Feeding France: New Sciences of Food, 1760–1815 by E.C. Spary (review)

Today the food world is mostly divided among mutually antagonistic camps. On one side are the food scientists and all the various cohorts of the food industry such as agronomists, the flavor and fragrance wizards, marketers and advertisers, etc. Their goal is to invent the next Dorito, even if that might be organic, low fat, gluten free or whatever fad following consumers happen to desire this week. On the other side are the activists, the sustainable agriculture advocates, the just, fair, artisanal, slow food proponents and food studies scholars, all of whom regard the industry and its political power with contempt. A third camp, the chefs and foodies have often sided with the latter as opponents of mass produced convenience and junk food, but have lately warmed up to technology in the kitchen, using toys like sous vide machines, alginates, liquid nitrogen and centrifuges. We might assume these food fights are natural and perennial.

But as Emma Spary’s new study Feeding France reveals is that in the late 18^th and early 19^th century these animosities were not only absent, but it was one and the same people promoting food science, nutritious and even good tasting food. Brillat Savarin might come to mind as indicative of this era with his landmark Physiology of Taste, but the real hero of this book is Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, the champion of potatoes, as well as a handful of like-minded progressive scientists like Cadet de Vaux, who somehow managed not only to embrace research, but public service and lucrative business.

How surprising, too, that the French who invented fine dining were equally devoted to industrial food. Who knew that the critic Grimod de la Reyière, was at one and the same time a founding father of French gastronomy but his panel of experts also tasted and rated all the latest industrial foods? This is a story largely neglected by food historians: how chemists and food magnates, government officials, nutritionists and gastronomes collaborated closely to improve the food supply of France. These figures became public experts in nutrition, offering their services to governments and corporations in ways that seem impossible to us today, while at the same time promoting local, regional and artisanal specialties.

Parmentier, for example, was a brilliant marketer of the potato, not only getting the king to wear a potato flower in his buttonhole to promote the new starchy tuber, but inventing a potato bread which would be the envy of our own gluten free industry. In the process, he examined the nutritive properties of starch with an eye to public good and pure science. That there was an argument over the value of bread in the 18^th century, paralleling current debates, is itself startling. Gluten intolerance wasn’t the problem, but rather the dependence on bread among the lower classes, which many claimed was the cause of their physical debility. This became a political issue during the revolution as savants proposed not only the potato but maize and rice as superior substitutes. Parmentier’s real triumph was creating a space for chemistry in evaluating the nutritive properties of plants, one step on the road toward modern food science.

There are many other fascinating surprises in the book: the enlightenment focus on économie in the older broader sense of the word, applying to household and personal management. Rather than images of gustatory excesses we immediately conjure up, eating frugally and simply became fashionable and experts advised people to cook economically in the interest of public welfare. Equally interesting are the debates over nutrition and the scramble to explain physiology in the years after humoral physiology had been abandoned but before the modern science of protein, carbohydrates and fats. Various chemical and mechanical theories competed for dominance. That people several hundred years ago became concerned with obesity as a medical issue is one among many subjects that parallel our own food anxieties...