Response

    Food interest has increased over the years and the discipline seems to be an emergent field. However, the field of food has been there for ages but people were not as interested as they are currently. Most people nowadays are too much determined by studying individual ingredients while others have engaged in the publishing of cookery books that are currently in high demand. Thus with this increment in food interest, food studies cannot be avoided and food history is essential in understanding food development over the years. This paper, therefore, will present and discuss some of the ideas that clearly show the relationship between the two articles.

    According to the two articles, it is quite evident that food history has been there for ages and people used to engage in talks about food. However, these talks were not written down during those eras since the cooks and bakers were illiterate and this made not to realize their unique interest in food. With the current globalization and modernization, the idea of cookbooks and recipes were introduced with an aim of airing the voice of these cooks and bakers so as to help the caregivers and all the other groups of people so as to be able to survive and be healthy. This has greatly contributed to the increasing interest in food.

    The two authors argue out that electronic media has played an important role in the development of food history. Some of these recipes and cookbooks are found online and digitized texts that enable accessibility by the majority of the people. This has helped in sensitization on the essence of food topic in academics. This digitized media has allowed for the presentation of food through the use of images as well as pictures that people can relate to (Albala 7).

A good example is the use of images for some of these ingredients so that readers can familiarize with the ingredients.

    The emergence and acceptance of the food history and the increasing interest in food have resulted in the creation of many job opportunities to food-related fields. An example is a high number of publishers for these cookbooks, the food historians, the cooks as well as the academic teachers who offer education on food unit. Food has, therefore, become a profitable genre, especially in the press and publishing industry as the old cookbooks have been reprinted over and over again in various forms (Freedman et al 278).

    The study of food history is incorporated with that of the feeding or eating habits by the human beings. Thus most of the writers for these cookbooks have shifted their core focus onto the study of recent food eating habits and especially that of their origin tradition (Freedman et al 276). Thus the two articles have greatly focused on the social, cultural, economic as well as the intellectual measures of consumption. Thus the authors are more interested in explaining the ingredients, the cooking methods, and recipes. They also explain the life of the cooks as well as their societies, expertise, aspiration and pride. The cookbooks, therefore, have enhanced the people to be able to follow the advice of these cooks and thus making them have more interest in food.

    Illiteracy, as portrayed by the two authors, is the major cause of disinterest amongst the people of that society. Thus the societies that are still not up to date with the current trend in food discipline are unfortunate as they have not been able to have a proper documentation and thus the low interest on food topic.

Thus they fail to get guidelines on the food recipes of their own society but rather they follow other cooks guidelines from other societies since the cookbooks are written by outsiders. Thus it is quite clear that in nations where illiteracy rate for women and poverty rate is high, cookbooks are quite rare as compared to other nations that have high literacy rates and are wealthy.

Conclusion

    It is thus evident that food history has improved over the past decades and it is expected to continue improving with time. Different groups of people such as the culinary historians as well as food historian and cooks have been able to voice out their ideas on food and it is this enlightenment that has yielded the increase in food interest. Various elements of food such as nutrition, eating habits, recipes, ingredients, culinary foods and the kitchen are widely discussed in the various cookbooks. However, the development of food has not been evenly distributed across the world as it is only limited to the rich and literate nations. The state of food currently is not the same as that of the past and neither will it be the same with that of the time to come. Electronic media through printing, publishing and the internet has widely enhanced a wider coverage of the targeted groups of people such as the women, the youth and some proportion of men.

 

 

 

 

 

References

    Albala, Ken. "History on the Plate: The Current State of Food History." Historically Speaking 10.5 (2009): 6-8.

    Freedman, Paul, Joyce E. Chaplin, and Ken Albala, eds. Food in time and place: the American Historical Association companion to food history. Univ of California Press, 2014.