ICREFH’s mission is to organize symposia and publications – this book is the ninth in the series – aimed at understanding European food in all of its aspects (cultural, social, economic, political), as it has changed over the last 250 years. Our approach is avowedly international and inter-disciplinary and we regard this as a strength, since it gives our deliberations ‘hybrid vigour’. The coordination of scholarship is essential in any such enterprise and we hope that the reader will have found a harmony of voices rather than a cacophony.

This book is about food in the city in all its manifestations from the production, processing, marketing and consumption of food to the impact of urbanization upon diets and food systems. The International Commission for Research into European Food History (ICREFH) has given thought to cities and towns before, but has never concentrated on the larger urban aggregations, often with multiple centres, that grew up in Europe in the late nineteenth century, and which were characterized by Patrick Geddes (1854–1932) – the Scottish biologist – as ‘conurbations’. By 1900, Europe contained several large urban agglomerations, notably London, Paris, Berlin, followed in size by Moscow and Vienna. Their size meant that the supply and distribution of foodstuffs was especially complex: after collection and transportation to markets, food might be stale on arrival, in which case wholesalers and retailers alike sought to delay the deterioration of perishable items. Although London, Berlin and Paris were outstanding as centres of population, the metropolitan effect of a large primary town was also felt in smaller countries, like Belgium, as the stages in the food chain between farm gate and consumers’ kitchens grew, and in post-World War II Czechoslovakia to meet the regime’ s showcase requirements.

"Feeding the city" has been a prominent topic in historical literature for many decades. Most of this literature, however, remained based on the assumption that cities above a certain population level are essentially fed through the market, with rural agricultural surpluses being exchanged for the products of urban industry and trade. Stimulated by recent articulations of alternative ways of urban food provision-ing, this article reconsiders the importance of urban agriculture in European towns before 1850 from the perspective of "urban food alternatives". The scattered evidence suggests that in many European towns a significant part of the urban population was directly involved in food production, but also that important differences persisted both between towns and between households in a town. While traditional interpretations for instance, those linking urban agriculture with small towns, poverty, or the rise of commercial horticulture-fail to explain this spatial, social, and temporal variation, a better understanding of the success and decline of urban agriculture in different market configurations and in different social contexts might offer an important historical contribution to present-day debates on the viability and social dynamics of such urban food alternatives.

In 2007 I published a survey dealing with research about Europe's foodways in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 1 Rather than being interested in the conclusions of this research, I wished to examine how scholars study food history, which offered an opportunity for testing the application and relevance of interdisciplinarity. Luckily, not only historians but also scholars who were not trained as historians investigate foodways of the past. Studying food in the modern era has indeed attracted a large number of disciplines, ranging from anthropology and sociology to communication sciences and geography. I wished to learn whether and how these approaches, methods, and insights inspired historians. My conclusions confi rmed the extraordinarily thriving interest in Europe's past foodways by an ever-growing number of disciplines, the total lack of common ground of these studies, and their hesitant interest in interdisciplinary approaches. In this chapter I want to expand this inquiry by using recent literature and asking additional questions. I am, fi rst and foremost, interested in the way historians have dealt with the overwhelming attention from other disciplines since the early 2000s. Would they welcome it and explore new themes, methods, and insights, or resist and ignore the loud knock on their door? Also, I consider the question of how amateur historians (i.e., nontrained historians as well as nonacademics) set off with historical questions and debates, apply historical concepts, search for historical sources, and refer to adequate historical literature. This chapter has three sections: the fi rst two form a chronological survey with the year 2005 as a caesura (in order not to replicate my 2007 survey and to emphasize recent developments), while the third section is a lengthy conclusion. Separate Rooms in a Cozy Hut (1960s–1980s) and Accessible Rooms in a Welcoming House (1990s–2005) Broadly speaking, two intellectual loci in food studies existed between 1900 and 1960: that of economic history and that of folklore. 2 The two neglected each other. Economic historians dealt with the food supply, hunger, and prices, while folklorists studied

This paper introduces the special issue of Food & History, which is the product of a two-day colloquium that was organised in December 2010, aiming at closing a large-scale research project. This investigation questions whether food (and if so, to what extent) serves as a reliable proxy for measuring rough and more subtle social hierarchies. Three themes have been considered, which this paper presents and situates in a broader context: elite cuisine, middle-class shopping for food, and bourgeois eating out.

The last 20 years have seen a burgeoning of social scientific and historical research on food. The field has drawn in experts to investigate topics such as: the way globalisation affects the food supply; what cookery books can (and cannot) tell us; changing understandings of famine; the social meanings of meals - and many more. Now sufficiently extensive to require a critical overview, this is the first handbook of specially commissioned essays to provide a tour d’horizon of this broad range of topics and disciplines. The editors have enlisted eminent researchers across the social sciences to illustrate the debates, concepts and analytic approaches of this widely diverse and dynamic field. This volume will be essential reading, a ready-to-hand reference book surveying the state of the art for anyone involved in, and actively concerned about research on the social, political, economic, psychological, geographic and historical aspects of food. It will cater for all who need to be info...

This survey focuses on food history writing on 19th- and 20th - century Europe, by using a selection of book introductions, colloquium papers, critical reviews, and papers from specialised journals. It provides a chronological survey that starts in the 1980s, and ends with recent trends. It explores tensions between social- economic traditions and ethnological approaches, looks for the cultural, linguistic and other turns, and puts forward as a promising field of study the integrated approach of the food chain.

The urban food question is forcing itself up the political agenda in the Global North because of a new food equation that spells the end of the ‘cheap food’ era, fuelling nutritional poverty in the cities of Europe and North America. This article explores the rise of the urban food question in the Global North through the multiple prisms of theory, policy and political practice. First, it explores the theoretical ways in which the food system is being framed in urban planning, urban political ecology and community food security. Second, it charts the rise of new urban foodscapes associated with urban agriculture and public health. Finally, it identifies a new urban food politics and asks if this constitutes a new social movement.

London and Paris were the two largest centres of consumption in mid-nineteenth century Europe. London was the capital of an ever-extending global Empire and financial hub of the United Kingdom’s industrial revolution. A rapidly growing city in the first half of the nineteenth century (2.4 million in 1851), she relied upon her food wholesalers, retailers and transport managers to keep her metabolism in a state of positive balance. For a considerable period of time, London’s demand had been a stimulation to increasingly specialized food producers all over the nation, and beyond, but the introduction of steam-powered railways and ships added the possibility of moving perishable items such as fish and meat quickly over longer distances without loss of quality, and her nodal accessibility in the new transport network yielded a greater volume and variety of foodstuffs than available in other cities of equivalent status. Paris was smaller (1.2 million) and drew the bulk of her provisions from a shorter radius but the growth of the French railway system, focused on the capital city, opened up supplies beyond the Île de France.