaeologists.

Miscellaneous Favorites

On line library catalogs. I love WorldCat  which not only has the catalogs of 10,000 libraries but let’s you make lists and bibliographies.   Library Spot  is another great site.

Food History Research Tips .  Invaluable.

The home page of University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee professor,  Martha Carlin  who teaches history of medieval food. A wonderful source for links to food history bibliographies, universities, history journals, world-wide, reference tools and maps, archives, downloadable cookbooks and guides to how to footnote.

Lynne also has a terrific  list of resources for researching foods . 

On-line historic  cookbooks from the blog Kitchen Historic.

Napa Valley College Culinary Arts Web Resources

Foodlinks  is a collection of websites, dealing with the history of food, organized in 15 categories (“Bibliographies”, “Museums”, “Reviews”, “Products”, “Blogs”, “Research Methods”, “by Country”, etc). Dozens of webpages, collected by postgraduates of EUROMASTER of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel.  Excellent.

Center for History and New Media  at George Mason University. Extraordinarily useful site with guides to the profession, tools for the historian, bibliographies, links, and good guides to “unpacking evidence” such as travel narratives, objects, music, maps, etc.

Measuring Worth , an invaluable guide to the very tricky business of deciding what things (a loaf of bread, for example) in the past would be worth in today’s currency.  Their essay,  Explaining Measures of Worth , is a good place to start and includes a discussion of bread in 1931 and today.

Any Land Grant University library. These universities with their agricultural schools and home economics departments have been collecting works on agriculture, nutrition, and related subjects for a hundred and fifty years. They are wonderful resources.  They tend to be much better for food history than some more prestigious private or state universities.

The eleventh edition of the  Encyclopedia Britannica . Published in 1911, it is one of the best reference works every produced as it is written by real experts. Not much use, I admit, for the last hundred years but a gem for everything up to then. Facts and figures on population, trade and agriculture, detailed accounts of everything from dairying to Vedic sacrifice.

Any books or articles in a foreign language. One of my favorite histories of Indian food is written by a Brazilian scholar. Although I can barely make out the text, just the references are invaluable.  Do not restrict yourself to English.

Older culinary histories. Food history goes back to the Greek writer Athenaeus who excerpted earlier writings on food, was very active in the Renaissance, and there are lots of nineteenth and early twentieth century works. To my sorrow my Latin is not up to the Renaissance texts. But the  Histoire de l’Alimentation Végétale published by the Polish botanist Adam Maurizio in 1932, remains for example a wonderful source for plants, particularly wild plants, eaten in Europe.

Digital History

Three articles on how computers are changing the way historians do history: the first is on  history blogs;  the second is on  on-line archives ; and I’ll post the third when it appears.

3. Writing Your Food History

Taking notes.

Our memories are sieves, or at least, mine is. It’s essential to take notes.  The old days of note taking on index cards are long gone.

I have never been able to use a computer for taking notes. I like to be able to use the flexibility of a pencil to comment, underline, put in exclamation points, etc.

So I simply use notepads with the title of the manuscript, article or book I am using at the top. Or if it’s an interview, details about the interview. Then I put page numbers in the left hand margin, quotes, summaries and comments opposite.

But computer note taking, which is searchable and taggable, is obviously the way of the future. I’ll let you figure that one out, though in self-defense I do find Evernote handy.

A digital camera is great for quick shots of manuscripts. Also for when you have limited time with a set of resources or for recording fragile documents.

Cameras are also great for recording kitchen experiments, contemporary history outings, etc.

Even so before you write you will need to process what you have recorded. Note-taking forces you to reflect.

  Footnotes and references

Footnotes and references are one of the things that sets history off from legend and memory. People can check where you got your information. Here is some  advice about how to document your research by Dr. Martha Carlin of the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee . This is for an academic paper but you can adjust the recommendations to your own needs.

There are various styles of endnotes and footnotes, two of the better known being the MLA style and the Chicago Style. If you get to the stage of writing a book, it may be worth buying the  Chicago Manual of Style . It’s incredibly useful on such arcana as the signs proof readers use, how to refer to every imaginable source, and how to do footnotes.

Zotero . If you get serious about looking at lots of books and articles about your topic, you might want to consider learning up a program called Zotero. This is one of several programs for managing references that have been developed in recent years. The nifty thing about Zotero is that it is free .  You can enter references manually but even better a little icon appears in your web browser. When you click that you can download the reference to a book, article, newspaper piece, all kinds of different documents.  Then once you have learned a few simple commands, you can instantly create bibliographies and footnotes. Hurrah.  But there is a learning curve, so if you are just beginning, make a mental note of this and come back to it when you are ready.

The options are far greater than they used to be, thanks to the internet.  Moreover they are changing extraordinarily rapidly, so I will only offer a few words here.

Blogs and web sites

Great fun, a massive amount of work, and a great way to try out ideas and meet people who kindly take the time to comment on your posts.  Free and relatively easy, thanks to Word Press . Wow. There is a mountain of on-line advice.

The big divisions are between self-publishing, academic publishing, and trade publishing.

Self-publishing is ideal if you have a niche audience–that is, if you want to produce a book for your extended family, for example, or sell or give away a book as a promotional item in your restaurant. It’s also easier to reach wider audiences than it used to be.  And if you have a specialized topic, it’s an excellent option.  Ammini Ramachandran’s Grains, Greens, and Coconuts: Recipes and Remembrances of a Vegetarian Legacy (2007) about the foods of Kerala in southern India received enthusiastic reviews in the New York Times and Saveur, something even most trade book authors rarely get.

It’s a lot of work, even with the help of Lulu or Amazon .

Trade publishing means going with the big commercial presses and academic publishing with university presses. Ken Albala, has some  useful guidelines for publishing food books .

If you are really ambitious and want to write a trade book (that is, a book published by a commercial non-university press), you will probably want to find an agent, write a query letter, and if that intrigues one or more presses, have a proposal ready to go.

Periodicals, Newspapers and Journals

Lots of people interested in food would like to see food pages and food periodicals move beyond the predictable mix of legends, memory and recipes. It’s especially important with the whole issue of food world-wide so politically charged. You can add perspective.

Write accessible food history for the community paper, the newsletter your business or school puts out. Or try to get a column going in the local paper. Or food or travel magazines. Or try one of the many on-line publications now available.  These are changing too rapidly to make useful recommendations.

If you want to go for the more academic publications, here are some to start with:

Petits Propos Culinaires .  (Founded by the British food historian Alan Davidson on a lark, this long-running quirky journal takes a strongly international perspective and just about all the senior food historians have published in it.

Digest: A Journal of Foodways and Culture .  A folklore approach.

Gastronomica  (Darra Goldstein’s pioneering editorial stance welcomed all kinds of food scholarship and more besides. Now edited by Lissa Caldwell who is taking it in a more academic direction).

Food, Culture and Society  ( the journal of the Association for the Study of Science in Society). Scholarly.

Food and History   (excellent multi-lingual journal of the European Institute for the History and Culture of Food, unfortunately hard to find in US university libraries):

A more comprehensive list of journals  (thanks Association for the Study of Food in Society).

4. Other Useful Points about Food History

Finding other food historians.

This is a great time to get to know people. With the internet, the fact that you are not in New York or Berkeley doesn’t matter one whit. In fact, it can be a huge advantage. You have a perspective that is out of the ordinary. You have access to materials that are unusual.

Join a culinary historians’ group  (thanks Boston Culinary Historians). Many have awards, videos of events, and other resources besides just talks and tastings. Or start one. Just a group of friends who like to get together and chat and eat.

On Facebook, join one or more the these groups: Oxford Symposium , Association for the Study of Food and Society , Food and Farm Discussion Lab (not history but sane list on food politics), The Rambling Epicure (more than history, but many historians on the list), Bread History and Practice .

On Twitter, #foodhistory.

Apart from Writing Articles or Books: What Food Historians Can Do

Encourage your family, your library or your business to keep records. Many librarians still think of cookbooks as ephemera to be thrown away as new ones appear. Many businesses do not know the value of their archives.

Help out at your local museum, school etc. Visitors, children, students respond really well to food history. It’s so immediate.

Contribute to Wikipedia.  Biographies of people, particularly women, important in the history of food are notably absent.  The Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, the British Library, and a loose coalition of food history scholars are working to remedy this.  They need volunteers.  You do not need experience writing for Wikipedia so if you are interested in helping contact Carolin Young ([email protected]) who is spearheading all this.

Contribute to the Oxford English Dictionary .  Food words (like most technical words) are not very well served by the OED. If you are a word fan, then you might want to read up on how you can add words or add to the evidence of the history of words in the OED.

Help the New York Public Library transcribe historical restaurant menus .

Write book reviews.Writing a thoughtful review is a great responsibility and a great chance to come to terms with important works.  It’s a chance to begin putting a portfolio of your work together. And it is far more help to the authors and to others interested in food history than you can possibly imagine. You can publish it yourself on Amazon.com, GoodReads or other on-line sites. Or you can try your local or neighborhood paper, food history group sites and the like.  It’s quite an art so google “how to write a book review.”  I particularly like this piece on writing book reviews .

And let me know about missing links, other useful resources, etc. for Getting Started. I’d be really grateful.

If You Want to Go Further in Food History

It really depends on what you want to do.  If you are just interested in getting a little more formal instruction, then look out for occasional courses.  Journalist Molly O’Neilll’s organization for budding food writers  Cook and Scribble , for example, offers courses by Sandra Oliver, an expert in early American food history.  If you are interested in cookbooks, Barbara Wheaton, a pioneer in food history and author of  Savoring the Past: The French Kitchen and Table from 1300 to 1789 , gives a week-long course on reading historic cookbooks  at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University.

You might also look out for the many museums, parks and individuals that specialize in historical cooking.

There are excellent conferences open to the public.  The  Oxford Symposium for Food and Cookery  is the oldest of these. In New York,  Andy Smith  regularly puts on interesting programs. If you have the funds, Amsterdam and Dublin are also possibilities.

If you are interested in food history in the context of food studies more generally, then the two major American options are Boston University master’s program in  Gastronomy  and New York University’s undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral programs in  Food Studies .  The  University of the Pacific is just starting a Master’s Program in San Francisco  led by Ken Albala that promised to be a worthy alternative. The  University of Gastronomic Sciences in Italy  is another option.  Here’s a full list of food studies programs  (thanks ASFS). All of them will be fun, stimulating, and a great preparation for an assortment of careers, which you can learn about by checking out what their graduates have done.

If you want an academic career in history, American Studies or some other relevant department, then choose the very best and very toughest doctoral program you can in the knowledge that academic jobs are hard to find and only likely to get harder to find. Even so if you are serious about academic preparation this is the way to go.

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78 thoughts on “ getting started in food history ”.

This a great, informative post! Do you know if there are any more resources or books out there about getting started in food history, particularly from the perspective of writers? Thanks!

Excellent Paper on getting started with food history. Thanks for this information.

Thanks so much Carolyn and Jean. It’s encouraging to get this feedback,

Rachel, I have to be more observant!

What a wonderful guide to getting started in Food History.

Thanks Ruth.

Dear Rachel, Perhaps an addition to your section with journals: Food & History (edited by Grieco, Montanari and myself, published twice a year, mostly about Europe (but inbedded in world history -naturally). Published by the Institut Europeen de l’Histoire et des Cultures de l’Alimentation (Tours, France). All information via: http://www.iehca.eu/IEHCA_v4/food.html/ . Best, Peter

Thank you so much for your informative article and the multitude of resources you list. I have been working on a food history project for almost a year now. The more I read, the more topics spring up. Then, being trained as an attorney and not a historian, I always come to the question: “where can I get more information about that?”, or “Can I site that source or do I need to get permission from the publisher or author?” I know that food history has become a popular topic and various universities in the U.S. now offer graduate programs on the subject, but are there non-academic sources interested in publishing our work? How large do you perceive our audience to be? Any response would be appreciated. Thanks again for providing your valuable resource.

Charlotte, one of the reasons why I wrote that small piece was to encourage people to go ahead and do food history without feeling they had to take formal university training. I think if you do it well there are lots of places interested. Since you need to prove yourself a bit, why not publish on the web? Or self publish? Depending on what you want to do of course.

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Thank you so much for this valuable information. I’ve been pouring over it in recent days and am thrilled with the depth and diversity of the resources. What a generous post!

Belatedly, thank you Amber

I currently have my BA in Anthropology and French Language, and am working towards my MA in Public History. Clearly, I am more interested in Social and Cultural History. My thesis is going to be over Food History, and this just helped me so much! Thanks!!

Britany. I am so glad. It’s so helpful to get feedback. I am busy updating it and hope to have it up before long. Let me know how your research goes.

This was a very interesting read and it’s nice to hear from someone who believes in diving in head first. Would you consider putting in some of the education requirements that most food historians have? I’m currently working on a 4 year undergrad in history, hoping to make it a masters but am unsure of what types of classes would be most beneficial. thanks for putting so much effort into this!

My general answer is take the hardest, toughest classes you can. If you are a history undergrad, get the pivotal periods and issues under your belt. Learn at least one other language to a high degree of competency. Learn about food on the side.

And thanks for commenting.

This is such wonderful information! I didn’t know that I was interested in food history until I started working on an eBook for college on the subject of English food. Now I’m hooked and want to do more!

Love your blog. And thanks for writing.

Hi, I’m so glad to have come across your blog! I’ve wonder many times why certain ingredients or preparations have caught on in Mexican or Texas/Mexican cooking and others have fallen to the wayside. For example, how did tamarind arrive on the scene? How and why have certain breads developed? I’m not a food historian, I don’t have the time and resources at hand to get in depth. These kinds of questions come about because my blog prompts them. It’s always a careful decision of what foods or ingredients to include. Though it is not strictly about traditional foods, I try to keep in the spirit of it. Your wonderful writing, research and information is very inspiring and thought-provoking.

Gerard, Delighted to know about your blog which is now ensconced in my RSS feeder. Looking forward to you bread experiments. And thanks for the kind words.

This is a great article Rachel! Very good overview, advice, links etc. Thank you, Karin

Thanks Karin. It’s a work in progress so check in from time to time.

I have so much to learn from this. Thank you for taking the time to write it.

Thank you, Annie. I add to it from time to time so think of it as an on-going resource. And I am enjoying your intelligent, off beat blog.

Thanks a lot, Rachel. That means a lot to me from you. I have a really really great idea for a food history project and am just trying to get my skills and writing a little more developed before I get stuck in. I will return to this piece for sure. :)

Rachel, I know this post has been up for a while, but it came to me today, just when I needed it. I have been nattering around with rough ideas about food history for quite some time…and this article gave me great guidance! I am bookmarking this, so I can begin to think about it more deeply. Thank you.

Glad you enjoyed it, Dylene. I do revise it periodically and it’s due for another revision right now so it’s a good idea to come back to it.

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Thank you for being so generous as to share your hard earned knowledge about research and writing. I’ve got some ideas floating around in my mind, and will use your excellent article as a guide.

I look forward to seeing what emerges, Mercy.

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Wow, thanks so much Rachel, a godsend as I’m struggling with a monograph I’m working on. Will print out and read again and again for reassurance and guidance! Lots of cheers, Cecilia

If someone with as much historical background as you, Cecilia, finds this helpful, then I’m doubly delighted. Any suggestions for improvements or modifications most welcome.

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This is wonderfully clear and I wish my lecturers had handed a photocopy out on the first day of my history degree.

Thanks, Nic. Researching, writing, and publishing are changing so fast right now that I am having trouble keeping up!

This is great!

Wish I can Skype with you. I have tons of questions

So glad it was helpful.

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Hello, this is very useful.I am interested in Indian food history. Which is the guide to Indian food written by a Brazillian writer?

Fernanda de Camargo-Moro, Arqueologias culinárias da Índia (Rio de Janeiro: Record, 2000). Perhaps a little dated now as a lot has appeared on the history of Indian cuisines since then.

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Thank you so much for writing this article and sharing your thoughts and tips on how to get started. You have no idea how much I needed to read this post at this moment. It’s a new year, and I’m hoping for a new beginning and to work on new and exciting projects!

Enjoy. I hope it goes well.

Just finished reading this post and I am excited to follow up on all the links you provided. Thank you so much for going into such depth on the topic!

So pleased to hear it was useful.

What awesome post on exactly what i needed. I looking for how to go about how food defines us culturally and i stumbled on this post. Very rich on detail. Thanks

Rachel, I see I am a bit late to the party, but really enjoyed your précis. I saw your comments on the Breakthrough Institute whom I have been following for some time. What a great opportunity for collaboration you all have! Bit harder when you’re far away in Brisbane, Australia. BTW, I’m sure someone has already told you but there’s a typo in the first line of the third paragraph under the heading ‘Deciding What Were the Important Turning Points’ – a ‘to’ should be ‘too’ (hope you don’t mind!) Michael van Baarle

Delighted to have corrections. You need a generous philanthropist to fund a similar discussion in Australia.

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Thanks so much for this information! I am not a historian, but a food physicist (www.knowwattscooking.com). I study the energy of the food system (which is quite unsustainable at this point) and am interested in history that is linked to food. In particular I teach about those turning points related to an altered access to energy of cooking (fire, then vessels for boiling, gas, microwave, …) as those are frequently related to technological advancements which is then tied to the scientific discoveries. Can you suggest other sources of historical records with a focus on the flow of food as an energy source or of energy to fuel our food system? Thank you. Carla Ramsdell

This is a great question. When I was writing Cuisine and Empire I really wanted to find out what processing and cooking food cost in terms of energy. There was lots on agriculture but nothing on processing and cooking. So go for it. Virgin territory.

Thank you Rachel for this wonderful, informative article. Just what I needed. I “met” you at the OFS last weekend and now I will look forward to the day when I can meet and thank you in person. You are generous and thoughtful.

I see you are a historian so I especially appreciate the comments. Looking forward to meeting you too,

Only additional point I’d add about Wikipedia is that all writer should know that it is not considered an acceptable source by most publishers, especially academic publishers. It is a useful way to learn about other sources, as you note, but don’t have a footnote or bibliography listing that includes Wikipedia. In fact, some publishers are even touchy about more “legitimate” encyclopedias (such as Britannica) and want you to find sources that are not only more reliable but that show a little more effort in research. (Specialty encyclopedias that focus on the topic under discussion can be acceptable.)

But otherwise, this is a wonderful article.

Thanks so much for the suggestion. I try to update the article on a regular basis so I will be sure to include this.

Thank you for this wonderful introduction to the topic. I just forwarded the link to my food studies class here in Beijing.

Delighted at its global reach!

I have found this piece invaluable in my first foray into food history. I am currently attempting to write the first ever history on food for the Island of St Helena in the South Atlantic. And as a complete novice in this field I must admit I am feeling very overwhelmed by the job at hand and at time frustrated by my inexperience. Thank you for your insight, knoeledge and encouragement. I re-read this article whenever I need to reset and get myself back on track from whatever rabbit hole I’ve gone down.

Dear Emily, Many thanks for writing. I am so glad that you found my piece useful. I really look forward to what you find out about Saint Helena. You might want to look at a PhD thesis I am currently reading. It’s called First Fleet by Jaqueline Newling and its about the initial provisioning of Australia. Roughly the same period as your study and dealing with some of the same issues. It’s free to download. You should be able to find it by googling but if not just send me another message.

Arrr thanks Rachel for the suggestion. I’ve found the thesis on google scholar so will give it a read. EJ

Rachel – very late to the game, but having read this with such delight, I’d like to acknowledge how fantastic it is. Thank you. Wish someone had pointed me that way before I wrote my German food history!! And hope to see you at the Oxford Food Symposium’s table again…

Thanks so much, Ursula. And a reminder to me that it’s time to update it again!

Hello Dr. Laudan, Thank you very much for this blog post. This information is extremely useful for a doctoral student like me who is planning to do Food History. I am looking at the cultural and social connections between Brazil, Portugal and the western coast of India ( Daman, Diu and Goa) through the lens of food. I was intrigued by the mention of a Brazilian scholar who has written a book on Indian Food. Could you please share the name of that book? I can read basic Portuguese and also Gujarati so this book would be very useful for my research. I look forward to hearing from you. Thanks Purvi Sanghvi

Glad you like this page. And a reminder that it is time to update it. The details on the book I mention are Fernanda de Camargo-Moro, Arqueologias Culinarias da India (record, 2000).

Thank you so much for your response! I am going to find out if I can buy this book. It seems that it is not available in the US.

My goals are not quite as lofty as a research project. I am attempting to start a cookbook book club, but I want it to go past merely selecting a cookbook for us to share, read and cook from. I am hoping that we can discuss the historical context of recording and passing recipes between generations. Mostly we will be using more modern (20th century+) cookbooks for our club, but I have some interest in providing historical context. I may be seriously overthinking what could be a light, fun book club where we get to eat and drink some novel foods every month or so, but we’re a pretty curious bunch who would really enjoy a little history thrown into the mix. There’s just so much information available, not all of it easy to get or to read, that I don’t precisely know where to start.

Combining a cookbook book club with exploring a bit about how those books are created and the traditions they draw on sounds like a great idea. And modern cookbooks are a fine place to start. Let me mull this over and I’ll make some suggestions. Rachel

Thank you! I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Here are four of many possibilities. Rob Walsh, The Tex-Mex Cookbook Raghavan Iyer On the Curry Trail Gaitri Pagrach Chandra Warm Bread and Honey Cake Rachel Laudan The Food of Paradise: Exploring Hawaii’s Culinary Heritage

All have recipes that are set in their historical and cultural context–a well researched context not just an invented on. Iyer traces curry all around the world. Pagrach Chandra has lovely recipes for baked goods including those from the Caribbean region where she grew up.

Hope this helsp.

Hello Dr. Laudun. First off, thank you so much for this. It’s truly the best and most helpful thing to fall into my hands! I am an American living in Haiti. Although I am studying to become a professional chef, my passion lies in the history of Haitian food. I want to showcase the cuisine in the most authentic way, but I’m having trouble finding documentation resources. The cuisine and history are so diverse, everyone has a story and there are no rules to it . I’m a bit lost as how to proceed. Wondering if you have any thoughts on this.

Best Vanessa

Thank you, Vanessa. I am so glad you find my introduction helpful.

I would suggest a three-pronged approach.

1. Start jotting down notes about foods/ingredients/meals/cookbooks you find interesting or puzzling. That way you will begin building up a body of writing. 2. Read the best histories of the island that you can find. Food reflects history. Migration, culture, social class, etc. 3. Search out histories (Wikipedia) and cookbooks. However inadequate, they will give you starting points.

You might also want to approach my colleague Cynthia Bertelson. She spent three years in Haiti and has a keen eye for food history. You can find her easily on the internet.

Oh wow! Thank you so much! I really appreciate the help. I will definitely reach out to your friend. You have completely made my day. So looking forward to seeing more from you. I’m going through your other articles as we speak. You are the best! Sincerely

“It’s truly the best and most helpful thing to fall into my hands!”

It’s true, this page is a treasure.

I’m doing something similar in China and was stymied by the very same question of where to start. There are so many diversions about finding the “right” story to follow, it’s a problem that plagues any approach to documenting heritage. Eventually, I decided that the best place to start was anywhere; every story was important and worth knowing. The problem isn’t finding the true carrier of authentic tradition, but rather the unique series of events that make each kitchen what it is. Once that door had opened, the worries all fell away, and instead of being stuck in planning doldrums, I found that I couldn’t work fast enough.

Best of luck!

Thanks for chiming in and for the helpful comment.

I'd love to know your thoughts Cancel reply

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Nia Rose Froome, MBA ’23: Making Local, Fresh Food Available for All

Stanford Impact Founder Fellow plans to remove food barriers for low-income communities.

April 08, 2024

Nia Rose Froome, MBA ’23 | Saul Bromberger

It was her mother’s breast cancer diagnosis that first gave Nia Froome (then aged seven) an awareness of the importance of healthy eating and sustainable local food systems. After her mother’s diagnosis and during some tough months of chemotherapy, her parents became vegans and have maintained a primarily plant-based diet ever since. It was a decision that paid off — her mother is now more than 20 years cancer-free. “I developed an acute understanding of the relationship between our diet and health,” says Froome.

For her parents, however, the switch in diet was far from easy. The family’s East Flatbush neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, while not lacking in food stores and chain restaurants, had few that offered healthy options. “We didn’t do any of our grocery shopping locally,” she says. “We’d go out of our way to find fresh, organic produce and products we needed — even volunteering a few hours each month at a food co-op — and that takes time and a lot of effort.”

After graduating from Yale and working for Google in Michigan, Froome found herself back in East Flatbush, still working for Google, when the pandemic hit. The rapid spread of the virus meant she avoided the once-bustling stores in other neighborhoods, where she had previously shopped. Soon, she realized that in her own neighborhood, retailers weren’t providing the nutritious, fresh produce she had grown accustomed to. Before long, she again became aware of the gaps in local access to healthy food. “I found a couple of niche services that were offering food delivery, however, the slots were grabbed within seconds and the service was very expensive.”

Since then, Froome has been exploring the local food ecosystem, engaging with everyone from community gardeners, nonprofits, and small-plot farmers to farmers using controlled-environment agriculture, such as indoor and vertical farming. This community, she says, is also facing gaps and obstacles.

In one vicious cycle, for example, the challenges of reaching sufficient scale can make it difficult to secure larger supply contracts and make financing harder to secure, which in turn makes it difficult if not impossible to expand.

Froome sees a need for a more collective, holistic approach that joins the dots between local providers and local consumers. For her, the challenge is to “short circuit the food system death spiral” and remove the barriers low-income, underserved communities face to both producing and consuming local, fresh, healthy food.

The Problem

As Froome has learned, challenges exist at both ends of the food chain. On the consumer side, the problem facing low-income communities is not necessarily a lack of access to food — there is often an abundance of ultra-processed foods high in salt, fructose, and corn syrup — but a dearth of fresh vegetables and other healthy options.

“You can find food,” she says, “But it’s often the Chinese restaurant, the fried chicken or pizza place, or the bodegas, which have plenty of packaged and non-perishable snacks but whose fresh produce sections are tiny. These are wonderful parts of the community, but we also need affordable, accessible, and appealing healthy fresh food options.”

Their absence in these communities is the product of a system of “food apartheid” — a term food activists see as more accurate than “food deserts.” Studies have shown that predominantly Black communities have roughly half as many supermarkets as white communities and that the percentage of Black residents in a neighborhood is positively correlated with the number of fast food restaurants present, patterns that are also true for low-income and Hispanic communities.

Studies have also shown that fewer healthy foods are available in supermarkets in disadvantaged communities and that despite assumptions often made to the contrary, residents of such communities choose to shop in stores with healthier options if they are available and accessible.

Quote “The more we participate in our own food production, the better our chances of circumventing food systems that are damaging to public health.”

As Froome’s research has found, the dearth of healthy food options has consequences. Without consistent access to food that is nutritionally balanced, easy to access, affordable, and desirable, communities are forced to adopt poor diets that can create severe health problems. For example, residents of neighborhoods that lack access to healthy food have 20% higher rates of diabetes, higher average BMIs, lower life expectancy, and higher risk of stroke than residents of neighborhoods with abundant access.

Conversely, the introduction of healthy food suppliers — from healthy supermarkets to community gardens — has been proven to have the opposite effect on health and often plays a pivotal role in revitalizing communities.

When it comes to the broader food and farming ecosystem, local producers face many challenges: starting a business, knowing how to meet the tastes of local consumers, tapping into distribution networks, and scaling up production.

“When you’re a small-plot farmer, it can be hard to access capital, such as investment funding, loans, or government grants, if you don’t have a history of volume or a repertoire of partnerships to tap into,” says Froome. This also makes it hard to secure larger contracts with organizations such as school districts, nursing homes, and supermarket chains. Forecasting demand and managing yields can also be challenging for small-plot farmers.

The challenges tend to be similar for growers without a history of growing commercially. “Local producers in urban areas are often gardeners and farmers who love planting and are experts in growing food — but that’s different from being a businessperson or a producer of food oriented towards scale.”

The Solution

In transforming the landscape of food production and consumption in underserved communities, Froome sees the first step as changing the economic equation so that high-quality foods cost the same or less than fast food and highly-processed products.

She also believes healthy options should be as quick and easy to access as fast food, and should be available where people live and work, from the lobbies of public schools and hospitals to the streets around churches, offices and residential buildings.

However, while Froome’s work started with a focus on filling consumers’ immediate needs, her research has led her to understand that transforming access to healthy food in the long term will depend on transforming the broader ecosystem — including helping local producers to thrive economically.

This is where she believes it is critical to join the dots by helping local farmers and food producers to pool their resources. Working collectively, producers could benefit from scale in everything from securing better prices for inputs such as seeds and fertilizer to being able to fulfill orders for larger clients.

One way to make this happen, she says, could be through a membership or association model. Members would be able to connect with local consumers to understand their budgets and preferences. Some could access expertise and resources to help start new farming operations. Existing producers could share experience and resources on everything from market trends to local climate adaptation.

“It would be a way for growers to share expertise and sell to larger institutions,” she says. “Because there’s so much knowledge acquired when you’re putting something into the ground. How could that be disseminated more broadly? How can they reach more of the people they want to serve? I am passionate about getting healthy, whole foods into the hands of more families, and want to cultivate new types of relationships between growers and buyers that increase food quality and prioritize ease of access.”

As Froome iterates on her model, she hopes to serve both those who are growing or producing healthy foods and members of communities affected by inequitable food access. And she draws inspiration from the work of activists, community members, and leaders working to tackle the problem — from Tony Hillery of Harlem Grown and Dan Zauderer of Grassroots Grocery to John Rivers of 4Roots Farm, and the teams of ENY Farms, Brooklyn Supported Agriculture, GreenThumb, Oko Farms, Farm School NYC, Cornell Cooperative Extension, Green Guerillas and countless others.

Empowering community members to become hyperlocal food producers & distributors themselves, argues Froome, could also be transformative, whether they grow indoors, in backyards, or in community gardens. Hyperlocal growing often has an outsized impact on communities, providing food for, educating and empowering the people they serve. “The more we participate in our own food production, the better our chances of circumventing food systems that are damaging to public health,” she says.

The Innovator

In working to fix local food systems, Froome has several advantages. First, she has the knowledge of the benefits of healthy eating that prioritizes whole foods that she gained from her family’s lifestyle and her enduring interest in nutrition. And as a young food entrepreneur, she founded a vegan bakery while in high school — something she sees as an early reflection of her enduring commitment. “I’ve always been passionate about serving my community,” she says.

Her commitment to community has helped Froome gain valuable skills in building supportive networks. While at Google, for example, she created a diversity, equity and inclusion program for her division and co-led a digital literacy program that ran at local churches.

At Google, she also developed an alumni engagement program for the Black Founders Exchange, an annual accelerator program hosted by startup hub American Underground and Google for Startups. The program brought black founders of high-growth companies from around the country to North Carolina to help them progress from developing an initial product to raising seed capital.

Part of Froome’s work involved ensuring founders were getting the most out of their time by connecting them with Google experts in everything from recruitment techniques to sales strategies. “I spent a lot of time cultivating community and making sure there were regular opportunities for alumni to learn from each other,” she says.

It is a skill she believes she can deploy by connecting local food producers to new opportunities to grow while meeting local demand, thereby deepening their impact. “I’ve always done a good job of connecting humans,” she says.

As Froome continues to develop a model that is both scalable and replicable, she knows exactly what she wants to achieve. “I want the solution to be one that fortifies local agriculture while increasing healthy food consumption in local communities,” she says.

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