The past decade has been a very productive one for the development of medieval and Renaissance food history, which can be said to have made its way into “mainstream” history. In all fields of research, we may notice the increasing dominance of a cultural version of food history. This is true for the histories of dietetic medicine, cooking, feasting, and wine, among many other fields. There has been also a widening of geographical and chronological horizons, especially into the early Middle Ages, thanks to the use of new kinds of sources, including the endlessly renewed resources offered by archaeology.
- Content Type Journal Article
- Category Original
- Pages 73-88
- DOI 10.1484/J.FOOD.1.103306
- Authors
- Alban Gautier
- Allen J. Grieco
Back Matter („Acknowledgements“, „Upcoming issues“, „Food history – A bibliographic database“, „Submission of Articles“)
- Content Type Journal Article
- Category Original
- Pages 225-235
The restaurant is a place of various social interactions, not only between patrons, but also between owners and staff. The representation of these interactions in one particular literary genre, the restaurant review, is of particular interest. Through the use of linguistic methods such as frequency and collocational analysis, a number of discursive transformations are uncovered. The most striking discovery is the near-disappearance of references to particular social actors and the relations of power between them throughout the 1980’s and 1990’s as compared with the two previous decades. One possible explanation focuses on the changed nature of restaurant guide publishing.
- Content Type Journal Article
- Category Original
- Pages 173-194
- DOI 10.1484/J.FOOD.1.102965
- Authors
The role of restaurants and chefs in contemporary Norway is interesting not only as a local phenomenon reflecting a shift in food mentality, but also a global phenomenon. This article offers an exploratory study, mostly descriptive, but linked to the concept of globalization. The first part gives a brief account of the political and cultural framework of Norwegian food. The second part focuses on the evolution of the structural system Norwegian chefs have worked within during the past thirty years. Thirdly, we emphasize chefs’ direct responsibility in respect of the construction of traditional, local, regional and national understanding of food.
- Content Type Journal Article
- Category Original
- Pages 155-171
- DOI 10.1484/J.FOOD.1.102964
- Authors
In this article we extend the papers by Steven Van den Berghe, Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson and Virginie Amilien to highlight the most salient changes and evolution of the restaurant industry, emphasizing the first decade of the twenty-first century. Reflecting some of the themes raised by the preceding articles we ask: what are the identities of the contemporary restaurant and how are they expressed? Focusing on the American context we trace four major developments: the new charismatic celebrity chef, food enthusiasts and the expansion of a unique food culture, “moral” eating and related food politics and the changing structures of kitchen life.
- Content Type Journal Article
- Category Original
- Pages 195-209
- DOI 10.1484/J.FOOD.1.102966
- Authors
- Gary Alan Fine
- Daphne Demetry
Gonzalo ARANDA JIMÉNEZ, Sandra MONTÓN-SUBÍAS, Margarita SÁNCHEZ-ROMERO (eds.), Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner: Feasting Rituals in the Prehistoric Societies of Europe and the Near East (Oxford, Oxbow, 2011), 245 pages. ISBN 978-1-84217-985-7, price £40.00 / 80.00. < /p > < p > Nelly LABÈRE (études réunies et présentées par), Être à table au Moyen Âge (Madrid, Casa de Velázquez, 2010), 277 pages. ISBN 978-84-96820- 49-4, Prix € 24. < /p > < p > Craig MULDREW, < i > Food, Energy and the Creation of Industriousness: Work and Material Culture in Agrarian England, 1550-1780 < /i > (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2011), 355 pages, ISBN 9780521881852; Price £60.00 (US 99.00)
David GENTILCORE, Pomodoro! A History of the Tomato in Italy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 272 pages, 45 illustrations. ISBN 978-0-231-15206-8 (ISBN 978-0-231-52550-3 e-book), price £ 18,95 / $ 26,95.
- Content Type Journal Article
- Category Review
- Pages 211-223
- DOI 10.1484/J.FOOD.1.102967
This paper explores the extent to which Delhaize Le Lion Belgium’s first and largest food chain store, exploited the semiotic potential of architecture to construct a brand identity and to ensure visibility and recognition in a modern urban context. By using photographs and building plans as primary sources, the article analyzes the store front design in order to gain insight in the social values and cultural categories that are embedded therein and the clientele at which they were aimed.
- Content Type Journal Article
- Category Original
- Pages 107-140
- DOI 10.1484/J.FOOD.1.102962
- Authors
The article presents a survey of the literature published since 1990 on the history of restaurants in Western Europe and the United States. It focuses on the following topics: the invention and extension of the modern restaurant, celebrity chefs and mo…
The article presents a survey of the literature published since 1990 on shopping for food in Western Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. After a geographically organised survey of contributions dealing with the history of food retailing i…
The role of female protesters in the “food politics” of the First World War, both in Britain and in other combatant countries, is well known. Indeed, their absence would be surprising: women, it is widely acknowledged, played a central role in selecting, buying and preparing food for the family, and the wartime shortages placed an especially heavy burden on them. Men, on the other hand, feature far less in accounts of wartime food politics, and middle-class men hardly at all, at least not as consumers of food in their own right. Focusing on the English home front, this article suggests that this “absence” was not the product of a lack of interest on the part of middle-class men in issues of food consumption. On the contrary, men were deeply concerned by deteriorating middle-class diets, were involved in families’ purchasing decisions and practices, and often sought to supplement their families’ diets through self-provisioning. However, this article suggests, many middle-class men found their forays into food production and shopping to be deeply troubling: in the particular circumstances of the wartime home front, they often found that their identities and responsibilities as food consumers threatened to undermine their sense of themselves as competent, authoritative, fit and manly men.
- Content Type Journal Article
- Category Original
- Pages 83-105
- DOI 10.1484/J.FOOD.1.102961
- Authors