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Given the chance, Bored Panda reached out to a cultural historian of food and early modern religion, Dr. Eleanor Barnett, who has a PhD from the University of Cambridge. As a food historian, Dr. Barnett is drawn to the field by her desire to connect with the everyday lives of ordinary people in the past.

"I wanted to find a way of connecting to the everyday lives of ordinary people in the past, rather than telling traditional ‘top-down’ histories about kings and queens. After all, everyone has to eat! Especially before the advent of artificial refrigeration and the stacked supermarket shelves of the modern age, food - growing it, cooking it, eating it, reusing leftovers - took up a huge amount of everyone’s time," says Eleanor.

The food historian approaches her research and writing about the history of food and food culture by not just asking about what past people ate but why, how, and with whom they ate it. "No culture eats everything that’s edible. Think about our modern, western aversion to eating insects. Why is it that we don’t want to eat them? The answer tells us something profound about our values, identity, and our understanding of the natural world. Or think about who you eat with. Family, friends, colleagues? By sharing food, we enact certain rituals intended to forge or solidify allegiances. This was true of people in the past too, so studying food tells us much more about a culture than just changing diets over time," she adds.

What Eleanor finds most rewarding about her work as a food historian is "Nothing beats the hours spent exploring piles of handwritten records in the archives! As part of my research, I was lucky enough to study 16th and 17th-century court records from the Venetian Inquisition. It’s so rewarding to hear the voices of people who lived hundreds of years ago and to reconstruct what their lives - and their diets! - would have been like."

The history of food and food culture has been shaped by social, cultural, and political factors. Dr. Barnett explains it by saying "The dietary decisions that people make have long been shaped by wider social, cultural, economic, political, and religious factors. In the Renaissance period, for example, people believed that peasants and the wealthy had different types of bodies that suited different foods. The poor were associated with onions, garlic, and other simple vegetables whereas the rich were advised by doctors to eat more seemingly lavish foods like chicken."

In her research, Eleanor uses primary sources, such as cookbooks and food-related documents. "Cookbooks - and the tantalizing (sometimes bizarre!) dishes they prescribe - are really exciting ways of studying the past. You might even try recreating a past recipe if you want to be transported to the flavors and smells of a past society!

Just like today, however, cookbooks are often aspirational texts. How many of us have a delicious selection of cookbooks on the kitchen shelf but end up making our go-to spaghetti bolognese recipe (again!) after a long day at work? So historians of food pair these culinary texts with other rich primary sources, like account books, medicinal tracts, images, and court records."

Another thing the food historian finds most fulfilling about the work she does is "Sharing this research with a wonderful community of food, history, and art lovers from across the world has been a really rewarding experience. I love connecting to my followers by learning about the role that food plays in different cultural traditions," as she shares her research on Instagram under the handle 'Historyeats'.