Letter from the Editor
I'm thrilled to introduce the Oxford Research Encyclopedia (ORE) of Food Studies, the youngest discipline covered by Oxford University Press’s catalogue of research encyclopedias. The study of food first came to the fore in the 1960s among French historians of the Annales School; it took a lot longer for the field to gain recognition in British and American academic circles. Many scholars were skeptical, considering the study of food insufficiently intellectual, too sensual and too closely linked to bodily processes. It didn’t help that food studies is inherently multidisciplinary, making its courses less easily slotted into traditional academic disciplines, each with their own methodologies. Food studies inevitably embraces numerous approaches ranging from the empirical, carried out in kitchens and laboratories, to the historical and archival, based on written documents as well as visual and material culture. As practiced today, the field of food studies could hardly be more wide ranging, drawing on issues of gender, class, race, ethnicity, labor, agriculture, economics, politics, the environment, aesthetics, and more.
It is no exaggeration to state that the entire range of human experience can be studied from the perspective of food. Apart from being necessary to sustain life, food is crucial to understanding how we live. Food reflects social, cultural, and metabolic processes even as it carries enormous emotional weight. Food can be at once a symbol of power, an aesthetic display, and an ideological expression, even a tool for propaganda. It is also an apt metaphor for desires beyond the purely physical: intellectual hunger, food for thought. The mind-body connection is strong: Erasmus advised readers to digest material rather than merely memorize it, while Montaigne described education and digestion as parallel functions.
The intersections of identity, environment, technology, and pleasure are central to who we are, both as individuals and as members of vastly different cultures and groups with distinctive ways of producing, preparing, and consuming food. The supply-chain issues during the pandemic brought heightened awareness not just of our global trade interdependency but of the intricate political, economic, cultural, and scientific concerns related to food. Food in contemporary society inevitably involves moral, religious, and practical judgments, which are often reflected in public policies. The ORE of Food Studies will dig deep into all of these issues by offering an impressive range of topics from the deeply historical to the most contemporary, among them hunger, food justice, labor, health, and the interplay between farming and the environment.
In launching the ORE of Food Studies, Oxford University Press has moved to the forefront of the field. The digital format of the encyclopedia enables the articles to be regularly updated to reflect the latest findings. It also allows for extensive cross-linking among the articles as well as to outside resources. We are especially fortunate to be able to cross-link to several important books on food and drink that OUP has published over the years, including Alan Davidson’s magisterial Oxford Companion to Food and the definitive Oxford companions to wine and beer. I very much look forward to sharing the encyclopedia’s evolving content with you as it expands our understanding of food’s centrality to life.
Darra Goldstein
Editor-in-Chief
Willcox B. and Harriet M. Adsit Professor of Russian
Emerita at Williams College
