Still Life with Ham, by Philippe Rousseau, c. 1870. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Collection, Wolfe Fund, 1982.

Food

Volume IV, Number 3 | summer 2011

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Still Life, by Carstian Luyckx, c. 1640. Columbus Museum of Art.

Preamble

The Midas Touch

By Lewis H. Lapham

The times change, and with them what, where, and how people eat.

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Kitchen Scene, by Peter Wtewael, c. 1620. The Metropolitian Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1906.

Death in the Pot

By Deborah Blum

Before the regulation of the food industry, there was very little preventing us from eating poison.

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Map

Food Chains

Tracing the world travels of tomato, pepper, and coffee.

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Miscellany

In the 1790s in the United States, the average American over the age of fifteen consumed almost six gallons of pure alcohol per annum. The modern figure is 2.8.

1180 | Canterbury

Conspicuously Consuming Clergy

The expensive taste of medieval monks.More

c. 64 | Campania

Piggy Bank

Petronius witnesses an embarrassment of sausages.More

c. 1250 BC | Mt. Sinai

No Seagull, Hold the Camel

Thus saith the Lord: eat this, not that.More

Charts & Graphs

Detail of list

The Great Meal Theory of History

The most famous feasts of all time.

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Painted portrait of English poet John Milton.

Comedian, actor, and writer Patton Oswalt.

Photograph of American editor Brent Cunningham.

American poet Allen Ginsberg.

Black and white photograph of Mencken looking over his shoulder at the camera

Photograph of journalist, author, and professor Michael Pollan.

Statue of the Persian poet Ferdowsi.

Portrait bust of Greek historian Xenophon.

Feasts must be solemn and rare, or else they cease to be feasts.

—Aldous Huxley, 1929

Irish author Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington.

Socialite, actress, model, and Warhol superstar Edie Sedgwick.

Marguerite Gardiner & the Sedgwick Sisters

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