Cuisine, Nationality and the Making of a National Meal: The English Breakfast

Abstract

The cultural turn in history — and the concomitant historical turn in anthropology — have brought material culture to the fore as a medium and interdisciplinary method for the study of society over time. To what early anthropologists called the classic domains of material culture — food, housing, and clothing — have now been added all the other material forms in which cultural values and social identity are embedded. Yet although landscape, consumer goods and interior design have now become commonplace subjects of cultural histories, food has yet to find as central a position in the cultural historian’s repertoire, although for anthropologists it has always been a primary form of material culture (Firth, 1940; Douglas, 1970, 1971; Goody, 1982, 1998; Mintz, 1985, 1996; Sahlins, 1976). This is a striking lacuna, for as the anthropologist and cultural theorist Mary Douglas (1997, p. 7) put it succinctly, ‘food is not feed’. That food is essential to life gives it a fundamental physiological importance, but it is the symbolic aspect of food, and the insights it provides into society and history, that accounts for the importance accorded to it in anthropology.