Description

Feast and Famine traces the history of food and famine in Ireland from the sixteenth to the early twentieth century. It looks at what people ate and drank, and how this changed over time. The authors explore the economic and social forces which lay behind these changes as well as the more personal motives of taste, preference, and acceptability. They analyze the reasons why the potato became a major component of the diet for so many people during the eighteenth century as well as the diets of the middling and upper classes. The authors also look at the relationship between the supply of food and the growth of the population and then finally, and unavoidably in any history of the Irish and food, the issue of famine, examining first its likelihood and then its dreadful reality when it actually occurred.

Features

• Covers over four hundred years of food and famine in Ireland
• Charts the early development of the modern palate
• Co-written by a qualified dietician, the book brings a new approach to the history of food in Ireland

Reviews

"Clarkson and Crawford deserve to be congratulated on putting famine into perspective as part of the dietary history of Ireland."--Albion

"This book rescues food and nutrition from what the authors call the basement of history... the study of history with food and drink omitted is incomplete history, and this book is an important demonstration of that maxim."--Europe: Early Modern and Modern

Product Details

336 pages; 28 line illus; ISBN13: 978-0-19-822751-9ISBN10: 0-19-822751-5

About the Author(s)