Global Food History
Dados do Periódico
| Tipo | JOURNAL |
|---|---|
| Editora | Taylor & Francis (GB) |
| ISSN | 2054-9555 / 2054-9547 |
| Scopus | 21101163290 |
| Wikidata | Q63871644 |
| OpenAlex | S4210206832 |
| MAG | 4210206832 |
| Site | https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rfgf20/current |
| Total de publicações | 193 |
| Período coberto | 2015 - 2026 |
| País | GB |
| Idioma | EN |
| Indexação | Scopus |
| Citada por | 93 |
| Fator de impacto | 0.179 |
| SJR | 0.276 (Q1) |
| SNIP | 0.721 |
| CiteScore | 2 |
| Índice h | 4 |
| Média de citações em 2 anos | 0.08 |
| Participação feminina na autoria | 51.9% |
"Global Food History" focuses on the social and cultural history of food, which is a cognate area to social anthropology. It regularly intersects with anthropological interests in material culture, consumption, and cultural practices
History · Food Science · Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development · American History and Culture · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Asian Culture and Media Studies · Asian Studies and History · Australian History and Society · Canadian Identity and History
Colonialism, Crisis, and Food Diversification
The Culture of Frozen Foods in Early Modern Malta
Wobbly, Bouncy, Slippery, Dissolving
Native Informants in the Kitchen
“Miss Mumford’s receipt to pot cheese,” “Grandmother’s plumcake,” “pot roast Leonor”: recipe titles can connect a dish to a person, perhaps a friend, relative or – as with chef Diana Kennedy’s recipe for pot roast – much-valued domestic help. What is at stake in such attributions? They may memorialize a friendship or preserve family memories. They may also reflect an unwilling relinquishing of valuable knowledge, a desire to establish a recipe’s …
Opening the Lid on Australia’s Love Affair with Canned Meat
Regulation and science may make food physically safe to consume but what makes food culturally “safe?” This article explores how canned meat was transformed into a culturally and socially “safe” substitute for fresh meat through an examination of the early-twentieth-century advertising of a uniquely Australian canned meat, camp pie. At the start of the twentieth century, Australian canned meat had a poor reputation. To change this perception, Aus…
“Floating Restaurants”
While research on European transatlantic migration has largely focused on departure and arrival points, this study gives prominence to the journey, situating shipboard life and food service at the epicenter. It argues that shipboard dining during mass migration from the Mediterranean was not a marginal moment but a key aspect of the journey, in which class hierarchies, national identities, and transnational encounters were produced and negotiated…
Brewing History
Although Taiwan’s sake industry remains a small market niche, it represents a historically significant colonial and postcolonial industrial formation. Drawing on historical literature, this study traces its development across a century, from the early Japanese colonial period to the early twenty-first century, in five phases: (1) the colonial introduction of brewing technologies, (2) the establishment of the alcohol monopoly under Japanese rule, …
“You Must Learn to Love Me”
“Send Me Some Good Muscatel Wine” The Shopping Lists of the European Jesuits in Japan, c. 1603–1604. The Case of Grape Wine s
Since their arrival in Japan in 1549, Jesuit missionaries described the cultural and dietary challenges of adapting to the local environment. Staples of their southern European refectories – grape wine, bread, cheese, meat, and sugary confections – were largely unknown or rarely consumed in early modern Japanese society. Even as they gradually accommodated local customs, the fathers continued to depend on annual shipments of familiar provisions c…
The Meat of the Matter
The late Romanov Empire experienced a series of global transformations. New scientific fields such as nutrition, veterinary studies, and zootechnics were emerging, slaughtering processes were industrialized, livestock commodified, and agriculture commercialized – all of which served to intensify public and scientific debates over optimal diets. This article proposes meatification as an analytical framework for examining the global developments wi…
Nutrition Science and Global Networks in Turkey During the Cold War
This article examins the nexus among global corporations, the Rockefeller Foundation, and nutritional habits in Turkey after WW II. During the Cold War, hunger and nutrition became political issues, and efforts were made to establish criteria, standardize “healthy nutrition, and eliminate “the danger of hunger”. The Rockefeller Foundation has emerged as one of the leading institutions coordinating research and investment in nutrition science in W…
Li Yu’s Culinary Aesthetics
The Idolaters Never Eat Anything Cut by Us
This article investigates the varying strategies of early modern “food ethnography” - writings on food consumption, habits, and rules – that can be observed within the late-seventeenth-century Giro del Mondo (Travel Around the World), a travel account by Giovanni Francesco Gemelli Careri, a lay traveler who circumnavigated the globe in the final decade of the eighteenth century. He exhibits an honest curiosity for the peoples and places he encoun…
A Taste of Empire
Tasting the Past? Developing a Methodology for Researching Historical Tastes
Just like books, paintings, and music, historical foodways are an important part of our history and heritage. But simply reading recipes does not tell us much, as it is hard to understand how historical ingredients and dishes tasted, and how people in the past experienced and valued such tastes. In the research project Tastes of the Past , a team consisting of three historians, an archaeobotanist, and a professional taster developed a methodology…
Nineteenth-Century Iranian Culinary Culture
Confecting Creole Bengal, from Sandesh to Rosogolla
Sandesh and rosogolla, two chhana (milk curds)-based sweets emblematic of the Bengali palate and identity, are popularly attributed to the Portuguese introduction of milk curdling into Bengal. While collective memory situates sandesh’s emergence during what we call “creole Bengal,” when different European powers operated in the Hooghly district, rosogolla was purportedly invented in 1868 in Calcutta, then capital of British India. We analyse this…
Workplace Catering at the Dolní Rožínka Uranium Mines
Hygiene Criteria as Markers of Gustative and Spatial Difference Between Public and Private Sales of Sweets in Mexico City (1872–1910)
Already Acquainted with the Methods of Mr. Appert”
The Paradoxical Identities of San Francisco’s Bay Shrimp and Chinese Shrimpers
Food as Integration, Resistance, and Acceptance
A North African Sheikh’s Ultimo Gusto
Beef Tea and Protose Broth
A Spanish Settler Writes in Te Reo Māori
The Delectable and Dangerous
The durian, for turn of the twentieth century Euro-American travelers in Southeast Asia, seemed a strange fruit – exotic, but unattainable in metropolitan centers. Durian was different than the banana, for example. Colonial companies never grew them in plantations. Even if durians crowded marketplaces from Singapore to Sumatra, the business remained in the hands of native peoples. The fruit matters because the peoples and animals who lived in Mal…
Nutritional Epidemiology of Chronic Disease and Defining “Healthy Diet”
This investigation follows the shift in US “healthy diet” guidance from prevention of nutritional deficiencies to prevention of chronic diseases. In particular, it shows how the Dietary Goals for Americans, first published in 1977, came to be based on the relatively new science of nutritional epidemiology of chronic disease, a methodology of statistical analysis whose most influential datasets relied primarily on white health professionals deeply…
Culinary Infrastructure
Culinary infrastructure comprises the diverse artifacts, organizations, and media that mobilize food or that organize and convey knowledge about food, thereby facilitating production and consumption, but without having those transformations as a direct goal. This infrastructure includes both material components (such as transportation and sewage networks, marketplaces and ports, refrigeration, and communication technologies) and immaterial or emb…
Geographical Turns and Historical Returns in Narrating French Wine Culture
The narration of French wine culture in the twentieth century has been markedly influenced by the geographers Paul Vidal de la Blache, Roger Dion, and Jean-Robert Pitte. Their impact is notable in redefining terroir as not only a geological, climactic, and topographical phenomenon, but a space which is also dependent on human intervention and tradition, including social and economic infrastructure. In this article, I will trace the postwar constr…
Camel Controversies and Pork Politics in British Mandate Palestine
World War II brought an industrial boom to British Mandate Palestine, but also extreme inflation and scarcity in essential commodities and foodstuffs. In Europe, fresh meat shortages created a market for meat preserves. In Palestine, meat shortages caused an unusual surge in marginal meats, namely, pork and camel. This article traces how pork and camel meat were bred or brought to wartime Palestine, the unusual visibility they gained, and the con…
What Is “Chinese” Food? Historicizing the Concept of Culinary Regionalism
When discussing Chinese food in the People’s Republic of China, the concept of culinary regionalism appears everywhere. Scholarly and popular accounts alike systematically list the same four (eight, ten, or twelve) “great” regional cuisines (sidacaixi, badacaixi, etc.), asserting that the designation of the original four great regional cuisines (Lu from Shandong Province, Yue from Guangdong Province, Chuan from Sichuan Province, and Huaiyang from…
Qahwa and Kleiche
In uncovering marginalized and silenced voices of the past, feminist oral historians and ethnographers emphasize the ways that oral history subjects use their conversations with researchers to define and make meaningful their own personal and communal histories. This article explores how Iraqi diasporic women of diverse ethno-religious background use the formal ritual of coffee in oral history interviews to designate formal and informal spaces wi…
Developing Constipation
This paper focuses on the rise of what we call the dietary fiber paradigm, as championed by British medical researcher Denis Burkitt, a.k.a. “Dr Fiber,” and his collaborators working in Uganda and South Africa. We situate this attention to fiber intake in nutritional advice within a longer history of white Euro-American anxieties about the corrosive physiological effects of modernization. We examine how former colonial medical experts transformed…
A Palatable Journey through the Pages
This paper evaluates how Bengali cookbook writing, which was a new phenomenon in the colonial era, sought to add new dimensions to the kitchen in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The cookbooks of colonial Bengal highlighted the special significance of culinary art in order to make food “tasty,” “healthy,” and “satisfactory.” In attempting to provide “total” knowledge, those cookbooks did not confine themselves to mouth-watering …
The Limits of Disgust
This article reexamines the dietary choices made by English colonists during the notorious Starving Time of 1609–10. During moments of crisis, like the Starving Time, attitudes toward foods normally deemed disgusting, such as vermin and human flesh, could be recalibrated. Ideas of edibility and permissible dietary behavior were pliable, changeable, and grounded in a social environment in which hunger and ill health were pervasive but nonetheless …
From Colonial Hoof to Metropolitan Table
Compared to research conducted into the development of transoceanic meatways between Europe, the Americas, and Australasia during the long nineteenth century, relatively little is known about how meatways internationalized in East Asia. This article fills this gap in the literature by investigating how Japan exploited the bovine resources of colonial Korea. As a “hoof-to-table history,” it explains how bureaucrats, agricultural scientists, veteri…
Classifying” Margarine
From its inception in 1869, margarine was considered a working-class food, associated with poverty and inferiority. In the early twentieth century, Swedish margarine brands set about to change public perception of the product, investing vast sums of money in extensive marketing campaigns to showcase it as suitable for the middle classes. However, wanting to retain as much market share as possible, they also continued to direct margarine advertise…
Of Crayfish, Rice, and Anxiety
This essay examines the emergence of crayfish and crayfish rice production in Chongzhou, Sichuan as a product of China’s agrarian transition and at the conjuncture of several forms of food anxiety. To earn revenue, the Chongzhou government has encouraged the cultivation of crayfish. Once a local peasant food, crayfish has been rebranded as a luxury item and made a centerpiece of local placemaking efforts. However, Chongzhou is also the site of an…
Stewed Chicken and Long-Nosed Kings
This ethnographic article examines conditions of material plenty in post-reform China from the perspective of staff and suppliers at a farm-to-table restaurant in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province. From data gathered during mealtime conversations and through everyday reflections on food and flavor, I piece together an historical hypothesis about changing times and tastes in Hangzhou. I find that food talk embodies and reflects my interlocutors’ analysi…
Breadways and Black-Market Intrigues in 1942 Malta
When Italy declared war on the Allies on June 10, 1940, Malta’s state of readiness was almost nonexistent. Largely dependent on food imports, the blockaded archipelago struggled to provide the most important item in the Maltese diet: bread. The hand-to-mouth improvisation of the British colonial government until the end of 1941 left Malta precariously exposed to the possibility of an imminent surrender. Uninformed pricing regulations, inadequate …
From Kitchen Arabic to Recipes for Good Taste
Between the 1880s and the 1950s, a new genre of cookbooks appeared in Egypt. Largely written by women, these texts addressed the housewives of Egypt’s expanding middle classes. This essay describes how the genre’s authors instructed women to nourish the nascent Egyptian nation. In prescribing specific flavors to notions of “good taste,” these cookbooks’ eclectic combinations of recipes oriented Egyptian readers towards Europe and the Arab East, r…
Worlds in a Wine Glass
A Transnational Fiasco
Recent research on authenticity in food products has highlighted the importance of place. I use the example of wine called Chianti – once made in both central Italy and northern California – to reframe the discussion of how authenticity is constructed. I show that both versions of Chianti were dynamic, not stable, products that were the results of networks of capital, geographies of production, and consumer desires. I explain the transoceanic vin…
Food Comes First”
This article examines the origins of colonial-era nutrition policy in Ghana (the colonial Gold Coast). It shows how imperial ideas about food and nutrition evolved in response to changing conditions in Ghana, as well as in response to new ideas originating outside Africa. British officials initially assumed food was abundant, identifying a growing taste for imports among urban elites as a key problem. By the early 1920s, new personnel with new pr…
Selling the French Past, Selling Wine, and Erasing Labor from Terroir
While the word terroir was used sparsely in wine literature dating back to the Middle Ages, our current approach to the term is largely a result of debates that began in France in the early twentieth century. It was in those debates that French wines were said to be vins de terroir because they were vins d’histoire, an expression of a “naturalized” wine-based civilization that had existed over millennia. This article examines the unsuccessful att…
Fishing
In Fishing, archeologist Brian Fagan argues that global food historians have overlooked the centrality of fishing and shellfish collection to human existence. While scholars have typically consider
Sugar, Surveillance, and Citizenship
During the demobilization from the First World War in 1919, people around the world participated in mass protests over stagnant wages and the rising cost of living. With the Soviet revolution fresh in their minds, leaders used two strategies to contain dissent: xenophobic political repression on the one hand, and heavy-handed economic interventions to control the prices of basic foodstuffs on the other. In fact, the same law enforcement agency ch…
Bhoma's Kitchen
This article discusses the food symbolism in martial scenes of kakavin, narrative poems composed in Old Javanese between the ninth and fifteenth centuries CE. Starting from the hypothesis that Javanese conceived of a battle and a preparation of food with a common set of ideas and concepts, a striking food metaphor, found in the Bhāratayuddha, has been analyzed. The slaying of Kama, an epic hero who sided with the Pāndavas, is likened to the proce…
Cookie” and “Jungle Boy”
This article advances the historiography on food and colonialism by using the categories of race, class and masculinity to highlight how social distinctions that were carefully maintained in the domestic sphere became blurred when colonials ventured into the field. South East Asian cooks, known as “Cookie,” were responsible for food preparation in colonial households of Malaysia and Singapore. It was their culinary skills and knowledge of local f…
A Taste of Empire
Organics, Fair Trade, and Peasants
Preface
Traumatic Terroir
Terroir is a term used for foods with unique tastes, properties, and values based on their origins in particular landscapes and production methods. Contrary to the usual marketing of terroir based on idyllic images of peasant life, constructions of terroir in contemporary Hunan, China, make reference to the traumas of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) and to the unforgiving landscape of the region. The collective identity and consumerist ideolo…
And Serve the Cause of Freedom”
This article argues that the United States Food Administration (USFA) employed contradictory imagery and rhetoric to motivate Americans to conserve wheat, beef, sugar, pork, and other essential foods during the First World War. While USFA posters emphasized patriotism, solidarity, and euphoric national loyalty, they simultaneously employed dystopian portrayals of hunger, chaos, and madness. Yet neither uplifting nationalism nor overt fearmongerin…
Qahwa and Kleiche
In uncovering marginalized and silenced voices of the past, feminist oral historians and ethnographers emphasize the ways that oral history subjects use their conversations with researchers to define and make meaningful their own personal and communal histories. This article explores how Iraqi diasporic women of diverse ethno-religious background use the formal ritual of coffee in oral history interviews to designate formal and informal spaces wi…
The Ethnic Restaurateur
Krishnendu Ray’s latest book is a tour de force that elegantly unites the ethnographic and sociological imaginations demonstrated in The Migrant’s Table (Temple, 2004) and Curried Cultures (Oxford
Makanlah Nasi! (Eat Rice!)”
This article analyzes the role of colonial foodways in Dutch metropolitan imperial culture. The interaction between material life, cultural values, and imperial ideologies remains a relative blind spot in our understanding of Dutch imperialism. The cuisine from the Dutch East Indies, which found its way to The Netherlands around the turn of the twentieth century, was a decidedly colonial invention and was a reflection of the racial and gendered c…
Southern Provisions
Kosher USA
Kosher USA: How Coke Became Kosher and Other Tales of Modern Food.." Global Food History, 3(2), pp. 210–211
Inventing Texture
In the 1960s, food scientists turned their attention to the problem of texture, asking how it could be defined as a discrete sensory property of food, measured with instruments, and made useful for industrial manufacturers. In the ensuing decade researchers in North America, Japan, and elsewhere proposed answers to these questions in specialized trade journals, where they crafted sophisticated mathematics, described measuring apparatuses and prot…
A “Queer-Looking Compound”
The ecological, cosmological, and genealogic meanings of kalo (taro) and the foods made from it bind the practice of eating poi, an important traditional staple food, to both material and cultural concepts of Hawaiian identity. During the nineteenth century, the taste of foods like poi became a subject of debate among newcomers to the archipelago, who used the language of disgust, queerness, and civility to distinguish Euro-American whiteness fro…
Teaching Food History
This roundtable discussion examines pedagogical practices in the emerging field of food history. Participants shared their experiences in a wide variety of different institutional settings and considered the differences between a food history classroom and more traditional history courses. Topics included how best to teach the history of taste, chronological and temporal scales of analysis, and issues of social justice. Discussants also problemat…
Introduction
At the First Table
At the First Table: Food and Social Identity in Early Modern Spain." Global Food History, 3(2), pp. 209–210
Empire and the Reordering of Edibility
Exotic, plant-based stimulants such as sugar, tea, and coffee linked metropolitan bodies with colonial expansion in support of the formation of modern Europe. But, not all tropical commodities easily flowed along these metropolitan routes. Betel quid, a prepared comestible, was among the most widely consumed stimulants in the world, but it was not popularized as a masticatory in modern Europe. This article traces the reconfiguration of betel quid…
The Delectable and Dangerous
The durian, for turn of the twentieth century Euro-American travelers in Southeast Asia, seemed a strange fruit – exotic, but unattainable in metropolitan centers. Durian was different than the banana, for example. Colonial companies never grew them in plantations. Even if durians crowded marketplaces from Singapore to Sumatra, the business remained in the hands of native peoples. The fruit matters because the peoples and animals who lived in Mal…
Consuming the café colonial
The cultural tourism industry in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil has as one of its main attractions the so-called café colonial, an afternoon meal of German-inspired delicacies. This article traces the rise of the café colonial, revealing the multiple uses, meanings, and origins of the Germanness on offer for visitors. It argues that café colonial is part of a touristic migrant marketplace where ethnicity is constructed and commodified, shaping both th…
Comida Mineira
In 2016, the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil passed a law declaring gastronomia mineira – the state’s cuisine – a “cultural patrimony” worthy of promotion and protection. The state’s goals of promoting tourism and development by touting the heritage of its cuisine is common in an age of culinary tourism. More unusual, was the attempt to safeguard a regional cultural identity not only from foreign influences and the whims of food industry marketing …
Taste of the Nation
Taste of the Nation: The New Deal Search for America’s Food." Global Food History, 4(1), pp. 105–106
Mexican Chicago’s Colonia Hull House
Tourists and Mexicanos alike could leave the Mexican community on the Near West Side of Chicago content that la colonia hull house had met their culinary and cultural expectations. Local migrant marketplaces created and recreated sights, sounds, and smells, as both cultural anchors for the community and tourist attractions for the visitor. This examination of the centrality of culturally distinct Mexican food, restaurants, and other food establis…
The Taste of Empire
Culinary Culture in Colonial India. A Cosmopolitan Platter and the Middle-Class
Utsa Ray’s Culinary Culture in Colonial India provides a robust historiography of Bengali cuisine that allows for productive new conceptualizations on cuisine and territory. There are three kinds o
Introduction
Fishing
In Fishing, archeologist Brian Fagan argues that global food historians have overlooked the centrality of fishing and shellfish collection to human existence. While scholars have typically consider
The “Mad Men” of Nutrition
In 1964, a diet presented itself that would not only allow American men to recapture their fading youth and health through trimmer bodies, but would also permit them to reclaim their disappearing post-war social power through a reassertion of heteronormative hegemonic masculinity. Called The Drinking Man’s Diet: How to Lose Weight with a Minimum of Willpower, it was a statement against the changes that were occurring in American society, conveyed…