From the outset, food and the essay have shared a kinship, given that one of the original senses of the word ‘essai’ meant the ritual of tasting the French king’s food and drink. From metaphor to content, food has permeated the essay form; in turn, the essay became the vehicle for the emerging field of gastronomy. This chapter constellates several important moments of interaction between literal and literary taste, consumption and appetite, cultural criticism and culinary knowledge in essays by Michel Montaigne, Alexandre-Balthazar-Laurent Grimod de La Reynière, Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, William Kitchiner, Launcelot Sturgeon, Charles Lamb, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Elizabeth Robins Pennell. As cosmopolitan practices of discretionary dining became more widespread, these gastronomic essayistic writers often satirised the burgeoning bourgeoisie and their cultural milieu. Given its flexibility, the essay remains paramount to food writing, in its many forms and genres.

Children’s first words are remarkably consistent over languages and over time: They first talk about people (dada, mama), food (juice), body-parts (eye), clothing (sock), animals (dog), vehicles (car), toys (ball), household objects (key), routines (bye), and activities (uhoh, up). Their first productions emerge between 12 months and 24 months, and they attain some 50 words in production about 6 months later. Earlier claims about a vocabulary spurt may rather reflect increased motor skill that aids production. Do children learn to produce nouns before verbs? The proportions of nouns and verbs differ by context, e.g., toy play versus book reading. Spontaneous speech samples and parental checklists of vocabulary often differ. Overall, production lags behind comprehension. This leads to communicatively driven overextensions in production until 2;6 or so, as well as reliance on general purpose terms (do, go, that). As children add more words, they stop using earlier overextensions. Early word meanings are based on children’s existing conceptual and perceptual categories, based on their experience of the world so far. And as they take different perspectives, they begin to use of different words for the same referent (animal, dog, pug; do, mend).

The chapter focuses on the influence of French cuisine in Britain. The innovations of French courtly cuisine were frequently mocked in Britain which had its own tradition of sound and economical country house cooking. The Industrial Revolution brought a loss of cooking skills among the urban poor. The affluent benefitted from the flight of French chefs after the French Revolution, leading to the culinary pretensions of the (equally mocked) Regency period. French chefs set up French restaurants and cooking schools, popularising French cuisine, thus influencing the tastes of the middle classes and stimulating a range of gastronomical writings. Examples from Antony Trollope’s Vanity Fair, Virgina Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, Mike Leigh’s Life is Sweet, Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, the Wife and Her Lover and Elizabeth David’s postwar books serve to gauge the extent of French infuence and help define what makes British food, British.

“As food increasingly disappeared from shops, market stalls, and restaurants, wartime shortages badly affected city life. By 1917, most Prague residents struggled to obtain basic food items; the city and its inhabitants were cold, due to coal shortages, and dirty, through lack of soap. The state’s rationing system proved insufficient to cover the needs of the population, leading to the blossoming of a black market. Discrepancies in access to food shaped new divisions. Prague was ‘ruralized’ as people grew vegetables in allotments and on balconies. Hungry city-dwellers went on trips to the countryside to purchase food. This new reliance on farmers subverted social hierarchies. An antagonism grew between Prague and the countryside, undermining the unity of the Czech nation. The association ‘The Czech Heart’ attempted to heal the rift by sending hungry Prague children to better-fed villages. Food provision shifted legitimacy away from the Austrian state to national organizations.”

Much of Swift’s work is informed by an interest in food, together with a sharp awareness of how it might be spoiled, adulterated, or withheld. This chapter investigates the degree to which Swift uses food as an index of honesty and generosity. In his writings, continental cookery is associated with moral and aesthetic perversity of a distinctly modern flavour. The chapter shows that, in both A Tale of a Tub and A Modest Proposal, the common sense associated with English Protestantism (and emblematised by pudding and roast meat) is pitted against modern, continental slipperiness (emblematised by food whose true identity is suppressed or withheld).

The goal of this chapter is to provide an overview of the Food, Nutrition and Health (FNH) focus area within the Cooperative Extension Service (CES), which includes discussing influential policy and legislation, demonstrating how this focus area has developed and evolved over time, and commenting on potential future directions. This chapter begins by providing information about US Federal legislation that established the CES, as well as other influential laws and policies that have impacted how it operates today. The discussion then moves to how the overarching vision, mission, and goals of FNH programming have remained constant over time, yet, how efforts, audiences, demographics, and methods of engagement have evolved. Such shifts have emerged alongside advancing research, evaluation tools, national guidelines and recommendations, and technology; and as FNH CES adapted to meet the changing needs of clientele. Changes in FNH CES programming also resulted from efforts to be more inclusive and equitable for audiences. Recommendations for future directions in light of current trends and projections in the field of FNH are provided.

Using consumption data, this chapter profiles in detail the arrival of China’s age of abundance, from improvements in diet, to clothing, housing, and transportation. It documents and establishes the arrival of China’s age of material abundance.

Children are faced with a rapidly changing world that is having a significant influence on their health and wellbeing. These changes include alterations to our food supply, new approaches to the marketing of food and other lifestyle factors that influence children’s food consumption. The early years represent a pivotal period in the establishment of food literacy – that is, dietary education, behaviours and preferences – when children are forming their tastes and preferences and are most receptive to health messages. Food literacy is a relatively recent concept that has emerged over the past decade (McManus et al., 2022), and early years settings, schools and caregivers are ideally placed to assist early years learners to develop positive attitudes towards, and knowledge about, healthy food. This is also relevant to schools because healthy children are better learners, and evidence suggests that a holistic approach to education that includes health and nutrition has wide-reaching benefits for children and educators.

Large numbers of different accounts are preserved in the archives which record many fascinating details about everyday life whether in the royal household (with particular items indicating various incidents), in trade, in ecclesiastical contexts. The price of items is also of interest, as well as the names and professions of those involved in making or transporting the items recorded.

“Look, if it’s not my genes, it must be the environment?” I overheard someone say this in a pub. Well, yes and no. One of the visible aspects of urban environments – and let’s face it, most of us are urban now – is food. Ever-present junk food, aisles of frozen pizza and snack foods in the supermarkets. In the United Kingdom, which built much of its colonial power on the triangle of relationships among industrialization, slavery and plantation production, sugar is historically a huge industry, and you can see sugar-based products in stores everywhere. It hurts people’s lives through dental decay, obesity, and type 2 diabetes. In the United States, perfectly edible maize is systematically turned into high-fructose corn syrup, a substance that is even more damaging to health than sugar.

When I put on weight over Christmas, I tell myself I will burn it off in the summer, when I get out more. When summer comes around, I can’t resist a barbecue and a nice glass of red wine. When I put on weight across the summer, I tell myself I will take it off come September, when I get back to serious business again. The thing is, there is never a time in the future when I can take weight off by simply watching what I eat over a short period of time, so I just have to watch myself all the time. How can I not eat too much, when there is so much good and tasty food around, and when I love my food, as I always have? This chapter considers the misunderstanding that everyone can regulate their appetite and eat only what their share is, for a stable body weight and stable energy balance. It just doesn’t work like that. Some people can very easily overeat without noticeable effect, while many of us cannot and dare not, without putting on weight.

People have asked me if their body fatness is genetic, to which I reply unhelpfully, yes and no. There is a very tiny proportion of any population that very easily puts on weight, where a small number of genes relate to, or are implicated in, excessive weight gain. There is a larger group of people with several genes that are triggered by one or several of a range of environmental factors to gain body fatness. And then there is almost everyone else, each person with thousands of genetic variants that have seemingly small individual effects in relation to obesity under circumstances that favour it. There are also those annoying people who can eat as much as they want, of anything they want, and not put on weight, seemingly with genes for thinness. The study of obesity genetics is steadily letting the genie out of the bottle – once you know something, you can’t unknow it, and we know enough about this area now to be able to reply with ‘It depends’, when someone says, ‘My body fatness is down to my genes.’