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The introduction follows the emergence of food films as an international genre before its success in the U.S, also discussing the concept of genre, and whether we can talk of a food film genre. The section also explores the connection between food film and embodiment, above all in terms of physical reactions of the viewers. It then investigate the increasing relevance of food in cultural and social debates in the US, and well as its growing visibility in the media

This chapter argues that food seems to be a domain in which everybody feels they are an expert, and that ordinary eaters should be responsible for making the right food choices for their own daily consumption. It demonstrates the historical significance of food, including its ephemeral, transient, and perishable qualities. It also explains that the history of food demands attention to the changing relationship between matter, knowledge, and meaning.

The introduction provides an overview of the monograph, introducing key themes such as the complex relationship between post-Famine Ireland and Britain, the development of socially active medical and scientific communities in Ireland and the complex circulation of power relations that impacted on perceptions of Irish consumption and production practices between 1845 and 1922. It maintains that food continued to occupy a problematic position in Ireland for some decades after the Famine, serving as a contentious socio-economic issue that often served as a prism through which to understand Anglo-Irish relations in a period of political and social turbulence. The introduction outlines the theoretical methodologies employed in this monograph and provides a chapter outline.

Food is a contentious topic in the contemporary United States. But our debates surrounding food are hardly new. The chapters in Food Fights constitute a series of debates about food, emphasizing the historical background to our current arguments. All the authors share the assumption that knowing how we got the food and foodways we have today will help us appreciate both the triumphs and failures, strengths and weaknesses of our current food system, and thereby build some common understanding between those who only condemn its problems and those who see only its virtues.

In the late nineteenth-century, steps were taken to tackle food adulteration in Ireland as the concept of purity to be upheld as a new safety standard. This activity coincided with the post-Famine evolution of a consumerist culture. This chapter demonstrates that the advance of consumerism in Ireland was met with new forms of scientific engagement with consumers and producers that encouraged food quality to be considered in new ways. From the 1860s, public health officials made concerted efforts to delineate the boundaries between purity and impurity and to impose relevant legal standards. The war on impure food was fought on various fronts ranging from cattle raising to butchering and dairy production. Resistance played out on two interconnected levels. Producers contested the need for scientific standards of purity because these threatened to displace long-standing butchering and food production practices. In addition, resistance emerged in the fraught context of late nineteenth-century Anglo-Irish economic relations as anti-adulteration legislation, coupled with an absence of policies to protect the Irish economy, allowed Irish traders and politicians to openly question whether state legislation pertaining to food production was truly benefiting Irish economic life. This pessimistic narrative reflected mounting concern over the economic implications of British rule.

The Introduction defines migrant marketplaces, the book’s theoretical framework, as urban spaces characterized by material and imagined transnational linkages between mobile people and goods. As one of the most mobile ethnic groups during the age of mass migration, Italians in the United States and Argentina illuminate the historical formation of migrant marketplaces. It situates the book within the fields of transnational and comparative migration history, gender and food history, and the history of globalization. The introduction contends that Italian-language commercial newspapers, including La Patria degli Italiani in Buenos Aires, Il Progresso Italo-Americano in New York and publications of Italian Chambers of Commerce in these two cities, make an examination of migrant marketplaces possible because they ground global migratory and commercial flows in specific cities.

This chapter explores the evolving relationship between gastronomy and dietetics—or more specifically, pleasure and health—in food history. Before the science of nutrition was tempered by the discovery of vitamins and the culinary practices that were changed or shaped around this knowledge, more ancient perspectives had found an easy correlation between pleasure and health. What tastes good for you, it was said, was also good for you. Such ideas had brought about cooking procedures that ensured balance in the flavors and qualities of the meal, albeit, perhaps, at the expense of modern nutritive science. Many such gastronomic contradictions arise throughout ancient history when compared to the culinary practices of today—other such anecdotes are discussed in further detail in the rest of this chapter.

The ending of the Anglo-Irish Economic War (1932-8) is often represented as a watershed in British-Irish relations. However, it was soon followed by renewed trade hostility. Between 1940 and 1945, Winston Churchill subjected Ireland to an economic squeeze: the price of Irish neutrality in the Second World War. While the length of this trade war has generally been overlooked by historians, the effect of this ‘long’ Economic War on Irish public health has been similarly disregarded. This contribution argues that the Anglo-Irish economic war resulted in the mass slaughter of Irish herds due to the removal of the British export market. Market disruption had a significant knock-on effect on Irish public health, particularly in the countryside. Similarly, the British economic squeeze of the Second World War ensured that Ireland’s agricultural economy was denied fertilisers, feed, chemicals and tractors; modern productive aids that are essential to food production. The Irish government infamously introduced the ‘black loaf’ as wheat production wheat stalled, causing fears of a second Famine. Aggravated by a belatedly introduced rationing system, public health suffered.

This chapter explores the role of hunger in food history, and how it has led to many revelations and innovations that are often overlooked by its chroniclers. Gastronomy is in itself a product of hunger and the need to consume food, and it comes in many forms. Understanding the diversity of food is one such endeavor, as the knowledge of the land and the plants it generates spontaneously, and the oral transmission of knowledge shared by common people, is recognized as extremely important even by official science. But this powerful link between food and hunger can be expressed in other ways, such as in the conception of food “staples” and food preservation, as it is these that sustain the peasant through the harsh winter months. Overall, food is both a pleasure and a resource.

This chapter discusses the notion of food as a fundamental instrument of cultural identity. Many have, after all, asserted their identities via the authenticities of a particular cuisine, yet food and alimentary traditions in general are continually evolving, continually shaped by history and many other factors. The authenticity with a dish respective to its region is not static, as its historical roots likely point to a variety of sources from elsewhere. Culinary traditions are frequently shaped by the dietary needs of their time, as well as the cultural and political implications thereof. Identities associated with these are likewise fluid as they construct themselves over time, leaving even the mere notions of “traditions” and “roots” moot.

This chapter explores the eating habits and utensils employed throughout history, from the practice of picking up food with one's fingers to the more sophisticated art of dining with fine wine. Prior to its widespread use in the eighteenth century, it was almost unheard of to distance one's self from one's meal with the use of such utensils as the fork, yet nowadays “finger foods” have come into fashion and have been duly accorded with dietary benefits, besides. Other such eating habits over the years have changed the emphasis from overeating to deconstructing one's meal in courses, or in coupling one's meals with cold drinks. Some innovations in dining, such as the lazy Susan and the soup tureen, even allow for a more convivial—even aesthetic—atmosphere, if not one immersed in formal and informal rules of etiquette.

This chapter presents the book’s broader arguments and isolates the specific ways in which the study makes a critical intervention in the historiography of modern Britain. It also introduces the different categories of source material, and then isolates four key motifs in the book. First, it demonstrates how the London restaurant raises important issues about geography and scale in the writing of the history, not merely of London, but of Britain and its relationship to the wider world. Second, it recovers categories of social actors (waiting staff, cooks, managers, and restaurant proprietors) who have been overlooked in the existing practices of social history. Third, this study of the restaurant requires us to acknowledge the service sector in the creation of metropolitan modernity. Fourth, it demonstrates the rewards of focusing on the more quotidian and congenial, as opposed to sensational or fraught, aspects of urban life.

No single aspect of Civil War prison history has been more controversial than food. Unfortunately, policy and administrative histories tend to devalue how prisoners tasted captivity at the individual and local level. This chapter restores that individuality and the autonomy of experience by following how prisoners responded to privation. While there was no universal experience surrounding food in captivity, prisoners generally believed that hunger was a decivilizing force that—if unchecked—turned men into animals. Hunger changed what was edible, what tasted satisfying, and food scarcity animated prison life from markets to gambling. It made products like coffee and tobacco more—not less—essential to the internal struggle of captivity.