I enjoyed the chapter, “The Philosophical Palate,” and in particular the section entitled, “The Decline of Taste.” Do you think contemporary “eaters” forget in general that food is a history? What are some ways to reconnect our tastes with those of past eras, or to situate our tastes in a different temporality?

E.C. Spary
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

I don’t think any eater forgets this. Every time they eat, they enact history. Every food choice is both the outcome and the production of history. However, food is not only one history, but many. This is why in the book I argue strongly against commodity history, which attempts to trace a continuous thread of meaning for a given foodstuff across time and place.

Foods are constantly being reinvented, and within individual societies they have a variety of historical meanings. These histories can be short or long term. There might be a history within your immediate family which explains why you do not like meat. Or you may have had contact with the long and distinguished history behind the modern vegetarian movement, which begins with Pythagoras (usually). Or you might appeal to history in the form of the degradation over time of the environment resulting from over-grazing to produce meat. For any of these historical reasons, you might decide to exclude meat from your diet. But even to say that you “never liked meat” is to create a history for your decision not to eat meat. The question is what provokes many people to act in concordance in the same way and thus for there to be a macroscopic change in eating habits in a society. This is the same question for historians and for legislators or analysts attempting to understand future trends or predict the fate of the meat product industry. It is the question that originally interested actor-network theorists in their attempts to explain how societies make collective change out of individual actions. As someone whose historiographical approach has been strongly structured by a concern with agency and power, I do see much public knowledge as being the result of collective action in this way. At the same time, collective outcomes — which are what historians usually take to be most important — cannot be predicted from studying individual action, or only to a very limited extent. This gives historians an advantage of hindsight which analysts and politicians do not possess.

I have doubts about the feasibility of replicating past tastes. There are two conditions which seem to me insurmountable, in the sense that we could never know whether we had been successful in the replication. One is the impossibility of following all the recommendations in cookbooks of the early modern period in order to replicate faithfully. Some cookbooks recommended that the best-flavoured kid came from animals nourished on aromatic herbs in dry landscapes, meaning we would be forced to find not only an organically reared kid of a breed identical to that used in the eighteenth century, but also one which had roamed wild through lavender bushes, say. This could be recreated, but only by those with immense resources. There are even some cookbooks which go to enormous lengths to specify the season, astral aspect, and time of day at which to harvest certain foods. What happens in practice is that the recreators of recipes ignore such information as having no bearing upon flavour, and use recipe recreation as a way of indulging a nostalgic desire for non-factory-reared meat produced in an eco-friendly setting. This choice of which attributes from history to select as the ones which determine flavour fits well with our current political sympathies, which is fine, but it does not give us a reliable guide to past taste experiences.

Every food choice is both the outcome and the production of history. However, food is not only one history, but many…. Foods are constantly being reinvented, and within individual societies they have a variety of historical meanings. These histories can be short or long term.

The second obstacle is that eighteenth-century eaters regarded their senses as the outcome of their whole lifetime’s experiences. Well into the nineteenth century, this view continued to prevail: the chemist Michel-Eugène Chevreul wrote in very old age that he had never drunk anything but water, in an effort to preserve his sense of taste in its full acuity. To taste like an eighteenth-century person, would you not have to have grown up in the eighteenth century? This might be literally the case: even organic foods and wild foods and our own bodies are now filled with certain industrial chemicals. These are affecting male fertility in every species worldwide; it seems entirely likely that less measurable things such as the sense of taste would have been profoundly altered by a lifetime of exposure to industrial chemistry.

So where historical tastes are concerned I am a radical relativist. I have no objection to trying dishes adapted from old recipes as an entertainment, but I don’t feel we can attain some authentic ‘experience of past tastes’ by so doing. There are just too many unknowable and uncontrollable factors involved. In the same way, I don’t see historians as writing “about the past,” but rather as constructing historical narratives which are more or less convincing to contemporaries, for a whole variety of reasons.

The interesting thing about recipes is that no matter how detailed they are, they can never exhaustively spell out all the conditions of production, like any set of rules or prescriptions. There is always space for manoeuvre between those rules and for reinterpretation from one iteration to the next. To situate our tastes in a different temporality? Eat a new meal. If you like, make it a futuristic meal. Novelty comes through creativity — in the story of Eating the Enlightenment, for sure — so to formulate and put into practice views about what a meal of the future would taste like is, de facto, to shape one possibility for future tastes. To recreate a meal of the past is actually to do the same thing — to innovate.