Captured by Abenaki Indians from New Hampshire in 1724, the Englishwoman Elizabeth Hanson described how after a disappointing hunt, her captor “with a very angry Look threw a Stick or Corn-Cob at me,” and threatened to kill her and her children. But, Hanson observed, “when-ever he was in such a Temper, he wanted Food, and… Read more →
Category: Bites of History
“We lost our appetite for food”: Why Eighteenth-Century Hangriness Might Not Be a Thing
In August 2015, Oxford Dictionaries declared that the word “hangry” had entered our common vocabulary. Surely most people living in the twenty-first century have experienced the sense of being simultaneously hungry and angry. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, hunger was also everywhere. A recent NPR essay examines how slaveholders withheld food from enslaved people,… Read more →
Elimination Diets: Medical & Dietary Detective Work
After a lengthy, expensive, and invasive process, I received a diagnosis of eosinophilic esophagitis (EoE), a hard to pronounce and fairly rare — but increasingly common — chronic allergic disorder. Hesitant to accept a lifelong diagnosis and the sick person’s role I imagined would come with it, I asked my physician what would happen if… Read more →
Milk: A History of Tasting What Cows Eat
Everybody since the dawn of time has had to eat — for once, that’s a sentence construction that no professor or teaching assistant can take umbrage with. Today we are pleased to bring you the first essay in our new series Bites of History. From diets meant to treat medical issues to the founding of… Read more →