Food in the USA

A Reader

Carole Counihan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415932325
• eBook ISBN: 9781135323592
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

From Thanksgiving to fast food to the Passover seder, Food in the USA brings together the essential readings on these topics and is the only substantial collection of essays on food and culture in the United States. Essay topics include the globalization of U.S. food; the dangers of the meatpacking industry; the rise of Italian-American food; the meaning of Soul food; the anorexia epidemic; the omnipotence of Coca-Cola; and the invention of Thanksgiving. Together, the collection provides a fascinating look at how and why we Americans are what we eat.

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FOOD AND THE NATION

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INTRODUCTION: FOOD AND THE NATION

CAROLE M. COUNIHAN

OVERVIEW

The goal of this book is to bring together a representative selection of recent scholarly articles that highlight the contributions of food and culture studies to understanding the contemporary United States. It asks five main questions: (1) What is U.S. food and is there a national cuisine? (2) How have U.S. food and cuisine been made and at what cost? (3) How have people used eating, fasting, and commensality to cope with power, exploitation, connection, and identity? (4) How do foodways signify identity and keep cultural traditions and personal stories alive, even under conditions of oppression? (5) How is the spread of the capitalist, profit-making food economy around the globe affecting food quality and access, and what alternatives to corporate food production and distribution exist?

Articles in this book examine what U.S. food tells us about who we are. They give a picture of how foodways—beliefs and behaviors surrounding the production, distribution, and consumption of food—reveal race-ethnic, class, gender, and national identity and power. The articles are as multistranded as the ways food unfolds in our lives. Taken together they suggest that human well-being depends not only on having sufficient food but also on establishing meaningful and affirming relationships surrounding food.

But many people in the United States and the world do not have adequate food nor do they have positive commensal experiences. At least 800 million people eat less than 2000 calories a day and suffer chronic hunger and malnutrition (Conway 1999a:352). This is in violation of the United Nations International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, which, however, has not been ratified by the United States (Economist 2001). In fact, “at the World Food Summit in November 1996, the United States issued a written declaration that the right to adequate food is ‘a goal or aspiration’ but not an international obligation of governments” (Canada and the World Backgrounder 1997). Hunger is a frightfully extensive problem with severe human consequences. Yet even when people have enough food, they still must struggle to control their foodways to ensure a healthy diet, to keep alive cultural traditions, and to affirm their self-worth—issues that the articles in this book approach from diverse disciplinary perspectives.

All articles included in this volume were originally published between 1988 and 2001 and they represent a cross section of the rich scholarship on food that has erupted over the past two decades. Hundreds of websites and several interdisciplinary food journals sprouted during this period, including Food and Foodways, Journal of Gastronomy, Ecology of Food and Nutrition, Culture and Agriculture, Nutritional Anthropology, The Digest, The Association for the Study of Food and Society Journal, Gastronomica, and Slow.¹ Foodways scholarship has burgeoned with major work appearing across many humanities and social sciences disciplines, including anthropology, folklore, geography, history, literary criticism, psychology, and sociology.² In selecting articles for this volume, I was animated by three main concerns. First, I wanted to give as rich a sense of the diversity of U.S. foodways and people as possible. Second, I wanted original scholarship demonstrating an array of disciplinary approaches and methodologies. Third, I wanted articles addressing pressing social concerns centered around food, identity, and power.

This book includes articles that deal directly with race-ethnic, class, gender, and national identity. African-Americans, Asian-Americans, European-Americans, Latinas/os, and Native Americans are represented. The literature on the melting pot is more abundant on European American than on other groups, for whom ethnographic and historical studies of foodways are sparse but increasing.³ In the extant literature, it is clear that food has played a major part of cultural survival and affirmation; the demise of foodways often signifies cultural extinction.

Approximately two-thirds of the articles in this book are authored by cultural anthropologists and American studies scholars. Anthropologists have been influential pioneers in food and culture studies as well as significant contemporary contributors (Counihan 2001). American studies has included historical and literary analysis and been a fertile arena for ethnic studies foodways research. One-third of the articles come from a wide array of fields, including African-American studies, communications, community nutrition, ecology, folklore, history, literary criticism, sociology, and women’s studies. Together, the articles show the broad reach of food as a research topic and analytical tool. Several are based on ethnographic fieldwork in diverse communities. Others conduct symbolic analyses of food in literature, cookbooks, television advertising, and corporation trade journals. Still others look at food in historical documents. Through disciplinary depth and breadth, this volume hopes to introduce readers to diverse perspectives, methods, and literatures in food-ways research and to define the field of food and culture studies in the United States.

U.S. food and culture studies is the interdisciplinary field crossing the social sciences and the humanities that explores foodways, food work, and food meanings. It examines relationships and processes surrounding making, cooking, and eating food. This volume brings together articles from U.S. food and culture studies to address five main questions about food and U.S. national identity.

PART I: FOOD AND THE NATION

The first section, “Food and the Nation,” addresses the question What is U.S. food? It asks whether we have a national cuisine and how regional, immigrant, ethnic, and corporate cuisines have contributed to it. John Hess and Karen Hess start the collection with the new introduction to the 2000 edition of their bold 1972 classic, The Taste of America, a witty invective on the decline of U.S. food quality and the rise of a cuisine based on the ubiquitous tastes of sugar and salt. In “The Taste of Y2K,” the Hesses bring us up to date on the state of the nation’s cuisine, noting good news and bad. They celebrate farmers’ markets, organic produce, bakeries, and good coffee, but lament the excesses of microwave cooking, chemical processing, toxic pollution, genetic engineering, agribusiness, and economic inequality. They poke fun at the ways glamour and pretentiousness have replaced taste as the salient attributes of food. But in spite of the glum trends, they conclude, “Here and there, good people are feeding the hungry, defending nature, rediscovering real cooking. There is hope.”

In “Eating American,” a chapter from his book Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom (1997), Sidney Mintz argues that there is no American cuisine and asks, “Why … is having a cuisine important? … Could it be good not to have a cuisine? If you don’t have one, can you get one?” Mintz describes how U.S. foodways sprung fro m Europeans’ conquest of North America and how today they act as assimilation pressure on immigrants. Profit-making imperatives dominate the definition of cuisine, and fast and processed foods prevail in the national diet and culinary culture.

Donna Gabaccia draws out a different dimension of U.S. cuisine in the introduction to her book We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Foods and the Making of Americans (1998). She argues that ethnic food is truly American food because immigrants have continually contributed diverse traditions, tastes, and hybrids to the melting pot. She asserts U.S. cuisine is defined by the fact that immigration has been continuous and people “have eagerly sought new foods and new taste. … As eaters, all Americans mingle the culinary traditions of many regions and cultures within ourselves. We are multi-ethnic eaters.” Gabaccia, Mintz, and the Hesses all take a sweeping approach to U.S. foodways, and draw attention to important characteristics of U.S. cuisine that subsequent articles consider in detail: its profit-making imperative, its multiethnicity, and its nutritional and gustatory deficiencies.

The last two articles in part one approach the question of what is U.S. food by looking at two very different icons of our foodways: Thanksgiving and the “meal-in-a-pill.” Janet Siskind asks what meanings about nation and family are reproduced in Thanksgiving, our most important commensal ritual. She claims that Thanksgiving is a widely practiced family-centered ritual, which expresses “being American” and reproduces cultural ideologies about white privilege while integrating diverse ethnic traditions into a national consensus.⁴ Warren Belasco interrogates futuristic food technologies by analyzing the history and lore surrounding the “meal-in-a-pill,” an enduring food symbol. The idea of a meal contained in a tiny pill expresses central middle-class Anglo-American values on mobility, efficiency, and science. But the meal-in-a-pill never materialized because, Belasco suggests, it was ultimately incompatible with the social, aesthetic, and political-economic contexts of food production and consumption in the United States.

PART II: MAKING U.S. FOOD

The second section, “Making U.S. Food,” includes case studies about the processes and costs involved in the production of U.S. food and cuisine. Articles on Italian American, Native American, and African-American food consider how the U.S. diet has emerged through the amalgamation, hybridization, and erasure of diverse ethnic cuisines. Articles examine the decline of agriculture, the rise of industrial food, and the role of the military and corporations in creating food markets and gustatory desires.

Three articles address how and why so-called ethnic foods of some of the diverse groups peopling North America have survived, changed, or died. The case of Italian food in the United States is interesting because it readily became integrated into the national cuisine, in contrast to many other immigrant foodways. Harvey Levenstein argues that Italians clung to their foods in the New World because of their traditional centrality to family life and women’s identity. Several political factors favored the integration of Italian cuisine such as Italy’s alliance with the United States in World War I. The number of nutritious and inexpensive Italian dishes made without meat raised their popularity during the two World Wars and the Great Depression. The increasing integration of Italian Americans into “white” culture fostered the spread of their foodways.

African-American cuisine underwent a different development process due to the historical conditions of racism, segregation, and the northern migration of thousands of African-Americans. Tracey Poe examines the emergence of soul food out of “Black urban identity.” When African-Americans migrated to Chicago and other northern cities in the first half of the twentieth century, they created an urban, black culture by cooking and eating their traditional southern foods, marketing them in restaurants and grocery stores, and practicing commensality.

Anthropologist Christiana E. Miewald examines a different dimension of ethnic foodways by looking at the impact of European colonization and capitalist agriculture on Native American foods and cultures. She finds loss of land and decline in subsistence farming, hunting, and gathering resulting in deterioration of diet and health, but also a continuing use of native foods and an awareness of their cultural and nutritional importance. Both Poe and Miewald suggest that foodways can be a form of resistance to erasure, a theme taken up further later in the book.

Mark Weiner’s article provides a case study of food industry development by focusing on Coca-Cola. He examines how World War II became a vehicle for the global economic penetration of Coke and its emergence as the most popular fizzy, caffeine-laden bottle of water and sugar in the world (Pendergrast 1993). He shows how Coca-Cola became a symbol of U.S. national identity during World War II through close ties between the U.S. military and the Coca-Cola company, the messages in Coke’s advertising, and the emotional ties overseas GIs felt with Coke as revealed through their letters.

Anthropologist Deborah Fink’s “Farm Boys Don’t Believe in Radicals” provides another case study on the food industry, focusing on the labor process in meat packing (Fink 1998). After conducting participant-observation and interviews in a meat-packing plant in Perry, Iowa, she describes the grueling work of slaughtering animals and packing meat, compounded by pressure to work 60-hour weeks due to low wages and threats of firing. Workers are physically and emotionally exhausted and never have enough time to care for self and family, much less any time to recreate or do union work.

While Fink’s piece indicates the workings of class in the meat-packing industry from the point of view of the laborers, the late anthropologist William Roseberry looks at the opposite end of corporate food production through close analysis of two major trade magazines of the coffee growers’ association. He shows their purposeful efforts to manipulate taste and shape purchasing decisions. Consumption patterns continually reenact class relations locally and globally, and class exploitation underlies much commodity consumption, especially of coffee.

PART III: COMPLEXITIES OF CONSUMPTION

Articles in this section examine diverse aspects of consumption. They investigate how people have used eating, desiring food, self-denial of food, and commensality to cope with issues of power, exploitation, connection, and identity. The first article, by Amy Bentley, is part of her investigation of the social and symbolic aspects of food in wartime United States (see Bentley 1996, 1998). She begins with Norman Rockwell’s famous 1943 image Freedom from Want and argues that this depiction of the widely celebrated Thanksgiving ritual was one of many wartime images that supported social order, abundance, and the status quo. But these images of familial tranquility and bounty contrasted with people’s wartime experiences of family rupture, death, anxiety about the future, and rationing. While workers, women, and people of color made real advances during the war, images of white or black women serving meals to families reinforced race, class, and gender hierarchies. Bentley’s article shows how the emotionally laden meal is a key terrain for the reproduction of cultural values.

The annual Jewish Seder, an important religious ritual centered around a meal, reflects in intense manner the role of all commensality in affirming social connections, defining cultural values, and remembering history. Sharon Sherman applies the perspective of folklore and the methods of ethnography and history to unveil the practices and meanings of the highly symbolic Jewish Seder. She uses her own memories of family Seders throughout the years as well as interviews with eight relatives to describe the ritual’s evolving practice and ongoing affirmation of Jewish family, identity, and culture.

Historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg and psychologist Ruth Striegel-Moore look not at commensality but its negation, anorexia nervosa. In “Continuity and Change in Symptom Choice: Anorexia,” they demonstrate the fruitfulness of cross-disciplinary collaboration in understanding culturally embedded psychopathologies. They examine changes in the constellation of symptoms associated with anorexia in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgments
• PART I FOOD AND THE NATION
• PART II MAKING U.S. FOOD
• PART III COMPLEXITIES OF CONSUMPTION
• PART IV FOOD SIGNIFYING IDENTITIES
• PART V FOOD AND THE EMERGING WORLD
• Contributors
• Permissions
• Index