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PROFESSIONALIZATION. Professionalization in food preparation, food media, food styling, restaurant training, and food production assures the consumer that professionals incorporate current educational and practical experience in foods, and possess unique knowledge and skills that solve particular problems facing the food industry. The food professional's goal is to take a body of abstract knowledge and effectively convert it into comprehensible terms for the public. Through the ages, specific knowledge about food was passed first from families, through guilds, and then to professional associations.

In the third century B.C.E., Rome's citizens handed grain to professional bakers (a practice that continued through the thirteenth century), yet bread baking also continued to be done at home. Before the second century B.C.E., Greek observer Athenaeus reported seventy-two kinds of bread in Greece. Rome's culinary advantage was based on outlying regions with efficient trade and transportation; it benefited from pickles from Spain, lemons from Libya, and peaches from Persia. In Rome a good cook was considered an artist, manipulating out-of-season foods. Yet after the appearance of the cookbook of Marcus Gavius Apicius, a first-century Roman epicure, no European cookbooks were issued until the thirteenth century. Historian Michael Symons associates this lapse with the influence of Plato, who warned against taking an interest in cooks. But by the twentieth century, Western scholars had become food specialists writing for public consumption.

Apicius's emphasis on the over-dramatization of the act of eating is what professionals are continually in danger of reproducing. Romans cooked for the eye, not the palate. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, an emergence of food-related trades was represented by guilds that secured exclusive rights to prepare and sell food products previously managed by journeymen. The French Revolution of the eighteenth century gave birth to the modern restaurant, transferring the art of cooking from courts to the middle and working classes, which signaled the death of the guilds. Modern-day restaurants have become, according to food historian W. K. H. Bode, "dormitories for the food manufacturing industry" that "sell their wares under long-established and well respected culinary language which have taken chefs . . . much toil" (Bode, pp. 233, 237). Modern man eats better, but he knows less about the preparation and presentation of food.

During the 1800s and 1900s, increases in population and food production stimulated the world economy with automated technology and mass-production marketing. Georges-Auguste Escoffier's introduction of the brigade system in kitchens broke down the craft barrier and gave rise to the appearance of assembly lines. Cooks became highly specialized, and cooking was corporatized. In eighteenth-century Britain, James Boswell, the literary biographer, defined man as a "cooking animal," noting that it is not tool making, but cooking that separates humans from nature. In pre-Christian Rome, sixth-century Italy, seventeenth-century Europe, and the present millennium, Western consumers did not worry about regional or seasonal limitations because with affluence and a good chef one could have what one wanted all year around.

The influence of cooks on society includes the areas of arts and technology. Before 4000 B.C.E, food was gathered by cooks; later, it was distributed by cooks; and in the last century, cooks organized foods, their efforts garnering professional recognition. Professional cooks were born from home cooks, a tradition that has been replaced with science and technology, a manipulation of foods. The advances that man has devised have changed the shape and taste of food consumed. Taste buds are no longer educated to distinguish the purity of foods.

Over time, food professionals have practiced by creating a recipe, consuming time and money, and refining it for specialized consumption. In the evolution to saturating foods with sauces and producing presentations merely for display, many food professionals disregarded primitive tastes based on indigenous products and cooking equipment made of local wood, fiber, and clay. Artisan work, craft in all phases of food preparation, fell more and more to cultivated specialists, who closely guarded their craft. As specialists begin to exert their knowledge more broadly, professionals may no longer dominate the foreground. The more knowledge is shared, the larger the impact on the profession that was founded on formalized techniques and apprenticeships.

Specialists who share their skills contribute to decisions on dietary needs by emphasizing less, but better-quality, healthy, safe, ecologically sound foods that exhibit global concern and may re-awaken consumers' faith. Professionals "revisiting" food through the specialist "eye" learn from the past, and from global, urban, and rural foods.

Some philosophers contend that thinking of food as a movement changes its significance. The recognition by other professions of the significance of making food can dispel ignorance and disrespect of food and enable research into such subjects as bioterrorism in the food supply. Our identity with food is transformed at the speed of technology, and food specialists, by sharing skills and information, help manage this transformation that shapes our history and forms our future.

See also Apicius; Chef, The; Cookbooks; Escoffier, Georges-Auguste; Restaurants.

Susan Sykes Hendee Loring Davena Boglioli