Introduction: Food as Medicine, Medicine as Food

The history of food is “well and truly out of the academic wilderness.”1 Long a marginalized area of inquiry in both food studies programs and history departments, food history has moved into the historical mainstream since the early 2000s, and found institutionalization in conferences, journals, anthologies, and programs of study.2 The publication of companion guides to food history perhaps signaled this move most of all.3 In addition to being at the center of an increasingly well-demarcated field, food has also become a useful category of analysis in political, social, and environmental histories. Food has been recognized, for example, as a particularly illuminating way of examining empire and globalization.4 At the opposite end of the scale, food forms part of local and national history.5 Changing technologies of food production in the home have been linked to shifts in gender roles and particularly to increasingly housebound women.6 Environmental historians have used food to raise issues around resource management, economic development, and the configurations of notions such as purity and the natural.7