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Digest: A Journal of Foodways & Culture 7:1 (2018-2019): 63-64  ©  American Folklore Society 2020

Before “Farm to Table” Early Modern Foodways & Cultures 
Project at the Folger Library 

By: Julia Fine 

The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, home to the world’s largest 
collection of early modern English manuscript recipe books, launched its 
multidisciplinary, $1.5 million Mellon-funded Before ‘Farm to Table’: Early 
Modern Foodways and Cultures project in 2017.1 Drawing on the work of 
historians, anthropologists, geographers, literary critics, artists, and more, this five-year 
project investigates how food shapes—and was in turn shaped by—culture, migration, 
violence, trade, and geopolitics. It focuses on the period from 1450 to 1800, a moment in 
history when European acts of colonization and conquest gave rise to a new kind of 
global foodways. 

Since its inception, Before ‘Farm to Table’ has embraced a collaborative working 
model, with a multidisciplinary team of scholars designing a wide range of programs in 
order to probe the function of food in the early modern world. These projects have taken 
many forms: workshops; lectures; an interactive performance art piece in the Folger’s 
historic Reading Room; an exhibit in the Folger’s Great Hall, highlighting the unsung 
heroes who shaped the food culture of Britain and America; collaborations with 
humanitarian chef José Andrés; and a traveling exhibition that will take place in 
Washington DC in the fall of 2020. This exciting program, focusing upon the 
contributions of people who were marginalized in the early modern period, will see 
Folger materials installed at local restaurants, cultural centers, and advocacy 
organizations like Busboys and Poets, a restaurant group which advocates for social 
justice and community activism.  

Recently, the Before ‘Farm to Table’ team hosted a graduate student workshop on 
“Eating Through The Archives,” which invited over 20 students from institutions 
around the world to come to the Folger and discuss the challenges and gratifications of 
multidisciplinary approaches to food. What can we learn when practitioners of Spanish 
Literature, the History of Science, and Postcolonial Studies compare notes on food?  
What are the best approaches to researching and understanding food in the past and the 
present? What do “foodways” mean, and how do they move, react, and change? 

Questions like these structured the workshop and fueled its discussions. In one breakout 
session, led by Jack Bouchard, students explored how to study travelogues, maps, 
artwork, and ephemera to find depictions of non-elite, marginalized people and reveal 
their experiences and relationships with food. Another session, led by Heather Wolfe 
and Elisa Tersigni, taught participants how to read not only the words inscribed in 
cookbooks written hundreds of years ago, but also their materiality: close study of 
bindings, folds, paper, and stitching can deepen our understanding of a book’s historical 



64     Fine, Before “Farm to Table,” Digest: A Journal of Foodways & Culture 7:1 (2018-2019)

and literary framework. One particularly memorable session featured a roundtable by 
health equity advocates Ambrose Lane, Jr. and Laura MacCleery and culinary historian 
Michael W. Twitty. The panelists unpacked the long and fraught history of sugar in the 
Americas, and urged the students to think of a “history of a particular commodity and its 
history on bodies as a social justice story,” that pervades the present day. 

Through programs like “Eating Through The Archives,” Before ‘Farm to Table’ 
works to stress the need for multidisciplinarity in food studies, the importance of re-
examining and contextualizing the notion of foodways, and how critical it is to apply 
global frameworks to the study of food cultures. The team continues with these efforts, 
as well as others, as they undertake future projects: writing articles on the hidden 
colonial history of English condiments; convening a conference on “Food and the Book,” 
featuring chef and food-writer Tamar Adler; and creating an open-access, searchable 
corpus of the Folger’s early modern English handwritten recipes, which anyone in the 
world may view.  

Before ‘Farm to Table’ is led by David Goldstein, Amanda Herbert, and Heather 
Wolfe, and includes three Postdoctoral Fellows, Jack Bouchard, Elisa Tersigni, and 
Michael Walkden. Jonathan MacDonald acts as the Project Coordinator, and Julia Fine 
is the Dumbarton Oaks Humanities Fellow attached to the project.   

1 See https://www.folger.edu/history and  
https://www.folger.edu/before-farm-to-table-early-modern-foodways-cultures 
(access April 22, 2020). 


