Grow Food, Cook Food, Share Food: Perspectives on Eating from the Past and a Preliminary Agenda for the Future

Foreword

viii || foreword The Thomas Hart and Mary Jones Horning Endowment in the Humanities at Oregon State University was established by a bequest from Benjamin Horning (1890–1991) in memory of his parents, Mary Jones and Thomas Hart Horning, members of pioneering families of Benton County and Corvallis, Oregon. Benjamin B. Horning graduated in 1914 from what was then Oregon Agricultural College, and went on to complete a medical degree at Harvard and a degree in public health at the Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Horning’s long professional career included service in public health in Connecticut, work on rural health as a staff member with the American Public Health Association, and a position as medical director for the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, which led to his spending many years in Latin America. Dr. Horning wanted his bequest at Oregon State University to expand education in the humanities and to build a bridge between the humanities and the sciences. Since 1994, the endowment has supported an annual lecture series and individual lectures, conferences, symposia, and colloquia, as well as teaching, research, and program and library collection development. The Horning professorships are housed in the Department of History in the School of History, Philosophy, and Religion. The first Thomas Hart and Mary Jones Horning Professors in the Humanities, Mary Jo Nye and Robert A. Nye, were appointed in 1994. Anita Guerrini and David A. Luft succeeded them in 2008. The Horning Visiting Scholar in the Humanities program was inaugurated in 2006 to allow a distinguished scholar to spend a week in residence at OSU and deliver a series of lectures as well as participate in other activities in and out of the classroom. Visiting Scholars have included Liba | ix ix Taub (Cambridge University), John Beatty (University of British Columbia), and Pamela O. Long (independent scholar). The OSU Press Horning Visiting Scholars Publication Series, under the direction of the Press’s acquisitions editor, Mary Elizabeth Braun, publishes the public lectures delivered by the Horning Visiting Scholar: two volumes in the series have appeared, Liba Taub’s Aetna and the Moon (2008) and Pamela O. Long’s Artisan/Practitioners and the New Science (2011). Other works in the humanities outside the scope of this series that the series editors have found to be relevant to the aims of the Horning Endowment may also be published by the Press in the future. Ken Albala was the Horning Visiting Scholar in November 2011. Dr. Albala, Professor of History at Pacific University in Stockton, California, is a well-known historian of food. His research and scholarship have focused particularly on the Renaissance but have ranged widely to include two recent books written with Rosanna Nafziger on traditional food and household skills, The Lost Art of Real Cooking (2010) and The Lost Arts of Hearth and Home (2012). Other titles among his ten books include Eating Right in the Renaissance (2002); Beans: A History (2007), winner of the 2008 International Association of Culinary Professionals Jane Grigson Award and the Cordon d’Or in Food History/Literature; and most recently Three World Cuisines: Italian, Mexican, Chinese (2012), which won the 2013 Gourmand World Cookbook Award for “Best Foreign Cuisine Book in the World.” Until recently he co-edited the scholarly journal Food, Culture and Society, and he is general editor of the AltaMira Studies in Food and Gastronomy (Rowman & Littlefield). In Grow Food, Cook Food, Share Food, Ken Albala offers, as his subtitle states, “perspectives on eating from the past and a preliminary agenda for the future.” Drawing on his vast knowledge of preindustrial food production and consumption, he offers a concise and personal account of how we might regain some of the lost pleasures of past food practices. As any reader of his Lost Arts x | books or his blog (“Ken Albala’s Food Rant”) knows, Dr. Albala practices what he preaches. He begins his story with his own childhood in what was then rural New Jersey, moving on to see what we can learn from ancient, medieval, and early modern Italian agricultural manuals, each of which offers a different model of agrarian life and its relationship to the city. Just as modern urbanites—that is, most Americans— have lost touch with where our food comes from, so too we have lost touch with how to prepare it. Employing fermentation as displayed in the making of bread, salami, and cheese, Dr. Albala takes us through the process...