thE hISTORY OF FOOD WASTE
A third of the food we produce today goes to waste, and saving it from the bin is an important part of the global fight against climate change. This got me thinking: how was wasting food understood in the past, and how did people mitigate it through food preservation and reusing leftovers? Very little has been written about these questions despite their importance to the present day!
My book Leftovers: A History of Food Waste & Preservation is out with Head of Zeus, Bloomsbury in March 2024. It explores these themes from the medieval era – through industrial revolution, world wars, and the pandemic – right until today.
I co-edited a special issue of the Global Food History journal on ‘Food Waste in Historical Perspective’. Articles in the collection explore thrift and culinary experiment in early modern England and Victorian cookbooks, the practical and symbolic function of pies in the early modern British world, the emergence of skimmed milk powders as an industrial reuse of waste products, and soviet management of food scarcity during the 1930s.
My article ‘Introduction to the Global History of Food Waste’ will soon be published on the Bloomsbury Food Platform. It summarises the key interdisciplinary scholarship in this field, and makes the case for it to become a thriving area of historical research, suggesting potential themes and methodologies.
Having co-organised a conference at Cambridge University on the topic, I co-edited a series of online articles for the Recipes Project under the title ‘Waste Not, Want Not: An Introduction to Histories of Food Waste, Thrift, and Sustainability’.
