How America Eats

A Social History of U.S. Food and Culture

Häftad, Engelska, 2014

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How America Eats: A Social History of U.S. Food and Culture, by food and social historian Jennifer Wallach, sheds a new and interesting light on American history by way of the dinner table. It is, at once, a study of America’s diverse culinary history and a look at the country’s unique and unprecedented journey to the present day. While undeniably a “melting pot” of different cultures and cuisines, America’s food habits have been shaped as much by technological innovations and industrial progress as by the intermingling and mixture of ethnic cultures. By studying what Americans have been eating since the colonial era, we are further enlightened to the conflicting ways in which Americans have chosen to define themselves, their culture, their beliefs, and the changes those definitions have undergone over time. Understanding the American diet is the first step toward grasping the larger truths, the complex American narratives that have long been swept under the table, and the evolving answers to the question: What does it mean to be American?

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2014-03-12
Mått153 x 227 x 19 mm
Vikt395 g
FormatHäftad
SpråkEngelska
Antal sidor258
FörlagBloomsbury Publishing Plc
ISBN9781442232181

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There is no question that our food system is fragile and deeply flawed, but few things will frustrate a food scholar as much as the creep into contemporary discussion of 'the way things used to be,' a nostalgic journey to family farms, dinners round the table, consumption in moderation, and 'mom’s apple pie,' made with apples so local and ripe that they fell from the tree and rolled to the kitchen door to be picked up by a sturdy farmwife in an unostentatious but immaculate kitchen. [How America Eats shows] that the food and eating of our past was not as Rockwellian as all that and, where it was, it was only for an elite few. . . . Wallach offers a general people’s history of food in the U.S., sweeping from the Jamestown settlement in 1607 through to present-day food politics. . . . Wallach dispels myths, reminding the reader, with ample evidence, that nostalgic images of Native Americans and European pilgrims happily dining together around an early Thanksgiving table are pure fiction. A pre-Civil War meal of Southern fried chicken and country ham had as its backdrop blood, disease and sweat; and these foods owe their enduring presence in the modern American diet to hegemony, theft and strife in relation to race, class and gender. . . . Wallach shows how what Americans eat today is drawn from this collective history, arguing in particular that 'American cuisine,' and the culture which surrounds it, originated with the Africans, brought over by slave traders, who combined the foods of their homeland with Native American and European traditions.