Food is pleasure, sustenance, and memory. Food is labor, need, and survival.
Join our Before ‘Farm to Table’ team as we rethink how to research and discuss the ways that food was grown and harvested, marketed and sold, eaten and imagined. In studying these foodways and cultures of the past, we hope to shed light on the ways food matters to us today.
About Us
Curators and professors, scholars and administrators. Meet our team.
Foodways
Circuitous, diverse, troubling: learn how food moved from farm to table.
Investigations
Traditional scholarship, imaginative thinking, database creation, and adapting recipes. Learn about our work.
Collaborations
Neither food-making nor food-thinking is a solitary endeavor. Meet our partners.
Our Recipe Books
Handwritten recipes have been at the heart of our project. You can use them, too.
Before ‘Farm to Table’: Early Modern Foodways and Cultures is a collaborative research initiative in the humanities. Active from fall 2017 through summer 2021, the project was convened at the Folger Institute of the Folger Shakespeare Library. It was funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
The premise of this project is that food, then as now, is a basic human need. Food also has a long and complex history. We examined paucity and plenty; systems of free and unfree labor; trade and exploitation; making and producing; constructions of race, class, and gender; and the many ways people thought about eating together or staying apart. Our team taught courses, created exhibitions, hosted conversations, transcribed manuscripts, and collaborated with food professionals. In this website, a curated collection of our project activities, we share our insights, excitements, queries, and resources with you.
Before ‘Farm to Table’ logo includes text from W.b.456; “The Pastry Chef,” ART Box B745 no.1 (size L); “Ornatus muliebris,” STC 13599.5; “A Caveatt for the Citty of London,” V.a.318; “De cierlycke voorsyndinge aller tafel-gerechten,” TX 885 C5 1664 Cage; “The Queen-Like Closet,” W3284; “The history of the coronation [of James II]” S652; Composite image of ownership marks from Folger manuscript recipe books V.a.561; V.a.456; V.a.20; W.b.668; V.a.215; V.a.397; V.a.468; V.a.450; V.a.434; V.b.301; V.a.612; W.a.317; W.a.318; V.a.600; W.a.302; V.a.619; V.a.429; V.a.430; V.a.401; V.a.561; W.a.112; V.a.680; V.a.697; V.a.396; “Ritratto di quelli che vanno vendendo,” ART 231749 (size L); “The French Cook,” L625. All images are from the collections of the Folger Shakespeare Library. Unless under non-Folger copyright, images are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0). Language use changes over time, as do research interests. Please see the Folger’s Statement on Potentially Harmful Language in Collection Description for the work our cataloguers and others are doing to redress outmoded, one-sided, and exclusionary descriptions of rare materials.