Ferrières, Madeleine

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Ferrières, Madeleine

PERSONAL: Female.

ADDRESSES: Home—Avignon, France. Office—Université d'Avignon, 74 rue Louis Pasteur, 84029 Avignon Cedex 1, France. Agent—c/o Author Mail, Columbia University Press, 61 W. 62nd St., New York, NY 10023.

CAREER: University of Avignon, Avignon, France, professor of social history.

WRITINGS:

Histoire des Peurs Alimentaires: du Moyen Âge à l'aube du XXe Siècle, Editions du Seuil (Paris, France), 2002, translation by Jody Gladding published as Sacred Cow, Mad Cow: A History of Food Fears, Columbia University Press (New York, NY), 2005.

Le Bien des Pauvres: La Consommation Populaire en Avignon, 1600–1800, Champ Vallon (Seyssel, France), 2004.

SIDELIGHTS: French writer Madeleine Ferrières is a professor of social history. In her book Sacred Cow, Mad Cow: A History of Food Fears, she traces the history of people's anxieties regarding food. Her investigation relies upon medical and veterinary journals, public health records, cook books, and agricultural statistics. Ferrières regards food fears from two distinct angles (worry over the quantity of food and concerns over the quality of food), and includes numerous intriguing anecdotes, such as the story of a seventeenth-century lawsuit based upon the supposition that yeast made bakery bread unhealthy. The book concentrates primarily on food culture in Europe, with the occasional reference to the United States, including a discussion of Upton Sinclair's work The Jungle, and the enactment of the Pure Food and Drug Act. Mark Knoblauch, in a review for Booklist, found Fer-rières's effort to be "highly scholarly," and "a historical foundation for anyone interested in development of public policy regarding what we eat." A contributor for Kirkus Reviews was also impressed, remarking that the book was "filled with choice nuggets of food lore, culinary information and social history."

Ferrières told CA: "The starting point for my work is the strong conviction that food-related behaviour, both presently and in former times, is determined by cultural representation. While observing the behaviour of consumers faced with Mad Cow disease, or bird flu, I have become thoroughly convinced of this opinion. Therefore I have studied the cultural representations throughout an extensive period (1300–1900), to be able to locate constancies and divisions, and across a wide area, on both sides of the Atlantic.

"From our past eating habits, I think that I have revealed several keys in order to understand the present; for example, by studying the first measures of systematic culling of cows during the bovine plague epidemic in Europe between 1711–1714, on the advice of Lancisi, the Pope's chief doctor. Or, for example, by observing that all the pigeons in Paris were killed at the time of Louis XIV, for fear of the transmission of a disease from birds to man. My standpoint is at the same time that of an historian of the countryside specialised in agriculture, and an historian of representations; I am also able to piece together all the food related processes, from production to consumption. My present work also concerns everyday foodstuffs, and ingredients which are the base of traditional French cuisine."