Okakura Kakuzō’s ‘The Book of Tea’ begins with the striking line “Tea began as a medicine and grew into a beverage” – a truth that extends to the history of many of the practices that we now associate with eating and drinking for pleasure. Since Okakura wrote this, there has been a bifurcation in food and health culture. With the rise of modern medicine, as well as the compartmentalisation of food into mere lifestyle choice, the origins of food as a way to combat unhealth have become obscured; at the same time, an obsession with a depoliticised wellness culture has individualised communal and culturally specific knowledge.
In this series of essays chosen by Vittles editor Jonathan Nunn, five writers look at the documents and places where the link between food and health, as well as its negative – unhealth – have not been forgotten: from the pages of Renaissance food diaries to the policies of 20th-century anticolonial leaders, from the kebab shop to the polski sklep, showing how the personal and political implications of food, health and unhealth cannot be untwined.
