Eating the Enlightenment
Food and the Sciences in Paris, 1670-1760
"Eating the Enlightenment" offers a new perspective on the history of food, looking at writings about cuisine, diet, and food chemistry as a key to larger debates over the state of the nation in Old Regime France. Embracing a wide range of authors and scientific or medical practitioners – from physicians and poets to philosophes and playwrights – E. C. Spary demonstrates how public discussions of eating and drinking were used to articulate concerns about the state of civilization versus that of nature, about the effects of consumption upon the identities of individuals and nations, and about the proper form and practice of scholarship. En route, Spary devotes extensive attention to the manufacture, trade, and eating of foods, focusing upon coffee and liqueurs in particular, and also considers controversies over specific issues such as the chemistry of digestion and the nature of alcohol. Familiar figures such as Fontenelle, Diderot, and Rousseau appear alongside little-known individuals from the margins of the world of letters: the draughts-playing cafe owner Charles Manoury, the "Turkish envoy" Soliman Aga, and the natural philosopher Jacques Gautier d'Agoty. Equally entertaining and enlightening, "Eating the Enlightenment" will be an original contribution to discussions of the dissemination of knowledge and the nature of scientific authority.
Content
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Intestinal Struggles
2. From Curiosi to Consumers
3. The Place of Coffee
4. Distilling Learning
5. The Philosophical Palate
6. Rules of Regimen
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
Reviews
"['Eating the Enlightenment'] rewards those who might decide to engage with its fascinating content. Focusing on the Parisian who's who, Spary explores debates and cultural dynamics that eerily remind us of the way many contemporary consumers in post-industrial societies decide what and how to eat... Spary's book not only provides us with great information to understand the development of a cuisine that is still among the most prestigious worldwide, but also elicits reflections to our present-day attitudes about food, dietary choices, and their connections to much larger social issues" – Fabio Parasecoli, Huffington Post
"With this remarkable book, E. C. Spary captures both the science and the sensuality that drove the culture of eating during the French Enlightenment. This is a richly textured history of the transformations that occurred in food science and gustatory practices from 1670 to 1760: it reveals the complex web of relations that bound knowledge about food with knowledge tout court in eighteenth-century Paris, a city that was both a metropolis of exotic consumption and a highly public arena for the display and contestation of claims to learned authority about food. Yet Spary gives us far more than just a new history of eating, taste, and gastronomic connoisseurship: she also provides a groundbreaking account of the Enlightenment, understood not as a neatly packaged ideological movement but as a highly localized process whose aspirants ranged well beyond such famous figures as Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot. With its wealth of insights into the history of the body as well as French culture, 'Eating the Enlightenment' offers abundant food for thought for scholars and students in a wide range of fields" – Anne Vila, University of Wisconsin-Madison
"Creatively crossing disciplinary boundaries and interweaving a wide variety of subjects and source materials to show how social, epistemological, and even political authority was constituted in debates about delicacies and digestion, E. C. Spary's 'Eating the Enlightenment' is sure to be of interest to historians, literature scholars, and historians of science alike" – Rebecca L. Spang, author of "The Invention of the Restaurant"
"E. C. Spary successfully demonstrates that food is a serious matter of history, involving learned controversies, commercial networks, medical expertise, and even political stakes. This tasty and nourishing book offers us a fresh and unexpected view on Enlightenment culture and Parisian society and raises this important question: why, after all, do people eat what they eat?" – Antoine Lilti, Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales Paris
