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 proposes that recipes are a form of culinary communication, suggesting that a recipe's biography is one of communicative moments, negotiations, and multiple voices. This framework is applied to The Art of Cooking, a series of culinary demonstrations organized by the Women's Committee at the Art Gallery of Toronto in the 1960s. The events, featuring chefs such as James Beard and Dione Lucas, were organized around the logics of gourmet cooking but departed from it when faced with the realities of women's daily lives. The research is based on archival documents and media coverage of these very popular events, which offer an opportunity to explore the mythologies and narratives about gourmet cooking in the 1960s. This article argues that communications about a recipe are part of the recipe's evolving biography and need to be analyzed alongside ingredients, instructions, makers, and users. In addition, the article advocates for the inclusion of women's committees’ histories to those of art museums in North America.

Food and wine are frequently named according to their place of production, either to protect the specific characteristics of a given product through regulatory frameworks or to assert the existence of a homogenized cuisine within a specific area. Both perspectives cause analytical problems, in particular with regard to conceptions of seemingly straightforward terms such as place and taste. The interest of this article is to carry out a philosophical investigation into how links between food and place are established. Its intent is to pave the way for a renewed understanding of overlooked perspectives in the existing interpretations of the relationship between places and food.

This paper examines taste as a factor in beer's arrival as a symbol of modernity in India, Japan, and China. From nineteenth-century colonial production of India pale ale to contemporary attempts by global brewing firms to profit from a burgeoning Chinese market, beer has had an important but largely unexamined role in modern Asian-European encounters. This paper follows distinct agents of transmission—merchants, migrants, and empire builders—and their interactions with local drinking cultures to shape the particular tastes and meanings associated with beer in these countries. The case studies illustrate the different relationships that each country had with Western imperialism: India as a subject of British occupation, China as a site of commercial competition between imperial rivals, and Japan as a nascent imperial power in its own right. Beer gained least acceptance in the Indian subcontinent, in part because of Hindu and Muslim moralizing, and it symbolized western modernity for those who wished to challenge traditional culture. South Asian preferences often focused more on alcohol content than on the taste of malt or hops. The Japanese became Asia's most avid consumers of beer, adapting German lagers to local tastes. Chinese beer drinking has been limited to cities, and local brands are also bland, which reflects the place of beer within Chinese meals as a neutral grain. More broadly, I suggest that beer became a subject for nation-building efforts in Asia precisely because of its cosmopolitanism, which provided status to nationalist ideologues and supported their program of transcending regional rivalries.

This paper introduces a special issue on “Rescuing Taste from the Nation: Oceans, Borders, and Culinary Flows.” It examines culinary linkages and sensory geographies across national boundaries, and highlights alternative spatial configurations of taste. From the politics of tea to the transnational pathways of turtle soup, papers attend to culinary cultures, systems of preparation, and forms of knowledge that escape or challenge a strictly national circumscription.

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.

This essay examines the significance of gustation in the history of therapeutics as a shared anthropological inheritance that mediates human relationships with the natural world. Bringing together ancient Indian, Chinese, and Western medical cosmologies, I argue that our faith in the curative properties of certain tastes—or “taste-based medicine”—has been remarkably enduring. Focusing on elite English medical practitioners over the long eighteenth century, I demonstrate that “taste-based medicine” not only survived transformations within the English medical marketplace and the rise of the “new science,” but actively mobilized debates about the constitution of expertise and who should have access to it.

José de Ribera's personification of Taste (c. 1615), part of a set of paintings depicting The Five Senses, has gained fame for its vivid, earthy depiction of a man and his meal. This essay attempts to situate Taste in the social milieu of its time, paying attention to the human figure in relation to the foodstuffs arranged before him. It briefly explores the man's physical type, pose, gestures, and clothing; the fare displayed on the table; the impact of the cost of food in Rome on various social classes; and the place of the image within artistic representations of the Five Senses. Surprisingly, Ribera deviated from traditional alimentary symbols of Taste by including a number of culinary conundrums. Wine, olives, and bread present no problems, but there also appears a prominent plate of food that has never been conclusively identified. Moreover, two additional items on the table remain a mystery. Therefore, consideration is limited here to the figure in conjunction with the comestibles that are easily recognized and the sheer quantity of the unknown food in the dish.

Until now, the impact of the expected climate changes on food has been almost entirely about crop yields, and fantasies about how olives might flourish in Oklahoma. This piece takes a narrow focus, asking how the changes in rainfall patterns and temperatures will possibly affect what a tomato tastes like, or whether the ““beef”” that our children enjoy will be too different for us to enjoy. Many important changes will be to the flavors of fish (already most palates can taste a difference between wild shrimp and farmed) and those foods relying on fragile herbs and flavors like vanilla. If food scenarios become very bad, no one is going to die from the loss of genuine basmati rice, but it is important to anticipate what we will lose. And enjoy it while we can.

In the Nineteenth Century, France became a nation that ate horse. The introduction of horsemeat into French cuisine marks a rare occurrence in history of a change in attitude, if not taste, towards a once tabooed food. Whether or not to permit hippophagy was, indeed, a matter of great debate at the time, having to do not only with the status of French cuisine, but also with the status of the horse. While the legalization of horsemeat for human food in 1866 was justified primarily on socioeconomic grounds -- horsemeat was a ready and cheap source of protein for those in need -- the consumption of horse remained a controversial idea because of the complex and conflicting affections horses inspired. The debates around hippophagy reveal an increasingly ambivalent attitude toward the horse and its potential subjectivity, especially since horses, in turn, had the power to represent the questionable subjectivity of certain "breeds" of humans and their status within the nation.