Grog to Grits

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?”

Consider the humble avocado.  Green and tough on the outside, somewhat slimy on the inside, it’s high in fat (but, as supporters tell us, the good kind of fat) and difficult to use in cooking.  In short, it’s a strange kind of fruit, and it’s had a tough time since its introduction in America in the late 19th century.

As Jeffrey Charles writes in his article “Searching for Gold in Guacamole: California Growers Market the Avocado, 1910-1994″ (in the book Food Nations: Selling Taste in Consumer Societies), the avocado is a good example of a food where growers essentially put the cart in front of the horse.  That is, they first started growing the fruit on a large scale, and then tried to find a way to sell it to Americans.  That didn’t always work so well.

Charles notes the many things the avocado had going against it in the eyes of consumers.  It’s a fruit, but it’s not sweet; it has high levels of fat (and the good fat/bad fat thing is a product of only the past few decades—before that, all fat was bad), and it “cannot be cooked, stewed, or baked, or it turns rancid.” (page 132)  Furthermore, it had two negative associations (from the point of view of marketers): since it was often used in salads, it was seen as being a feminine food, and therefore unfit for men; and since it was originally grown in Latin America, there was an association with Latin American culture, and Latin American foods were not really popular in this country until the 1960s and 1970s.

In spite of the negative aspects of avocados, one thing the fruit had going for it in the early 20th century was people who wanted to grow it.  Starting in the 1920s two trends centered in California induced lots of people to grow avocados.  The first trend was the development of large-scale irrigation and agriculture, particularly around Los Angeles, and the fact that early farmers in the area became rich.  The second trend was large scale land speculating in the same region.  Land speculators, who bought thousands of acres at once, carved that acreage up into smaller lots, and sold them for profit, pushed the idea that anyone could buy some land (from them, of course), plant a few avocado trees, and become rich.  Lots of people took the first two steps, but not that many went on to the last step.

The problem was that as more and more people bought land in the 1920s and 1930s and planted avocado trees on their way to becoming rich, the avocado supply exploded and the price per pound plummeted.  In 1929, California growers produced only 800,000 pounds of avocados and received $.32 per pound for them; two years later they produced 3.3 million pounds and received only $.08 per pound. (page 140)

Exacerbating the problem was the fact that uses for the avocado in cooking never really went beyond the early idea of using avocados in salads.  Today, the main use for avocados is as an ingredient in guacamole, but as Jeffrey Charles points out, avocado advertising through the 1970s steadfastly avoided the idea that avocados had any connection whatsoever to Mexican cooking.  The avocado marketers wanted to portray avocados as an upper-class food, something you might serve when company came over, but during that time period Mexican food was generally considered to be low-class.

Obviously, there are a couple of ironies there, including the fact that the avocado comes from Latin America, was largely picked and packed in California by Mexicans and Mexican-American workers, and hispanic communities, then and now, were far and away the largest consumers of avocados.

Avocado consumption has increased over time, but it is still something of a niche food.  As Charles writes, “The avocado’s place in the national diet is now well established, if predictable: it occasionally appears in salads and sandwiches but most often it will be pureed and consumed with salty snacks.” (page 150)  The most typical dish avocados are used in is guacamole, and consumption of avocados peaks around two different days: Super Bowl Sunday and Cinco de Mayo.  As of the writing of his article Charles reports that avocados are still largely produced by small growers rather than huge concerns.  Those growers are still likely hoping that some great new recipe development or cultural trend will come along to allow them to sell more and more avocados and become as rich as those early land speculators told them they could be.

This is part of the Traveling Foods Series, in which I take a look at foods eaten by different kinds of travelers.

In the fall of 1906, Vilhjalmur Stefansson, a Canadian-born anthropologist, was in a quandary.  He was on an island in the Mackenzie River in far northern Canada, 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle, waiting for a ship to pick him up.  The cold, dark arctic winter was coming, but unfortunately, the ship was stuck elsewhere in ice and couldn’t get to him.  As he later wrote, “I now found myself, in accord with my own plan, set down two hundred miles north of the polar circle, with a summer suit of clothing, a camera, some notebooks, a rifle, and about two hundred rounds of ammunition, facing an Arctic winter, where my only shelter would have to be the roof of some hospitable Eskimo house.

“These were the ideal conditions for me.”(1)

Stefansson’s goal was to study the Inuit (who used to be called the Eskimo) by living with them.  He survived the winter exactly as he planned it, by living under “the roof of some hospitable Eskimo house” (from the beginning he had doubted that the ship would be able to pick him up).  He lived as the Inuit did, sleeping in their houses, working alongside them, and eating the same food.

In doing so he was able to see just how much food was available to Arctic travelers, if they would stop and look for it.  At that time there were two ways of outfitting an Arctic expedition when it came to food.  The first way was for them to carry everything they needed.  While not much dehydrated food was available in the early 20th century canned foods had been around for decades, and many explorers took canned food with them.  Lots of it, to the point where moving literally tons of food became a logistical nightmare.

The second option Arctic explorers had was the one Stefansson advocated: not taking much food at all, but packing guns and lots of ammunition for hunting.  It might take longer to move through a given area because the group would have to stop and hunt, but they could travel much lighter.

As Stefansson noted, the Arctic areas abounded with meat but had almost no vegetation, which meant that people living off the land would have to eat an all-meat diet.  This was not a problem as the Inuit had been doing this for thousands of years, but there was one important thing to keep in mind: you could not survive purely on lean meat.  You had to eat some fatty meat too.

The Inuit called it “rabbit starvation,” not because the rabbits starved (and there were rabbits that far north) but because you could die from eating nothing but rabbit, which had lean meat.  As Stefansson wrote, those on an all-rabbit diet kept eating more and more food but never seemed to be full.  They ate meals that were three to four times the size of normal meals but, because of the diet of nothing but lean meat, showed “both signs of starvation and of protein poisoning.”  Death came within a few weeks; in fact, Stefansson pointed out that someone living on nothing but water would die at about the same time as someone attempting to survive on rabbit meat and water. (2)

When Stefansson returned from his explorations he publicly advocated an all-meat diet, which was quite different from what most Americans believed would be healthy.  To prove the benefits of his diet he and another member of an Arctic expedition went through an experiment, monitored by researchers, in which they ate nothing but meat for a year.  This was, of course, a low-carb diet taken to the extreme, but the two men ended the year as healthy as they were when they started—and at about the same weight.  Later in his life Stefansson began to feel run down so he went back to the all-meat diet and, he said, lost weight, regained energy, and some of his aches and pains went away.

I should probably mention here that the classic food food used by polar explorers was a food that came from Native Americans called pemmican.  Pemmican was a mixture of lean dried meat, animal fat (usually bear fat), and dried berries.  Stefansson recommended a ratio of 1 ⅓ pound lean meat to half a pound of fat, pre-cooked weights.  Mixing the two materials apparently kept spoilage from happening very quickly, and pemmican was high in both protein and calories, which explorers needed.

(1) My Life with the Eskimo, by Vilhjalmur Stefansson (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1943), 2.

(2) Arctic Manual, by Vilhjalmur Stefansson (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1944), 233-234.

Food In History by Reay Tannahill (New York: Stein and Day, 1973)

I read Food In History years before I thought about studying food history; at the time I just thought it was an interesting book to check out from the library.  It was one of two food history books that percolated in the back of my mind for about a decade before I decided to go back to college and get a PhD in history (the other book is Bacon, Beans, and Galantines, by Joseph Conlin, about what gold miners in the 19th century ate).  It’s a book that influenced me by showing me that food history can be serious subject matter while at the same time being entertaining.

Food In History is a big book—almost 400 pages of text, plus a bibliography, notes, index, etc.—and it covers a lot of material in those pages.  The title accurately sums up the contents, since the book traces the history of food from before the development of agriculture all the way through the 1970s, and Tannahill ends the book by taking a look ahead at what she believed would happen in the late 20th century.

The book is divided into six parts, which look at, in turn, the prehistoric world; the Near-East, Egypt, and Europe through 1000 AD; Asia and the Arab world through 1000 AD; Europe from 1000-1500 AD; the World from 1490-1800 (so it includes colonization); and the modern world from 1800 to the 1970s.  Much of the coverage focuses on Europe and, after 1500, America, but Tannahill does a good job of at least touching on what was happening around the world during most of the time periods she looks at.

The book was published in 1973, and reading it today I’m struck by two things: how much she covers and how different the book would be if it was published today.

In terms of coverage, I’m not sure that the equivalent of this book could be written today.  Historians these days focus their research on particular times and places—for example, my specialty is post-World War II America.  It’s very hard for historians to write knowledgeably and accurately about times and locations outside of their specialty since each topic has its own special concerns.  I would be lost in writing a history of Britain, since some of the big themes in British history, like royalty and the role of religion, either don’t exist or are completely different in American history.  The problem would be magnified if I tried to write a history that included not just Britain but the entire world, all the way back through history.  The main rule for historians is to try to Get It Right, and any historian who today tried to write this book would be setting themselves up for failure (and for blisteringly negative reviews)

Tannahill wrote in a period when, frankly, not many people thought food history was an important subject, and so there wasn’t much published on the topic (and much of what was published was junk that wasn’t actually true).  Today, though, food history is growing in popularity, and dozens of new books appear every year with new information on the topic.  This is another reason why an entirely updated Food In History is unlikely to be published any time soon—there’s just too much information out there now.  The book’s index lists only five pages where African foods are mentioned, while a search on Amazon for “African food history” brings up entire books on the subject.  Harvey Levenstein’s 2003 book Paradox of Plenty is about the length of Food In History, it only covers American food since the 1870s, and it doesn’t even go into details about most of the subjects it touches on.

For the period it was written Food In History is a very good book.  Tannahill used what was available to write the book, including lots of classical Greek and Roman texts and archeological evidence, and her writing style is quite engaging.  While the book is certainly not the last word on the subject of food history, it is certainly a good starting point for anyone interested in knowing more about the topic, or anyone interested in history in general.