Grew 1999 Food and Global History

Chapter One
Food and Global History

Raymond Grew
The history of food is a fashionable topic, and so is global history. Although

they come together naturally, their combination is explosive. They intersect
so easily because each sends forth tentacles of relevance that reach across
conventional limitations of time, region, and scholarly specialization. Both
employ vocabularies applicable everywhere. As subjects of study, however,
food and global history begin from opposing points of departure and move
along contrasting intellectual trajectories—with different purposes, meth-
ods, and prejudices. Remarkably, these complex, erudite, demanding topics
appeal to a broad public. Articles and programs on the history of food ap-
pear in all the media, and allusions to it decorate patriotic speeches and ad-
vertising. A reference to globalization (and therefore some conception of
global history) has become a talisman of wise engagement with the modern
world and regularly inserted in economic forecasts, political statements, and
sociological analyses. Although this double popularity has been a stimulus
to this book and understanding the challenge m combining two such univer-
sal interests was essential to the project it represents.
I
The Appeal of Food as a Subject of Study
Readers who would not normally wade through the abstractions of social
analysis and for whom the details of history are a burden will nevertheless ea-
gerly read about the foods and eating habits of other eras and cultures. There
are many reasons for this appeal. Descriptions of other societies seem more
immediate and concrete •when they treat the common experiences of hunger
and eating, inevitably invoking personal memories, sentimental associations
with familiar foods, and a shock of delight or revulsion at descriptions of
strange foods. Travel accounts, novels, and motion pictures all use food to
measure social distance and to give immediacy to penury or plentitude. At
1
2 RAYMOND GREW
home or abroad, colorful food markets are taken to represent something es-
sential and real about culture and society that becomes masked or artificial in
supermarkets.l
This universality of food gives it enormous potential as an indicator of
cultural differences and historical change.2 All societies must produce and
distribute food.3 Their ways of doing so define the societies themselves. All
societies construct elaborate rules about the preparation and consumption of
food, rules that reveal internal structure and tensions; and apparently no re-
gion has been so poor as not to have special foods for festivals or holidays or
family occasions. Necessity, taste, social distinction, opportunity, and values
all intersect at the table, dictating who sits where, what is on the plate and
whether there is one, who prepares the food and who serves it. On great
public occasions, the order of service expresses this formally; but food oper-
ates as a social indicator even more powerfully with daily repetition. Every-
one in Western societies recognizes the social implications of whether a
household normally eats caviar or hot dogs, truffles or frozen dinners and
whether they do so standing or sitting and in a kitchenette or under a chan-
delier. In other societies other signs are no less clear,4
The production of food is so fundamentally integrated with labor systems
and property arrangements and so clearly tied to available technology that
diet is often taken to be a measure of economic development (with effects
ranging from the elimination of famine to clogged arteries and obesity). Ad-
vancing science has not merely affected what people eat but has made diet a
concern of public policy, and fortifying foods with vitamins may be one of
the most successful, and beneficial, efforts at social control. Of course, the
connections between food and the environment and between food and social
organization change with the systems of agriculture, food preservation, and
transport and are altered by new knowledge about the principles of nutri-
tion, plant genetics, and biological needs. Diet depends on more than wealth
and knowledge, however; and experts have sometimes mistaken cultural
preference for scientific or economic indicators of the level of develop-
ment—mistaking the discouragement of breast feeding, a preference for big
breakfasts, or the high consumption of milk and meat for universal signs of
progress.
Historians find in food's ties to economics, technology, commerce, and re-
ligion particularly satisfying evidence of how ordinary, daily activities are re-
lated to larger historical trends. Until the high middle ages, Europeans re-
clined while eating, at least on formal occasions. The change to a seated
position, two leading historians of food point out, freed the left hand, facili-
tating the use of a knife, which opened the way to the fork, adopted in the
fourteenth century following the Black Death, The change in food manners
was connected to changes in social relations, furniture, wealth, and technol-
ogy. Current historical scholarship on food and diet, they add, seeks,"to
touch upon all aspects of human action and thought."5
Food and Global History 3
That scholarship can proceed in many different ways. There are excellent
studies of foods in single cultures.6 Specific foods and the customary ways of
eating them have been tellingly analyzed as an aesthetic, cultural, semiotic
code; and changes in eating can be related to important social and psycho-
logical changes, something Sidney Mintz suggests when he asserts that a new
conception, the idea that a person could become different by consuming dif-
ferently, first emerged with tobacco, tea, and sugar—stimulants and products
of empire.7 Interestingly, the urge to make food historically significant is not
just the penchant of scholars; in every society, folk histories accompany par-
ticular dishes and, like folk etymologies, associate the local and familiar with
famous figures, great events, and historical turning points.8
The attention to food in literature and art reinforces the impression that
whole cultures divulge themselves through their way with food;9 and the
sense of food's significance comes so readily, perhaps from deep within the
psyche, that claims for cuisine as evidence must be accepted with some
grains of salt. Modern nations, for example, tend to stress the antiquity and
distinctiveness of their regional cuisines, especially at times when, for other
reasons, regional differences seem important. In reality, however, the pro-
motion of certain dishes to a place in regional identity is often quite modern,
following rather than preceding the creation of a nation and the establish-
ment of a national cuisme.10
Harvest rituals, communal celebrations, religious and family feasts all use
food to infuse social ties with a sense of plentitude and well-being. Foods
thereby define and reinforce group membership, and they provide an instru-
ment for exposing the processes of assimilation. Migration, often in part a
search for food, carried special foods with it; and there is much to be learned
from the capacity of cuisines to spread, to change, and to absorb elements of
other cuisines, while preserving their distinctiveness and remaining powerful
symbols of identity.11 Food remains at home in melting pots.
Strongly associated with women's domestic roles, the preparation and
serving of food within the family conveys bonds of affection and tends to as-
sert male authority and female power—thus the modern concern that these
meanings may be eroded by the spread of packaged foods and the practice of
eating in restaurants12 (where professional chefs, like the corporate execu-
tives who produce and distribute packaged food, are likely to be men).
In all these respects, the study of food demonstrates how deeply processes
of political and social change can reach into society. No wonder then that
commentary on contemporary cuisine is often also a comment on politics,
commercialization, the ecology, and cultural decline.13 Books on the history
of food can be fascinating and delightful as they set unusual and interesting
details about the daily life of an era within grand (and satisfyingly familiar)
historical narratives. Unfamiliar information on a commonplace subject
often has an impact greater than its import, and historical lore about food
can readily acquire an aura of significance and erudition it may not merit.
4 RAYMOND GREW
Only rarely does the study of food reveal historical processes previously
slighted. Can thinking in terms of global history make a significant differ-
ence ?The chapters that follow address questions of historical importance.
These essays constitute something of an experiment, neither because they
engage a neglected subject nor because their authors are scholars from many
different fields. The study of food has tended to stimulate interdisciplinary
research. The fresh achievement here lies with the engagement of scholars
from many disciplines using the latest work in their own fields to think
about the history of food within a framework of global history. In doing that
they discuss topics of great general interest, subjects discussed in the mass
media, matters of official policies normally considered in congressional com-
mittees and international agencies, and issues of medical science more at
home in seminars and antiseptic corridors. The authors have in common
their command of great bodies of knowledge that partially overlap, their
willingness to take part in this experiment, and their desire to reach a
broader audience.
The Interest in Globalization

Increasing attention to things global may reflect increasing curiosity about
the rest of the world; but globalization refers to a fundamental historical
process. Admittedly, the weight of the term is lessened by the frequency and
intellectual lightness with which labels are used to declare modern times a
new epoch—the Computer Age, the Atomic Age, the Age of Totalitarian-
ism, the Age of the Automobile, the Age of Anxiety—but this obsessive la-
beling may in itself be an important sign of our times. Almost everyone
agrees, a little uncritically, that the pace of historical change has become
faster; and the need for such labels indicates how fundamentally modern
thought is shaped by conceptions of historical change as •well as by contem-
porary concern about where that process of change is taking us. Globaliza-
tion has much of the appeal of science fiction.
Usually assumed to be propelled by new technologies and by mechanisms
internal to capitalism., globalization is sometimes described in the language of
progress, with echoes of Enlightenment confidence in the power of reason
and of nineteenth-century hope for science and technology. Globalization so
conceived brings societies closer together, with benefits that include the elim-
ination of famine and the enjoyment of foods from around the world. Diets
that once featured chestnuts, taro, or turnips were imposed by nature; now
those limitations have been overcome. From, a common biology and through
a shared human experience, this progress allows more diverse diets and
makes them more widely available as they also become internationally more
similar, achieving through food what Esperanto attempted through language.
More often, however, references to globalization are accompanied by allu-
sions to the sorcerer's apprentice and by warnings of dehumanized com-
merce and environmental disaster. An ungainly term, globalization often

suggests a troubling determinism, a juggernaut that destroys ram forests
while multinational agribusinesses plow under family farms and capitalism
forces peasants to move into cities and work for wages, thereby eroding so-
cial relations, undermining local customs, and subverting taste in culture and
food. This globalization involves an assault on nature. With respect to food,
technology violates the natural rhythm of the seasons and modernity under-
mines the convivial rituals and religious meanings associated with eating.
Ever more available, food loses the savor preserved only in memories of pro-
duce fresh from the garden and prepared in mother's kitchen from recipes so
traditional they were never written down. Ultimately, this litany compares
the barbarism of gulping hamburgers with the refinements of family feasts
and contrasts fruit freshly picked with processed foods deficient in flavor
and nutrients. Admittedly, the spread of McDonald's restaurants around the
world would seem to imply some universal attraction or need; yet that ex-
pansion is more famous as a symptom than as a success. Part of the interest
of this book's topic lies in the fact that, at the end of the twentieth century,
discussions of globalization and food encapsulate such conflicting assess-
ments of the present and the future.
II
Constructing Global Histories (of Food)
Concerns with globalization today have obviously stimulated interest in
global history. As a field of study that uses historical methods to analyze
global connections and processes of historical change, global history has
other intellectual roots as well, among them eighteenth-century Scottish and
French philosophers, much of nineteenth-century social science (including
August Comte, Karl Marx, and the birth of anthropology), and twentieth-
century studies of modernization and world systems. As a distinctive field,
however, global history can be said to be new; and there is an ongoing debate
among interested historians as to whether or not global history is a way of
studying all of history or should be limited to study of the modern, period.14
For some, the global connectedness of our age is its distinguishing charac-
teristic, a new reality and a change in consciousness of which interest in
global history is but one manifestation.15 This global era and its origins, in-
cluding perhaps the last 50 or 100 years, should therefore be the subject mat-
ter of global history. For others, historians, thinking globally as a result of
contemporary experience invites a new look at all periods of the past, prob-
ing for global connections and recognizing global historical processes of
change that may have been underestimated. Such new research would in turn
deepen understanding of the modern period itself and should lead to new
categories of analysis and new theories of change.
6 RAYMOND GREW
The study of food in global history is unlikely to resolve this issue of peri-
odization. Some themes —such as agribusiness, global marketing, fast foods,
environmental concerns, and genetic engineering—are very much part of
global history understood as the history of modernity. Others —sych as
trade in food stuffs over great distance, even in prehistory; the response of
subsistence economies to global changes in climate and disease, and the
spread across societies and continents of techniques for producing and pre-
serving food (beginning in ancient times)—extend through history. That
human beings around the world are tending to grow taller and live longer is
related to the global history of food in the modern era, that food is a crucial
element in the relations of economies and empires and religions has been a
part of global history much longer.
Some patterns of change are clear. Undeniably there has been an historic
increase in the amount of food available (with enormous implications for
population and longevity and all of social life), and there has been an increase
in the range of foods in prosperous countries and in the distribution of food
among social classes. Conceived on a grand scale, global history tends to
privilege long-term and highly visible factors like conquest, technology, and
economic necessity. The importance of food in human history is not limited,
however, to material factors. Eating together, sharing certain foods, and es-
chewing others have helped groups define themselves and religions maintain
community. Shamans and doctors have relied on foods, specially prepared
as medicines, to sustain their social roles. Patterns of consumption have
been principle indicators of social position from soup kitchen to bourgeois
banquet. Family life, peasant festivities, and rulers* displays of power
have always featured food; and the symbolic power of food is expressed in
everyday preferences, religious proscriptions, works of art, and modern
advertising.
Perhaps food can be used as a kind of trace element, tracking the direction
of change, revealing the complex intersections of old and new that demark
the global and the local but belong to both. The history of food can be
thought of as beginning with biology and the hard realities of climate, soil,
property, and labor; but it continues through social structure, economic ex-
change, and technology to embrace culture and include a history of collec-
tive and individual preferences. This global history of food need not reject
contingency nor deny the efficacy of human choices.
Thinking in terms of global history nevertheless generates significant ten-
sions. When global historians look for connections, they are looking at es-
tablished subjects of research and are especially dependent on the work of
others for the knowledge they have assembled, the theories they have gener-
ated, and the very topics being studied. Each of these topics has its own lore,
sets of questions, bodies of knowledge, and particular methods that come to
be thought of as part of the topic itself and serve to give it boundaries. The
study, for example, of a single manufacturing company is always understood
to be a sybtopic of larger topics: a kind of product, a form of production, the

economy of a nation,16 Such topics are normally explored within an estab-
lished conceptual framework and a well-developed scholarly literature. To
consider them on a global scale is not only to be unusually dependent on the
work of others but to use that research in ways for which it was not
intended.
In practice this search for connections often challenges established cate-
gories of thought and conventional boundaries between topics. Thus, while
relying on the work of others, the global historian is also often subverting it.
That may result simply from reversing the emphasis, stressing the connec-
tions more than the things connected, an analysis that often reveals unex-
posed relationships that cut across established categories. It may result more
fundamentally from a new perspective, a new angle of vision that signifi-
cantly modifies the topics connected, that reveals assumptions which need
rethinking, and that identifies historical, processes largely overlooked. Or,
most ambitious of all, it may result from the application of theories about
global relations that explain historical processes in new ways. (The essays in
this book function at the more moderate of these levels, although the atten-
tive reader will note some striking possibilities for larger theories). Even
when happily convinced of having something new and important to say, the
global historian cannot forget the great risks m transgressing distinctions
that have resulted from specialized knowledge and disciplined methods.
Global connections are not necessarily hard to find, and scholars often
know in advance where to look for them. Most obvious are the connections
across space, from country to country, across continents, and around the
globe. These attract our attention for two reasons. The first is modern expe-
rience. The ease of movement and communication, the increase in both the
pressures of international markets and concern for the environment have
made us aware that all the world is connected. Globalization is on everyone's
lips, shibboleth and excuse, often loosely used; and serious thought cannot
afford to avoid the obvious. Connections across space attract our attention
for a subtler reason as well. The study of society has been shaped by the fact
that travel and communication were for so long difficult and slow, that cus-
toms and languages tend to amplify the sense of distance and difficulty, and
that cultures are so often noticed and described in terms of difference. The
prominence of state and nation, with historiography its product and chroni-
cler, has obscured many continuing connections. When the response to in-
formation about global connections is one of surprise, that surprise comes as
much from the realization that important ties had been overlooked as from,
the discovery of their existence.
The analysis of global connections must be attentive to time as well as
space. Connections formed in one era tend to shift in form and meanings
with the passage of time. The visible exchange of goods may have its most
important effects through the ideas and customs that accompany it but only
8 RAYMOND GREW
slowly take effect. Ties that were once imperial may outlast the political con-
nections that formed them. Explanations of how specific global connections
began are often easier to establish than why they persist, are transformed, or
peter out—promising areas for research in global history. The reminder to
be alert for connections across space and over time can be a useful prod to
further investigate but is both too easy and too grand to shape research.
Because global history, conceived of as a kind of historical research, does
not aspire to create a narrative of world history that leaves no island out, it
can tolerate lots of gaps. But global historians face other difficulties. In their
search for connections, global historians need an explicit rationale for delim-
iting their inquiry. Once accepted categories have been denied their truncat-
ing power and habits of thought no longer define the boundaries of research,
connections can become infinite. The two most common devices for avoid-
ing an endless loop of connections are either to focus on a closely defined
subject treated as an example of other nodes of multiple connections or to
study a specific system of connections, for which it is then necessary to pro-
vide some theoretical support. 17 Both are used in the chapters that follow.
The global historical framework one chooses will go far to determine what
evidence is relevant; the theories and methods employed will shape its inter-
pretation. There are, it seems to me, essentially four broad approaches to
building a global, historical framework. One begins from universal experi-
ences. Human beings everywhere construct shelter, ward off or survive dis-
ease, and, of course, eat. Environmental and economic factors have, for exam-
ple, led many societies at different times to depend heavily on a single dietary
staple. Whether that staple was wheat, rice, potatoes or something else, the
production, distribution, and consumption of that staple was integral to so-
cial organization and cultural values. Changes m any of these elements af-
fected the others in a process that can be studied. Similarly, urban living, set
working hours, and restaurants are now nearly universal experiences that
have implications for food and its cultural meanings. Constructing a global
history on the basis of a selected set of universal experiences has important
advantages. It encourages comparison of how societies meet similar needs and
how different social systems respond to change, and it tends to favor research
that is empirical and open-ended. Nutritional studies, with their foundation
in biology and medicine and their concerns for public health, frequently
work this way; and a number of chapters in this book illustrate its effective-
ness. Defining historical problems on the basis of common experiences can be
done in a way to avoid imposing Western models on non-Western societies.18
The selection of which universal experiences to study and which comparisons
to make is not automatic, however, but requires some carefully elaborated
conception of historical change to avoid the dull simplifications that assump-
tions about universal experience can encourage.
A second way to way to build a framework of global history is to trace the
diffusion of materials, techniques, ideas, and customs from one place to an-
other. William McNeill's study of the global diffusion of plagues is an out-

standing example19; and several of the essays in this volume establish their
problematic from instances of diffusion. The spread of previously unknown
foods from the New World to Europe and Asia provides one of the great
historical examples of diffusion,20 the contemporary spread of fast foods,
one of the most talked about. An important element in historical change, dif-
fusion is a natural preoccupation of global history. Tracking the movement
of something specific from place to place over time allows a measured con-
creteness and chronological clarity that facilitates the comparison of diverse
responses to similar opportunities and challenges. Tracing such contacts has
a further importance, because every item carries some culture with it and
patterns of contact thus have wider historical significance.
Within a framework of diffusion a global history of food might investigate
the spread of plants and animals, agricultural techniques (from irrigation, the
plow, and animal husbandry to tractors, fertilizers, and genetically engi-
neered plants); the food preferences and taboos carried by religion; or the
specific dishes, ways of cooking, and table manners disseminated by travel-
ers, migrants, and merchants. Studies of diffusion tend to favor the concrete
and readily identifiable, churches more than religious beliefs, inventions
more than social organization, certain foods more than social relations. That
can be a serious limitation, as can the fact that the thing disseminated may it-
self be changed in the process. In global histories of diffusion, significant is-
sues and findings arise less reliably from study of the idea or object diffused
than from exploration of the responses to it, which often reveals a great deal
about the process of change. In that way research into the diffusion of peo-
ple, businesses and markets, labor systems, knowledge and techniques, reli-
gious or political movements, or public policies can contribute significantly
to global history.
A third approach to building a framework for global history uses the for-
mal ties of politics, economics, or culture to explore the creation of global
webs of connections. These are most often thought of in terms of trade or
empire, relations that lie at the core of many of the best known and most in-
fluential global histories published in the last thirty years. Such close atten-
tion to economic ties opens the study of global history to an extensive litera-
ture on economic theory. Variants of Marxism in particular have contributed
to theories of dependency and the world-capitalist system that have been ef-
fectively applied to examples from around the world. Similarly, political ties
are central to global histories of the shifting balance of power and of com-
peting hegemonies, and modern studies of imperialism have enriched our
understanding of the lasting impact of webs of connection. Among the vari-
ous approaches to global history, the search for webs of connections is the
one most inherently attentive to power, another respect in which it fits well
with contemporary social science, and is useful for the kind of ecological,
analysis in some of the following chapters.
10 RAYMOND GREW
Webs of connection built on trade in food (and in tobacco, tea, and opium)
have been crucial in many periods of history. Trade in wine and olive oil in
the ancient world, the flow of grain in the Roman empire, the demand for
spices in the middle ages, and the transatlantic exportation of meat and grain
have often structured accounts of European history. Food was also an im-
portant commodity on the comparably important trade routes of Asia and
the Middle East. Investigating global connections through food underscores
the importance of cultural and social factors such as language, religion, and
migration in sustaining webs of connections. From Japan to the European
Union and North America, battles over the quality and effects of foreign
foods show the continuing importance of symbolic associations as well as
economic interests. Intimately related to personal style and social practice,
food consumption (like a preference for wine, beer, espresso, or Coca-Cola)
flourishes at the intersection of the local and the global. These examples also
point to significant changes in the contemporary world; for the global his-
tory of food brings to the fore the role of international marketing in today's
economy, when the capacity to create demand and to domesticate imported
products is one of the marks of corporate capital. There is a dangerous ten-
dency, however, to confuse connection with hegemony and to assume that
vectors of influence flow in only one direction. Global historians (unlike na-
tivists "who fear the effects of importing foreign foods) cannot assume that
imported practices arrive unfiltered or that such encounters transform cul-
ture, for there is exciting research to be done on when elective affinities do
and do not obtain and when they form webs of connection.
A fourth way of building toward a framework of global history looks at
cultural encounters, not simply as conflicts but as a process of change in
which cultural identities are formed and altered. Many elements of this can
be found in what is thought of as the history of civilizations, global history
differing primarily in a lesser commitment to seamless narrative and a
greater focus on the processes of historical change. Global history con-
structed around cultural encounters, which uses established work on reli-
gion, language, and society, has strong resonance with late-twentieth-cen-
tury concerns about nationalism, fundamentalism., and ethnic identity.21
Applied to the place of food in global history, it probes the ways in •which
foods function as cultural symbols and markers of difference. The array of
examples (rice, the beef of old England, couscous, rye bread, curry, borscht,
tortillas) is extraordinary, and so is the range of purposes to which they have
been put. Foods can demark cultural difference and define community. Spe-
cific foods have long been associated with particular groups, and it has been
common to associate the foods of a region •with its climate and terrain as the
basis for a description (and implied explanation) of the character of the in-
habitants. In the nineteenth century, as the choice of food increased, nation-
alism flourished, and the limited diets of the poor became all the more no-
ticeable, proletarian foods quickly became a (usually disparaging) nickname
for other nations: potato-eaters, limeys, frogs, and krauts.
The examples are so interesting that they are often cited on the way to
conclusions already familiar, but the study of cultural encounters has much
more to offer to global history. The process of codification whereby the
diets of ordinary people came to be a mark of identity associated with partic-
ular festivals and ethnic groups is historically important. Increased aware-
ness of others and greater freedom of choice provoked issues of identity;
consciousness of change stimulated inventive uses of the term, traditional.
Global cultural encounters expand and alter that consciousness and those
choices. Distinctive foods, recodified in ethnic restaurants around the world,
became part of shifting balances between the exotic and the familiar,22as sev-
eral chapters here demonstrate. Food provides a sensitive indicator of the
melding of global and local; and study of how cuisines adapt to new circum-
stances (or are adapted by elites, restauranteurs, migrants, advertisers, and
international social agencies) can provide a useful counterweight to the ten-
dency to think of global history in. terms of impersonal, predictable, and ir-
resistible forces. The intersection of larger trends and individual choices, of
great forces and local groups, of structures and cultures that has given vital-
ity to all forms of history remains essential for global history, too.
Constructing Histories of Food

(in a Global Context)
Global historical frameworks developed from histories of universal experi-
ences, diffusion, webs of connections, or cultural encounters are all appli-
cable to global histories of food. There is much to build on. The historical
literature on food is considerable; and although most of it was written inde-
pendent of any special concern for global history, its extension to global
frameworks follows logically. This potential can be found in the histories of
single foods; of food, famine and demography; of human nutrition; of food
as a cultural marker, distinguishing one culture from another; of the trade in
food and of the systems of landholding and labor on which it rests; and of
agribusiness and the international capital and marketing it involves.
There are marvelous histories of particular foods that, by reaching across
vast expanses of time and geography, reveal continuities and relationships
that are the ligaments of global history. One of the most impressive is Red-
cliffe Salaman's history of the potato, and there are a, number of others. 23
The intellectual pleasures of contemplating the multiple and often surprising
ways a single food connects to social history can be savored in Toussaint-
Samat's encyclopedic account of foods, which considers the berries and ani-
mals of the wild, cultivated grains and fruits, locally varied yet ubiquitous
alcoholic drinks, and more exotic products, some of which like spices and
coffee, became featured items of world trade.24 Sydney Mintz's remarkable
study of sugar begins with the universal human appeal of sweetness; follows
the diffusion of techniques used to cultivate and consume sugar; examines
12 RAYMOND GREW
the trade in sugar and the imperial connections, plantation systems, and slav-
ery that developed around that trade; and explores the cultural changes asso-
ciated with sugar consumed as medicine, condiment, and luxury but differ-
ently by different social classes. "Uses," he notes, "determine meanings," a
point crucial in thinking about food in global history precisely because the
cultural habit is to think of that relationship in reverse.2S
Scarcity and famine are also topics that invite a global outlook. At the be-
ginning of the modern, industrial era, the Reverend Malthus argued that
only war, disease, and famine prevented overpopulation, which otherwise
would foster all three scourges on an unprecedented scale. Ever since, as
populations continued to increase, the question of whether scientific knowl-
edge, technology, and social organization could provide the food to sustain
such growth has remained central. This concern—important to contempo-
rary discussions of economic development, population planning, interna-
tional aid, and environmental policies—has also greatly added to historical
research and understanding. Much as tree rings register the quality of each
growing season, a society's system of food supply can be read as the skeletal
remains of its social structure and the vicissitudes that it had to meet. Ar-
chaeologists and historians study the ratios of population to land, the efforts
to establish an adequate water supply (crucial elements in the development
of the fertile crescent between the Tigris and Euphrates and in the stability of
Asian, Roman, and pre-Columbian civilizations), the impact of technology
from animal harnesses and moldboard plows to gasoline engines, new fertil-
izers, and pesticides. Scholars have learned to give close attention to the im-
portance of food stuffs for the development of trade routes and empires
from the date palms of the ancient world and the spice trade of the middle
ages to developmental change in the last fifty years.2* Issues of food supply
run through history from the most ancient periods to the present.27
Famine is often thought of as a natural disaster about •which little could be
done. Historians, however, find that for the last several centuries at least
governments could make all the difference, and thus famine should not be
dismissed from historical analysis as an external pressure on society but
should rather stimulate questions about the human policies that made it pos-
sible.28 The effects of famine are far-reaching, and responses to its tragedy
have served political, imperial, and political interests. The demographic ef-
fects of famine tend to be statistically minor compared to its psychological
and social effects; but population growth, one of the great themes of global
history, is due in part to the increasing provision of sufficient food to
strengthen resistance to disease. Like demography, the science of nutrition
examines universal aspects of human biology in very specific contexts. Nu-
tritionists know the physiological effects of specific foods and the nutri-
tional elements they contain; for recent times, at least, these researchers
know a great deal about the effects of dietary change. And they have consid-
erable experience of public policy; of the impact on it of cultural, economic,
and political factors; and of its often unexpected outcomes. This can be a
tool for uncovering large-scale historical trends. Food, the object of consid-
erable record keeping, makes an invaluable historical indicator.
Which plants and animals are considered to be food varies with culture;
and what is eaten, how it is prepared, and who eats it, often needs to be stud-
ied in quite local terms yet raises important questions about how societies
function. Anthropologists have long made use of this,29 and food practices
can be the basis for stimulating comparisons between societies, including
some very distant in time,30 and for analyzing patterns of change.
Food has been an important item of trade since ancient times; and increas-
ing global trade has spread plant and animal varieties, added greatly to the va-
riety of foods available in wealthier societies, and created powerful networks
of distribution and processing.31 These developments have not all pointed in
one direction, however. It can be argued that economic ties have also reduced
the variety of foods available in developing countries, pushing them to pro-
duce single crops for international markets.32 International agribusiness can
also drive peasants into city slums, favor high-yield grains that provide re-
duced nutrition, and harm the environment as well as health by making re-
gions once self-sufficient (admittedly at low levels) dependent on imported
foodstuffs and the exportation of goods produced at low wages,33 These are
primarily modern phenomena, and there is disagreement about their extent
and long-term effects, a disagreement that is in effect an argument about their
place in global history. Many current practices are clearly extensions of pat-
terns developed following the great European expansion of the sixteenth cen-
tury. Staple foods and foods that are major exports have always been closely
tied to a society's labor system, and dramatic examples include the latifundia
of ancient Rome, the labor-intensive production of nee in China and Japan,
and the reliance on slavery in the sugar islands. From the nineteenth century
to the present, the modern food industry has often relied on cheap labor in
poor countries to produce foods sold in rich markets.
As a subject, then, food lends itself especially well to the study of global
historical patterns, connecting elements of history that are more often stud-
ied in isolation. Because foodways intersect so concretely with economics,
politics, social structure, and culture, the history of food is remarkably sug-
gestive. Yet histories of food must accomplish more than that if they are to
add to the understanding of global history.
Ill
This conjunction between histories of food and global history facilitates
our project but says little about how specific studies should be formulated.
Although this is not the place for a disquisition on methodology and global
history, it is useful while reading the chapters that follow to bear in mind the
concerns that shaped them. Like all good history, global histories should
14 RAYMOND GREW
address important historical problems. Identifying those to be considered is

a critical step. The four, broad global historical frameworks discussed above,
used with whatever degree of deliberation and whether separately or in com-
bination, can be helpful but are not enough. Theories, or at least certain con-
ceptions, of global historical processes direct the scholar's attention to the
kind of events and practices likely to be important. Investigating those more
closely provokes a series of questions, leading to further explorations. And
all of this, from beginning to end, evolves from the author's initial interests,
which are necessarily delimited in time and place and topic. Influenced by
available data and current discussions, these interests also reflect the tradi-
tions and methods of particular academic disciplines. Along the way, this
posing of questions and persistent probing leads to the recognition of signif-
icant problems in global history that can be given the definition and delimi-
tation necessary for systematic investigation.
Finding coherent patterns in history is a resounding challenge, tracing
them through time and space an enormous satisfaction, and attaching them
to specific cases a critical contribution to historical understanding. For that
to work, global history, as a field of study, must be able to proceed from the
specific to the general as well as the reverse. The essays that follow do that.
They emphasize different global connections. Their authors do not always
agree about the global historical processes that matter most. Yet all attend to
ecology, economics, technology, and politics and are alert to issues of cul-
ture, social class, and gender as they track the interaction of global and local
factors. Writing on diverse societies and starting from, different fields of re-
search with their own vocabularies, data, and methods, these authors never-
theless address related, and important, issues about food in global history.
The Processes of Global History

The four essays in this section all analyze processes of change in foodways
but do so on very different scales, moving from a truly global conception of
change through human history, to a comparative study of Chinese and In-
dian responses over several centuries to new foods from the Americas, to an
assessment of restaurants and travel as agents of change, to the cultural con-
structions of an ethnic minority that moved from North Africa to metropol-
itan France. Each essay uses all of the approaches to building a global frame-
work discussed above; yet each begins from an emphasis on one of them.
In Chapter Two, "Going in Circles: The Political Ecology of Food and
Agriculture," Harriet Friedmann starts from the universal, the complex bal-
ance of nature that evolves in place and purpose. This framework leads to an
evolutionary perspective on how human beings, seeking the sustenance life
requires, have benefited from, worked with, and battled against various eco-
logical niches. That provides a way to identify major historical transforma-
tions; and Friedmann emphasizes in the last three centuries the Columbian
exchange (the subject of Chapter Three), the global expansion of European

power, and the decline of the household economy with industrialization, a
radical break that made food a commodity. The themes she identifies are
taken up again and again in this volume. Through her focus on ecology, she
outlines a chain of being from bacteria to human relations that connects en-
vironment, economy, social system, urban-rural relations, techniques of pro-
duction, family structure, and social values. Her political ecology becomes
an impassioned warning against miscalculations of efficiency and profit
(consider mad cow disease, discussed in Chapter Fourteen) and against the
dangers of losing genetic diversity. Attention to place, primarily Great
Britain and the United States, provides evidence for a social vision and a cul-
tural program (echoed in the last chapter of this book).
The global framework that Sucheta Mazumdar uses in Chapter Three
starts from the most visible example of diffusion in the history of food, the
spread of plants from the New World following European exploration. She
then identifies a significant historical problem, for "The Impact of New
World Food Crops on the Diet and Economy of China and India,
1600-1900" explores two strikingly different responses to these new crops,
especially sweet potatoes, maize, and peanuts. The contrast between China
and India was not the matter of a moment but lasted for centuries. It began
with China's agricultural revolution, much earlier than Europe's, and it had
implications for demographic growth and political revolts as well as national
cuisines. Attentive to plant histories, ecology, and local economies, Mazum-
dar *s analytic comparison emphasizes the importance of land-holding pat-
terns, peasant proprietors, and the role of the state (providing valuable back-
ground for the discussion in Chapter Thirteen of Japan's response to
imported foods). Institutions, policies, and ordinary people created the dif-
ference, using crops differently and in ways that affected the history of great
civilizations.
Global frameworks can thus point to, and clarify, critical, long-term,
processes. They can also illuminate transformations that occur on a shorter
time scale. Rebecca Spang also writes about diffusion in Chapter Four, but
her emphasis is on the restaurant as a site of cultural encounter, between peo-
ple from the provinces and urban sophisticates, consumers from different so-
cial classes, and travelers from different cultures. "All the World's a Restau-
rant: Gastronomies of Tourism, and Travel" contains a number of surprises.
Placed in a, global context, the restaurant is seen to be far from universal and
hardly some artless, natural development; its rise needs to be explained. As-
sociated from, birth with travel, it was then inventively made a kind of substi-
tute for it. This is a modern story, in which modern concerns for health and
the technologies of modern travel intersect with commerce and the wealth
and taste of the middle class to create an institution—the restaurant—that
codifies cuisines and makes the exotic accessible and safe. In the process of
becoming global, this orchestrated form of cultural encounter preserved
16 RAYMOND GREW
something of older, local ways the representation of social and ethnic identi-
ties and an essential marker of the modern way of life around the world.
Cultural encounter is also central to Joelle Bahloul's close study of North
African Jews. But Chapter Five, "On Cabbages and Kings: The Politics of
Jewish Identity in Post-Colonial French Society and Cuisine," builds its
global framework from the webs of connections within which the Jews of
North Africa have for centuries been situated. Their eating patterns recapit-
ulated their position between Muslim neighbors and French governors. Sub-
sequently carried into France, that way of eating underwent further compro-
mises between ancient Jewish law and the attractive opportunities of French
republican society. Bahloul's research on food practices that developed, in-
formally and in the home, weighs the impact of migration, economic devel-
opment, and political climate as well as issues of ethnic, religious, and class
identity in a case study of responses to modern social change. It reveals a
subtle and complex process that intermingles rituals with shifting symbolic
meanings and constructs changing boundaries within the fields of tension
created by the promises and threats of integration.34 In four frameworks of
different chronological and geographic scale, these studies of food reveal
much about global historical processes.
Public Policy and Global Science

The chapters in this section constitute a rather different experiment. Interna-
tional agencies and programs for world health and economic development
are in themselves forces for global change. Global thinking is, in a sense,
built into the disciplines represented here, while the policies they advocate
must deal with immediate, often pressing, local issues. Written by experts
who study universal nutritional needs and design public policies to meet
those needs, these chapters concentrate on modern conditions, especially in
countries undergoing rapid change. These authors assess their own fields of
research and the policies they have fostered with remarkable critical balance.
Placing those practices •within global patterns, uncovers trends that influence
research itself as well as policies on nutrition and food supply. Public poli-
cies formulated in the name of science and public welfare, are often shaped
by fashions, ideologies, commercial interests, and political considerations
that reach around the world. Two generations ago, protein deficiency was a
principal target, one now overshadowed by concern for nutritional balance
and the risks from excessive consumption of sugar and fat. That change re-
sults from new knowledge, of course, but also from the experience of the de-
veloped world with the •worrisome indulgences of prosperous people. While
acknowledging the dangers of imposing on one society standards derived
from another, policy makers face shifting targets; for the societies they seek
to help, whether rich or poor, are rapidly changing through their participa-
tion in global historical trends.
The production of food has always been one of society's most important
purposes, and Elisabet Helsing begins with that historical perspective in
Chapter Six on "Food and Nutrition Trends, East and West," Governments
have always had to be concerned about supplies of food; and in those terms,
as she points out, food policy is nothing new. The idea that governments
should establish national policies based on the latest findings in nutrition sci-
ence is, however, quite new and itself a product of global historical trends.
The results are mixed. Policies, even those favored by United Nations agen-
cies, may be influenced by commercial interests and political considerations
for which public health benefits are at best secondary. Nutrition science it-
self reflects the cultures from which it comes as well as the theories currently
in vogue. Helsing develops these points with courageous independence,
starting with a look at Europe as a whole, contrasting the greater autonomy
of nutrition scientists in the United States from commercial pressures, then
more closely studying differences among the Nordic countries. They offer a
rare instance in which per capita food production has been declining and
where governments, starting with Norway, the first nation to have a nutri-
tion policy, have pioneered in applying nutritional standards. She then turns
to the telling and troubled case of the Soviet Union. Its subsequent breakup
reveals in contemporary crisis how nutrition policies were frozen in the
knowledge and ambitions of the 1930s, to be maintained for food as for in-
dustrial organization or the arts within the amber rigidity of Soviet bureau-
cracy. In all these instances, the results in terms of what people eat and the
state of their health demonstrate the importance of public policies but also
the degree to which these policies in turn reflect global influences on politics,
economics, and science itself.
In Chapter Seven Delia McMillan and Thomas Reardon address classic is-
sues of development and international economic aid as it affects "food Pol-
icy Research in a Global Context: the West African Sahel." The impact of
global trends stand out starkly in a region where even the harsh constraints
of poverty and aridity do not lessen the variety of factors—economic, social,
and cultural—involved in changing the production of food. Keenly aware of
this complexity, McMillan and Reardon ponder the efficacy of research itself
in bringing about desirable change. Policies stimulated by international agen-
cies and external ideologies are inevitably transformed as they function
within specific societies. Cultures and social structures remain tightly tied to
a distinctive environment, and local leaders have their own sets of ideologies
and ambitions. The path from international research and experts* recommen-
dations to the creation of local jobs and higher living standards is not direct.
For all that, McMillan and Reardon sustain a sense of calling that leaves them
optimistic about the value of research. Research, they conclude, can, by ac-
knowledging its practical limitations, contribute to the more efficient pro-
duction and better distribution of food in difficult and undeveloped regions,
even as global patterns of aid, trade, and urbanization sweep over them.
18 RAYMOND GREW
Issues of nutrition, development, and global processes come together dif-

ferently and with particular clarity in Chapter Eight, by Noel Solomon, on
"Childhood Nutrition in Developing Countries and Its Policy Conse-
quences." Focusing sharply on the special, and morally compelling, issues of
child nutrition, especially in the Caribbean, he expands on the impact of im-
perialism and such international agencies as the World Bank and the World
Health Organization that was mentioned in the preceding two chapters. He
measures development in terms of the peoples newly affected by it and
warns against Eurocentrism and the adoption of North American standards
for the normal height and weight of children. He views the shifting equilib-
ria established within local ecologies in response to global pressures as a cul-
tural achievement; and, while recognizing the opportunities (including bet-
ter health) that arise from global change, he never forgets that the knowledge
of Western science is limited and its dogmas usually impermanent. The very
training given experts in nutrition is, he notes, a reflection of global pres-
sures. Applying the latest findings of nutrition science, nevertheless,
Solomon lays out the multiple elements essential to childhood diet and of-
fers alternative assessments of what balanced diets mean and how they can
be achieved. That opens a prospect that, he shows, is relevant to many re-
gions of South America, Africa, and Asia—and an open-ended perspective
on global history, past and future.
Global Systems and Human Diet

The essays so far, on the global processes affecting the production and avail-
ability of food and on public policies reflecting preferences for some foods
over others, have all mentioned some changes in what people actually eat.
That is brought to the fore in the next three chapters, all of which address the
question of why there are global patterns of dietary change and their rela-
tionship to health.
Here, too, the conceptual challenge lies in the complexity of multiple in-
terconnections that give food a place in global history. Jeffrey Sobal directly
addresses that complexity in Chapter Nine. "Food System Globalization,
Eating Transformations, and Nutrition Transitions," provides an ambitious
overarching schema for comprehending global patterns in dietary change.
The familiar evolution from hunting and gathering to settled agriculture to
industrial society and to global exchange is analyzed as a series of intersect-
ing systems. Food and nutrition in a given society also constitute a system,
composed of subsystems of producers, consumers, and nutritional results.
The foods any group consumes corne primarily from surrounding regions,
called foodsheds, but these have expanded as cheaper, faster transport and
new techniques of preservation draw food stuffs from ever larger areas and
eventually the entire world. This process, Sobal declares, has created major
historical changes, which he labels eating transformations, nutrition transi-
tions, and health outcomes. Concentrating on the period since industrializa-

tion, he notes the role of taste (closely analyzed in the next chapter) and
restaurants (the subject of Chapter Four) and assesses the impact on health
(continuing the discussion in Chapters Six and Eight). This schema, which
reviews economic, political, and cultural approaches to globalization, pulls
together much that has gone before (in a view more optimistic than Fried-
mann's in Chapter One) and points to much that follows in the subsequent
chapters.
Adam Drewnowski is concerned with a specific but fundamental, histori-
cal change in "Fat and Sugar in the Global Diet: Dietary Diversity in the
Nutrition Transition." Chapter Nine considers one of the most talked-about
issues of diet and health, the (dangerously excessive) consumption of sugar
and fat. As he makes clear, the subject, mentioned in several other chapters as
well, is not merely controversial but ideologically sensitive, the product of
differing definitions of good health and of differing attitudes toward modern
change. Using the concept of transition, adapted from demography, he treats
dietary change as a general transition from one pattern of consumption to
another. That transition, he argues, is a cross-cultural one, the result of an in-
herent and healthy human preference for variety. Moving from the familiar
North American experience, he uses empirical evidence to expose a similar
pattern in Asia, with evidence from China and Japan (the subject of Chapter
Fourteen). Drewnowski thereby makes the case that the taste for sugar and
fat is universal in human beings, that consumption of them both has indeed
tended to increase over time, that this pattern of increase is remarkably tran-
scultural (however much its fame in the United States may be related to cul-
tural traditions of meat and potatoes), and that this universal, historical ten-
dency to consume more sugar and fat can be correlated "with increased
wealth—a stunningly clear and global, historical pattern.35 The disagree-
ment, then, is about values, about whether this transition is good or harmful,
as many international agencies (and as the many Americans discussed in
Chapter Fourteen) assume.
The relationship between global systems and the choice of food made re-
cent headlines around the world with reports of a mysterious and catastrophic
disease; and in Chapter Eleven on "The 'Mad Cow* Crisis; A Global Perspec-
tive," Claude Fischler lucidly exposes its relationship to industrial production
(the availabilty and use of bone meal in feed), to the scientific analysis of the
causes of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy and its transmissibility, and to
the role of governments in the regulation of food production and public
health measures. As news reports circled the globe, the disease created a
world-wide scare, with dramatic effects on international markets and the sale
of meat. Within this impressively global context, each society responded
somewhat differently and in ways that reflected its own traditions of eating,
public health, and general suspiciousness; and Fischler notes in particular the
contrast between attitudes in northern and Mediterranean Europe. Prejudices
20 RAYMOND GREW
(toward other nationalities, modern science, or urban life) and ideologies

(about the dangers of free markets, the industrial production of food, and
the eating of meat—a subject of taboos from prehistory to the present)—
came into play. These reactions, not always closely tied to real risks, exem-
plify another aspect of global connections, one that echoes through the
history of public health regulations. Similar outbreaks of concern can be
expected in the future, too, as new techniques such as the genetic alteration
of plants, themselves products of international efforts, can be expected
to spread rapidly and to provoke greater contentiousness, mobilizing sci-
entists, interest groups, and health experts to do battle in ideological con-
flicts often inflamed by exaggerated claims, misplaced certitude, and ancient
fears.
Eating Together Globally

Of all food's connections to human society, none is more interesting than its
ties to culture. As symbol, center of ritual, and marker of cultural bound-
aries, it is universally understood to be an expression of identity and the rep-
resentation of a social group. The food that matters is shared commensally,
within the family or at a public feast;36 and the foods employed in these daily
and seasonal rituals evoke family ties, Denmark community, and seem to
embody culture in some immemorial way. Yet the foods served, the cere-
monies that go 'with them, and the meanings constructed around them do
change nevertheless and for all the reasons discussed in previous chapters.
What people eat, under what circumstances, and what they believe about
these actions is important to this volume because global and local meet at the
table.
The family is the great instrument for the construction of these complex
meanings, even when it does not invent them. Alex Mclntosh considers food
and the changing roles of the family in Chapter Twelve, "The Family Meal
and Its Significance in Global Times." The change is important and needs
emphasis because of the constantly restated myths about the strength of the
family in the past. As Mclntosh points out, self-conscious emphasis on the
family is in itself a relatively modern phenomenon. He thus wants to con-
centrate on recent history, and he accepts that ours is already a global era. He
finds, however, that scholarship on family eating is surprisingly limited and
that he must construct a framework for placing the family meal in global his-
tory. Reviewing the vast literature on the family, Mclntosh notes the variety
of functions the family meal serves or is thought to serve, and he considers
some of the ways these functions are expressed through gender roles or
parental discipline or seating arrangements. The question that follows —
what have been the effects, on the family and on society, of the changes in
eating patterns that we associate with recent global history?—deserves the
attention from scholars that it receives in popular discourse. Assertions

about the impact on family life of packaged food and fast foods, nearly al-
ways alleged to be deleterious, are commonplaces of late-twentieth-century
commentary. On subjects as sensitive as food and family, the fears of global
changes are clearer than the changes themselves.
In fact, of course, the global and the local construct each other, creating
something new, as Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney emphasizes in "We Eat Each
Other's Food to Nourish our Body: The Global and the Local as Mutually
Constituent Forces," Chapter Thirteen. After comparing anthropological
and historical approaches to global history, she traces Japan's response over
the centuries to three different sets of food practices. All of them—eating
rice, meat, and American fast foods—were imported; yet as symbols and
metaphors, these food practices express intensely felt conceptions of iden-
tity, modernity, and the Other. External influences have been absorbed,
changing society by becoming critical constituents of it. Art, poetry, rituals,
proclamations, and popular culture have reinforced the association of rice
with the land and an ancient past, of meat with modernity, and fast food with
a new generation in a global culture. Even so, something of older beliefs and
taboos has mingled with new practices. Ohnuki-Tierney's examples have the
richness of anthropological fieldwork; by placing them in the context of a
broader literature, she makes her study of Japan a statement about global
processes more generally.
The final chapter, "Food and the Counterculture: A Story of Bread and
Politics," treats the current history of one country, the United States; yet
Warren Belasco's lively study is also an essay on, and example of, truly
global thinking. It explains the intellectual and cultural origins of a move-
ment that constructed a countercultural conception of globalization. Using
the twentieth-century's increased knowledge of other cultures, the world
economy, nutritional needs, the agricultural and biological sciences, and is-
sues of identity—the very kinds of knowledge that ted to assertions that
mass-produced food, globally distributed were an inevitable necessity—this
movement created an alternative vision. While maintaining much of the
apocalyptic tone of those it opposes, that movement has, as Belasco shows,
deeply American roots. In turn, it has found notable resonance in much of
the rest of the developed world, as so much of American culture has. The call
for radical change comes not simply as a reaction to global forces but from,
the sense of liberation that can come from awareness of them. An account of
ecological and global connections that stimulate a countercultural movement
centered on food and then facilitates new marketing strategies by interna-
tional corporations, Belasco's chapter about the choices of some young, mid-
dle-class Americans is also about global history on many levels. Written with
the wit and insight of a sympathetic participant, it relates to all the other
chapters m this book.
22 RAYMOND GREW
iv
The Results
This project on food in global history did not require, it is worth noting, that
everyone agree or that all issues be resolved. Global history does not imply a
particular methodology or ideology. Globalization remains an imprecise
term, its sources, direction, antiquity, and inevitability all subject to dispute.
Nevertheless, these authors, experts looking anew at topics they know well,
found it useful to relate their analyses to global historical processes. Nor
does global history require massive coverage of all human experience but
only the establishment of global frameworks within which to set the histori-
cal problem to be analyzed. Such frameworks then help determine the theo-
ries and data relevant to the problem's solution. The study of food encour-
ages construction of such frameworks both because there is so much
information on which to build and because histories of food touch on so
many aspects of social life.
Connecting food to social life while placing that relationship in a global
context encourages the use of evidence and methods often kept apart by the
habits of academic disciplines. As many of these chapters indicate, the fact
that with regard to food some similar issues arise in all societies facilitates
unusual comparisons between distant societies and stimulates more system-
atic comparisons of societies known to be connected. Recognizing foodways
as part of large-scale patterns of historical change makes it possible to relate
the food practices of one place at one moment to theories about global
change.
There are hints in these essays that food itself be made the basis for a peri-
od ization of human history, and some of these chapters show to good effect
how that might be done. Assessing contemporary change in light of histori-
cal turning points can be salutary, and historical understanding is deepened
with recognition of food's importance in the history of civilization. Food
was a central factor in the transition of hunters and gatherers to settled agri-
culture, irrigation, and the domestication of animals; in evolution of new
systems of land holding and increased division of labor; in the development
and diffusion of agricultural technology; and in the rise of commerce around
the world. In such an outline, European settlement of the New World stands
out for the wealth of new foods carried to Europe and Asia as well as for the
building of empires. A periodization based on foodways 'would stress the
massive migrations that came later and then, especially in the last one hun-
dred years, the improved means of transporting and preserving foods. Such
penodizations, which can be worked out in greater detail for single societies
or particular foods, are helpful in relating foodways to political and cultural
change. Like all efforts to place food in a global, historical context, they usu-
ally are more valuable when they lead to fresh thinking about the nature of
historical processes than when they attach data on food to conventional con-
ceptions of change or, in laying claim to historical significance, treat food as

an independent cause of long-term change. (Whole civilizations can also be
categorized in terms of the foods that are their dietary staples, emphasizing
the ties to social structure and culture built around wheat, rice, or potatoes.
Such efforts, however, tend to be more interesting than explanatory and in
fact to rely on conventional historical frameworks),
In many of these chapters, a global historical framework leads to the iden-
tification of problems needing fresh analysis, exposing, for example,
parochial assumptions that had flourished unchallenged and sometimes un-
noticed. This is most evident in accounts of public policy but applies else-
where as well. By moving beyond the nation, which provides the framework
of most historical writing, national and regional practices that seemed simply
natural or necessary are often shown to need fuller explanation. In the same
way, extending analysis through time exposes hidden assumptions common
to contemporary thinking (including many within the social sciences and
global history itself). Global history can similarly help overcome the habits
of Eurocentricism, although that benefit is by no means automatic.
The history of food invites some generalizations about global history
more generally. The rules of material necessity do apply to the production of
food and the need for nutrition. There are limits to the possible. Material
conditions, which both inhibit and stimulate change, circumscribe history
but do not determine it. As these chapters illustrate, rarely do such con-
straints explain more than the most basic elements of a society's eating pat-
terns. Foods and cuisines—like technologies, ideas, and fashions—spread
beyond the circumstances of their creation to other environments, altering
the receiving societies in the process even as they themselves are trans-
formed. Cuisine is never fixed. The meanings of food derive from the way
eating intersects with community, and expressions of those meanings matter;
for cultures are real, but cultural boundaries are shifting, social creations.
Food is a useful marker of difference and cultural purity would be an impov-
erishment. When the study of food reveals more clearly the interdependence
of ecology, property, social structure, international trade, scientific knowl-
edge, public policy, taste, custom, belief, and life style and when that study
shows how those interconnections reach around the world, then the history
of food has revealed ligatures of global history.
Not surprisingly, historical interest in food turns out to have extraordinary
relevance to our own times, illuminating issues of development, international
cooperation, multinational corporations, public policy, human health, and
social identity, while revealing the tensions between tradition and change
within specific cultures. These intense contemporary concerns should open
up new avenues of historical research that will in turn affect our understand-
ing of the present. Notably, these issues fall within five areas in which global
historical scholarship, empirical and theoretical, is particularly strong: the
global restructuring of cultures as the result of mass communications,
24 RAYMOND GREW
increased leisure, and salient issues of identity; the global networks of pro-
duction that depend on and locally demand particular structures of land
holding, labor relations, and systems of production; the global role of state
policies in shaping international connections through empire, international
agencies, trade policies, tariffs, and regulations that favor certain interests in
the name of public welfare or national need; the global systems of distribu-
tion that foster global fashions and patterns of consumption; and the global
environmental constraints that become more pressing as technology mines
resources around the globe. The chapters in this volume touch on all these
areas, indicating both the fruitfulness of current scholarship on global his-
tory and the contribution to that history that can come from the study of
food.
Some conclusions do emerge. Historically, food has tended to become
more available, its distribution increasingly a matter of market rationality,
and its consumption increasingly self-conscious and codified. Its availability
has increased in a double sense. Despite ever-growing populations, a greater
quantity of food is accessible to a larger proportion of human beings; and in
nearly every market, there is an ever-greater choice of foods. But these chap-
ters point to other trends as well. The variety of local species may be dimin-
ished, with important ecological, evolutionary, and social losses, Capitalist
distribution makes access to specific foods primarily a matter of means, thin-
ning some of its cultural symbolism. Food becomes a product, produced and
even redesigned for markets that advertising has helped create. At the same
time, the ethnic and regional identity of food has become increasingly codi-
fied, less a matter of local custom or of the foods available at a given moment
than of a representation collectively agreed upon: a cuisine defined in a cer-
tain way, served in restaurants with a certain decor, usually at set hours to fit
urban needs at predictable prices and to the expected customers.
Several chapters deal with the remarkable spread of cuisines that were
once identified with a single country. The result of migration, touring, mar-
keting, and wealth, this dissemination of cuisines does not strike our authors
as the homogenization so many fear. It may be that the foods consumed with
minimal ritual in their homelands (or at least, like tea, easily stripped for ex-
port of the rituals that sustained them at home)—hamburger, french fries,
pizza, hot dogs—are the ones that travel best. In any case much of the fear
about the globalization of eating habits and taste seems misplaced. Food cul-
tures have always intermixed and overflowed political or cultural bound-
aries, and their symbolic importance makes it easy to exaggerate their cul-
tural effect. Sushi bars on every continent do not replace other cuisines; and
if McDonald's hamburgers have found a niche on the Champs Elysees and in
Tokyo and Istanbul, their impact on national eating habits has been rather
less revolutionary than many feared.37
These chapters also help to correct the presumptions of determinism, dri-
ven by technology and markets, that many discussions of global history in-
vite. The contributors here do not find the global and the local to be in mor-
tal combat but see their intersection as part of a continuing process of cre-
ativity. They identify the distinctiveness of our era in the range and pace of
change but consider any dichotomy between homogeneity and heterogene-
ity more false than helpful. Cultures, it is clear, give very unreliable testi-
mony as to which behaviors are new or old; and societies are deceptive about
the distinctions between the foreign and the indigenous. Several authors
show that much considered to be timeless (styles of regional cooking, for ex-
ample) often has quite recent origins and that much heralded as new (such as
the transcontinental spread of foods, pushed by economic interests and
pulled by fashion) often has many precedents.
These studies of food in global history demonstrate anew the humbling
relevance of the past, connect society to ecology and time, reveal the persis-
tent power of human choice, employ knowledge of nutrition and evidence
from history to challenge received opinions in both areas, provide critical as-
sessments of public policies affecting food and health, and explore the con-
tinuing concern for cultural identity while revealing some of the con-
trivances from which identities are constructed. The history of food invites a
tolerant relativism by underscoring how much of culture consists of taste
and mores combining necessity with convention. Although omnivorous and
adaptable, human beings choose to erect taboos and prejudices against cer-
tain foods; and the tension between preference for the familiar foods of
home and attraction to the luxury of imported variety adds its energy to the
process of change. Because something so simple as food is so thoroughly
woven into the fabric of social life, foodways provide a remarkable instru-
ment for tracking critical patterns in global history.
Notes
1. Emile Zola's novel, Le Ventre de Paris, about the markets of Les Halles is a clas-
sic elaboration of these themes.
2. The Cambridge History and Culture of Food and Nutrition, Kenneth F, Kiple
and Kriemhild Conee Onelas, eds. (New York: Cambridge University Press, forth-
coming) will be a major reference. Among the important and reflective works on the
meanings of food; P. Caplan, Feasts, Fasts, Famine: Food for Thought (Providence:
Berg, 1994); Food: Multidisdplinary Perspectives, Barbara Harris-White and Ray-
mond Hoffenberg, eds. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1994); Peter Frab and George
Armelagos, Consuming Passions: The Anthropology of Eating (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1980); Jack Goody, Cooking, Cuisine, and Class: A Study in Comparative
Sociology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982); The Sociology of Food and
Eating, Stephen Mennell, Anne Murcott, and Anneke H. Van Otterloo, eds. (Beverly
Hills: Sage Publications, 1993).
3. That fact alone can provide a broad framework for global history: Charles B.
Heiser, Jr., Seed to Civilization: The Story of Food (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1990); Otto T. Solbrig and Dorothy J. Solbrig, So Shall You Reap: Farming and
26 RAYMOND G R E W
Crops in Hitman Affairs(Washington, D.C.: Inland Press, 1997);Agriculture, Re-

source Exploitation, and Environmental Change, Helen Wheatley, ed. (Brookfield,
Vt: Ashgate, 1997).
4. These points are developed in William Alex Mclntosh, Sociologies of Food and
Nutrition (New York: Plenum, 1996).
5. Histoire de ['Alimentation, Jean-Louis Flandrin and Massimo Montanari, eds.
(Paris: Fayard, 1996}, 13. Studies of food have particular resonance in the historiogra-
phy of ancient and medieval Europe: L'Alimentaziane nel mondo antico, Gabriele
Barbieri, ed., 4 vols, (Rome: Istituto poligrafico, 1987); Rudolph M. Bell, Holy
Anorexia (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1985); Caroline Walker Bynum, "Fast,
Feast, and Flesh: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women,1" Represen-
tations (Summer 1985) and Holy Fea.it and Holy Fast (Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 1987); M.P. Cosman, Fabulous Feasts: Medieval Cookery and Ceremony
(New York: Braziller, 1976); Gillian Feeley-Harnik, The Lord's Table: The Meaning
of Food in Early Judaism and Christianity (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institu-
tion Press, 1994); Peter Garnsey, Famine and Food Supply in the Graeco-Roman
World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Bernard Rudofsky, Now I
Lay Me Down to Eat (Garden City: Doubleday, 1980); F.J. Simoons, Eat Not this
Flesh: Food Avoidances in the Old World (Westport, Ct: Greenwood Press, 1981) and
Eat Not This Flesh: Food Avoidances from Prehistory to the Present (Madison: Uni-
versity of Wisconsin Press, 1994).
6. The list is endless, but in addition to works already mentioned, the following are
particularly notable: C. Anne Wilson, Food and Drink in Britain from the Stone Age
to the Present (London: Constable, 1973); K.C. Chang, Food in Chinese Culture
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977); Arjyn Appadurai, "How to Make a Na-
tional Cuisine: Cookbooks in Contemporary India," Comparative Studies in Society
and History, 30:1 (January, 1988); European Food History: A Research Review, Hans
J. Teuteberg, ed. (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1992); Storia d'ttalia: Alimen-
tazione (Turin: Einaudi, 1997); Paolo Sorcinelli, Gli italiani e il cibo (Bologna:
CLUEB, 1995); E. Ohnuki-Tierney, Rice as Self: Japanese Identities Through Time
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Dining in America, Kathryn Grover,
ed. (University of Massachusetts Press, 1987); Harvey Levenstein, Paradox of Plenty:
A Social History of Plating in Modern America (New York: Oxford University Press,
1993} and Revolution at the Table; The Transformation of the American Diet (Ox-
ford University Press, 1988).
7. The work of Mary Douglas has been particularly influential, see her "Decipher-
ing a Meal," in Myth, Symbol, and Culture, Clifford Geertz, ed. (New York: Norton,
1971). Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modem History
(New York: Viking, 1982), 185.
8. Flandrin and Montanari, Histoire de I'Alimentation, 8-10,
9. As an example; Sabry Hafez, "Food as a Semiotic Code in Arabic Literature,"
Zubaida and Tapper, eds., Culinary Cultures of the Middle East, 257-80; the use of
food by individual artists can be revealing, too, as in Maggie Lane,/«»e Austen and
Food (London: Hambledon Press, 1995).
10. In France, for example, the most noted regional dishes are often based on foods
that only arrived from the New World in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Jean-
Louis Flandrin and Philip Hyman, "Regional Tastes and Cuisines; Problems, Docu-
ments, and Discourses on Food in Southern France in the 16th and 17th Centuries,"
Food and Foodways: Explorations in the History and Culture oj Human Nourishment
(June, 1986), 1-31. Similarly, the case for an Italian cuisine was made during the
Risorgimento in Artusi's famous cookbook, which borrowed from French models.
11. The multiple connections of food and migration are apparent in another vol-
ume in this series: Global History and Migrations, Wang Gungwu, ed. (Boulder:
Westview Press, 1997).
12. For an unexpected example, see lanthe Maclagan, "Food and Gender in a
Yemeni Community," in Culinary Cultures of the Middle East, Sami Zubaida and
Richard Tapper, eds. (London: T.B. Tauris Publishers, 1994), 159-72. The topic has a
remarkable range and important theoretical implications: C. Adams, The Sexual Pol-
itics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (Cambridge: Polity, 1990); M.
Buitelaar, Fasting and Feasting in Morocco; Women's Participation in Ramadan (Ox-
ford: Berg, 1993); J. Dubisch, "Culture Enters Through the Kitchen: Women, Food,
and Social Boundaries in Rural Greece," in Gender and Power in Rural Greece, G.
Dubisch, ed, (Princeton: Princeton, 1986); J. Kaplan, A Woman's Conflict: The Spe-
cial Relationship Between Women and Food (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1980);
Anna S. Meigs, Food, Sex and Pollution: A New Guinea Religion (New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press, 1984).
13. Sidney W. Mintz, Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996)
is a notable example.
14. Bruce Mazlish, Wolf Schafer, and I have sustained an ongoing debate on this
subject for some time. Initial positions can be found in our chapters in Conceptualiz-
ing Global History, Bruce Mazlish and Ralph Buultjens, eds. (Boulder, Colo.: West-
view Press, 1933), Schafer's sense of global history is more fully developed in his
book, Ungleichzeitigkeit als Ideologic (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag,
1994). Some of the available theories and ideological differences are discussed in the
1995 special issue of History and Theory.
15. Arjue Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Reading the Shape of the Mod-
ern World, Henry Schwartz and Richard Dienst, eds. (Boulder: Westview Press,
1996); Robert K. Schaeffer, Understanding Globalization: The Social Consequences
of Political and Economic Change (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997);
Peter Taylor, The Way the Modern World Works: World Hegemony to World Impasse
(New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1996).
16. Reay Tannahill, Food in History (New York: Stein and Day, 1973) treats indi-
vidual companies.
17. The most influential example is Immanuel Wallerstein's conception of a world
system, The Modern World-System, vols. 1-111 (New York: Academic Press, Inc.,
1974—89). There are many others on systems of economic connection or world
power, often emphasizing the ascendency of Europe.
18. Victor Liberman achieves this in "Transcending East-West Dichotomies: State
and Culture Formation in Six Ostensibly Disparate Areas," Modern Asian Studies,
31 (1997), 463-546. He compares the internal development in the early modern pe-
riod of selected Asian and European countries, and the parallels he finds are all the
more suggestive because they do not start from the search for a connection between
the cases (a preoccupation of global history).
28 RAYMOND GREW
19. William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (Garden City, N.J.: 1977).
20. Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Conse-
quences oj 1491 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1972); Jack Weatherford, Indian
Givers: How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World (New York: Faw-
cett Columbine, 1988).
21. A good introduction is Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization, and
Modernity, M. Featherstone, ed. (London: Sage, 1990).
22. The subtleties of Jewish adaptations are particularly interesting: Judith Fried-
lander, "Jewish Cooking in the American Melting Pot," Revue franfaise d'etudes
atnericaines, 11 (February, 1986), 87-98; Joelle Bahloui, Le cnlte de la table dresses:
Rites et traditions de la table nlgerienne (Paris: A.-M. Metallic, 1983); Claudia Roden,
"Jewish Food in the Middle East," Zubaida and Tapper, eds., Culinary Cultures of
the Middle East, 153-58,
23. Redcliffe Salaman, The History and Social Influence of the Potato (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1949, 1985). See also S.A.M. Adshead, Salt and Civi-
lization (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992); Kaj Birket-Smith, Origin of Maize
(Copenhagen: E. Munksgaard, 1943); Spices in the Indian Ocean World, M.N. Pear-
son, ed. (Brookfield, Vt.: Ashgate, 1997); H. Garrison Wilkes, "Maize and Its Wild
Relatives," Science, 177 (September 1972), 22.
24. Maguelonne Touissant-Samat, History of Food (Cambridge: Blackwell Pub-
lishers, 1992).
25. Mintz, Sweetness and Power, 6.
26. For a valuable recapitulation of this research, see Ester Boserup, "The Impact
of Scarcity and Plenty on Development,** Hunger and History: The Impact of
Changing Food Production and Consumption Patterns on Society, Robert I. Rotberg
and Theodore K. Rabb, eds. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 185-93.
Also see Gigi M. Berardi, World Food, Population, and Development. (Totowa, N.J.:
Roman and Allanheld, 1985); Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of
Human Societies (New York: W.W, Norton, 1997); Philip D. Curtin, "Nutrition in
African History," ibid., 172-84, shows how African history can be understood in
light of these issues.
27. On the contemporary issues: A 20/20 Vision for Food, Agriculture, and the En-
vironment (Washington, D.C.: International Food Policy Research Institute, 1995);
Phillips Foster, The World Food Problem: Tackling the Causes of Undernutrition in
the Third World (Boulder: Lynee Rienner Publishers, 1992); David Grigg, The World
Food Problem (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1993); Susan George, III Fares the
Land: Essays on Food, Hunger, and Power (Washington: Institute for Policy Studies,
1984); Population and Food in the Early Twenty-first Century: Meeting Future Food
Demand of an Increasing Population, Nurul Islam, ed. (Washington, D.C.: World
Bank, 1995); World Hunger And Morality, William Aiken and Hugh LaFollette, eds,
(New York: Prentice Hall, 1996).
28. David Arnold, Famine: Social Crises and Historical Change (Oxford: Black-
well Publishers, 1988); David W. Fogel, "The Conquest of High Mortality and
Hunger in Europe and America: Timing and Mechanisms," in Favorites of Fortune:
Technology, Growth, and Economic Development, Patrice Higonnet, David S, Lan-
des, and Henry Rosovsky, eds. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 38—39;
Susan George, How the Other Half Dies; The Real Reasons for World Hunger (Har-
moridsworth, EngI: Penguin Books, 1976), and see Amartya Sen,"Nobody Need
Starve," Granta, 52 (Winter, 1995), 213-20, for a provocative assessment of interna-
tional economic and political practices today.
29. The classic of the rich anthropological literature is, of course, Claude Levi-
Strauss, The RAW And the Cooked (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), but the fol-
lowing can suggest some of the range of the work done since: M. Arnott, Gastron-
omy: The Anthropology oj Food and Food Habits (The Hague: Mouton, 1975); Peter
Farb and George Armelagos, Consuming Passions: The Anthropology of Eating
(New York: Washington Square Press, 1980); Marvin Harris, The Sacred Cow and
the Abominable Pig: Riddles of Food and Culture (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1986); C. Hugh-Jones, "Food for Thought: Patterns of Production and Consump-
tion in Pira-Parana Society," in J.S. La Fontaine, ed., Sex and Age its Principles oj So-
cial Differentiation (Academic Press, 1978), 41-66,
30. Two interesting examples appeared in Comparative Civilizations Review, 5
(Fall, 1980): Lowell Edmunds, "Ancient Roman and Modern American Food: A
Comparative Sketch of Two Semiological Systems," 52-69, and William E. Naff,
"Some Reflections on the Food Habits of China, Japan, and Rural America," 70-95.
But see also R.S. Khare, The Eternal Food: Gastronomic Ideas and Experiences of
Hindus and Buddhists (Albany: University of New York Press, 1992); South Asian
Food Systems: Food, Society, and Culture, R.S. Khare and M.S.A. Rao, eds. (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1977) and Stephen Mennell, All Manners of Food: Eat-
ing and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present (Oxford:
Blackwell Publishers, 1985).
31. Marcel Mazoyer and Laurence Roudart, Histoire des Agricultures du Monde:
du Neoiitbujite a, l& cnse contetnporaine (Paris: Seuil, 1998).
32. See Getel H. Pelto and Pertiti J. Pelto, "Diet and Delocalization: Dietary
Changes since 1750," in Rotberg and Rabb, Hunger and History, 309-30.
33. Discussed in The Age oj Transition: Trajectory of the World System, 1945-2025,
Terence K. Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein, eds. (London: Zed Books, 1996) by
Sheila Pelizzon and John Casparis, "World Human Welfare," 126-32, 143-45; and
Immanuel Wallerstein, "The Global Picture," 209-225.
34. For a comparable response to global changes affecting a local society, see
Marie-Claud Mathias, "Milk and Its Transformations in Indian Society," Food and
Food-ways, 2 (1988), 265-88.
35. There is, of course, a whole literature on the development of taste, see Taste,
Experience, and Feeding, Elizabeth D. Capaldi and Terry L. Powley, eds. (Washing-
ton, D.C.: American Psychological Association, 1990); Hans Deutsch-Renner, The
Origin of Food Habits (London: Faber and Faber, 1944).
36. Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power (New York: The Viking Press, 1962) speaks
of feasts, crowds and the special importance of abundance, 62-63.
37. Holly Chase, "The Meyhane or McDonald's? Changes in Eating Habits and
Evolution of Fast Food in Istanbul," Zubaida and Tapper, eds., Culinary Cultures of
the Middle East, 73-85.

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Chapter One

Food and Global History

The history of food is a fashionable topic, and so is global history. Although

The Interest in Globalization

merce and environmental disaster. An ungainly term, globalization often

to be a sybtopic of larger topics: a kind of product, a form of production, the

other. William McNeill's study of the global diffusion of plagues is an out-

Constructing Histories of Food

address important historical problems. Identifying those to be considered is

The Processes of Global History

exchange (the subject of Chapter Three), the global expansion of European

Public Policy and Global Science

Issues of nutrition, development, and global processes come together dif-

Global Systems and Human Diet

tions, and health outcomes. Concentrating on the period since industrializa-

(toward other nationalities, modern science, or urban life) and ideologies

Eating Together Globally

attention from scholars that it receives in popular discourse. Assertions

ceptions of change or, in laying claim to historical significance, treat food as

Crops in Hitman Affairs(Washington, D.C.: Inland Press, 1997);Agriculture, Re-

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