Feast and Famine: Food and Nutrition in Ireland 1500-1920 - Tapa dura

Most welcome ... rich fare ... a veritable feast for those interested in food, famine and disease in Ireland and elsewhere. Clearly we have here the definitive book on the subject of Irish food and nutrition. (Medical History)

Besides being an able and reliable account of Irish diet over half a millennium, Feast and Famine is also an excellent introduction to much of the new research in Irish economic history over the past two decades. (The Agricultural History Review)

Illuminating and innovative study ... The authors handle sources cautiously and convincingly. Even when at their most technical they write lightly and attractively ... They have set a rich but finely prepared dish before us. Its many novelties and subtleties will take time to digest. It satisfies while whetting the appetite for more. (English Historical Review)

The style is felicitous, the exposition clear and issues disposed of only after a conscientious discussion of the difficulties ... The book is an effective opening up of dietary issues, and it ably and at times innovatively explores and presents detail, and brings a novel and refreshing competence in nutritional knowledge to historical study. (Irish Studies Review)

This book traces the history of food and famine in Ireland from the sixteenth to the early twentieth century. It looks at what people ate and drank, and how this changed over time. The authors explore the economic and social forces which lay behind these changes as well as the more personal motives of taste, preference, and acceptability. They analyze the reasons why the potato became a major component of the diet for so many people during the eighteenth century as well as the diets of the middling and upper classes. This is not, however, simply a social history of food but it is a nutritional one as well, and the authors go on to explore the connection between eating, health, and disease. They look at the relationship between the supply of food and the growth of the population and then finally, and unavoidably in any history of the Irish and food, the issue of famine, examining first its likelihood and then its dreadful reality when it actually occurred.