Victoria wedding cake

England’s Obsession with Queen Victoria’s Wedding Cake

Queen Victoria's wedding, and its spectacular cake, caused a frenzy.
fast food phthalates

Would You Like Phthalates with That?

People who like dining out have 40 to 55 percent higher phthalate levels than those who eat at home.
Toast and coffee on wooden background,breakfast or meal

The Unbearable Sadness of Toast

One scholar sees the toaster as a symbol of a modernized, industrialized society—the culprit of bread’s mechanization and a perpetrator of assimilation.
Early food stamps

What the History of Food Stamps Reveals

In the early years of food stamps the goal wasn't necessarily to feed America's poor. The idea was to buttress the price of food after the decline in crop prices had created a crisis in rural America.
English tea time

The Extremely Un-British Origins of Tea

Tea is bound up in the nation's history of colonial expansion. British tea drinkers preferred Chinese tea at first, and had to be convinced on patriotic grounds to drink tea from India.
supermarket illustration

Sex and the Supermarket

Supermarkets represented a major innovation in food distribution—a gendered innovation that encouraged women to find sexual pleasure in subordination.
Fresh vegetables

Why Americans Love Diets

On a diet or cleanse in the new year? You're continuing in the very American tradition of self-perfection.
Christmas banquet

How Victorians’ Fear of Starvation Created Our Christmas Lore

One scholar sees more in the Christmas food of authors like Charles Dickens—English national identity and class.
Compleat Housewife frontispiece

What Amateur Cookbooks Reveal About History

Remember those spiral-bound cookbooks from your church group or your mom’s favorite charity? Those amateur recipe collections are history books, too.
Settlement cookbook

The Cooking Classes that Americanized Jewish Immigrants

At the end of the 19th century, a Wisconsin woman named Elizabeth “Lizzie” Black Kander tried to help immigrants assimilate, through the food they ate.