Food Matters: Knowledge, Ecologies, Circulation and Health in the European World, 1500–1900

Call for papers for a special issue in the journal Physis. International Journal for the History of Science

Editors: 

Federica Bonacini (Roma Tre University; ILIESI-CNR)

Lavinia Maddaluno (Institut d’études Avancèes; Paris/Ca’ Foscari University of Venice)

What does the history of food reveal about the ways knowledge is produced and circulated? How has food-related knowledge shaped, and been shaped by, the exploitation of natural resources and the transformation of environments? Food is the material and immaterial fabric of human and non-human life. Beyond nourishment, it is embedded with symbolic, cultural, religious, political, and economic meanings. Through food, societies have revealed ways of seeing nature, producing and applying scientific knowledge, exploiting and transforming ecologies, and imagining models of health and well-being. As such, food history has been shown to be inseparable from the histories of dietetics, medicine and taste (Gentilcore, 2016; Shapin, 2025), nutrition (Spary, 2015), colonial encounters (Earle, 2012), knowledge circulation (Crosby, 1972), social regulation (Kaplan, 2015; Stanziani, 2007), ethical and political debates (Spary, 2012) and ecological concerns (Maddaluno, 2025). Shaped by multiple cultures of knowledge and temporalities (Yildirim, 2020), food and foodways have revealed power asymmetries  and economic systems (Mintz, 1985), while recent work in STS (Bray et al., 2023) has further emphasized how food crop histories intersect with human, material, technological, and environmental histories, at the same time deconstructing the linear narratives of global history, reassessing the integration of multilayered and multiscale perspectives.  

This special issue invites contributions that explore the role of food in the early modern and modern European world (16th–19th centuries), situating it within both local and global contexts. We are particularly interested in how food connects to histories of ecological and colonial extraction, the construction of Otherness, and the emergence of early modern dietary and health norms. Case studies may focus on specific crops, substances, or practices—such as bread and social control, cassava and indigenous knowledge, rice and labor exploitation, or the pineapple as a marker of exoticism, just to make a few examples—but contributions that take broader comparative, conceptual, or methodological perspectives are equally welcome. We aim to bring together historians of science, medicine, and knowledge with scholars working on agriculture, ecology, colonialism, and cultural history. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Food and the production of scientific and medical knowledge (botany, medicine, mineralogy, chemistry, pharmacy).
• Food, colonialism, and the circulation of crops and techniques across continents.
• Social control, labor, and political economy through food production and distribution.
• Political ecology of food (environmental, material, hydraulic constraints in food chains).
• The diffusion of nutritional practices for preventive or therapeutic purposes.
• The intersections of food, health, and ethics in the private and public sphere.
• Culinary aesthetics, taste, and disgust as cultural categories.

We welcome proposals from historians of science and knowledge with different disciplinary and methodological perspectives. Please send an abstract (300–400 words), along with a brief biographical note (max. 150 words), to Lavinia Maddaluno Questo indirizzo email è protetto dagli spambots. È necessario abilitare JavaScript per vederlo. and Federica Bonacini Questo indirizzo email è protetto dagli spambots. È necessario abilitare JavaScript per vederlo. by 30th November 2025. We expect to submit final papers (8,000-10,000 words) for peer-review by the 15th July 2026.

Selected bibliography:

Crosby, Alfred W. The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1972

Earle, Rebecca, The body of the conquistador. Food, Race and the Colonial Experience in Spanish America 1492-1700 (Cambridge, 2012). 

Gentilcore, David, Food and Health in Early Modern Europe. Diet, Medicine and Society, 1450-1800 (London, 2016). 

Kaplan, Steven, “Between Habit and Necessity”. The "ersatz" Question in Eighteenth-Century France”, in Joseph Goy, Marie-Jeanne Tits-Dieuaide and André Burguière (eds), L’histoire grande ouverte: hommages à Emmanuel Le Roy (Paris, 1997), 379-393.  

Maddaluno, Lavinia, “Estrema Ruina”: Rice and Its Ambiguities in the Sixteenth-Century Duchy of Milan”, Renaissance Quarterly, 78, 4 (2025). 

Mintz, Sidney, Sweetness and Power. The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York, 1985). 

Shapin, Steven, Eating and Being. A History of Ideas about Our Food and Ourselves (Chicago, 2024). 

Spary, Emma, Feeding France: New Sciences of Food, 1760–1815 (Cambridge, 2015). 

Stanziani, Alessandro. “Negotiating Innovation in a Market Economy: Foodstuffs and Beverages Adulteration in Nineteenth-Century France.” Enterprise and Society 8.2 (2007): 375–412. 

Yıldırım, Duygu. “Bevanda asiatica: Scholarly Exchange between the Ottomans and Europeans on Coffee.” Journal of Ottoman Studies 56.56 (2020): 25-48.