Leftovers: A History, Nov 9 @ 10 AM Zoom from Wales

Chicago Foodways Roundtable

Leftovers A History of Food Waste & Preservation



Presented by Eleanor Barnett, PhD


A third of all the food we produce goes to waste globally, and if all this needlessly discarded food were a country it would be the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world after China and the US! How did we become such a wasteful society? What can we learn about building a sustainable food future by looking to the past?Based on Eleanor Barnett’s newly-published book Leftovers: A History of Food Waste and Preservation, this talk will explore the many ingenious ways our ancestors sought to avoid food waste through preservation, recycling or otherwise disposing of food scraps. Beginning in the Tudor kitchen, it’s a delicious and disgusting story that takes us to medieval streets lined with butchers’ offal, that explores the world-changing inventions in preservation of the Industrial Revolution, the hidden history of Victorian street-food scavengers, the thrifty recipes of the World Wars, right through to the AI restaurants of the future. Through our leftovers, we learn a lot more about our culture and our shared history, from poverty and inequality to globalisation. If we are what we don’t eat, we are equally defined by what we don’t eat!

Eleanor Barnett is a historian of food and religion with a PhD from the University of Cambridge (UK). She is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Cardiff University in Wales, where her research uses food as a unique lens through which to view the daily lives, beliefs, and identities of ordinary people in the past. Her first book, Leftovers: A History of Food and Preservation has just been released in 2024, exploring the topical issue of wasting food from a historical lens that moves from the medieval era to the AI restaurants of the future! Her other area of expertise focuses on the links between food and religion in the early modern world, exploring shared meals to break down traditional Christian-centric notions of major themes from the Reformation to colonisation. As @historyeats on Instagram, Eleanor posts daily food history facts, stories, and art to a large international following . She is a regular contributor to public-facing media, including TV, podcasts, and radio, and writes the monthly food history column for BBC History Magazine.

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Saturday, November 9, 2024

10 AM Central Time

If you have any questions or wish for a zoom link,
please e-mail: Culinary.Historians@gmail.com

http://www.CulinaryHistorians.org

A gentle reminder this will be Saturday morning.

From a technology point of view, I could not imagine doing this five years ago:
Presenter will be somewhere in Wales, I will be south of Carbondale, and everyone else will be from who knows where.

I love Zoom.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHhqs9NwNQ8

Great presentation.

I think that the best way to deal with the issue of leftovers is NOT to produce them. I really do NOT see a need to make more than what you will consume in one meal. There is no need to make a recipe for eight when you can adjust it to make four portions. I have become more passionate about this in recent years as I find that I am the only one eating the leftovers.

During the pandemic, many of the restaurant supply houses like US Foodservice were forced to repackage a lot of their meat products into consumer portions and sold off to salvage stores.

HI,

I regularly make half-recipes to avoid leftovers.

If it is pasta sauces or soups, I will freeze in quart quantities for future lunches.

This last week of reworking a 10-pound ham, done to make room for a turkey, was fun because of the challenge of making every ham-based meal seem fresh.

Happy Thanksgiving!

CAthy2