Profusion et Pénurie: Les Hommes Face à Leurs Besoins Alimentaires (review)

This slim volume, the product of a 2008 one-day conference in Poitiers, brings together the findings of historians, archeologists, and sociologists, all working on topics related to food history. Focusing primarily on the interplay between abundance and scarcity, the seven essays collected here range from prehistory to the present; but, with the exception of one piece on classical Greece and Rome, they concentrate on one area, France. Representing a cross between an analysis of the current state of the field and a call for further research, they are also unified by a concern with the social and cultural dynamics that influenced and resulted from humankind’s constant struggle to meet its dietary needs. As Martin Bruegel indicates in his introduction, this is something of a departure for a field that grew out of quantitative analyses of how societies satisfied their biological requirements. The point of departure for these essays is not nutritional need; it is the individual as the “sum of his social relations,” with the freedom to accept or reject social and cultural norms (p. 22). For his part, for example, Bruegel calls for future work that addresses more seriously the question of taste, work that he argues should be rooted in the abundant folklore studies of the nineteenth century.

Two of the remaining six essays deal with the organization of provisioning. In his essay on the Magdalenians of the prehistoric Paris basin, Olivier Bignon explores the relationship between environment, alimentary needs, and survival strategies to demonstrate the flexibility of the Magdalenians and the importance of both abundance and shortage in their lifestyle and social organization. Preferring horse and reindeer as their chief game, the lifecycles of both animals influenced hunting strategies and patterns of group dispersement, leading to greater cohesion for the collective spring and summer hunts of horses, when small hunting parties would come and go between excursions, and again for the autumnal hunt of reindeer, when the entire group would displace to follow the herd, but less during the winter scattering of their preferred prey, when smaller familial units would decamp from the larger community. Jumping ahead to the 19^th century, Alessandro Stanziani explores the continuing concern with speculation in food products well after industrialization, tracing fears of monopolization to their impacts on the organization of futures markets in the 1880s. Along the way, concern shifted away from the typical early modern anxiety over social unrest to the need to protect small producers from international competition and drastic price fluctuations. Only during the Belle Epoque did attention turn yet again to the defense of consumer interests.

Two other essays take up the cultural dimension of food. Florent Qullier analyzes the impacts of what she terms a “culture of hunger” during the early modern period, the fragment of food history that is perhaps most familiar to social historians thanks to the work of Robert Darnton. Rooted in the constant fear of hunger regardless of the actual availability of food, the culture of hunger gave rise to specific types of foods, like the ubiquitous soups that were a mainstay of peasant meals, and various practices that Quillier associates with the concept of “compensatory spaces”. These could range from Darnton’s well-worked peasant fables to the feasts that accompanied special events like weddings. Quellier even equates the common cottage garden plot with such spaces, where individual choice and variety offset the community’s need to devote most of its efforts to staple crops and the subsequent monotony this occasioned for peasant diets. Sociologist Faustine Régnier investigates a completely different context, one characterized more by plenty than scarcity. Based on a recent survey of 85 individuals, she determines the groups most susceptible to what she identifies as the “torment” of abundance, those who feel torn between well-publicized nutritional standards and other cultural imperatives like taste or childcare standards. Perhaps not surprisingly, she finds social standing, or integration, a key indicator...