Climate Change in the Kitchen: Atlantic Eating at the End of the Little Ice Age

• In Event: Nourishing Extraction, Environing Bodies: Corporeal Histories of Food, Empire, and Environment

Abstract

Historians have long pointed to impacts on food supply — harvest failures, scarcity, and plant pathogens — as environmental consequences of climate change. Yet large-scale studies elide the more complex relationships between climate change ecologies and food production and consumption and their impact on people and landscapes. Such relationships are legible not in records of crop yields and grain prices, but in accounts of preparing, cooking, and eating food, which were often used and maintained by women. By examining recipes and diaries of rural women in the British Northern Atlantic world, this paper considers the ways in which climate changes of the late eighteenth century (including the chilly period known as the Dalton Minimum) did and did not find their way into domestic life in Northern Atlantic outposts of the British imperial project. In so doing, it demonstrates the complex immediacy of changing climates to kitchens and the women within them. Eating in the late-eighteenth century Atlantic world meant embodying imperial and climatic realities. The same is true of eating in the twenty-first century, where women continue to be on the front lines of experiencing and responding to climate change and the imperial context of food remains of paramount importance.

Author

• Emma Moesswilde, Georgetown University