Food In History by Reay Tannahill (New York: Stein and Day, 1973)

I read Food In History years before I thought about studying food history; at the time I just thought it was an interesting book to check out from the library.  It was one of two food history books that percolated in the back of my mind for about a decade before I decided to go back to college and get a PhD in history (the other book is Bacon, Beans, and Galantines, by Joseph Conlin, about what gold miners in the 19th century ate).  It’s a book that influenced me by showing me that food history can be serious subject matter while at the same time being entertaining.

Food In History is a big book—almost 400 pages of text, plus a bibliography, notes, index, etc.—and it covers a lot of material in those pages.  The title accurately sums up the contents, since the book traces the history of food from before the development of agriculture all the way through the 1970s, and Tannahill ends the book by taking a look ahead at what she believed would happen in the late 20th century.

The book is divided into six parts, which look at, in turn, the prehistoric world; the Near-East, Egypt, and Europe through 1000 AD; Asia and the Arab world through 1000 AD; Europe from 1000-1500 AD; the World from 1490-1800 (so it includes colonization); and the modern world from 1800 to the 1970s.  Much of the coverage focuses on Europe and, after 1500, America, but Tannahill does a good job of at least touching on what was happening around the world during most of the time periods she looks at.

The book was published in 1973, and reading it today I’m struck by two things: how much she covers and how different the book would be if it was published today.

In terms of coverage, I’m not sure that the equivalent of this book could be written today.  Historians these days focus their research on particular times and places—for example, my specialty is post-World War II America.  It’s very hard for historians to write knowledgeably and accurately about times and locations outside of their specialty since each topic has its own special concerns.  I would be lost in writing a history of Britain, since some of the big themes in British history, like royalty and the role of religion, either don’t exist or are completely different in American history.  The problem would be magnified if I tried to write a history that included not just Britain but the entire world, all the way back through history.  The main rule for historians is to try to Get It Right, and any historian who today tried to write this book would be setting themselves up for failure (and for blisteringly negative reviews)

Tannahill wrote in a period when, frankly, not many people thought food history was an important subject, and so there wasn’t much published on the topic (and much of what was published was junk that wasn’t actually true).  Today, though, food history is growing in popularity, and dozens of new books appear every year with new information on the topic.  This is another reason why an entirely updated Food In History is unlikely to be published any time soon—there’s just too much information out there now.  The book’s index lists only five pages where African foods are mentioned, while a search on Amazon for “African food history” brings up entire books on the subject.  Harvey Levenstein’s 2003 book Paradox of Plenty is about the length of Food In History, it only covers American food since the 1870s, and it doesn’t even go into details about most of the subjects it touches on.

For the period it was written Food In History is a very good book.  Tannahill used what was available to write the book, including lots of classical Greek and Roman texts and archeological evidence, and her writing style is quite engaging.  While the book is certainly not the last word on the subject of food history, it is certainly a good starting point for anyone interested in knowing more about the topic, or anyone interested in history in general.