History Of Food Consumption

... teenth century. The mapping of famine was an early example of how gov-ernments reflected on their obligations of monitoring the welfare of their people, what Michel Foucault has called 'biopower'. Interestingly, through attention ...

Packaged goods preserved in sugar or vinegar appeared on an industrial scale in Britain in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, yet they are rarely accorded any significance in food histories or histories of the retail grocery trade. Their extended shelf life was a very welcome feature in an era before refrigeration; in this they resembled hams and cheeses but they had the additional advantage that they were often in hermetically sealed bottles and so could be carried to the other side of world without deterioration. Where the bottles bore a label they were also standard bearers of the brand revolution to come. Customers learned to trust the brands and the implicit quality guarantee they bore. In several ways, therefore, these goods prefigured the globalization of foodstuffs that is commonplace today.