Squid: Natural history as food history, c. 1730–1860
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| Abstract |
The history of natural history and the history of food have largely been narrated as separate stories. But many natural things in the early modern period were, at their core, consumable. Natural histories documented the viability of plants and animals as foodstuffs; trying circumstances could force naturalists to eat their specimens instead of preserving them; and naturalists used food itself—from rum to oats to bread—to prepare and transport specimens. While food historians and material culture scholars rightly lament the scarcity of historical foodstuffs preserved in archives (given food’s transient nature), the collections of natural history museums offer tangible evidence of early modern foodways. Objects’ simultaneous status as curiosities and as foods drove the material practices of nature studies, particularly in British imperial investigations of so-called new worlds in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Atlantic and Pacific. By retracing the journey of a squid that fed crew members of James Cook’s Endeavour voyage, this chapter argues that the framework of nature studies offers a unique means of connecting food history and the history of science, as it also uncovers long-lasting hierarchies that underwrote natural history investigations. |
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