An introduction to scholarship in the field of food waste and a call for more historical research on this topic, with suggested themes and methodologies.

Today, food waste garners increasing attention in the headlines as calls for direct action on climate change intensify. We still know surprisingly little about the ways in which historical actors thought about food waste, and how they reused, recycled, and disposed of it. Based on a selection of the papers presented at a conference at the University of Cambridge in 2019, this special issue highlights the potential of food waste as a subfield of historical research and encourages its further study. The five articles that follow shed light on the topic from a range of thematic and temporal perspectives, drawing on histories of visual and material culture, scientific experiment, and didactic nonfiction. As the authors demonstrate, practices around food waste – how and why people wasted food, preserved it, or recycled it into new dishes and products – fluctuated over the long epoch from the early modern period to the early twentieth century, in ways that reveal much more about the societies of the past: new moral values, socio-economic divisions, sources of knowledge, and gendered hierarchies.

Food Culture and Literary Imagination in Early Modern Italy offers fascinating new insights into the food culture of sixteenth-century Italy by analyzing an impressive range of early modern literary texts. It is a lively and detailed exploration of the changing ways in which food was consumed metaphorically and literally, that draws upon Laura Giannetti’s corpus of existing articles published elsewhere from 2006 onwards.

Through Venetian Inquisition trials relating to Protestantism, witchcraft, and Judaism, this article illuminates the centrality of food and eating practices to religious identity construction. The Holy Office used food to assert its model of post-Tridentine piety and the boundaries between Catholics and the non-Catholic populations in the city. These trial records concurrently act as access points to the experiences and beliefs—to the lived religion—of ordinary people living and working in Venice from 1560 to 1640. The article therefore offers new insight into the workings and impacts of the Counter-Reformation.

As the field of food history has come to fruition in the last few decades, cultural historians of early modern England have begun to recognize the significance of food and eating practices in the process of identity construction. Yet its effect on religious identities has yet to be written. This article illuminates a printed discourse in which Protestants laboured to define a new relationship to food and eating in light of the Reformation, from Elizabeth I's reign up until the Civil War. It is based on a wealth of religious tracts written by the clergy, alongside the work of physicians in the form of dietaries and regimens, which together highlight the close relationship between bodily and spiritual concerns. As a result of the theological changes of the Reformation, reformers sought to desacralize Catholic notions of holy food. However, by paying greater attention to the body, this article argues that eating continued to be a religiously significant act, which could both threaten spiritual health and enrich it. This discourse on food and eating helped draw the confessional boundaries and identities of the Reformation period, and so offers a rewarding and novel insight into English Protestantism.

I review Rebecca Earle’s Feeding the People: The Politics of the Potato . The book is at once a compelling account of the potato’s journey to become a global staple, and a seminal history of how eating came to feature in modern politics. In telling a story about the humble spud, Feeding the People does what all good food history should do: it shows us that food is never just sustenance, but is intricately connected to broader cultural, economic, and political processes that continue to shape the present-day.

Five articles in the Feast & Fast catalogue, which accompanied the exhibition of the same name on the history of food in early modern Europe at the Fitzwilliam Museum in 2020. Through historical objects and paintings, my contributions explore the role of food in gift-giving, food and the seven deadly sins in Christian theology, the links between food and charity, special diets for the ill and others, and the history of an accouchement set used for postpartum recovery at the time.

In 1616, Church of England clergyman Richard Bernard, then a preacher in Somerset, published a devotional handbook which aimed to help readers lead a pious life. Food emerged as a central concern in this task. Bernard advised how to eat in a godly manner and adopted an extended analogy between bodily and spiritual food which encouraged that eating be experienced as an expression of Protestant piety. I show how instructional religious works like Bernard’s offer a fruitful starting point from which to explore food and faith.