The Index

The Larder Index is an independent monograph. Between 2007 and the middle of the 2010s, the domain world-of-food.net carried a link directory that called itself, without much exaggeration, the largest link site for food products and companies. It was an initiative of Food-Info.net and EFFoST, the European Federation of Food Science and Technology, kept from a post office box in the Netherlands.

This site is not that directory, and it is not affiliated with Food-Info.net or EFFoST. It is a reading of what the directory was: how its keepers arranged the world's food organisations by country and by trade, which federations sat at the top of the shelf, which journals were kept within reach, and what happened to the pages when the keeping stopped.

How to read it

The five shelves organise the monograph. The Countries holds the atlas: how a nation page was stocked, and what the French and Dutch shelves contained. The Trades follows the product groups, from additives to wine. The Federations reads the upper layer of the index, the international bodies that gave the directory its spine. The Journals keeps the periodicals. The Pantry is the housekeeping shelf: how entries were submitted, what the parking years erased, and what can still be consulted today.

What it is for

A directory of links is a map of a trade. When the map is old enough, it becomes a record of how the trade saw itself. This index keeps that record legible: the real names, the real federations, the real arrangement, with the sources shelved beside each entry.