You also mentioned in the conclusion that your approach throughout the book is “closer to a poststructuralist reading of the ways in which individuals employ foods for self-fashioning, understanding such activities as part of a dialectic between agency and authority.” I am nonetheless tempted to simply ask: why do you think people eat what they eat?

Some of my answer to this question has already been given above by way of illustration. People are immensely complex, and they turn to a great many different sources in order to make an ultimate decision about what, when, where, why and how to eat. Most of their waking lives, they are bombarded with information from family members, friends, advertising, packaging, shops, restaurants, schools, doctors and the government. What I hope is that people feel able to eat for pleasure, because historically much nutritional advice has been about self-denial and risk, for obvious reasons. But there has tended to be a greatly inflated sense of guilt and anxiety about eating in consequence, particularly among women — I am not talking of eating disorders here, however defined, but of ordinary eating guilt. In reality we in the developed world have a better diet now than at any time in the past: we are healthier and we live longer than ever before, with hardly any diseases of scarcity prevalent among us. Of course, this doesn’t make us feel happier about our food! We are still just as anxious, just as bewildered as before, in part because we still experience the act of eating as a principal site at which the tension between our tastes as individuals and our membership of various hierarchical systems (kinship, citizenship, society, fashion etc.) is strongest. I hope that to show that these decisions were no more simple in the pre-industrial period is to suggest that we do have more freedom to choose what we eat than it might sometimes seem, as well as more choice per se. And that we are fortunate to have that freedom, immensely fortunate.

Do you cook? What are some of your favorite recipes? Have you experimented with any from past culinary practices?

When people ask this last question, I like to observe that the types of recipes I have studied in most detail include recipes for extracting gelatine from ox bones or making instant mashed potato —perhaps this is less true for Eating the Enlightenment than for my ongoing research, but I also am not convinced most people would be very tempted by ham buried six feet underground for nine weeks before being eaten. I was once tempted to try a recipe for strawberry marzipan…

To eat a meal, no matter how simple, that consists of the best ingredients and is beautifully prepared is an experience as moving as attending a wonderful performance of a beloved piece of classical music.

I do cook, I can cook. I prefer to write. My cookery has to be dishes that are done all at once in front of one’s eyes, with constant attention, such as omelets, or which can be prepared, then put into the oven for a long period with a timer, such as stews. Fatal recipes for me are those which require you to leave something for a few minutes on the stove. As soon as I put the lid on, a good sentence occurs to me for the end of Chapter 4… Half an hour later, I am wondering what the smell of burning from the stove can possibly be. So, as cookery is not my ruling passion, I don’t have the patience to develop the timing instinct. I do know several excellent, instinctive cooks, and they are the sort of people who will turn round and take the lid off the saucepan moments before the sauce reaches boiling point. It seems like a miracle to me.

However, I am an extremely successful eater. I love good food, it makes me happy. To eat a meal, no matter how simple, that consists of the best ingredients and is beautifully prepared is an experience as moving as attending a wonderful performance of a beloved piece of classical music. One has such gratitude, a sense of kinship with the producer who has — also miraculously — understood what will work and why. In that sense I am a part of the European gastronomic tradition, something for which my father, who took me to many good restaurants when I was a teenager, was responsible. He was a well-travelled man who spoke numerous European languages, and we lived in different parts of Europe, so I became familiar with the cuisines of Italy and Germany in particular — French cuisine was less familiar to me until I was older. It is from that upbringing that I retain a firm conviction that the best pleasure in good food is unmediated, experienced without a requirement to fulfil particular criteria such as fashion or the rules of haute cuisine. Homemade hummus and pitas in a New England country house have for me created as much happiness, if perfectly made, as lunch in a top city restaurant.

Therefore, I would not say that I have favourite recipes, as such. I have successful recipes, which I use regularly to feed myself and my family. What I have is favourite meals, remembered for some particular pleasure they gave me. And I am fortunate enough to have had a great many of those in my life.