Near a Thousand Tables by Felipe Fernández-Armesto Page A

the peaceful flood.”-
    To break my dream the vessel reached its bound; And homeless near a thousand homes I stood, And near a thousand tables pined and wanted food.
    â€”WILLIAM WORDSWORTH,
GUILT & SORROW, OR INCIDENTS ON SALISBURY PLAIN

Preface
    T he great press baron Lord Northcliffe used to tell his journalists that four subjects could be relied on for abiding public interest: crime, love, money and food. Only the last of these is fundamental and universal. Crime is a minority interest, even in the worst-regulated societies. It is possible to imagine an economy without money and reproduction without love but not life without food. Food, moreover, has a good claim to be considered the world’s most important subject. It is what matters most to most people for most of the time.
    Yet food history remains relatively underappreciated. Most academic institutions still neglect it . Many of the best contributions to its study are made by amateurs and antiquarians. There is no consensus about how to approach it. For some people, it is all about nutrition and malnutrition, sustenance and sickness; for others, less anxious to avoid condemnation for frivolity, it is essentially about cuisine. Economic historians see food as a commodity to be produced and traded. When it gets to the stage of being eaten, they lose interest. For social historians, diet is an index of differentiation and changing class relations. Cultural historians are increasingly interested in how food nourishes societies as well as individual bodies—how it feeds identities, defines groups. In political history, food is the stuff of tributary relationships and its distribution and management are at the heart of power. The small but gallant and growing band of environmental historians sees food as linkage in the chain of being: the substance of the ecosystems which human beings strive to dominate. Our most intimate contact with the natural environment occurs when we eat it. Food is a subject of pleasure and peril.
    Increasingly, in recent years—indeed, in some ways since before the Second World War, when the
Annales
school of French historical geography began to teach historians to take food seriously—the diversity of approaches has multiplied the scholarly output and made it harder to synthesize. Today, the materials available to a writer attempting a general conspectus are wonderful but intractable. Following the example of
Annales,
many historical periodicals carryfrequent relevant articles. A specialist periodical,
Petits propos culinaires,
has appeared for more than twenty years. The Oxford Symposium on Food History, established by Alan Davidson and Theodore Zeldin, provided a focus for interested students and a steady output of published transactions. Excellent general histories include Reay Tannahill’s
Food in History,
first published in 1973 and still deservedly popular, Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat’s
Histoire naturelle et morale de la nourriture,
which first appeared in 1987, and the compilation edited by J.-L. Flandre and M. Montanari in 1996,
Histoire de l’alimentation.
    Yet the rate at which new material appears makes it increasingly hard even for the best works of previous decades to be satisfactorily updated by periodic revision, Tannahill’s book, despite its tide, is determinedly in the “how-we-got-to-where-we-are” tradition and is not much concerned with an aspect of particular interest to many readers: the relationship between food history and history in general. Tous-saint-Samat’s work is a wonderful quarry but a sprawling and indisciplined work, chiefly composed as a series of essays on the histories of various foodstuffs. Flandre and Montanari, who launched the most scholarly and professionally ambitious attempt up to their time, only aimed to cover the history of food in Western civilization and its ancient predecessors. Like most volumes by multiple contributors, theirs is endlessly