Food and Eating in America

A Documentary Reader

James C. Giesen, Bryant Simon, James C. Giesen, Bryant Simon

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781118936399, 9781118936382
• eBook ISBN: 9781118936405
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Guides students through a rich menu of American history through food and eating

This book features a wide and diverse range of primary sources covering the cultivation, preparation, marketing, and consumption of food from the time before Europeans arrived in North America to the present-day United States. It is organized around what the authors label the "Four P's"—production, politics, price, and preference—in order to show readers that food represents something more than nutrition and the daily meals that keep us alive. The documents in this book demonstrate that food we eat is a "highly condensed social fact" that both reflects and is shaped by politics, economics, culture, religion, region, race, class, and gender.

Food and Eating in America covers more than 500 years of American food and eating history with sections on: An Appetizer: What Food and Eating Tell Us About America; Hunting, Harvesting, Starving, and the Occasional Feast: Food in Early America; Fields and Foods in the Nineteenth Century; Feeding a Modern World: Revolutions in Farming, Food, and Famine; and Counterculture Cuisines and Culinary Tourism.

• Presents primary sources from a wide variety of perspectives—Native Americans, explorers, public officials, generals, soldiers, slaves, slaveholders, clergy, businessmen, workers, immigrants, activists, African Americans, Hispanics, Asian Americans, artists, writers, investigative reporters, judges, the owners of food trucks, and prison inmates
• Illustrates the importance of eating and food through speeches, letters, diaries, memoirs, newspaper and magazine articles, illustrations, photographs, song lyrics, advertisements, legislative statutes, court rulings, interviews, manifestoes, government reports, and recipes
• Offers a new way of exploring how people lived in the past by looking closely and imaginatively at food

Food and Eating in America: A Documentary Reader is an ideal book for students of United States history, food, and the social sciences. It will also appeal to foodies and those with a curiosity for documentary-style books of all kinds.

Part I
An Appetizer: What Food and Eating Tell Us About America

No matter who you are or what you do or where you live, food stands at the center of life. Obviously, you cannot survive long without food, and neither can the people around you. Communities and nation states can’t build forts or ships or railroads or bridges or airports or nuclear reactors if people don’t have enough to eat. Wars can’t be fought, and can’t be won, without food, food for soldiers in the trenches and food for production workers and their families behind the lines. No matter what their faith, nationality, or background, people celebrate holidays and milestones with food. Think of the first, or the most recent, Thanksgiving. It is an American national holiday built around food, the bounty and promise of the United States, and the symbolism of a shared meal. When families and friends come together for births, marriages, confirmations, bar mitzvahs, and deaths, they typically eat. Religious celebrations like Ramadan and Yom Kippur involve fasting, followed by prayers that bless the wine and bread, then, and only then, lavishly scripted meals. In the United States, the second biggest day for eating (after Thanksgiving) is Super Bowl Sunday. Indeed, much of contemporary social life revolves around food, the focus of going out, and getting together. We post photos of our burritos and take selfies with our desserts. Eateries dot the landscapes of cities and suburbs, highways, and back roads from Maine to California. Cooking shows take up the endless time slots on cable television channels and recipes fill up pages of websites, newspapers, and magazines. Food apps glow on our phone screens.

As food stands at the center of daily life, it not only sustains life, it also kills. It can be contaminated or tainted. Run‐off from the farms that produce our food contaminates our rivers and streams. Food waste—parts of the plants and animals that we don’t cook or the scraps from our plates—clogs the nation’s waterways and overflows its landfills. For farmers and workers, producing and processing food can be deadly as well, due to the often dangerous working conditions on farms and in processing plants. Not having enough food and the illnesses that result from having too little to eat still kill millions each year—more than 21,000 per day to be precise—in the world, while in the United States, having too much of foods laden with fat, salt, and sugar threatens the health of countless people.

Despite food’s central role in the daily life and rituals of people now and in the past, studying food has for a long time remained at the margins of history writing. To be sure, scholars have researched famines, talked about feeding troops during wars, and remarked on changing diets and agricultural practices. But, foodways, meals, and the act of eating itself rarely made it into college textbooks or classroom lectures prior to the twenty‐first century.

In recent years food’s place on the margins of history has changed. Relying on new evidence and looking at old sources in news ways, historians of food and eating have written stacks of imaginative, wide‐ranging, and influential histories of things like sugar, cod, and the hamburger. They have looked at the social, cultural, and architectural significance of fast‐food joints and high‐end French restaurants, and the inner‐workings of animal factories in the fields and the gory efficiency of slaughterhouses in the cities. They have paid close attention to changes in understanding of biology, horticulture, nutrition, and ecology. They have discussed gender, dieting, and eating disorders, the appeal of Chinese food to Jews and Gentiles, and the growth of culinary tourism and foodie culture. They have talked about Native American cooking and the foodways immigrants from Europe, Asia, and Africa brought with them to the United States and took to other places in the diaspora. They have analyzed global protests against McDonald’s and boycotts against local butchers in ethnic enclaves. They have traced the early stirrings of vegetarianism and the first whiffs of the countercultural cuisines of the 1960s. They have recounted strikes at processing plants and the organizing campaigns of cooks and waitresses. Collectively they have begun to imagine, conceive, and write about food, as the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai suggested (in an article in American Ethnologist in August, 1981) that they do, as a “highly condensed social fact.”

This idea of food as a highly condensed social fact is the organizing framework for this book. What exactly does this concept mean? Essentially, it suggests that food represents more than just something to eat, calories to burn, or carbohydrates churning in our stomachs. Each meal, dish, and ingredient represents a crucial intersection of vital social forces that involve what we’re going call the Four Ps: production, politics, price, and preference. The idea of food as a dense social fact means that every time we eat something we place ourselves within a complex mix of these four broad forces.

Think for a few minutes about what goes into a rather typical meal. Let’s take as an example a Sunday dinner of roast chicken, mashed potatoes, and green beans. Perhaps the most obvious way to start thinking about this food is to ask how it arrived at our table. Each and every spice, ingredient, and item on the menu has a story, a process that brought it from the fields to our table, a process that throughout the majority of American history and for most Americans has meant many stops along the way. That process involves production, starting with who mined the salt, raised the chicken, picked the vegetables, and dug the potatoes. Who killed the chicken? Where did they do this killing? Where were the animals, for the meat and the milk, raised? What did they eat during their lives? What sorts of fertilizers or chemicals were sprayed on the beans or inserted into the soil? What role did the soil itself—or the rain, wind, and sunshine—play in the food’s production? What networks were used to get these products to the stores and shops? In what form did they arrive? How did the feed get to farmers? Did it come from a local supplier or a big agribusiness? What role did science, research, and technology play in the process and in the development of new breeds of chickens, new potato plants, and new flavors? Who controls the parts of that process, from the growing to the science to the transportation?

As the documents that follow demonstrate, the answers to these questions changed over time. Before the American Revolution most Americans ate chicken rarely if at all, and the availability of green beans depended on the season and the location. Meals like this were unthinkable to most slaves, even into the mid‐nineteenth century. As we’ll read, potatoes had their own cultural place for Americans and the little tuber itself played a role in who became accepted as “American” and when.

Food involves domestic production as well. Who made the food for the Sunday dinner? A mother? A father? The whole family? A domestic worker? How was this work divided along gender lines? Did they make it from scratch? Where did they obtain and accumulate their culinary knowledge? How were the foods prepared and cooked? What devices or appliances were used to make the foods? Was it cooked on an open fire, or a gas or electric oven, or in a microwave? Were the potatoes produced with a hand masher or a Cuisinart or did they come as a powder in a box? Did some or all of the food come from the store? Was it prepared ahead of time? Who served it? Was the table set? Did everyone sit down to eat together? Did the house they live in have a separate space for eating? What did that space look like and where was it in relation to the kitchen? Did the family or group eat at a table or in front of a newspaper, a radio, a television, or iPhone screens?

This brings us to our second “P.” Our food choices always involve politics. This might seem surprising. No one, of course, voted on that chicken dinner. It wasn’t legislated somewhere that the family get together to eat Sunday supper together. But the dinner itself is the result of a political history that involves slavery, industrialism, imperialism, and nationalism. Those big historical processes often determined who ate what, where they ate, and how they ate. Each of these processes is rooted in politics. Throughout much of early American history, dinner was determined as much by natural constraints as by any other force—it was who had control over grazing land, the crop land, the wild animals, the seas and waterways. This control was just as political as a modern U.S. Department of Agriculture agent inspecting chicken carcasses at a packinghouse. Were the potatoes Yukon^® Golds or the more generic “golden potato”? Why does that difference matter?

These are more than agricultural questions; they are political ones. As you’ll see in the documents that fill this book, as the act of eating moves farther from the place of production, food becomes even more about politics. Think for a moment about where the green beans came from and how were they made it to the table. Did the farmer get a guaranteed price to grow them, or state‐sponsored crop insurance? Were they produced by an American company on U.S. soil, or in another nation? Politicians have passed laws to encourage immigration so that landowners had access to cheaper labor, which in turn made the price of those beans, and our dinner, fall. Hopeful of winning votes in the Plains States, politicians give subsidies—basically a cash guarantee—for certain crops like corn, which pushes more farmers to grow the grain, a policy that, in turn, radically changes the price of food at the store and also our diets. Likewise, politicians and government agents insure that American farmers have access to foreign markets, and American eaters get “fresh” fruit from South Africa in the middle of winter. The United States government, like all modern governments, regularly gives advice on eating, pushing particular diets, and creating links between healthy people and good citizenship. In the documents that follow, food is at some times more politically important than at others. As you read the book, think about the eras when Americans’ politics and food intersected. Why is food more politically important at some moments than others?

Third, what’s the price of this chicken dinner? What a family spends on food is usually related to how much the individuals who make up the family earn and how much they value what they eat. Food is also, then, about economic class. The French gastronome, Jean Anthelme Brillat‐Savarin commented in the early nineteenth‐century, “Tell me what you eat and I can tell you who you are.” Some might choose the chicken over beef, not because they prefer its taste, but because it is cheaper. For that same reason, they may have chosen a “regular” chicken over a free‐range or organic bird. Yet sometimes Americans pick foods because they are more expensive. We want to treat ourselves or show off that we can afford them. Many of the documents in this book give us a look inside restaurant culture, where this is particularly true.

What, though, accounts for the price of a foodstuff at any given time and place? Certainly this involves supply and demand, but other factors are at work as well: natural disasters, land prices, machinery, fences, wages, energy costs, packaging, advertising, and research and development. Together these forces determine what a fast food chain or an individual grocer can charge for food. But what about the costs that aren’t reflected on the menu or price sticker? How do we account for the environmental costs of some foods, the waste running off from animal farms, or the carbon emissions of trucks hauling vegetables from Florida to New York? What about the cost of injuries to workers in packing plants, or the health care bills for children who live on a steady diet of fast food? Who pays these costs? Are they incorporated into food price? What, in turn, are the social costs (or savings) of particular foods, menus, or diets?

The fourth question to ask about our Sunday dinner is why are we eating these things at all? This is essentially a question about our last “P,” preference. What social and cultural factors lie behind our food choices? Why do we like the foods we like? People in some places and from some traditions eat things that others would never consider putting in their mouths. Where do we get our ideas about what food is, let alone what tastes good? Though genetics, biology, and chemistry certainly figure into our tastes, what we like and don’t like is at the same time culturally informed. Just as we learn from those around us what to wear and what music to listen to, we learn what tastes good.

The first time someone cooks a Sunday dinner they may use a recipe, or have the help of a relative or friend working alongside. But where do the recipe come from? A family member? A television celebrity? How has it changed over time? What did a roast chicken look like in 1890 and then in 2010? What tastes complement the chicken, steamed green beans, or a casserole made from frozen beans and condensed mushroom soup topped with packaged fried onions? Did we pick this meal as a healthy alternative to meatloaf and gravy? How is “healthy” defined at a particular time and place? Where do we get our information from about what is healthy and what is not healthy? From people we know and from government agencies to be sure, and in the recent past from talking heads and food bloggers. How, by the way, does someone become an expert on food and healthy eating? Is science behind a given diet, or is it a TV celebrity? Do we choose to eat things that we think make us look good to others? Do we eat new things because we empathize with another culture, or because we want to show off our sophistication? Do we eat things that make us look more cosmopolitan or affluent, more manly or feminine? Food as performance has become more important in recent years as eating has become more public, especially through our Instagram and Facebook feeds.

In this book, students will learn how the highly condensed social fact of food reflects and shapes the America past, how our food choices reveal essential details about production, politics, price, and preference. But really the goal of this documentary reader is to show what food explains to us about us in the past and in the present.

As we’ll see, the history of food and eating in America makes it clear that none of us is simply one thing or has one identity or set of preferences or politics; we have overlapping, sometimes even contradictory concerns, and affinities. We never just choose the foods we want, and we never have. When someone in the colonial world looked for something to eat, they were confronted with the natural limits of the seasons, constraints on productive capacities, and certainly the politics of the moment. The food of today entails the same overlap. One thing, then, that the readers of this book will learn as they grapple with the idea of food as a “highly condensed social fact” is that eating cuts across intellectual boundaries and rigid categories of analysis. Thinking about food pulls together a range of economic, social, and cultural forces, tying together ideas about race, class, and gender and merging economic history with labor, agricultural, and environmental history. To study food means to think like a sociologist, anthropologist, and historian all at once. In other words, it means thinking in critical and interdisciplinary ways.

Beyond learning how to use food as an interdisciplinary window into the past, this book stresses one other important skill set for students: the close analytical reading of and engagement with primary documents. In order to detect and identify the layers of meaning in a document, whether it is a bland government report, a tattered recipe, or a color‐splashed advertisement, you need to become an active reader. That starts even before encountering the first word or image. As you approach each document, first ask yourself a set of key questions: When was the document produced? What was going on at the time, in that place? Does the document seem to reflect the times? Does the document have a geographically distinct origin and outlook? Perhaps most importantly, who produced the document and why? You cannot engage with the meaning of a document before understanding where it came from. Once you know who the producer of the document is, you can get to the ideas behind it. Is the author trying to “sell” a policy or an idea? A food or way of eating? An agricultural technique? How does the author or producer of the document make her/his case? What sorts of evidence does she/he use? Does the author produce statistics and tables of data to prove her/his claims? Do she/he use the testimonials of others? Does she/he suggest, as some advertisements do, that eating a certain food will make you happier, stronger, or sexier? Don’t overlook chronology either. What does happier, stronger, or sexier look like at the moment the document was produced? That will tell us a great deal about a society’s values. Posing the above questions will provide ans...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Part I: An Appetizer
• Part II: Hunting, Harvesting, Starving, and the Occasional Feast
• Part III: Fields and Foods in the Nineteenth Century
• Part IV: Feeding a Modern World
• Index
• End User License Agreement