The Embodied Imagination in Recent Writings on Food History

Recent research on food history has challenged the Cartesian mind-body dualism, revealing important connections between the material-sensory properties of foods and the mental-discursive meanings attached to them. The concept of the embodied imagination provides scholars with a useful tool for analyzing the social and cultural fantasies inspired by sensory perceptions and the ways that cultural meanings attached to taste, purity, and hunger shape the physical experience of these sensations. The brain’s multisensory interpretation of food—understood as flavor or physical taste—is filtered through the memory of past meals, thereby providing the mechanism for constructions of taste as social distinction. By developing an archive of taste and examining historical moments of changing food preferences, scholars have begun to reveal the dynamic interrelations between social and sensory expressions of taste. Purity, another concept that is simultaneously embodied and imagined, has begun to figure in present-day debates about the industrial transformations of food. Engaging with these debates, food historians call attention to the socially constructed nature of purity and emphasize the importance of the women’s and migrants’ labor in food preparation. A final contribution of historical research on food has been to connect the physical experience of hunger, including the hunger that inspired obesity, and the politics of food distribution. Food historians have thus captured a wide audience beyond the academy, helping to assert the relevance of the humanities to society and policy.