History of food

The history of food has been a subtopic explored in economic and social history.

United States and Canada

South

The South was pig country. The animals were easy to take care of--they fed themselves on mast in the forest, and came when called. Hogs could be herded and walked to distant markets, proving income for otherwise remote areas. Pork, ham and bacon--fried and covered with molasses--became popular in colonial days for all classes, including for slaves and the rural poor. Hog-killing became a ritual, as did the cooking and eating of barbecued pork. While pork's importance has diminished in the South, the continued popularity of barbecue and barbecue restaurants remains high.

Ethnic foods

Immigrants from Europe 1840-1910 all had experienced hunger in their countries of origin. Irish, Italians, and Eastern European Jews looked at America as a place where food was abundant and available to all. The prospect of improving their limited, sometimes meager, diets was a major "pull" factor in their decision to emigrate to America. The new land fully delivered on that promise: Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants enjoyed a better, richer, more varied diet in the United States than they ever did in the past. The abundant availability of food significantly shaped subjective and collective identities. On the one hand, it helped redefine immigrants into free consumers in a single democratic market. In this perspective, the abundance of food that immigrants encountered in America function as a shaping element in a common American culture. On the other, these dietary revolutions made the construction of private and public ethnic rituals possible and thus played an important role in the parallel processes of “ethnicization” of immigrant groups.

Diner (2001) shows that Italian immigrants created a symbolically lush Italo-American food culture based on their memories of crushing poverty and landlord exploitation in peasant Italy, while the Irish, whose ethnic memory linked colonialist starvation to collective identity, did nearly the opposite, eating because they must but refusing to elevate food to any sort of iconic status (such symbolization was reserved for hunger).

While sharing with other immigrants the deep impress of American material abundance, a conspicuous feature of which was a variety of protein-rich meals, eastern European Jews differed on account of the dense religious significance that centuries of halakic existence had imparted to their foodways. Diner (2001) depicts the sanctification of food in the shtetl, based on scriptural and rabbinic sanctions for eating well. Jewish political activism sometimes centered on food; witness the famous kosher meat protests of the turn of the century and labor struggles within the Jewish food industry. By 1929 waiters' unions controlled roughly eight hundred restaurants in New York City. When bakers, poultry handlers, and other food-industry employees went on strike, consumers overwhelmingly sided with the workers. Conflicts emerged between "experts" such as nutritionists and social workers and immigrant housewives, who were criticized for their unenlightened cookery. Immigrant Jewish women flocked to cooking classes, demonstrating their anxieties and aspirations about food and its Jewish and American meanings.

Pizza caught on late and slowly in the United States. The first restaurant appeared in Lower Manhattan in 1905, but the popularity of pizza did not take off until the 1940s. With many changes from the old Italian recipes and interest in the market of returning GI's, by the mid-1950s, pizza was suddenly in fashion. It became a staple in school lunch menus in the 1960s, and with home delivery the cheap, easy-to-eat meal soon became the favorite food of millions of Americans, regardless of ethnicity.

Ethnic entrepreneurs--such as the Swedish immigrant Carl Swanson of TV dinner fame and the Italian immigrant Hector Boiardi who morphed into Chef Boyardee--developed national brands that, lacking any clear ethnic markers. Businessmen whose products had no clear ethnic identity (Fleischmann's margarine) or who themselves had no connection to the ethnicity of the food they purveyed (such as the German immigrant William Gebhardt who developed a brand of Mexican foods) played key roles in the spread of ethnic foods to grocver stores consumers nationwide. The separation of ethnicity from entrepreneurship found its most influential expression in the fast foods of the late twentieth century--with Ray Kroc's Czech ancestry having no visible impact on the nature of McDonald's Egg McMuffin.

Historiography

In the 21st century the history of food began attracting more scholarly attention. Two book series appeared, Food in American History series by Greenwood Press, and Arts and Traditions of the Table: Perspectives on Culinary History series by Columbia U. Press.

See also

• Agriculture
• Homefront
• Irish Famine

Bibliography

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United States and Canada

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