This article, based on “Changing Tastes: The Effects of Eating Out,” the Annual Distinguished Lecture at SOAS Food Studies Centre given on March 21, 2018, focuses on change and continuity in the practice of dining out in England between 1995 and 2015. After briefly describing a restudy in three cities—Bristol, London, and Preston—the article investigates two tendencies that have progressed over the twenty-year period: familiarization and diversification. Dining out has become more common but at the same time variety has increased, allowing the expression of taste in the form of cultural omnivorousness. Behind these patterns can be found a small number of principles which steer the practice of dining out, ones shared almost universally but observed in different ways and to different degrees by sections of the population. Cohort, class, ethnicity, and location are important sources of differentiation, but almost everyone is subject to and influenced by similar imperatives to experience variety, feel comfortable, and display adequate practical knowledge. It is concluded that the rate of change has been relatively slow and that major current trends have been in train since the 1970s.

This article traces a transnational history of turtle soup through the flow of species, tastes, culinary techniques, and food technology across three continents over more than three centuries. It shows how the species, nested in the Caribbean, turned from a source of flesh for transatlantic seamen in the seventeenth century to a status dish for upper-class Europeans in the eighteenth century. The pleasure of eating turtle soup was underpinned by exotic references to “the West India Way” and national labels such as “the English fashion.” Such notions circulated via printed media across a variety of genres, constructing tastes that only a minority could afford; the less privileged consumed “mock turtle soup,” made with calf's head at best. Around the same time, turtle soup in “the English fashion” was reproduced in Asia along with the trading activities and colonial endeavors of the British Empire. Into the second half of the nineteenth century, with the invention of canned food, the once upper-class dish became widely popularized in the United States. The disastrous result was that the sea turtle hunt evolved from occasional seizure to outright massacre, which did not come to a halt until the 1970s, when the practices were outlawed.