Drew Gilpin Faust, then dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, president-elect of Harvard University (she became president July 1, 2007), and Lincoln Professor of History at Harvard, opens this two-day conference about the relationship between food and gender.

Faust provides an overview of the upcoming panel discussions: “We are going to look at food both as a vehicle of creativity, joy, self-expression, even hedonism. And, at the same time, insist on looking at food as a source, and even instrument of oppression and deprivation.” She remarks that these opposing views on food may cause tension during the discussion, but the tension is worth exploring.

Faust introduces the panel chair, Barbara Ketcham Wheaton, independent writer and honorary curator of the Schlesinger Library.

Barbara Ketcham Wheaton is an independent writer and honorary curator of the Schlesinger Library’s culinary collection.

Wheaton describes the panel as a series of observations about the way food is prepared, the quality of food, and the ways food is served. She notes that the presentations will end with a free-form meditation by one of the panelists.

During the introduction, Wheaton cedes the podium to Marylène Altieri, curator of books and printed materials at the Schlesinger Library, for the announcement of a special gift from the Houston Culinary Historians to purchase books for the culinary collection in honor of culinary author Alice Arndt.

Sharmila Sen is the editor for the humanities at Harvard University Press. She has published on Francophone African novels, gender and diaspora, postcolonial autobiographies, popular Bombay, as well as culinary cultures of Britain, India, and the Caribbean.

Sen introduces the listeners to a new Schlesinger Library acquisition: a late 19th-century Anglo-Indian dictionary called Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive. She says she will discuss one of the book’s entries in particular—the one on curry. But first, she gives the audience a hint of the social dynamics in India during the colonial period.

Sen then describes in-depth the “curry” entry in Hobson-Jobson, which she calls “fantastically crazy,” and to encourage the audience to look it up in Schlesinger Library. In particular, Sen discusses the relevance of the King Richard mention in the curry entry, which references a medieval poem that has him eating a European version of curry, although that curry’s main ingredient happens to be a human head.

She closes with a story about another 19th-century recipe, also with its roots in India. A former governor of Bengal retires to England in 1835. Once back in England, however, he realizes that he misses the cuisine, and one chutney in particular. He then commissions two nearby chemists—Lea and Perrins—to make the recipe. The rest is culinary history.

The author of French Beans and Food Scares: Culture and Commerce in an Anxious Age (Oxford University Press, 2004), Susanne Freidberg has written about food trade, culture, and regulation for the Washington Post and several journals. She is an associate professor of geography at Dartmouth College.

Freidberg discusses the history of food freshness, the topic of her next book. With the invention of refrigeration and the spread of railroads, the geography of the perishable food supply changed. Today, flying fresh foods around the world is a huge, profitable business. In her book, she will focus on the history of food freshness in the United States, partly because it was the first refrigerated society. In the 1920s and ’30s, Freidberg says, there was a lot of emphasis in women’s magazines about how the refrigerator would free up time for leisure and socializing, since women would not have to shop as often and could prepare dishes in advance.

How vegetables came to be regarded as virtuous foods is another historical strand Friedberg will follow in her book. In the late 19th century, nutritionists thought that fresh vegetables were largely frivolous because they did not contain much protein. They were seen as water foods. All of this changed, however, in the 1910s with the discovery of vitamins.

In Friedberg’s view, the notion that vegetables are virtuous because they come fresh from nature obscures the fact that they actually require a great deal of manual labor, much of it performed by people working under less than virtuous conditions. This is the kind of paradox she is working with in studying the history of food freshness.

Barbara Ketcham Wheaton, independent writer and honorary curator of the Schlesinger Library, introduces Julia Abramson, associate professor of French at the University of Georgia.

Abramson’s discussion focuses on the history of carving and related materials from the Schlesinger Library. She defines carving as “cutting up a large piece of meat that’s already cooked into portion-sized pieces and doing this in a kind of ceremonial fashion in full view of the people to whom the meat will be served, and who are going to eat it.” According to Abramson, the carver has historically been a man.

Abramson began her research on carving in the Schlesinger Library’s renowned culinary collection. Spanning the 16th century to present day, her research focuses on not only the history of carving in cooking and gastronomy, but also its history in the military and in medicine.

She remarks that carving is “an iteration of animal murder, of slaughter. But the act is made socially acceptable and even desirable and admirable through the aesthetic zing and formalizing transformation into ritual or ceremony.” She then details carving’s cultural evolution, from medieval times to the present day.

Abramson concludes by presenting several carving manuals from the Schlesinger Library’s collection, mainly those published in the 16th and 17th centuries. According to Abramson, carving manuals evolved to resemble anatomical treatises used in university settings to guide dissections of human cadavers and animals. She determines that scientific traditions greatly influenced the carving tradition.

John Willoughby, the executive editor of Gourmet magazine and coauthor, along with Chris Schlesinger, of eight cookbooks, shares his own experience engaging with food as something to be understood and written about as well as enjoyed.

Willoughby describes his own evolution as a food writer with strong connections in Cambridge, Massachusettes, writing with chef Chris Schlesinger and exploring the Schlesinger Library as well as other Harvard libraries. As a teacher in the Radcliffe Seminars and later as a published food writer, Willoughby notes his awareness that food studies was not a “particularly respected discipline.” He credits the Schlesinger Library and the strength and accessibility of its culinary collections with “legitimizing food and writing about food as a discipline suitable for study and for pursuit.” Willoughby thanks Barbara Haber, former curator of the Schlesinger Library culinary collection and author of From Hardtack to Home Fries: An Uncommon History of American Cooks and Meals, for the culinary collection and for its central role in the development of food studies.

After years of writing and thinking about food, Willoughby characterizes it as “a prism through which we can look at anything,” as a source for new ways of thinking about many aspects of our lives, including gender. As an example, he describes working on a story about community cookbooks of the Southwest and noticing “a lot of what you’d call macho sneering about how women didn’t like hot food.” He became curious about whether this was a fact or myth. The question, born in the stacks of the Schlesinger Library, took him to the Yale School of Medicine and researcher Linda Bartoshuk, who studies the mechanisms of taste. “It turns out that about 25 percent of the population are what researchers call 'super tasters'—people who have 100 times as many taste buds as the rest of us,” says Willoughby. Of that 25 percent, almost 80 percent are women. “So there is in fact some reason that many women do find chilies harder to eat than men. But it’s not because they’re wimps; it’s because they have better taste buds,” says Willoughby.

He closes by observing that the Schlesinger Library not only gave him access to primary sources about food and food history, but also gave him, as a writer, food for thought.