Premodern Europe

KEN ALBALA

In the two thousand year span on which this chapter focuses, there is scarcely a topic that cannot be discussed as essentially concerned with food. This is hardly surprising since growing, processing, and consuming food has been the preoccupation of most people on earth until very recently. Nonetheless, the traditional historical focus on topics such as war, the rise and fall of empires and great leaders, social strife, and great intellectual movements has obscured the fact that human history is at its very core about obtaining basic nourishment. This is true not only of ordinary people but even of powerful rulers whose attempts to expand borders, seek new trade routes for exotic goods, and conquer colonial outposts are more often than not motivated by the need either to feed people with common staples or to entice them with rare edible luxuries. The ancient Greek city-states spreading in search of fertile arable land on which to grow wheat, medieval merchants carrying spices grown halfway around the earth, or Portuguese colonists manning their sugar plantations in Brazil with African slave labor—all these can be told as food histories. When examining these topics through the lens of food, what might have seemed to be familiar terrain suddenly seems new, and new vistas are opened both for teachers and for students.

Consider first one of the most momentous events in European as well as global history: the encounter of Europeans with Native Americans beginning with Columbus. The story can be told many different ways: Columbus the explorer and expert navigator, Columbus the Christ-bearer carrying the cross over the ocean to civilize the native populations, or Columbus the inept greedy ruler whose cruelty led to the decimation of millions of humans. Each version is both politically charged and historiographically situated in a particular time and place with its own unique concerns. Since the publication of Alfred Crosby's Columbian Exchange, historians have increasingly seen these events as essentially a food narrative. Columbus was clearly seeking a westward route to Asia to trade in spices and other luxuries. His journal is filled with reports of culinary and medicinal plants he expected to encounter in Asia, and to his dying day he never realized he had discovered a new continent. More importantly, American plants and animals, rather than Asian spices, were brought to Europe: the tomato, chili peppers, maize, chocolate, squashes, and potatoes, as well as turkeys. Conversely European species such as wheat, pigs, cows, and chickens were brought to the Americas. Of course European diseases were also brought to the New World and had a devastating impact on native peoples.

Further research in the past few decades has complicated the story. Europeans did not immediately accept many American plants; it took centuries to adopt the tomato and potato. Moreover, European settlers in the New World were reluctant to give up their wheat bread and European recipes, and corn remained the staple of the impoverished Native Americans, creating social and ethnic divisions based on diet. It took much longer than might be supposed for cuisines incorporating ingredients from both sides of the Atlantic to develop.

This is merely the best known of subjects retold as a food story, and it has generally made its way into textbooks and curricula in grade schools and colleges. But there are many other narratives that can be recast in terms of food history to excellent effect.

The most profitable way to approach this vast expanse of time, from ancient to early modern civilizations, is by focusing on several interconnected themes. A useful first theme is the examination of how foodways and culture are shaped by the ways in which people interact with their geographical setting, how they exploit natural resources, and what technologies they employ in processing food. The gradual expansion of trade networks is a natural extension of this topic. So too is the social meaning of individual ingredients and recipes, and the discussion of cuisine as an expression of cultural, political, and artistic values. This might lead to examining the impact of ideas—philosophical, religious, and scientific—upon eating habits and prohibitions. What follows is achronological discussion of how these various food-related themes relate to successive periods in premodern history and how historians have dealt with these topics. Each section begins with a discussion of historiography then proceeds to pedagogy.

Most food historians speak of the relative newness of the field, how perhaps twenty years ago the topic of food history raised suspicious eyebrows or uncomfortable laughter. There certainly were people who did not consider it part of a serious curriculum. We can be grateful that that has changed, and dramatically—hence the proliferation of books and courses offered in universities across the country and abroad. But this narrative of sudden efflorescence can be countered with examples of what is undeniably food history written before the twentieth century, to show that current scholarship did not sprout up spontaneously without precedent, and that there have always been serious scholars writing about what undeniably has been a central concern to all people throughout history.

The pedagogical discussion within each section briefly recounts the major themes and sources so that interested historians unfamiliar with food history can better incorporate it into the classroom. Teaching strategies per se are not discussed, but incorporating primary documents for analysis, looking at images, and discussing influential ideas are, as with any historical topic, paramount.

ANCIENT GREECE

While the cultural, artistic, and economic accomplishments of ancient Greece are a well traversed subject, how these achievements relate to food culture is less familiar and rarely covered in the curriculum today. On the other...