What kind of readership do you hope for Eating the Enlightenment?

I suppose my imagined readership begins with a small core of historians of science with whom I am in constant debate. I also hope to reach those interested in the history of food, and suggest some new kinds of questions that might be asked about it.

Outside that circle, I hope it will be read by others who are interested in the conditions of formation of new knowledge, and in the reasons why the history of knowledge is so often told about so few. For eating is something everybody does almost all the time, so knowing about eating is a reflexive practice — we all have to choose between sources of advice — and I wanted to underline the argument, made by sociologists of science such as Steven Shapin, that all knowledge-making involves routine decisions about the credibility of competing claims. Not all people may have access to specialist institutions or skills, but on a daily basis, all of us have to navigate a complex set of alternatives in order to eat well, and in so doing we are deciding which claims about eating are the ones to trust. It is fascinating to me that one can see this happening even in the eighteenth century.

What were some of the challenges you faced during this project?

The research for the book took a number of years, and during that time I had a child and changed jobs, so there was a lot of upheaval behind the scenes which made the writing process more difficult than usual. But the materials for the book were available in abundance, since it depended heavily on documents that were rapidly being made available in a searchable form. …the historian’s struggle, I think, is always to keep the balance between individual agency and the need to convey the bigger picture, in one and the same narrative. An example here was the online digitized edition of the Encyclopédie, which had recently become available when I began to prepare the book.

Perhaps the most challenging academic problem that I faced was the difficulty of identifying many of the more unusual characters who feature in the book — often, they were not even the sort of people who would traditionally appear in biographical resources. I can’t claim to have had as much success as I would have liked in finding out more about the merchants, authors and café proprietors with whom the book is filled. One develops a passion to identify these individuals with more precision, because their writings survive and the impulse is to create a sort of narratorial identity for them, to salvage them all from forgetfulness and give them relevance. But it is also necessary to recognize that it is not always going to be possible to find out more about some unknown shopkeeper who had a café on the rue Saint-André-des-Arts in 1732: the historian’s struggle, I think, is always to keep the balance between individual agency and the need to convey the bigger picture, in one and the same narrative.

My biggest problem of all, though, was laughter — I am embarrassed to think of the times I came across a story in the archive or a library which inadvertently made me laugh out loud. Eventually I came to understand that this ludic function of writing about food was not an accident, but was, for eighteenth-century authors, the essence of food qua knowledge. And for some this was an acceptable feature of knowledge, so that to include food among the possible objects of scholarly attention was a good thing, in keeping with the wish of many philosophes to craft a learning that was both scholarly and worldly, rather than being sequestered in universities or the Church. But for others food could not be the object of knowledge, because that would have the inevitable effect of satirising scholarship as a whole. So to laugh at these food satires and jokes was a form of complicity with the debate.