On the origins of food composition tables

Interest in food composition has a long history, but the compilation of food information into tables did not start concomitantly with the advent of food composition analysis. Up to about the 1750s, “bodies” of the nature, including food, were considered to consist of three to five elements/principles, but thereafter, it gradually became more and more accepted that bodies were made up of more components. In the 1766 chemistry dictionary by Macquer, the different components were defined as substance classes, such as the proximate and ultimate principles. Taking the presence of either proximate and/or ultimate principles as a requirement for tables containing food information (to be named food composition tables (FCTs)), one can consider the 1814 FCT by John on plant analyses as the oldest FCT collection (i.e. FCTs displayed over several pages and printed in a book-like form). Even older are single FCTs (i.e. FCTs usually fitting on a single page), with the oldest so far uncovered being an FCT on water analysis compiled in 1780 by de Morveau in the translation of the first volume of the Opuscula Physica et Chemica by Bergman. We can, therefore, look back at about 230 years of FCTs.