info:doi/10.1038/440422a 2006-03-23T00:00:00Z 2006-03-23T00:00:00Z © 2006 Nature Publishing Group Nature 440 7083 422 422 0028-0836 1476-4679 (?-mix:\s+\W+|\W+\s+|\s+|\/) food their disease about they Ferrières which not when often fears would those animals eat but meat other have title historical additives more after bread them into buying So If also whether has been safety here rather theme cultural although expense cow walk weary poor modern had taste well sold fruit at read worry Instead especially century ate fear labels than there age slaughter don't France own anxieties she assuring centres outside ago saturated boldly tuberculosis records no main mad dramatic take point butchers faithfully slaughtering traditionally luxury dish notably put liberalism refrigeration cheaply range feasted I generations People others interested primarily loom These cases edition statutes someone credit related transmuted widespread neighbours football unripe need amply allusion Animals tripe central persisting hundreds foot-and-mouth particular do social twentieth through empty well-exploited will pesticides her trichinosis literature inversely Halwek sensibilities fuzzy At driven perennial Many could allowing smelled Islington details become themselves given vegetable your farming slaughtered steam manuals earlier nothing transportation convincingly way time make stew appears fluency now unknown generate Among insights political crime textbooks book George wholesale died part too younger modified fine health literal grew different mile grain culture same unfit past All highlights milieu mouldy coverage revolved some wholesome English quantity table contemporary around last able beginning vegetables London golden inspected sometimes Thomas shop policy running tables find wool all markets intersections seen struggled There diets milk fatty translation defined imaginative theories product worried legal foodstuffs advice everyone varies temporally made quality Barker Issington permitted strata concerns volume none nineteenth give much variety these recent provide plenty She Social declined tendency stamping couldn't most subsidiary trusting depending formidable urban stated diet squeamish only hooliganism topicality Mad factory chain low ensured needed who eventually But invoked miles court panders think acids half-a-millennium dinner idea fantasies argues sticks called British including capacity belly dilemma French economic consumption despite premium sources Middle experiences done large Miasmatic tool badly one demonstrated domestic genetically Those Madeleine monograph us both powerful conveyed out destinies having Her clumsy trust got reminded Canning Ages crops control touched nuclear affluence easy extended version ailments determined city satisfy suburb concentrates circumstance consumed considers book's using inspection created Economic ranges list original sense longer commercial thence Away bourgeois deemed medical legislation forms residual daily rich under young appetites. families one's rotten chronological never Food quickly (?-mix:\.\s+(?=[A-Z])) All these contemporary concerns give Madeleine Ferrières' monograph a powerful topicality Among the formidable list of modern anxieties, those related to food safety loom large Animals no longer had to be able to walk to their destinies At the same time, more widespread affluence put a premium on taste, often at the expense of safety Away from France, some of the details become fuzzy: a London suburb appears as Issington, rather than Islington, and George Barker has transmuted into someone called Thomas Halwek But the subsidiary theme is also amply demonstrated: fear about food quality varies inversely with fear about food quantity, both temporally and through social strata Canning, transportation and, eventually, refrigeration extended the food chain Economic circumstance determined whether one ate tripe or rotten meat with one's bread, not whether vegetable stew was the main dish Ferrières also considers other foodstuffs, notably fruit, vegetables and grain Ferrières argues convincingly, I think, that the nineteenth century created the modern food dilemma Ferrières concentrates primarily on France, although there are insights into other cultural experiences, including the persisting British policy of stamping out disease using wholesale slaughter, which is a clumsy tool of disease control Food inspection declined as political and economic liberalism grew Her running theme is boldly stated: food fears are perennial, although they take different forms depending on the cultural milieu If they couldn't make it under their own steam, they were not permitted to be sold If your belly is empty, you don't worry too much about additives or saturated fatty acids Instead of trusting themselves, they had to trust others Instead, in earlier generations, domestic animals with tuberculosis, trichinosis, foot-and-mouth disease and a variety of other ailments made their weary way to the butchers, and thence to dinner tables Mad cow disease, genetically modified crops, factory farming, residual pesticides, additives — we read about them daily and are reminded of them when we shop by labels assuring us that we don't need to worry when buying this particular product Many would have been especially weary, having been driven hundreds of miles to urban markets Miasmatic theories of disease and bourgeois sensibilities ensured that the slaughtering was done outside the city centres People who would traditionally have seen, touched and smelled the food they were buying now needed only to read the labels She has a fine sense of the dramatic, faithfully conveyed in the translation, which is sometimes literal at the expense of easy fluency So is the tendency to eat younger animals, rather than those past their capacity to provide milk or wool So there is nothing about mad cow disease here, despite the allusion in the title of the English version Social fears often generate fantasies of a golden age, when football hooliganism was unknown, crime was low, nuclear families feasted on wholesome food, and everyone got on well with their neighbours The idea of allowing meat to age after slaughter is a recent luxury The poor were often given, or sold cheaply, animals deemed unfit for commercial consumption The title of the original French edition highlights the book's chronological coverage, which ranges from the Middle Ages to the beginning of the twentieth century There is none of that in this volume: the poor struggled, ate badly and died young These invoked their own fears, especially unripe fruit and mouldy bread, but most legislation revolved around meat, which was a central part of diets half-a-millennium ago This book is not for the squeamish, but those interested in the culture of the table, or the historical intersections of health, taste and diet, will find plenty here to satisfy their appetites. Those that could walk the last mile would be inspected, slaughtered and consumed quickly To her credit, she never panders to the worried well, but sticks to a rich and well-exploited range of historical sources: advice manuals, legal records, statutes, court cases, medical textbooks and imaginative literature We are, after all, what we eat; or more to the point, we are defined by what we do not eat 0