First of all, I know you had some trouble narrowing your book choices down to five – and you also said it was difficult to restrict yourself to English-language books. Can you tell us what made it so hard?

If you’d asked me about the French Revolution, another of my fields, I probably would have reacted in the same way. Choosing the “best” books on any subject always implies invidious omissions, because books are pertinent or engaging for different reasons at different moments, and I think it’s hard to say in universal, unqualified terms: “These are the five best books in my field.” It’s particularly difficult in the food field, because food is at the confluence of five, six, seven disciplines – and it’s almost impossible when you do food history not to be doing at the same time food anthropology, food economics, food sociology, et cetera. So there’s a sprawling literature, and different books are compelling for different reasons and on different occasions.

Personally, I felt extremely uneasy about making some kind of hierarchical order out of the literally hundreds and hundreds of books that I’ve read in the course of the last 40 years, in what was once an embryonic and completely inchoate field, and has now become rather a growth industry. It’s particularly complicated in the food field, because you get a really bizarre mixture of books. You get books that are serious, scholarly undertakings; you get the history of the chocolate éclair (or the crêpe Suzette or baked Alaska) by a well-meaning foodie who has no idea about how to do history; you have cookbooks; you have books about cookbooks; you have meta-analyses; you have ethnographic studies – you have an absolutely exuberant array of different approaches, and that makes it difficult to make some kind of hard-and-fast choice about what’s best. So, yes, I chafed under your constraints.

That’s understandable. Before we go on to talk about your first book, can you give us a brief history of the field of food history itself?

The field probably goes back about 40 years. That’s when people began seriously writing about food in academia. Certainly, people had been writing about food for a long time, but it was a field that was largely journalistic, and in journalism different criteria apply – there are different kinds of evidentiary rules, and different tests for truth claims, different kinds of logics come to bear. So there was an important and influential journalistic literature in the 19th century, but it wasn’t really until the 1970s that we began to see scholars moving into the field – and they moved into the field with some manifest inquietude, especially in history. It was more natural for people to do this in anthropology, because they were dealing with societies whose chief preoccupation, in many cases, was simply food (food was at once the ration of survival, the focus of sacrality and religion, the major object or item or instrument of exchange, and so on). Anthropologists in some sense didn’t face the kind of resistance that we faced in history.

I remember in history it was not seen as being serious, initially, to be writing about food. It was one thing to go and have dinner, and it was another to try to get tenure by writing about food. But gradually, as we began to make the case for this kind of work, and as we began to define the field in fairly broad terms, it became clear that it was a hybrid of economic, social, cultural, religious, and political history – that it spoke to the mainstream epistemological and methodological questions of doing history – and so, after the initial period of resistance and scepticism and even sometimes contempt on the part of certain people, by the mid-1980s it became clear to people that this was a real field.

It’s important to stress here that the history of food is not, and never has been, coterminous with the history of gastronomy. It’s a very easy error to make, and I think it’s a categorical and fundamental error. The history of food is not about spending $500 at a Ducasse restaurant, or going to the new three-star restaurant in Copenhagen with its imaginatively inventive terroir – that’s not what the history of food is about. Gastronomy is only a small part of the history of food. The wider field begins with the search for food and the growing of food, the cultivating of food. It begins with farming, with animal husbandry. It begins, indeed, with hunting and gathering. And it covers the production, transformation, and communication of food – how it’s distributed, how it traverses space through commerce, how it enters into the market nexus and then the various ways in which social stratification segments its utilisation.

It’s a story that’s rich, textured, and highly differentiated – one that has different trajectories in different societies, in different cultures, one that is characterised by different words in different languages, and one that raises questions of a tremendous diversity. I mean, food can be the body and the blood of Christ, food can be a way in which to create trust in a business meal, food can be part of an act of seduction, food can be an arm in warfare (cold or hot), food can be a form of social control, it can be a form of political legitimation. It just has so many different incarnations. It has always been, and still is, a great mistake to think about food history as being the Julia Child/James Beard/Joël Robuchon/Heston Blumenthal Fat Duck what-have-you story. It’s not that. It’s not just about fine dining.