Remarkable and imaginative: Fitzwilliam Museum’s The Art of Food reviewed

Eating makes us anxious. This is a feature of contemporary life: a huge amount of attention is devoted to how much we eat, when we eat it, where it comes from, to toxic foods, organic and inorganic ones, environmentally damaging groceries, those that tot up too much mileage or cause damage to the rainforest.

Some of these worries are relatively novel, but preoccupation with the nourishment we consume is not. A remarkable and imaginative exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, Feast & Fast: The Art of Food in Europe, 1500–1800, documents just how obsessed our ancestors were with every aspect of their meals.

At its heart are a series of recreations by Ivan Day, a specialist on the subject of what can only be described as edible art. The first you encounter is a Jacobean banquet, c.1610, in which not only are the comestibles extremely sweet, even the crockery is made of moulded sugar.