Food Waste and Sustainable Eating in Historical Perspective

Today, food waste garners increasing attention in the headlines as calls for direct action on climate change intensify. A third of all the food we produce globally goes to waste, and if all this needlessly discarded produce were a country it would be the third greatest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions in the world. Scholars in the social sciences are beginning to explore in print the complex political, socio-economic, religious, and cultural reasons why food is wasted – be it lost in agricultural production, spoiled in transit, discarded at the retail stage, or wasted at home. Yet, very little has been written on this topic from a historical perspective. 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. The collection begins with Simon Werrett’s study of thrifty recipes in early modern England, an essay that draws out the important similarities between Isaac Newton’s experiments using glass prisms to refract light and Anne Shackleford’s culinary advice that candied fruit juice should be left upon glass on a windowsill to be sun-dried. Experimental recipes performed by cooks and natural philosophers were seen as “part of the same enterprise” in this period. Both scientists and housewives experimented by “putting together what was at hand to create something new.” However, as Werrett shows, thrifty kitchen experiments performed by women such as Shackleford were gradually written out of the emerging realm of natural philosophy, with consequences for women’s place in what would later be termed “science.” By the nineteenth century, the practices of culinary and scientific experimentation were wrenched apart by ideas about the public and the private. An anecdote recounted in this essay provides the inspiration for our cover image, by the journal’s artist Roxane van Beek. The natural philosopher Robert Boyle described an experiment with an egg in which he observed tiny light refractions visible in the froth of the egg white, thus illustrating a moment of discovery and re-seeing with wonder what we now take for granted. Amanda Herbert and Michael Walkden’s piece focuses on one particular form of “culinary experiment,” the pie crust, which was first imagined in the medieval period as GLOBAL FOOD HISTORY 2023, VOL. 9, NO. 3, 221–224 https://doi.org/10.1080/20549547.2023.2258014