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History on the Plate: The Current State of Food History
Ken Albala
The sudden and dramatic interest in food scholarship in the past two decades might lead one to believe that food history is a new and emergent field. The recent proliferation of monographs, studies of individual ingredients, and comprehensive encyclopedias is impossible to deny. But the roots of food history as a branch of the discipline are nearly as old as history writing itself. Athenaeus of Naucratis in the 2nd century A.D. set out to record every detail of ancient food habits in his Deipnosophistae and effectively founded a distinct genre in the Western tradition. The Food Canons (Shih ching) written in T’ang Dynasty China by Meng Shen, Athenaeus’s counterpart in the East, chronicle every food consumed at court, and when and how it arrived. One might even posit that the Hebrew Bible is essentially a narrative of successive epochs defining the relationship of the Jews to God based on their diet and is thus a form of food history, as is much of the mythology concerned with food around the globe. So, too, are the many chronicles of the Middle Ages, which record great feasts as a way of legitimizing royal power.
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The Culinary Connections between of Italy, France and England in the 1540s
Ken Albala
While the persistent myth of Catherine de’ Medici introducing refined dining to the French refuses to disappear, the printed cookbooks of this era do reveal mutual influence between Italy and France, and including, perhaps surprisingly, England. This paper will examine the works of Messisbugo in Ferrara, the Livre fort excellent and related works printed by Sargent in France at the same time, as well as the Proper Newe Booke of Cokery. Regardless of the unsubstantiated myths, Italy did contribute much to French cuisine, and vice versa. England, despite its later reputa-tion for poor cookery, was actually at the forefront of developments in international cooking of the 1540s.
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Eating in the Christian Tradition
Trudy Eden, Ken Albala, Johanna Moyer, Fabio Parasecoli, and Sydney Watts
This panel will discuss the influence of Christianity upon patterns of eating, ways of thinking about food and the body, and how consumption in the broadest sense of that term has been profoundly shaped by matters of faith in Europe and the US from the Renaissance to today. There have been a number of specialized studies of food and religion, beginning with Caroline Walker Bynum’s Holy Feast and Holy Fast and Bridget Anne Henisch’s Fast and Feast as well as a number of studies of asceticism, constructions of gender and pathologies influenced by religion, such as Rudolph Bell’s Holy Anorexia. More recently published are White Bread Protestants by Daniel Sack and R. Marie Griffith’s Born Again Bodies. To date, however, there has been no interdisciplinary scholarly discussion which gathers together the various uses of food by Christians on both sides of the Atlantic. This panel will do so. Panelists will discuss the interweaving global themes and particular local distinctions of the multiple uses of food by Christians. All participants are contributors to the upcoming book The Lord’s Supper: Food and Christian Faith from the Middle Ages to the Present, ed. Ken Albala and Trudy Eden (Columbia University, 2010).
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Food as Intangible Cultural Heritage
Lucy Long, Ken Albala, Fabio Parasecoli, Richard Wilk, Lisa Heldke, Jane Kauer, and Krishnendu Ray
In Jan. 2009, a news report of the Tuscan town of Lucca banishing “ethnic” foods from its town center raised numerous responses among food enthusiasts and scholars. Suggested as a way to “safeguard culinary traditions and...authenticity...,” the ban seemed to reflect racism and xenophobia, and an attempt to canonize a particular definition of the town’s identity and heritage. The ban, however, can also be interpreted as an attempt to establish coherent city planning or thematic tourism utilizing a specific view of local history and culture. This roundtable explores the implications of such attempts to preserve and promote culinary traditions. Food is an integral part of cultural heritage, carrying beliefs, ethos, history and memory. It is both material, having physical presence in the foodstuff itself as well as in farming and cooking implements and architecture, clothing, artistic renderings, books, and so on connected to it; and intangible, consisting of knowledge, skills, performances, attitudes and beliefs. It can be argued then that food traditions from the past should be preserved and protected as part of Intangible Cultural Heritage, a phrase used by UNESCO. Participants will discuss the issues surrounding such preservation, possibly posing more questions than answers.
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