You are what you don’t eat

If asked to think about food preservation for a moment you might picture an aproned woman boiling oranges for marmalade in a large copper maslin pan; or vegetable scraps being turned into stock; or those recipes from wartime rationing using root veg in place of sugar; or even, with an eye to the modern, you might imagine a trendy chef preparing offal in a gleaming chrome kitchen to ensure the nose-to-tail credentials of his restaurant.

But there is more to the history of preservation than preserves, and the obvious enemy, when we talk about preservation, is waste – the two engaged in a constant battle. Exploring that battleground is Leftovers, the debut book from Eleanor Barnett, a food historian and academic.

The premise is simple: ‘From the moment food is harvested or slaughtered, it risks becoming inedible as it begins to ferment, rot and decompose.’ Our ability to prolong the life of these perishable items has influenced the course of history. Leftovers tracks that history – with a particular focus on Britain – from the time we left behind a nomadic lifestyle to the American revolution (where Barnett frames the dumping of tea leaves as food waste) and the military invention of the tin can.

Of course, the history of food waste is also the history of poverty, and is therefore informed by our changing morals and priorities, and how we view that poverty. As Barnett puts it: ‘If, as the old adage goes, “you are what you eat”, we – our values and culture – are equally defined but what we don’t eat.’ Leftovers charts that division of poverty and wealth, and how it was affected by early fly-tipping, Victorian hygiene concerns, the Industrial Revolution, the rise of the domestic cookbook and advances in science, technology and public health.

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Of course, home preservation and culinary ingenuity do feature, and Barnett is particularly good on the domestic lives of ordinary people in the past.