The History of the food’s History

Abstract

Contrary to what it may seem, food history is not a nowadays invention. Food history wasborn with history. Somehow, food has always been a current matter but t was in the 20th century,between the wars, thanks to Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch’s first call in France when modern foodhistory was born.It was from 1960, once the Second World War was over, when Fernand Braudel and the AnnalesSchool took the initiative. Within the frame of Total History, according to the Annales Schoolideal, the new food history project was drawn up following more strict and demanding criteria andit was presented with much more magnitude as an interdisciplinary research systematizing the workand applying quantitative methods. In half a century the approach has evolved towards social andcultural aspects/facts. In 1987 Jean-Louis Flandrin denounced the food history critical situation andproposed an ambitious extension of its perspectives.Nowadays, food history has widened its meaning including not only the strictly material aspectsbut also the purely cultural ones. Food history’s backbone is the history of the society reflectedthrough food, or the other way round, food can also be seen through the history of society. As it isshown in Food History, published under Jean-Louis Flandrin & Massimo Montanari’s direction, food history has reached a wide and multiple dimension required to show its evolution through historyand make the food fact more understanding.In this article, not aimed to deal with the subject thoroughly, we have tried to follow the foodhistory path through history highlighting the main contributions from different countries and payingspecial attention to Spanish Historiography.