by Ashley Parry

As we now enter the time of year where many people in the UK are preparing to indulge in feasting and partying, what better way to mark this festive season than to explore how food and drink have been enjoyed and represented throughout history and across the globe. Thankfully, the Art Library and Bodleian collections contain a wide range of books on the subject – hopefully with something to tempt any palate!

Food is deeply embedded in many cultures around the world and the way that artists depict their national cuisines has a lot to say about not only diets, but also politics and the way that these artists want their culture and its food to be seen. For example, the book Farm to Table: Art, Food, and Identity in the Age of Impressionism explores how attitudes to food – long a source of French soft power – were shaped by the turbulent period at the end of the nineteenth-century, and how impressionist painters sought to both stabilise and question pre-existing ideals. Then, in Art and Appetite: American Painting, Culture, and Cuisine, each essay by the book’s various authors explores a different period of US painting, and how depictions of food also represented trends of anxiety, nationalism, and consumerism.

The way that food loaded with meaning can be used to tell national and cultural stories can also be seen in ancient literature. As John Wilkins argues in The Boastful Chef: The Discourse of Food in Ancient Greek Comedy, for Greek poetry and drama, the consumption of food, is usually associated with successful sacrifices to the gods, and therefore, a world running as it should. Because these sacrifices are so often unsuccessful in tragedy and epic, it is only comedy that is allowed to return to the subject of food repeatedly. Wilkins furthermore notes that comedy, above all other Greek genres available to us, includes enough variety of people and life experiences that the authors are able to explore the cultural significance of food in a wide-ranging way. Similarly, in Fillets of Fatling and Goblets of Gold, Dan Belnap examines Ugaritic literature to find evidence of the ritual significance of feasts and other meals in the Ancient Near East.

However, visual art and literary depictions can only tell half the story. To learn more, it really helps to examine archaeology and material culture, and this is part of what I have found so fascinating about exploring this topic at the Art Library: food and drink is a great medium for exploring the intersection between art and archaeology and for showing just how much they’re linked! It can be difficult, though, to find direct evidence of food and its consumption, due to the biodegradable nature of foodstuffs – outside of famous outliers like the carbonised bread uncovered in Pompeii (pictured below). Even though, as shown in the book Ancient Starch Research, there are methods available to archaeologists for looking at ancient food directly, these are very specific and reliant on chance.

The information from such methods can be supplemented by looking at the tools that people used to prepare and eat their food. For instance, in Dining with the Sultan, Jessica Hallett details how Persian turquoise jars found as far afield as Japan and Chinese tableware found at Iranian sites from the same period attest to the connectedness of the Abbasid world. It was this connectedness that allowed the Abbasid empire access to commodities such as cinnamon and rhubarb. Then, in Elegant Eating: Four Hundred Years of Dining in Style and Feeding Desire: Design and the Tools of the Table, 1500-2005, there are many examples of more modern, but no less fascinating historical utensils. Have you ever heard of a macaroni knife? What about an ice cream hatchet? I certainly hadn’t before this book.

Then again, the beautiful designs of the cutlery and ceramics in the last two books show how it’s not always easy to draw a line between visual and material culture. For example, the exhibition recorded in Feast & Fast: The Art of Food in Europe 1500-1800 relies on a mixture of both objects and artworks, and sometimes a blending of the two, as utensils for serving consumables, are often adorned with images of them too, such as the pineapple-inspired Staffordshire porcelain teapot shown below. A very similar Staffordshire teapot is also featured in Feast & Fast.

However, Feast: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art goes a step further than this and asks what if the act of eating and serving food can be art. These range from Tom Marioni’s The Act of Drinking Beer With Friends is the Highest Form of Art to Marina Abramović’s Communist Body/Fascist Body.

I was particularly inspired by Los Angeles-based art collective Fallen Fruit, and I especially enjoyed reading about their Public Fruit Jam projects. During these events, members of the public are invited to bring fruit and to work with strangers to make jam. I love this concept because of the way it encourages community collaboration and new approaches to cooking and ingredients.

On that note, we hope that you too find something that inspires you in this collection of books – or perhaps just something new. From all of us at the Art Library, have a satisfying and fun-filled holiday season!

Bibliography

P. Arbiter, Petronii Arbitri Cena Trimalchionis, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1975.

V. Avery and M. Calaresu (eds.), Feast & Fast: The Art of Food in Europe 1500-1800, London : Philip Wilson Publishers, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2019.

J. A. Barter (ed.), Art and Appetite: American Painting, Culture, and Cuisine, Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago, 2013.

H. Barton and R. Torrence, Ancient Starch Research, Walnut Creek CA, Left Coast Press, 2006.

D. Belnap, Fillets of Fatling and Goblets of Gold: The Use of Meal Events in the Ritual Imagery in the Ugaritic Mythological and Epic Texts, Piscataway NJ, Gorgias Press, 2008.

K. Bendiner, Food in Painting: From the Renaissance to the Present, London, Reaktion, 2004.

A. Briers, Eat, Drink and Be Merry, Oxford, Ashmolean Museum, 1990.

S. Coffin, Feeding Desire: Design and the Tools of the Table, 1500-2005, New York, Assouline, 2006.

G. E. Cummins, Antique Boxes – Inside and Out: For Eating, Drinking and Being Merry, Work, Play and the Boudoir, Easthampton MA, Antique Collectors’ Club, 2006.

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L. DeWitt and A. J. Eschelbacher (eds.), Farm to Table: Art, Food, and Identity in the Age of Impressionism, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2024.

P. Glanville and H. Young (eds.), Elegant Eating: Four Hundred Years of Dining in Style, London, V&A Publications, 2002.

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H. S. Nielsen and I. Nielsen (eds.), Meals in a Social Context: Aspects of the Communal Meal in the Hellenistic and Roman World, Aarhus, Aarhus University Press, 1998.

K. O’Connor, The Never-Ending Feast: The Anthropology and Archaeology of Feasting, London, Bloomsbury Academic, 2015.

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S. Smith (ed.), Feast: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art, Chicago, Smart Museum of Art, 2013.

U. Söderlind, Ancient Foodways: Gastronomy in Egypt, Greece, Rome, Luristan and the Muslim World, Malmö : Universus Academic Press, 2015.

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D. L. Thurmond, A Handbook of Food Processing in Classical Rome: For Her Bounty No Winter, Leiden, Brill, 2006.

F. Whitlum-Cooper, Discover Liotard & the Lavergne Family Breakfast, London, National Gallery Global, 2023.

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