Eating History: 30 Turning Points in the Making of American Cuisine, by Andrew F. Smith (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009)

Andrew Smith starts Eating History with the observation that there’s a vast gulf between what Americans say they’d like to eat and what they actually do eat.  When presented with a choice, they usually say that they’d rather have fresh, locally-grown organic food than food grown with chemical-based fertilizers and pesticides that is shipped across the world and then mixed with a variety of additives and preservatives.  In reality, though, it’s the foods laden with pesticides, fertilizers, additives, and preservatives that make up the vast bulk of foods sold to consumers in this country.

Smith’s point is that when Americans talk about what they’d like to eat they’re describing the America of about 150 years ago.  Things have changed a lot since then, and that’s what Eating History is about: 30 of the most important events, ideas or trends that brought us from then to now.

The list runs the gamut from the usual suspects (Julia Child, frozen foods, supermarkets) to the much less obvious (the Erie Canal and the transcontinental railroad).  Some entries concentrate on a single idea or event, while others focus on either major trends or use a particular subject to stand in for a larger trend.  For example, the entry on Fannie Farmer’s Cookbook, published in 1896, is mostly just the story of how the cookbook came to be published and its direct impact on American foods.  The entry right before that one is titled “The Cracker Jack Snack” and starts by telling the story of Cracker Jack, but then goes on to talk about snack foods in general in the early 20th century (that was when many candy bars, like Snickers and Milky Way, got their start).

The book is extremely well researched (it has about 34 pages of endnotes, and each entry gets its own book list) and well-written, as Smith is good at finding interesting stories to illustrate the points he makes about how modern food systems developed.  Furthermore, each entry in the book has a section that explains the context of that entry, and what happened after the period in question.  For example, in the section on the magazine Organic Gardening (which spearheaded the organic movement in America), Smith begins with a short history of organic farming in America, then discusses the early, difficult years of Jerome Rodale’s magazine in which it ran in the red (luckily, Rodale’s Prevention magazine helped pay the bills).  Smith then looks at the explosion in popularity of organic farming in the late 1960s and 1970s, and then continues on with what’s been happening with organic farming in the past number of years.  On the way Smith mentions interesting tidbits like Rodale’s untimely death only minutes after telling talk show host Dick Cavett that by eating organic foods he was full of energy and likely to live many more years (a heart attack then killed him).

The only negative thing I can think of regarding the book is that the point Smith makes at the beginning of the book leads to a more interesting question than the one the book answers.  The point he makes at the beginning is about how there’s such a wide divergence between what Americans say they want to eat and what they do eat.  The question the book answers is, “How did we get from having a food system based on local, organic production to one based on globalized, extremely large-scale production that is very dependent on chemicals and other non-food additives?”  The book does a good job of answering that question, but a more interesting question, I think, is, “Why is there such a large divergence between what we say we want and what we actually do eat?”