Abstract
The central argument of The Early American Table is that a comprehensive "philosophy of food security" linked understandings of diet, health, individual temperament, and social status. In the book's early chapters, Eden discusses Tudor England: "Because a properly fed person—one who had food security—was virtuous and because the presence or absence of virtue determined one's social status, food played a significant role in the maintenance of the English social hierarchy" (p. 4). Eden argues that the consequence of the humoral view of human bodies was a malleable social order in which "anyone who eats the right foods in the proper quantities and qualities will attain virtue" (p. 39), and rise in status, a state Eden defines as the "individual golden mean."