Eating Histories

Experience dictates that I would be wise to begin this review by stating the obvious: food is important. In fact, historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto has argued, “Food has a claim to be considered the world's most important subject. It is what matters most to most people for most of the time.”¹ It is, after all, the substance that fuels human history on the most fundamental level. However, the quotidian nature of the struggle for subsistence means that the central issue of food is often taken for granted and thus ignored. Historians who set out to rectify this collective oblivion should be prepared for the possibility that they may be met with bemused or incredulous responses from colleagues who, implicitly or otherwise, accuse them of forsaking serious scholarly work for research on a topic that some deem lacking in sufficient gravitas. (The temptation to conflate the pleasurable practice of eating with research on the subject is seemingly hard to resist.) The more self-important among us may also fear that there are insidious ramifications of the fact that the field of food studies has the potential of reaching broad, less rarified audiences. In 1999, anthropologist Sidney W. Mintz, whose Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (1985), was a progenitor to an entire generation of scholarship, described food studies as “a disdained and patronized subject.”² However, evidence suggests that change may be afoot. Nearly twenty-five years later, historian Jeffrey M. Pilcher, another foundational figure in the food studies movement, felt ready to proclaim: “The study of food, long derided as an amateur's avocation, has finally won professional respectability based on a generation of high-quality scholarship.”³

Looking at course offerings and publishers’ catalogs, there is ample evidence to support Pilcher's claim about the ascendency of the field. At universities throughout the world, more people are teaching and studying food than ever before. Furthermore, as anyone working in the area can tell you, skilled academic food writers are becoming the darling of the beleaguered publishing world. Books on the subject sell, and the audience for these works transcends disciplinary boundaries as well as the confines of the academy. However, it is worth noting that the gatekeepers Mintz identified have yet to lose all vestiges of their former power. Anecdotal evidence abounds suggesting that rising food historians still find themselves on the defensive, scrambling to justify their work to dubious advisors, manuscript referees, and employers. A common means for deflecting criticism has been to frame food studies as a means of gathering insights into other topics such as race, labor, technology, and gender, and not as an end but as something important in and of itself. This distinction is significant. One approach uses foodways research merely to provide answers; the other begins with this most basic of all human behaviors as a starting point for asking questions.

In his extensively researched Eating Puerto Rico: A History of Food, Culture, and Identity, Cruz Miguel Ortíz Cuadra begins at the dinner table. In fact, he pointedly disassociates his study from work “in which food, cooking, and eating ceased to be the object of study and instead became simply a means to investigating other issues and concerns” (p. 11). Ortíz treats his subject with respect and analytic rigor, and he does not make apologies. Instead he purposefully identifies several ingredients commonly associated with Puerto Rican cooking—rice, beans, cornmeal, codfish, viandas (an assortment of indigenous fruits and root vegetables), and meat—and sets out to discover the historical processes through which these foods became emblematic of a national cuisine. His approach, like all the best food-studies scholarship, is interdisciplinary. He draws indiscriminately...