introduction

And also that every man should eat and drink, and enjoy the good of
all his labor.
—ecclesiastes 3:13

Unlike the subjects of other books in this series, food matters

because it is necessary for survival. Beyond this fundamental im-
portance, or even because of it, the cultural meaning of food—
that it conditions how we see the world and ourselves—is less
clear. There is an enduring tradition in Western thought that
apart from its obvious biological significance, food does not mat-
ter, that it is not an intellectual subject. Eating sustains us and
while it is reassuring to expect regular meals, food is essentially
fuel and not worth further consideration. In David Mamet’s play
Glengarry Glen Ross (1984) the shady real-estate salesman Richard
Roma utters a common opinion: who cares about meals that are
over and done with? “ ’Cause it’s only food. The shit we put in

1
keeps us going. It’s only food.” The argument of this book is that
what people eat does matter for the formation of identity, the
preservation of health, the perception of others, and the future of
the natural world.
That food does not matter is both a popular and an intellec-
tual opinion. Learned skepticism about food as a serious topic is
exemplified by the sixteenth-century essayist Michel de Mon-
taigne who set down what he regarded as an amusing conversa-
tion with a chef who seemed to regard his menial job with
inappropriate gravity. The Italian cook, brought to France by
Montaigne’s patron Cardinal Giovanni Caraffa, lectured the phi-
losopher on what he referred to pompously as “the science of eat-
ing,” affecting “a grave and magisterial countenance, as if he were
discussing grand points of theology.” Montaigne found it laugh-
able that a mere artisan of the kitchen could describe salads and
roasts as if it they merited high seriousness, his discourse “bloated
with grand and magnificent words such as one might use in de-
scribing the government of an Empire.”
Four hundred years after Montaigne’s remarks, the distin-
guished chef Jacques Pépin in his memoirs recollects another dis-
missal of cuisine as a worthy subject of inquiry, in this case
pronounced by a professor of French literature. Having received
his BA degree in 1970 from Columbia University, Pépin was ad-
mitted to graduate school there and for his doctoral dissertation
he proposed to write about food in French literature. His adviser
contemptuously assured him that the theme, while certainly nov-
el, was out of the question: “The reason not much has been writ-
ten on the topic, Mr. Pépin, is that cuisine is not a serious art

2 Why Food Matters

form. It is far too trivial for academic study. Not intellectual
enough to form the basis of a Ph.D. thesis.”
No one would dispute the utility of agronomy, physiology, and
other science disciplines related to efficient cultivation or physical
health, but within Europe and North America, cuisine has not
been considered comparable to performing arts such as opera, let
alone university disciplines such as philosophy. Recipes and din-
ing out attract popular interest and discussion, but so do many
other diversions that do not merit academic attention, from fash-
ion to hang-gliding.
One problem with taking food seriously is that eating is a rou-
tine act providing only short-lived satiety; one meal has hardly
been finished when the next has to be prepared. Yet just because
something is ephemeral does not inevitably make it trivial. After
all, before the advent of recording technology, the aesthetic experi-
ence of music was fleeting, yet the subject was always regarded in
learned circles as a noble endeavor. Beginning in the early Middle
Ages, music was a foundational discipline, one of the seven liberal
arts. Music has the advantage that its effects are immaterial, spiri-
tual, and in some sense inexplicable. Materiality, necessity, and
repetition contribute to the apparent banality of food. Nothing is
more implicated in the material world than eating. Ingestion is a
quotidian, bodily need, physically urgent, but seemingly not worth
extensive discussion any more than is the case for the equally impe-
rious drives for sleep or urination. Many activities are biologically
important but uninteresting to humanistically oriented scholars.
And yet, notwithstanding popular and cultivated dismissal,
food has meaning beyond its routine aspects, and is important in

Introduction 3
forming memories and constituting a sense of who we are. Most
people retain exactly and fondly the delightful taste and ambience
of meals past. Pépin’s professor notwithstanding, literary authors
do write about food, and certain instances, such as Proust’s mad-
eleine, are renowned. Far from fading away, enjoyment endures
in our minds as entrancing and comforting recollections.
The Covid-19 pandemic accentuated the power of food both
to evoke loss and to preserve sanity. During the periods of restric-
tions, formerly common pleasures such as restaurant dining were
remembered with all the more affection because they used to oc-
cur repeatedly. In addition, such meals were missed because, as
Proust also noted, the only true paradises are those we have lost.
Writing from what amounted to exile in Taiwan, the writer Tang
Lusun (1908–1985) ended the introduction to a book entitled Re-
calling Homeland (Guyuan qing) with the hope that: “If food talk
can elicit one’s memory of the homeland and then inspire his
ambition of recovering the native soil, then I have not written in
vain these many years.”
Exile, migration, and confinement reinforce the symbolic sig-
nificance of food. An incomparably agonizing example of the
power of food and memory is a cookbook put together by Jewish
women imprisoned in the Theresienstadt concentration camp
(Terezín, Czech Republic) during the Nazi tyranny. Of course, no
one arrived at the camp with a collection of home recipes, and it
would not have been possible to find or prepare the dishes re-
membered for the cookbook while in a situation of near starva-
tion. As recounted in the book In Memory’s Kitchen by Cara De
Silva, the recipes were based on the women’s recollections of the

4 Why Food Matters

comforting, everyday food of home. These inmates were suppos-
edly privileged (the Germans referred to them as Prominenten),
kept at what was falsely presented to the world as a model Jewish
settlement, as conveyed via a grotesque propaganda film in 1944
titled Der Führer schenkt den Juden eine Stadt (The Führer Gives
the Jews a City). Theresienstadt included Jews of international
reputation (among those who survived were the eminent Ger-
man rabbi and scholar Leo Baeck, the Czech conductor Karel
Ančerl, and the Austrian psychotherapist Viktor Frankl), but all
the prisoners suffered deprivation and most were sooner or later
pushed out for death at Auschwitz and other extermination sites
as the endless trainloads of victims choked the camps.
In the face of attempts to obliterate and dehumanize, the
Theresienstadt cookbook reaffirmed the Jewish women’s identi-
ties and personal integrity. Recalling specific foods and how to
prepare them constituted a form of psychological resistance and
self-preservation. The cookbook is a harrowing document, epito-
mizing what I hope to show in this book: the significance of food
for cultural as well as biological survival. I want to look at this
primarily through history, because the significance of food prefer-
ences plays out over time and because of the connections between
memory and taste.
Not all cultures agree with the Western contemptuous or
amused attitude toward dining. In imperial China, poets and
other impeccably intellectual members of the elite classes created
rhapsodic compositions about the pleasures of the table. Su
Dongpo, a Song Dynasty poet and politician, wrote with fond
discrimination about cuisine, and there is even a well-known

Introduction 5
dish, “Dongpo Pork,” named after him. One can hardly imagine
“Chicken St. Jerome” or “Meringues à la Wittgenstein.” The lat-
ter once remarked that he did not care what he ate as long as it
was the same every day.
The subject of food afforded Chinese scholars an opportunity
to reflect nostalgically on personal history, on the better times of
their youth. The first-person “familiar essay” (xiaopinwen) is a tra-
ditional literary genre of self-reflection, often expressing longing
for the past. Recalling in poverty the pleasures he had enjoyed
during the last years of the recently overthrown Ming Dynasty,
the seventeenth-century essayist Zhang Dai lovingly described a
“crab club” whose members extensively discussed river crabs dur-
ing their fall season. Eating crabs accompanied by salted and
dried duck, junket, blood clams steeped in wine, cabbage, other
vegetables, and fruit: “It is really as though we had tasted the of-
ferings of the immortals come from the celestial kitchens . . .”
There was a boom in familiar essays in twentieth-century
China, especially among exiles from the mainland who fled to
Taiwan after the communist revolution triumphed in 1949. Culi-
nary nostalgia was a constituent of this literature, as with Tang
Lusun’s memories of New Year’s festival food in Beijing or Liang
Shiqiu (1903–1987), who remained in mainland China, recalling
the marvelous cuisine in Kunming (Yunnan) where he had lived
during the war and to which he never returned.
The Abbasid Caliphate too produced poets who celebrated
food and gourmandise and thought leaders who wrote cook-
books. A particularly important genre was formed by “poems of
the table,” compositions recited in praise of dishes as they were

6 Why Food Matters

served. Al-Masudi’s historical account of the luxuries of the
court in Baghdad describes a banquet hosted by the Caliph
al-Mustakfı̄ (whose brief reign was 944–946) at which those at-
tending declaimed poems about ideal dishes and the kitchen then
prepared them exactly according to specifications. The only thing
that proved unavailable, we are informed, was fresh asparagus.
In the Western intellectual tradition, food and drink are emi-
nently compatible with conversation, just not worthwhile as its
objects. Learned and convivial table talk is a theme derived from
Plato’s Symposium, periodically revived especially by Renaissance
humanists. Accounts of such repasts detail conversations about
friendship, arts and letters, and true nobility. Dining together
furnished opportunities to display eloquence and wit, but unlike
the Middle Eastern or Chinese examples, nothing was said
about the banquet dishes and seldom do we even know what was
served. The meal was simply a pleasant setting for discourse, not
itself worth expatiation.
There are a few exceptions. Learned Greek scholars explored
obscure terms for food and dining, speculating about their origin
and noting their appearance in literary works. The master of this
genre was Athenaeus, author of Deipnosophistae (“The Sophists’
Dinner”). Written in the early third century A.D., this celebra-
tion of cuisine presents an imagined series of feasts, the parade of
dishes enlivened by learned talk involving feats of textual recall
from the works of poets, playwrights, satirists, and historians
about food and pretty much everything else. Here the observa-
tions of the chef are treated with respectful attention, although
the boastful chef was a stock figure of ancient comedy. Dinner

Introduction 7
and after-dinner conversations extend over fifteen books, seven
volumes in the Loeb Classical Library edition. The Deipnosophis-
tae has long been valued for the thousands of literary excerpts
quoted by the cultivated diners, the majority of the passages tak-
en from works now otherwise lost. Unlike the usual classical ban-
quet practice, these gourmand-intellectuals talk endlessly about
food, discoursing on dozens of species of fish, for example, but
also on topics such as the faults of notable philosophers or a cata-
logue of gluttons beginning with Hercules, or exegesis of the
Egyptian custom of serving cakes at human sacrifices. Nothing
else in the Western canon equals Athenaeus’s often tedious yet
absorbing compendium.

Notwithstanding my own affection for prolixity and comedy, I

propose in what follows to look at food succinctly and seriously,
as both a pleasure and a necessity. I approach this task eagerly, but
not as the fulfillment of a life-long vocation for culinary matters.
Not until I was well over fifty did I consider food an intriguing
subject worth writing about. To be sure, as with many professors
and students, I liked restaurants. While some academics are indif-
ferent to food as anything more than an annoying necessity, the
majority consider themselves knowledgeable about different cui-
sines. American college towns have a higher density and greater
variety of restaurants than do ordinary cities. In Kansas, for ex-
ample, Lawrence, where the University of Kansas is located, has
more inexpensive and internationally diverse places to dine than
the larger centers Topeka, the capital, or Wichita, the state’s larg-
est city. Insofar as I thought about food, I used to consider myself

8 Why Food Matters

in the normal range of faculty of the type who also like classical
music or art museums. Belatedly, however, I now recall that when
I was ten and my family visited France, I learned the names of all
of the two- and three-star restaurants in the Guide Michelin for
1960. A dozen years later, as a graduate student at Berkeley, I was
berated by more rigorous peers for going on about cuisine, so ap-
parently I spent a lot of time unaware of my personal trajectory.
My career has been devoted to researching and teaching medi-
eval European history. While studying the social imagery of peas-
ants in the period 1000 to 1500, I noticed how often the upper
classes mocked rustic food habits. Consuming porridge, root veg-
etables, cheese, and on special occasions sausage was a source of
satire and amusement, much the way that ethnic minorities in the
contemporary world have been mocked for their food preferenc-
es. Aristocratic tastes in the Middle Ages were oriented toward
game, large fish such as sturgeon, and exotic spices such as cinna-
mon, cloves, and nutmeg. I wrote a book about the demand for
spices in the Middle Ages as an example of class determining culi-
nary taste and the power of seemingly frivolous preferences to
launch vast historical enterprises, in this case the fifteenth-century
ventures for spices that resulted in the European colonization of
much of the world.
Subsequently I wrote about upper-class dining, both in the
medieval period and in modern America. Both eras identified
certain foods as proof of refinement and so worth showing off. In
this book, Chapter 1, “Feast and Famine,” reflects this original
concern with what different classes consume and the taxonomy
of prestigious versus lowly food categories.

Introduction 9
 Classifying people by their level of culinary privilege or dis-
cernment is one way in which food affects identity, how we see
ourselves and others. Such associations are not stable but are rath-
er the objects of change and manipulation. For centuries French
cuisine defined the tastes of the upper classes around the world,
but even though Jacqueline Kennedy was lauded for bringing a
French chef and sophistication to the White House, presidents
after John F. Kennedy boasted of their plebeian tastes. George
Bush, a member of a wealthy dynasty from Connecticut, posed as
a folksy lover of pork rinds.
Keeping in mind the importance of both the biological and
cultural aspects of food, I hope to show the range and diversity of
dealing with what is simultaneously a necessity, a pleasure, and a
source of conflict. Eating is a biological imperative, but what we
eat depends on preferences dictated by society, not just availabil-
ity or the environment. The sybaritic poets of the Chinese or
Islamic courts were not the only people for whom food is impor-
tant. Likes and dislikes, recipes, and food experiences form the
subject of everyday conversation. Perhaps most significantly, in
the future subjectivity rather than science will determine how
much progress is made in changing the ominous ecological situa-
tion as influenced by food practices. Food production and con-
sumption play important roles in epidemics, climate change, and
social inequality. Action on a number of issues, from safeguarding
supply to reducing waste, will necessitate changes in attitudes.
The study of food cannot be limited to health and environ-
mental data because people are not swayed by science as much
as by emotions, resentments, experience, and other strong but

10 Why Food Matters

nonmaterial factors. We will look at the objective information
about our current situation toward the end of the book, but will
expend more space considering those powerful if elusive nonma-
terial concerns manifested through how people think about the
food of immigrants, women versus men, or according to racial
conceptions.
Individuals do not readily abandon the food habits that define
them. The French historian of Catalonia Pierre Vilar described a
Scandinavian cruise in the early 1950s during which he recog-
nized a group of fellow passengers as Catalans, not just because of
their language, but from their scorn for the “Anglo-Saxon” break-
fast provided. Characteristic of the Catalans’ savoir faire and
savoir vivre, according to Vilar, was their ability to persuade the
dining and kitchen staff to improvise a version of the classic Cata-
lan pa amb tomàquet—baguette grilled and then smeared with
olive oil and tomatoes.
Every society makes choices about what is edible and what is
not. The classical Greek definition of a barbarian was a nomad
speaking an incomprehensible language, but it also included the
notion that such people are unfamiliar with cooking. The so-
called barbarians, in turn, disapproved of the food customs of the
supposedly civilized. For Central Asian herdsmen, fermented
mare’s milk is delicious, while foreign visitors usually find it nau-
seating. For their part, the herders regard processed cows’ milk as
tasteless. What “they” eat, those who are different, whoever they
are, is opposed to what “we” prefer. Nationalist, anti-immigration
demonstrators in northern Italy carry signs saying “polenta
si, cous-cous no!” Polenta, a cornmeal porridge, is a symbol of

Introduction 11
Lombardy, although its primary ingredient was unknown before
Europeans arrived in the New World and was not adopted in
Italy until the nineteenth century. Couscous is identified with
North Africa, hence with poor immigrants, but it is also com-
monly eaten in Sicily. One has to acknowledge that for these
northern Italian demonstrators, Sicily might as well be Africa,
and in any event, as we know, mere facts are not sufficient effec-
tively to discredit symbols inciting anger.
At the same time, the food of others is often appealing. French
cuisine was imitated throughout the world in the nineteenth and
most of the twentieth century; Persian tastes and luxuries would
influence the gastronomy of many realms and cultures from Hel-
lenistic Greece to Mughal India. A foreign cuisine could be con-
sidered in certain respects admirable and in others off-putting.
During the 1890s, there was a craze for Chinese restaurants in
America, but newspapers popularized the belief that Chinese im-
migrants routinely ate rats and other vermin, and Chinese food
was popularly associated with opium and the so-called white
slave trade.
Seemingly benign food choices, whims, and preferences have
unplanned global side effects. The routine enjoyment of bananas
for breakfast or seafood for dinner is brought about through im-
mense labor, investments in transportation, and at substantial
environmental cost. How to move food acquisition and con-
sumption in an ecologically responsible direction requires scien-
tific advances, but also public enthusiasm. Food activists want to
change damaging agricultural and processing practices and call
attention to the oppressive labor conditions by which food is

12 Why Food Matters

brought to the consumer. To achieve this requires showing people
where food comes from and making them care about it.
Turning the natural world into food has always been difficult,
requiring until recently the mobilization of at least ninety percent
of the world’s population to engage directly with cultivation,
hunting, herding, fishing, and then processing and cooking. Even
though the average American supermarket contains more than
thirty thousand separate items, it is still difficult today to obtain
and prepare food—the difficulty is just not as visible. Procuring
nourishment involves toil and suffering, but for most of the de-
veloped world these remain easy to ignore. The true costs are con-
cealed because only a tiny percentage of the population in well-off
countries is employed in anything related to agriculture, and
many of those workers (such as the people who harvest crops or
work in meat-processing plants) are marginalized immigrants or
racial minorities.
The fact that getting enough to eat is laborious is a fundamen-
tal starting point for thoughtful consideration of the human con-
dition. According to Judeo-Christian teachings, the Fall made
agricultural toil necessary. In Milton’s Paradise Lost, Adam and
Eve tend the Garden of Eden where their work is easy. There is no
need to worry about the food getting cold on the table because
their vegetarian diet does not involve cooking. In contrast, post-
lapsarian cultivation is hard, the fields require tremendous effort
to prepare and sow, and the harvest is constantly threatened by
droughts, floods, weeds, and insects. The Book of Genesis (3:17–
19) is clear on this: “cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow
shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; Thorns also and thistles

Introduction 13
shall it bring forth to thee, and thou shalt eat the herb of the field;
In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.”
Especially prominent in the writings of Saint Augustine is the
grim observation that labor in this fallen world usually does not
profit the laborer above mere subsistence; agricultural work is a
form of exploitation to feed and provide luxuries for the wealthy.
Unfree labor might violate natural law, as Augustine and other
theologians acknowledged, but they regarded slavery as nonethe-
less acceptable, even necessary, according to the laws governing
society, including Christian society. A modern, secular version of
this argument justifying hard agricultural work is visible in the
propensity for twentieth-century revolutionary communist re-
gimes, notably in China and Cambodia, to exalt peasant domina-
tion by compelling intellectuals to toil in the fields.
Although cooking is not explicitly mentioned in the biblical ac-
count of the Fall, it too is essentially a tedious form of labor. In the
pre-modern world, without indoor plumbing and with the necessi-
ty of using open fires, it took considerable time and effort just to
prepare basic foodstuffs, and involved hours of churning butter, or
grinding grain for bread, or feeding and butchering pigs. Modern
conveniences have alleviated these burdensome routines, but the ef-
fort has simply been displaced. Restaurant kitchen work remains for
the most part harsh and ill-rewarded in societies such as the United
States where (at least before the pandemic) more money was spent
dining out (or ordering in) than in preparing food at home. The
relatively inexpensive availability of food has also meant a seemingly
paradoxical deterioration of nutritional well-being, most obvious in
the growing rate of obesity and related diseases such as diabetes.

14 Why Food Matters

 It is not all bad—against these unfortunate aspects of the cur-
rent human condition, food remains a source of delight, even a
solace in difficult circumstances. In his recent book The Consola-
tion of Food, the British chef Valentine Warner marshals stories
about culinary enjoyment mixed with grief; his recipes accom-
pany marvelous adventures fishing or discovering a wonderful
chef in Crete, but he also poignantly describes cooking escalope
of veal with Parma ham for his dying father, who “smiled weakly
and attempted to eat a few bites, but could not finish it.”
Food denotes joy, frustration, and comfort in the film Big Night
(1996). The big night in question turns out to be a ludicrous failure
for the “Paradise,” a doomed Italian restaurant in New Jersey where
the wonderful food is too authentic for its customers. Earlier, in a
rare happy moment, the normally angry and frustrated chef Primo
observes that to eat good food is to be close to God. The movie
ends with food as a less metaphysical comfort. Primo’s brother Sec-
ondo, who has been the front-of-house manager, silently, carefully,
and lovingly prepares and serves an omelet to offer spiritual as well
as physical sustenance to Primo and to the waiter, Cristiano.
The quotidian nature of eating is a source of tedium, but also
of enjoyment. Among the aperçus and witticisms of the diplomat
and resourceful political survivor Prince Talleyrand (1754–1838) is
this observation: “Show me another pleasure besides dinner that
happens every day and lasts an hour.” Not everyone is in a posi-
tion to choose what to eat or able to relax comfortably while din-
ing, let alone to extemporize in a learned and leisurely manner
about gastronomy, but neither is the daily pleasure of sharing
meals the unique privilege of the elite.

Introduction 15
 The reason food matters has as much to do with culture as
with science, with history as with predictions of the future. The
chapters that follow consider food as a biological imperative and
an expression of choice and self-presentation. Because the cul-
tural factors are less obvious than the basic struggle for survival,
they will be emphasized and discussed as aspects of both pleasure
and discrimination: why food is intriguing and meaningful, but
also why its satisfactions are so poorly distributed. Food brings
people together, but it also serves to differentiate rich from poor,
male from female, and to separate along lines of class and ethnic-
ity. Thinking about the significance of food in daily life is an ex-
ploration of social as well as nutritional reality.
In 2005, Ruth Reichl gave a series of lectures at Yale University
on the topic “Why Food Matters.” These talks were inspiring for
me at the time when I was just starting to think about food as an
intriguing subject. Reichl’s emphasis in those lectures on cooking
and sharing food as expressive of comfort and communion was
particularly striking, but I have also been influenced by her auto-
biographical books that show the comedy and occasional destruc-
tion that accompany a passion for food and cuisine. I hope this
book will demonstrate that food matters for the future of the
natural world, for ourselves at the present moment, and for the
way we think based on past generations’ literal and metaphorical
cultivation of food.

16 Why Food Matters