The Technopolitics of Food

Abstract

Since the Annales School started to investigate the history of food in the 1960s, institutional diets have been an important field of research. The history of food encountered the general source problem of the history of everyday life of the lower, often illiterate, classes, as they have left hardly any written sources. Even more, food is highly perishable, so that it leaves nothing as a source itself. In contrast to this, institutions kept books registering the expenses and consumption of food, and can be used to access the history of food. This article presents a different view of institutional food. It shows that prison food does not just mirror the general developments of the food of the people, as the Annalistes had hoped for. Instead, it shows that the dietetic order in prison described and expressed the social, political, and judicial concepts of the day, as well as concepts of the body. In addition, it shows that the dietetic order resulted from multiple negotiations of the various actors involved, including those in law, administration, science, and medicine, and last but not least, the public. Using the example of Prussia, this article investigates changes in prison food standards and cross-checks this with quantitative developments as well as with the personal experiences of prisoners from 1700 to 1914.