

It emphasizes the role that food-related activities play in defining community, class, and social status – as epitomized in such fundamental human acts as the choice and consumption of one’s daily bread.Ĭulinary history can also be defined by what it is not. These multidisciplinary perspectives are integrated along geographic and temporal dimensions, and as a consequence, culinary history encompasses the whole process of procuring food from land or laboratory, moving it through processors and market-places, and finally placing it on the stove and onto the table. Studies make connections between the sciences – medical, biological, and social – and the humanities and draw heavily on anthropology, economics, psychology, folklore, literature, and the fine arts, as well as history. Consequently, culinary history is widely interdisciplinary. It looks at practices on both sides of the kitchen door, at the significance of the food to the cook and to those who consume it, and at how cooking is done and what the final product means.

Since the 1970s, historical studies of food in particular cultures have emerged as a new field, “culinary history.” Culinary history studies the origins and development of the foodstuffs, equipment, and techniques of cookery, the presentation and eating of meals, and the meanings of these activities to the societies that produce them.
