Olivia Potts Olivia Potts

You are what you don’t eat

In the past, the ability to preserve food depended largely on people’s means, making Eleanor Barnett’s history of food waste also a history of changing attitudes to poverty

Curing herring by salting and packing in barrels. From ‘Graphic Illustrations of Animals and their Utility to Man’, c.1850. [Getty Images] 
issue 16 March 2024

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.

Some of the attempts in the past to spin out the life of fresh produce sound positively disgusting

But there is more to the history of preservation...

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