Food History

It’s funny how - outside the university - many people talk about stultifying academic exchanges and assume that intellectual developments happen at a snail’s pace. Inside a discipline there are rushes of major change based on a century or so of groundwork. Scholars rely on the past, but also do fascinating things during their lifetimes.

Archaeologists have always looked at food. Midddens and muckheaps are excellent places to find out about people’s lives. Now they’re looking at it differently and in a way that crosses over with the work of historians more readily. This creates such a wonderful depth in how we can see our food pasts. It also means that serious foodies need to start keeping an eye out for archaeological reports.

This post gives an example of one worth looking at. Rene T.J. Cappers has written Roman Foodprints at Beneike. Archaeobotanical evidence of subsistence and trade in the eastern desert of Egypt. It was published by the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, University of California, Los Angeles.

Don’t be put off by its scholarly apparatus. This book puts the food of the region into important contexts. If you want to understand people and their lives and their food habits, these contexts are crucial.

Capper looks at trade networks and how they affect populations in the region. He examines vegetation then and vegetation now and the exigencies of nomadic life. He looks at food production and differentiates between cultivated and wild plants. There’s a whole chapter on peaches.

The great thing about scholarly apparatus is use it to find the precise bit of information you’re after: in this book you can get to the material by plant name, you can follow up ideas in the bibliography and you can see exactly what the author is talking about through the colour plates at the end.

This type of book isn’t for the faint-hearted: you need to have your brain in gear. It will, however, open up a great deal of amazing insights into peoples past and their relationship with food and with food production.