A major bonus of this book, to me it seems, is that it is also a wealth of information on topics related to the main theme. We learn the origin of the "blancmange" which survived cooking terms such as "whitening" or "white meat" and the medical and health beliefs that led to the planting of pine trees in the Landes region in the 19th century.
The book also reveals beautifully the vision of medicine that crossed the centuries in the West since Hippocrates and Galen then until the 18th century around. The author dissects for example, the perception they had of the relationship between stomach and brain ... and how the intellectuals of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance have added a social reading grid. The latter, perverting hippocrato-dosage traditional view, sat their position on top of a pyramid and some justified, in good faith (!!), everything was good (snakes, rats, etc.) for the poor and the peasants whose stomach was by nature more solid than their own, which better suited the refined food.
The book shows indirectly the slow process of centralization of France, and its implications. It was possible to take national health measures (quarantine, culling campaigns in cases of zoonoses, etc.) when the central government was now finally able to actually rule the whole territory ... and that the concept of health public was sufficiently developed.
The first chapters follow the case of meat as an indicator of the forces, beliefs, concerns. Then come the bread, and then potatoes. Madeleine Ferrières, while following a broadly chronologically, not structure his book by periods. She announced also that the vision and the social and political organization allow it to take examples from around the late Middle Ages and that of the old regime. This constitutes the bulk of the book. The last chapters are more closely related to the new political structures and the development of science, medicine and the role of the media and of industrialization (Appert and discoveries of Pasteur, allowing, for example, clothing better preserves'), the growing influence of the United States on sanitary and culinary priorities, etc.
The book is very well documented. The author seems to have specialized in the study of the region of Avignon and the south in general, but growing, lively and detailed manner, numerous examples from various regions of France, Italy and quite often also more rarely elsewhere (Germany, England, etc.). It is based on old manuscript sources and a mass of local history publications by other historians (see the impressive final bibliography).
